In his final book, David Roberts paints a fresh, complex portrait of Henry George ‘Gino’ Watkins and his trek across the Greenland icecap
Review by Bryony Cottam
It’s 17 April 1931 and August Courtauld, alone in a weather station tent buried beneath a snowdrift, has run out of food and tobacco. Five months have passed, and in his diary, he writes: ‘There is now precious little left to live for.’
The story of how Henry George ‘Gino’ Watkins, an ambitious young man with limited experience as an expedition leader, set out on a perilous journey across the Greenland icecap to find his lost team member has faded into history. Into the Great Emptiness, adventure writer David Roberts’ final book, recounts the story of this ‘forgotten hero’. Drawing on letters and diary entries, it tells the tale of a ‘wildly, arrogantly’ bold plan to measure Greenland’s weather throughout its polar winter (with a view to creating a flight route between Britain and North America), the life that inspired it and the desperate rescue mission that followed.
A future of exploration wasn’t on the cards for Gino until an encounter with Antarctic explorer Raymond Priestley, the only man to have joined the teams of both Shackleton and Scott. Roberts speculates that Priestley may have alluded to the great discoveries to be made in the polar north, but whatever the contents of the discussion, Gino set his sights on seeing the Arctic. When polar explorer James Wordie, one of 22 men left on Elephant Island after the sinking of Shackleton’s Endurance, promises him a place on an upcoming expedition to Greenland, only to pull the trip at the last minute, Gino is undeterred. His friend and future expedition team mate Jamie Scott wrote: ‘There was nobody to take him: therefore he would lead an expedition of his own.’
The picture Roberts paints of Gino isn’t always flattering. Privileged and wealthy, with a childhood full of nannies, servants and a pet Russian bear cub named Popoff, he sailed through elite schools, despite paying little attention in class. On more than one occasion, his outdoor exploits landed him, and others, in hot water. As Roberts writes: ‘In his fits of manic ambition, Gino could be cavalier or even oblivious to the needs of others.’
Yet his qualities earned him a team that would ‘follow him anywhere’. His skills surpassed those of both Scott and Shackleton, who never learnt to build an igloo or hitch dogs to a sled. And despite his fecklessness, he never lost a man. In his carefully detailed depiction of this complex man, Roberts has written a fresh and gripping tale of polar exploration.
