Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (born March 7, 1944, Windsor, Berkshire, England) British adventurer, pioneering polar explorer, and writer, who, among his many exploits, in 1979–82 led the first north-south surface circumnavigation of the world (i.e., along a meridian).

Fiennes inherited the baronetcy at birth, as his father, an army officer, had already died in action during World War II. His family moved to his paternal grandmother’s home in South Africa in early 1947 and returned to England in 1954. He entered Eton College at age 13 but left after three generally unhappy years with marks insufficient for admission into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His goal had been to become an officer in the Royal Scots Greys, the regiment that his father had commanded during the war. He was able to secure a commission to the regiment by attending another military academy and served in the unit until he was accepted for training by the Special Air Service (SAS), the elite British fighting unit. He was still in training with the SAS when he was dismissed in 1966, however, for attempting to destroy part of a movie set in the Cotswolds being used to film Dr. Doolittle (he objected to the filmmakers’ damming of a creek). He spent most of the remainder of his military career in Oman fighting for the sultan there against Marxist insurgents.

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Exploration and Discovery

In 1969 Fiennes led his first expedition: a journey by hovercraft up the White Nile River that began in eastern Sudan and ended at Lake Victoria in southern Uganda. The following year he left the military and married Virginia (“Ginny”) Pepper, whom he had met as a child and who, until her death in 2004, would be the collaborator on many of his subsequent expeditions and adventures. A trip to Jostedals Glacier in Norway (1970) was followed by the first north-south traverse of British Columbia, Canada, via water (1971) and by a northward trek into the Arctic (1977) in preparation for his circumpolar expedition.

Preparation for what came to be called the Transglobe Expedition began in 1972 and occupied much of Fiennes’s and Ginny’s time during the rest of the decade. The trekking team, led by Fiennes and including fellow Britons Charles Burton and Oliver Shepard, had a support crew of some three dozen people, including Ginny. They departed from Greenwich, England, in September 1979, attempting to stay as close as possible to the Greenwich meridian as they journeyed southward over land and water, until they reached the coast of Antarctica in January 1980. They remained there until October, when Fiennes, Burton, and Shepherd departed on snowmobiles for the South Pole, which they reached on December 15. Setting out again after a short time at the American base there, they arrived at the Scott Base on the west coast of Antarctica in mid-January 1981, having made the continental traverse in a record-setting 67 days.

There they were met by their support ship, the Benjamin Bowring, and the rest of their team, and over the next several months they undertook a series of sea voyages northward through the Pacific Ocean, arriving at the Yukon River delta in western Alaska at the end of June. In July and August Fiennes and Burton (Shepard had by then left the expedition) headed east and north in an open boat through the Northwest Passage to Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, before proceeding on foot in September to the settlement of Alert on the island’s north shore. After wintering there for five months, the pair set out for the North Pole in mid-February 1982, arriving there on April 11 after an arduous trek by snowmobile and sledge. The journey home was no less challenging, hampered by difficult ice conditions and stretches of open water. After the two spent more than three months on a drifting ice floe, the Benjamin Bowring was able to retrieve them and sail home to Britain. The expedition arrived back in Greenwich in August, some three years after they had departed and after having traveled some 52,000 miles (84,000 km).

Remarkable as the transpolar journey had been, Fiennes subsequently undertook similar pioneering and challenging adventures. Between 1986 and 1990 he and the British physician and adventurer Mike Stroud made several unsuccessful attempts to reach the North Pole unsupported (i.e., without outside contact or resupply) and on foot before deciding to try the same feat in Antarctica in 1992–93. They did cross the continent—in the process setting a distance record for unsupported polar treks—but they were forced to abandon their quest just short of the opposite shore. Fiennes attempted one more polar feat: a solo unsupported hike to the North Pole that he had to abort after falling through the ice and getting severe frostbite on his hands that eventually necessitated amputating portions of fingers on his left hand.

In addition to his polar exploits, Fiennes pursued other adventures. Among the most notable was an expedition that in 1991 discovered the ancient trading city of Ubar in Oman. For sheer audacity, however, perhaps nothing topped his running (with Stroud) seven marathons on seven continents in seven consecutive days in 2003—though the “Antarctic” race was actually in the Falkland Islands—a feat he accomplished some four months after suffering a heart attack and undergoing bypass surgery. In addition, in 2009 Fiennes became the oldest Briton to successfully climb Mount Everest, after he twice (in 2005 and 2008) had to turn back short of the summit because of his heart condition (he actually had a heart attack while on the mountain in 2005).

Fiennes was a prolific writer. Most of his books were concerned with his exploits and adventures—e.g., To the Ends of the Earth (1983), about the Transglobe Expedition, and Atlantis of the Sands (1992), on the search for Ubar. Others, however, focused on topics of interest to him, including The Feather Men (1991), about an alleged plot by members of the SAS to thwart a series of assassinations by Middle Eastern terrorists, and a best-selling biography of Robert Falcon Scott that was published in 2003. He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, Living Dangerously (1987) and Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know (2007), as well as Fit for Life (1998), a self-help book. Among the numerous honours he received were the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1993 and the Polar Medal in 1984 (recognized again in 1995 for his work in both polar regions). Many of the endeavours undertaken by Fiennes were fund-raisers, and over the years he raised millions for a variety of charities.