Fergus Fleming

What boy doesn't love Tales of Endurance? Diets of weevils and worse, addled wanderings through scorched or frozen wastes, sudden death by crevassing or slow death by scurvy or husky-liver OD? Not this boy, that's for sure.

An exceptional narrative history of the early Arctic explorers (with the odd jaunt to Timbuctoo and Antarctica thrown in for good measure). Prompted by the Second Secretary to the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow, scores of classic stiff-upper-lipped British explorers set out to fill in the blank areas of the map. "What lay at the North Pole? Did Antarctica exist? Was there a North-West Passage? Where was Timbuctoo? What lay at the heart of Africa?" (pg. 9). With the Napoleonic Wars at an end, show more Great Britain was starting to flex its Imperial muscles. It was considered intolerable if "other countries should open up a globe over which Britain ruled supreme." (pg. 11).

Unfortunately, the ventures were often that peculiar mix of stout-hearted bravery and bumbling incompetence which those of us in Britain have long considered our hallmark, coupled with our habitual preference for 'muddling through'. As author Fergus Fleming remarks late on in the book, Barrow's men were stereotypical of the Victorian explorer: "a brave, patriotic chap, steadfast but daring, manly but emotional, confident but modest, willing to carry the banner of queen and country to the furthest reaches of the world; ready not only to face the void but to stare it down, and to do so in blind, cheerful ignorance." (pg. 374). Those of us in Britain have always been somewhat perversely proud of our incompetent failures as long as they have the redemptive quality of courage (witness the lionisation of Scott of the Antarctic, a spiritual descendent of Barrow's boys), and Fleming has provided us with a book chock full of them.

Only 19th-century Britain could have served us such characters. There is the officer who, having distinguished himself in the Sahara, is sent to the Arctic (pg. 106) and claims "he was better able to withstand the cold because he still retained the heat" (pg. 114). There are the officers who traverse the oppressively hot inner regions of Africa in full dress uniform, determined as they are to project all the pomp and power of Britain to the natives (pg. 179). There is the captain who, with his ship completely disabled in the Antarctic oceans by a clash with its sister ship, performs a sternboard (essentially reversing in neutral) in order to outmanoeuvre a fleet of mountainous icebergs (pp355-6). There are the countless, nameless, dauntless seamen who, as Sir John Franklin admiringly notes, enter "upon any enterprise, however hazardous, without inquiring or desiring to know where he is going or what he is going about." (pg. 127). And, overseeing it all, there is the extremely harsh taskmaster Barrow (who was annoyed when an early expedition returned home unscathed, because that "was not what exploration was about" (pg. 57)).

This is not to say that Barrow's Boys is solely a comical look into John Bull playing at explorer. Fleming often notes the very real effects of the poor planning, bureaucratic high-handedness and schoolboy-ish Boy's Own eagerness, not least the tell-tale knife scrapes on human bones indicating that a lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism. Some of the tales (most notably Franklin's two major expeditions and the horrific ordeal of McClure's crew) are positively appalling, and take some of the gloss off what would otherwise just be another ripping yarn. This is welcome, for Fleming offers a balanced appraisal of this era of exploration and the conditions endured. There are countless examples of the sheer indomitableness of the natural world, particularly in the ice lands, which – whilst it is not explicit – I interpreted as a necessary riposte to the hubris of an, here in the form of the British Empire. This means that you can marvel at the tales of derring-do and bravery, and feel patriotic pride in the endeavours of the King's and Queen's men to plant their piece of silk on new barren lands, whilst still accepting that Nature reigns supreme. Fleming allows us to, in effect, have our cake and eat it too.

I could go on and on about the events featured in the book, and there are countless adventures and anecdotes which are worthy of mention. But it is even more worthy to mention that Fleming has taken these stories and woven them into a brilliant piece of narrative history. He is a sympathetic storyteller throughout, imposing his own personality and humour on the prose without letting it get in the way of the facts and the history. It is a great example of the genre, right up there with one of my favourites, The Lost City of Z by David Grann (not coincidentally, also about a British explorer). Fleming's best quality is his eye for anecdote: there are innumerable bizarre events and occurrences peppered throughout the text, and if it took me longer to read Barrow's Boys than it would another book of similar length, it is because I was enjoying it so, so much.

