Free Alone Against the North by Adam Shoalts Page B

Unable to raise the necessary funds, Shackleton’s 1907 expedition to the South Pole left him deeply in debt. Seven years later, for his epic and unprecedented attempt to cross Antarctica, the Royal Geographical Society offered him a paltry thousand pounds, which would comprise only a tiny fraction of his budget. To make up the difference, Shackleton was forced to plead with wealthy private sponsors as well as a British government preoccupied with the looming conflict on the continent.
    Legendary explorer Percy Fawcett was a beggar at the Royal Geographical Society’s coffers, chronically short of money for his expeditions. On his quest in the 1920s to find the ruins of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon jungle, Fawcett received no salary, and the funding provided by the Geographical Society proved insufficient. But it took a certain flare, even genius, to mount expeditions with limited funds, and explorers like Fawcett who could do it were highly prized by underfunded geographical societies. Sir John Keltie, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, noted:
    It is quite true that [Fawcett] has a reputation of being difficult to get on with, and has a queer manner in many ways, being a mystic and a spiritualist, but all the same he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else.
    While Fawcett did succeed time and again against great odds, eventually he vanished without a trace in the Amazon.
    I now found myself in a similar financial situation: the Society’s generous grant of 5,500 dollars was inadequate to cover the entire expedition, which I estimated at around 10,000 dollars if we stuck to just the bare essentials. So, like Stanley, Livingstone, Shackleton, and Fawcett, I did the necessary trimming. We couldn’t afford bear spray, so that was dropped. We couldn’t afford watertight canoe barrels, so I improvised some of my own (in addition to one that I already possessed). We made a road trip to the United States to purchase a GPS, but couldn’t afford the mapping software that went with it—so we had to content ourselves with a GPS that had no maps but could at least give us our coordinates. Freeze-dried meals proved too expensive—so pasta, rice, and oatmeal would be our staples. Expensive waterproof Gore-Tex clothing was out of the question, as was a new canoe. Any sort of tripwire system or electric fence for protection against polar bears proved beyond our budget. Hiking boots and other miscellaneous gear were all old stuff that I had worn for years. Brent, having no money of his own, was outfitted entirely from my own closet: he was wearing my shirt, cargo pants, jacket, hat, bandanna, boots, and belt knife the day we left. Wes, meanwhile, lent Brent his backpack, sleeping bag, and a waterproof liner. By
    2011 standards, our expedition was woefully under-equipped, but it was still the best outfitted expedition I had ever mounted—and besides, I reasoned, we were better provisioned than any of our historic predecessors. I took heart in those explorers who had done the seemingly impossible with what limited geographical society funding they had possessed. I resolved that, like Fawcett, we would find a way to get through all difficulties—be they pinched nerves, tick bites, malaria pills, a broken-down car, inadequate gear, raging forest fires—or anything else fate might have in store for us.

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    INTO THE WILD

    Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.
    â€”Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872
    F ROM THE CO-PILOT’S SEAT of a bush plane, I peered through cloud and rain at a reddish and green patchwork of bog, sphagnum moss, and isolated clusters of stunted spruce and tamarack trees. It was about as gloomy and forbidding a landscape as I could imagine.
    The night before, Brent and I had arrived in the small