The pointless destiny of the Antarctic walker

Polar 'explorers' are brave people who endure terrible hardships. But do their journeys serve any purpose? Richard North spoke to Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Sir Ranulph Fiennes set out on a walk yesterday which is certain to be "unpleasant" - the word British adventurers always use for sheer hell.

Sir Ranulph aims to march 1,800 miles across Antarctica, taking in the South Pole as he goes. He will be lugging a 500lb sledge, everything he needs for 110 consecutive daily 18-mile walks. There is a good chance he will fall down a 60-foot crevasse and, without a companion, be finished. There is a fair chance that he will starve or freeze to death. Only if things go hideously wrong is there likely to be much fuss. The fact is, Antarctic adventures aren't what they were.

Sir Ranulph does not balk at the suggestion that the glory days are over.

"I have a profession in order to make an income", he says, when asked what's the draw of adventures in the wilderness. It's possible to see him in terms both less and more flattering: Nelson (who knew Arctic adventures as a young man) and Robert Falcon Scott (who died in Antarctica in 1912, having been beaten to the Pole) were both fiercely - and differently - driven by the need to make a mark. Surely Sir Ranulph has the same drive.

This time, he is involved in a sponsored circus turn, in which he more resembles Evel Knievel than Christopher Columbus. This is not his fault. The fact is, real exploration is now dead. In 1959, Wilfred Thesiger described his desert travels in the Empty Quarter a decade earlier: "To have done the journey on a camel when I could have done it in a car would have turned the venture into a stunt."

Exploration, in other words, must have real and not contrived exigencies.

In the mid-Fifties, Fuchs and Hillary crossed Antarctica with the help of the little grey Ferguson tractor - now a byword of quaintness. Once the motorised crossing had been accomplished, on the Thesiger argument, there was no need - no room - for further derring-do in Antarctica. Sir Ranulph might as well drive or fly across it.

Win or lose, his trip will - as have many of his others - raise a lot of money for charity (breast cancer research, this time). To that extent, it is worthy. But the thousands of sponsors might just as well have agreed to pay a certain sum per hour spent by Sir Ranulph on a treadmill in an abattoir's deep-freeze. His endurance and courage - never doubted - would have been as certainly tested.

The problem is not that Sir Ranulph can be plucked off the continent at the first real danger: he probably wouldn't let himself be, even if the fates were to allow it. The difficulty is that his adventure doesn't particularly need the Antarctic background, and it will not bring Antarctica to the foreground.

It will, in any case, focus on the "wrong" Antarctica. For nearly everyone who hasn't been there, the Antarctic is a symbol of loveliness; but for its adventurers it stands for horror. Nearly everyone we hear of who went there did so in the spirit of the assault course, or the lab technician. They sought challenge not solace; trials not enrichment; fact not insight; flag-waving not poetry. Above all, many went in a spirit that had more to do with conquering nature than celebrating it.

Sir Ranulph, having advised a rereading of Thesiger's Arabian Sands, rightly also said that since Scott's companion Edward Wilson - "who came out with some marvellous things" - few have had much to say about Antarctica. He added: "A recent novelist [I think he was quoting from one of his own adventure novels] said, 'It is a place for great thoughts and ideals but hardly anyone who goes there has them any more.'"

So it is a relief to come across the writing of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of Scott's expeditioneers for the fatal 1910-1913 journey and widely regarded as one of the continent's few readable chroniclers. "Polar exploration", he wrote, "is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised". He went on to say that Antarctica is "more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery".

We outsiders suspect or believe that there is a spiritual dimension to wilderness, and perhaps especially to Antarctica. Antarctica is the Great Other, the uncorrupted and perhaps incorruptible last outpost of innocence. It is a sanctuary. Its very cold is purifying.

It is not surprising that explorers - the people who have actually opened up wilderness in fact and imagination - tend to be muscular and matter- of-factish men rather than poets or gurus, or that when they are these last, they tend to be misanthropes. Liking solitude on an Antarctic scale would hardly come easily to the ordinarily gregarious.

Scott's own writing makes several of the principal points. "Great God! This is an awful place," he wrote in the last days, and the remark sticks because it is profane, religious, frightened, condemnatory and celebratory all at once. For Scott, it is also an unusually unfactual description. In most other bits of Scott's Last Expedition, Antarctica asserts itself as a scientific and logistical problem, and in flat prose. It answers technical questions, inflicts suffering, invites sacrifice, snatches the lives of good Englishmen.

The "last unspoiled continent" inspired heroism in Scott. Icy it might be, but it was chivalric, too. Yet the act of exploration does not necessarily bring out the best in people. The exploration of both poles, indeed, gave rise to such fierce competitiveness between individuals and nations that it is surprising that any dignity remains to the business at all. So much for the kindlier verities that the contemplation of Mother Earth is supposed to induce.

Scott, one feels, strained to avoid feeling competitive when constantly taunted by the knowledge that Amundsen was engaged in the race in a rather less gentlemanly way (at any rate, a less British way). Scott didn't want the enterprise reduced to a sporting wager, while for Ranulph Fiennes, as competitive as any who has ever gone South, it can't be much else. Indeed, the pursuit of science was important because it spared the early expeditions the charge of mere adventurism, mere jingoism, mere competition. Sponsorship was necessary from the start: commercialism and vulgarity were never far away. Now, raising money for charity alone raises Fiennes' work above being Gladiators-in-an-Icebox.

Much of Antarctica's short human history makes one feel that the right thing would be to leave it alone, so that it can regain its value as solitude. I don't mean that Fiennes is at serious risk of damaging the place. As he says: "Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton were the equivalent of Thesiger." To them go the blame and the fame of the first defilement. "I sort of pass the buck backwards to them," says Fiennes.

Still, Thesiger may be right in his belief that even writing about trips within wilderness defiles it: one should ideally be content merely just to be there. Wilderness, after all, can not only lose its virginity but once - it can lose it at a touch, at a glance, even.

There is however a view of Antarctica's usefulness to people that might allow and explain the Fiennes enterprise. In his 1986 book Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, Stephen J Pyne noted: "Its greatest asset is not any resource it possesses but the stripped and reradiated revelations it makes about those who stare into it." It is a mirror. It can be my sanctuary and your assault course.

Sir Ranulph is unlikely to discover, or say, anything new about Antarctica. But we will read his account of his journey because we are interested in him, not in the place where he tested himself.

Antarctica will keep its secrets, and reveal things about us instead.