Hotmao

Exploration and explorers have held a constant fascination – endeavours of heroism, tragedy and the overcoming of seemingly insurmountable odds ensure their ever-present status and our interest. Having nurtured a boyish fascination for explorers and the lives they lead since childhood, I have more recently become interested in trying to understand what drives people to pushing themselves beyond normal human boundaries – on a geographical, physical and mental level.

The history of exploration is a vast and intriguing subject. Human beings are by their very nature explorers, as has been chronicled for instance by the BBC’s Incredible Human Journey. However what drives explorers in a modern age to embark on similarly dangerous voyages which ostensibly have little or no need?

Explorers are not a unique race. Their backgrounds, education, likes and dislikes vary as much as any ordinary man on the street and their motivations also differ greatly. Some hunger for fame, others have felt driven by duty and patriotism, religion, science, and, quite simply, boredom. Many explorers have reported that they felt a sense of destiny – they were born to accomplish great things.

Perhaps an indication of what drives explorers can be seen in Shackleton’s terse advert in a London newspaper before he embarked upon yet another polar expedition.

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant journey, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

Hardly the sort of message that many would assume to get a favourable response and yet 5,000 people responded to that message.

In trying to analyse the drivers for explorers, what made them tick, I have picked two explorers who encompassed both the traditional, and modern, forms of exploration.

At first glance both Rory Stewart and Wilfred Thesiger seem to come from almost identical backgrounds. Both Eton and Oxford educated, sons of Diplomatic fathers and thus raised in exotic lands (Thesiger in Abyssinia, Stewart in Malayisa and Hong Kong). Stewart left Oxford to join the Foreign Office, Thesiger the Sudanese Political Service. However, here is where the immediate similarity ends. Thesiger dedicated his entire life to travelling. Aged 23 Thesiger set out to explore Abyssinia’s Awash River and study the much feared Aussa sultanate, along with its Danakil nomads. The Danakil were renowned primarily for their nasty tendency to kill men and sever their testicles as trophies. Thesiger was not fazed by this, comparing a young Afar boy, exhausted from the exertion of murdering, and the subsequent mutilation of four victims in a day, as “the equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket”.

Stewart joined the Foreign Office aged 24 serving in Indonesia and former Yugoslavia. Aged 27 Stewart set out to walk 6,000 miles from Turkey across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal to Bangladesh. Having completed this epic journey, Stewart took a taxi from Iran to Baghdad, in the wake of the Coalition invasion, to look for work. Aged 30, Stewart found himself helping to run a post-invasion province the size of Northern Ireland, constantly having to deal with local hostility, bureaucratic minefields and escalating levels of violence (sometimes from his friends). Stewart spent nine months in the southern provinces of Maysan – where Thesiger had lived with the Marsh Arabs - and Dhi Qar, focusing on rebuilding infrastructure, and smoothing the transition from rule by the Coalition forces to self-determination and democracy.

Thesiger’s experience as an assistant district commissioner in the Sudanese Political Service was markedly different to Stewart’s FCO work. Thesiger served in arid Darfur, moving later to the swamps of the Sudd, where one the main elements of his role was shooting the “verminous” lions that slaughtered local herds. However, it was in Darfur that Thesiger first learned to travel by fast-riding camel, eating local food and asking nothing of technology but a good rifle, a torch and a compass. His motivations can be partially understood in his reflective statement having come back from the desert:

“I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across the deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills.”

Thesiger’s most notable expeditions were in the deserts of Arabia between 1945 and 1949. Arabia’s impenetrable Empty Quarter had been the target for a number of esteemed Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward. Thesiger was not the first to cross, but he was the first to explore it widely, making maps featuring the oasis of Liwa to the quicksands of Umm As-Sammim. Thesiger travelled only with Bedu companions in the desert, his trek from Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi is remembered as one of the last great expeditions of Arabian travel. Thesiger ’s journeys were always undertaken either on foot or by traditional transport, such as camel, horse, mule, donkey or canoe.

“I had crossed the empty quarter. It was 14 days since we had left the last well…To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map that no one was ever likely to use. It was a personal experience and the reward had been a drink of clean, tasteless water. I was content with that.”

In Thesiger and Stewart it is possible to see a number of different driving factors behind explorers. Both undertook journeys not to seek any glory, or being driven by external factors (government for example). They travelled, in great discomfort, in order to find meaning to their lives and justify their places on earth. Fortunately for us their journeys have been published across the world giving us an even better insight into these remarkable men. The mystery behind what makes explorers tick still evades anyone looking for something finite. Perhaps, in trying to understand men such as Thesiger or Stewart we are missing the point. There is no definitive answer, people do things for different reasons and the world would be a much duller place without people such as these.