Into the Great Emptiness makes case for Henry George Watkins to join pantheon of great explorers

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• Title: Into the Great Emptiness
• Author: David Roberts
• Genre: Non-fiction
• Publisher: Norton
• Pages: 385

Like the duck-pouted Instagram influencers of today, the most famous polar explorers – Shackleton, Scott, Nansen – tend to assume a certain look in photos. Most glower out imperiously while donning naval uniforms or furs, depending whether we’ve caught them pre- or postexpedition. Zeal is expressed sparingly, usually via an outlandish moustache sprouted from a stiff upper lip.

Not so with the young British explorer Henry George Watkins – nicknamed “Gino” despite a distinct lack of Italian heritage. A studio portrait taken in his early 20s shows Watkins clean-shaven, in an elegant three-piece pin-striped suit, cigarette in hand, legs casually crossed. The slicked-back coif and aquiline, almost androgynous features suggest Evelyn Waugh (who attended the same public school) or a future Fred Astaire.

Stateside, Watkins carried a rolled umbrella, even on sunny days. Though he dated girls, his sexuality was dubious. He adored jazz and dancing till dawn. Did Roald Amundsen ever dance the foxtrot? Seems doubtful.

It’s hard to reconcile the man in the photograph with the doughty survivalist we come to know in David Roberts’s Into the Great Emptiness. The one who climbs mountains solo in a Norwegian archipelago in the high Arctic, portages miles through dense forest in Labrador and harpoons seals from a kayak in Greenland. The preternaturally optimistic chap whose exploits were like a Boys’ Own Annual come to life. Yet remarkably, the only thing Gino ever organized prior to his first Arctic expedition was a family ski trip to Switzerland.

Roberts, a mountaineer and Harvard-educated professor of English, believes his subject deserves a place in the pantheon of Shackleton et al. He chalks his omission up to Watkins’s early demise, at 25, in a freak, unwitnessed boating accident, and to the fact that he preferred to plan expeditions rather than write about them. The latter task he was happy to entrust to his crew.

Of the four expeditions Watkins led between 1927 and 1930, the most ambitious was the 14-man (I use “man” lightly, since all but one were, like him, Cambridge grads in their early 20s) British Arctic Air Route Expedition in Greenland. Robert calls it “the most daring and fruitful British expedition to the far north during the previous half century.”

One of his goals with BAARE was the establishment of a seven-stop pan-Arctic air route from London to Winnipeg, the facilitation of which involved the building of a permanently manned weather station 130 miles inland and 8,200 feet above sea level on the Greenland ice sheet – territory so forbidding that even the local Inuit refused to set foot there.

Watkins had a rare, co-operative leadership style based on the radical notion that people will work harder when happy. It may also have been born of the awkward fact that he was younger and less experienced than everyone under his command (he was 23 at the time of the BAARE).

His uncanny gift for persuasion meant that, instead of giving explicit orders, he gave people the sense they were choosing freely, only to realize in retrospect that they had done his precise bidding. It’s an approach that worked in other ways too. Unlike his more famous forebears, he never experienced a mutiny.

That spirit of co-operation and openness extended to the Indigenous peoples he encountered and often befriended. In Labrador, where he spent a year mapping the new border with Quebec, he used his gramophone as a barter device: First Nations would come for a listen and in return draw him maps of the area and share local lore.

The book’s most nail-biting section features Gino only peripherally as it details several abortive attempts to rescue a member of his team, August Courtauld, from his solitary winter sojourn at the Greenland ice cap station. (The vigils had previously been done in pairs; Courtauld, citing dwindling supplies, offered to stay on his own, though his true motivation seems to have been a powerful dislike of his planned station-mate.)

A flaw in Watkins’s otherwise clever design of the station meant that Courtauld had become entombed in the station with only Jane Eyre and The Forsyte Saga for company and a two-inch pipe for ventilation. When the relief team finally arrived, months late owing to various mishaps, a physically reduced and demoralized Courtauld was down to a day’s supply of paraffin.

Into the Great Emptiness is gripping and immersive in a way that belies its provenance – Roberts wrote it during the pandemic, while housebound and being treated for cancer (he died in 2021, at 78, so its publication is posthumous). He wasn’t known as “the dean of adventure writing,” for nothing. Many of Roberts’s 25-plus books are considered classics in their genre, including his first, The Mountain of My Fear, a memoir-as-catharsis detailing the death of a friend during their pioneering 1965 ascent of a mountain in Alaska, and 2015′s Alone on the Wall, co-authored with free-soloist Alex Honnold. Into the Great Emptiness is a fitting cap to an enviable career.

“Gino remains in some sense the Mozart of Arctic endeavor, the child genius who died before his genius could flower,” he writes. Happily, Roberts himself lived long enough to tell this wunderkind’s short but amazing tale.