Husky News

Evolutionary biology offers some hints of another possible reason. John Francis, a biologist with National Geographic, says there may be selective pressures that favour exploration and creativity. Most male mammals will travel away from home when they become juveniles in order to find mates other than their own relatives and avoid competing with their kin. It is also a way for them to expand into less-crowded territories with more abundant resources. “What do you eat next and where do you go to find it? Where can your offspring survive? These pressures encourage a certain level of inventiveness and what you could call exploration,” says Francis.

Explorers, of course, are driven by a mix of more worldly concerns-money, patriotism, fame, science, philanthropy. In modern times, it is the loftier of these, the “relevant” ones, that tend to be trumpeted. In The Worst Journey in the World the youngest member of Scott’s Antarctica expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, compares their mission to Amundsen’s: “We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have suffered from too much. We were primarily a great scientific expedition, with the Pole as our bait for public support.” The implication, embraced in the British press at the time, was that while Amundsen focused narrowly on being first to the Pole, Scott ventured south for science-a nobler cause. Hillary, the mountaineer, on the other hand once scoffed, “Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.”

After lunch with Winser at the RGS, Saunders and I stroll to Hyde Park. He says his motivations have changed from an ego-centric urge to make a name for himself to “something more personal. In the end, only a handful of people will really appreciate what I’m doing and why…” He trails off, then says, “There is something about the scale of the challenges, of the place. It is…bizarrely addictive.”

This comes at a cost. Although Saunders, with his speaking career on an upswing, is at last on a stable financial footing, much of his recent life has been “desperate… enormous peaks and troughs. Scrambling to plan and finance and train for each expedition is all-consuming. Stressful…Then you are away and alone for months on end. It’s what I love about it—the single-mindedness of it. But I am realising it is to the detriment of a lot of other stuff, whether that’s properly moving into my flat”—his living room is still lined with unpacked boxes-”or friends or relationships or family.” Saunders is single. One of his training partners for the 2004 expedition recently became a father to twins and no longer has time for gruelling runs.

A group of boisterous school children in uniforms spills on to the lawn in front of us. I can barely hear Saunders over their shouts. “I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he says, answering a question I have not posed. “It’s something about the polar environment-the power of it. It draws me in. But—I’m hoping,” he says and swings forward with hands clamped together, “I’m really hoping that I’ll be happy after ‘South’. That I can draw a line under it and say: that’s enough of the big stuff.”

Source: INTELLIGENT LIFE MAGAZINE, December 2007