If I have one criticism of the book, it is that the summation at the end (the last chapter, 'Riding the Globe', not counting the Epilogue) was rather too short. Fleming's conclusions are sound, however: for all their bravery and lunacy, Barrow's expeditions were also ones of futility. "Every single one of Barrow's goals had proved worthless in the finding: Timbuctoo was a mud town of no importance; the Niger had little practical application for trade; northern Australia was totally unworkable as the site of a 'second Singapore'; Antarctica was an inhospitable lump of ice; and the North-West Passage… was an utter waste of time. The Open Polar Sea, meanwhile, was not only not worth finding but not even there to be found." (pp422-3). And after all that, the North-West Passage would eventually first be sailed by Johnny Foreigner: the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Men had died, treasure had been expended, and for little gain in real terms. But it had fired the public imagination and began a love affair with exploration that encouraged the likes of Burton and Speke, Livingstone, Scott and Shackleton, and one which we can still see around us today (the discovery in 2014 of the wreck of the Erebus, one of Franklin's ships from his lost expedition, made headlines around the world). Despite everything, Barrow's boys embodied that primal desire for discovery, exploration and conquest which has driven human progress for millennia. And, as Fleming concludes (pp423-5), what a thrilling ride it all was. The same could be said for the reading of his book. show less

This is a wonderfully readable and colourful account of the heroic era of Arctic exploration from the mid nineteenth century until the early years of the twentieth century. It peters out after the bitter Frederick Cook v Robert Peary argument about which of them, if either, had reached the North Pole first in either 1908 or 1909 respectively. It seems clear that Cook was a fraud. Peary may well have been mistaken in his belief that he had reached it, though he almost certainly came extremely show more close, and the position is much more ambiguous than that of Cook. Peary was not a pleasant character, as witnessed by some of his activities towards the Eskimo community (stealing their only source of metal) and individual members of it (luring some with false promises then selling them to the Smithsonian Institution as curiosities); though, to be fair, he also inspired great devotion in many of them as well. Peary's extreme self-belief and utter conviction that he alone had the right almost physically to possess the entire Polar region, may well have distorted his judgement - the almost unbelievable speed at which he arrived there, and even more so, that at which he left makes it very difficult to believe he actually achieved 90 degrees north exactly. Before this, there was a rich cast of intrepid explorers like Fridtjof Nansen, scientists with very few leadership qualifications such as Elisha Kent Kane, amateur dreamers like the Verne-esque balloonist Salomon Andree and unscrupulous backers of expeditions such as James Gordon Bennett. There are gripping atmospheric accounts of struggling through snowdrifts and icefields, through months of darkness and battles with depression caused by the lack of light and activity during the winter and the extreme sameness of the landscape, debilitating attacks of scurvy, and frostbite leading to the loss of toes. It's marvellous stuff and a really great read. 5/5 show less

The Sword and the Cross is the chronicle of two men, Charles de Foucauld and Henri Lapperine, who devoted their lives to the conquest of the Sahara for France and Christianity.

France had seized northern Africa in a series of campaigns that began in the 1830s. Algeria and Tunisia were conquered on the initiative of the men on the ground rather than as part of an organised colonial policy directed from Paris. As a result, France ended up with territories that were economically poor and show more indefensible except by adopting a "forward policy". A "forward policy" meant keeping the hostile Berber and Taureg tribes back from the economically rich north (described by Fleming as the fertile Kepi that sits upon the great bald head of the Sahara) by pushing the colonial border south. This in turn created a new line of equally weak forts and garrisons that were more difficult to supply and more vulnerable to attack. To defend this forts and prevent raids, the border would be pushed south again...

In a time when colonies were a matter of national prestige and no colony could be relinquished without shocking loss of face, both Lapperine and de Foucauld were determined to gain control of the Sahara for France. Lapperine was a career soldier, a hardened desert explorer who raised a camel corps to fight the Toureg on their own terms and who out of communication with Paris for weeks, often months at a time, played the part of warrior king, diplomat and lawmaker with skill and verve. It it through the career of Lapperine, that Fleming recounts the history of the French army in the Sahara. It is a terrible history of suffering, courage, atrocity and counter atrocity as the French administration attempt to gain the international respect attendant on the ownership of colonies, while avoiding the responsibility they bring, while all the while Lapperine is dragging the tricolour further and further south.

In many ways, de Foucauld is the more interesting subject. As a young man, he was also a soldier, the spoiled eldest son of minor nobility, who died young leaving him to be raised by his uncle, a retired colonel. His early years are a catalogue of gluttony, indulgence and excess, but he underwent a sort of spiritual journey when he was posted to the Sahara and left the army to become an explorer and later a monk. But despite this, he never ceased being an imperialist. De Foucauld saw himself as an agent of French power in the Sahara and closely identified the power of France with the power of Christianity. To a twenty first century reader, used to an entirely secular state and to a clergy that wants nothing to do with the state*, this is shocking stuff.

Flemings book is a deftly written portrait of two men and an imperial project, which both educates and entertains. While the "Great Man" theory of history is no longer approved of, it's one that I have a great deal of time for. You can do a great deal worse if you want to learn about the conquest of the Sahara than read this fine biography.


*At least in my experience. show less