Life on the Edge - by Guestblogger Alan Lane

Veteran explorer John Blashford-Snell has been an inspiring and controversial figure leading some of the most extraordinary expeditions in modern times. Fusion View’s occasional guestblogger Alan Lane talked to Britain’s own Indiana Jones about his life and the continuing passions: scientific research, the future of the planet and solving inner city problems.

John Blashford-Snell will be giving an illustrated talk about ‘Stanley and Livingstone’ at the Royal Geographical Society, London on 1st October 2008 at 7pm. Further information from Anne Gilby: Tel: +44 01747 853353

The Royal Geographical Society on London’s Kensington Gore is a place where you don’t easily forget the past. In the Map Room, a portrait of explorer Henry Morton Stanley stares solemnly down on the crowded room. In a glass case just outside, is a copper bolt used by mutineers from the British Navy ship HMS Bounty in 1789 to split wood. Next to it are Stanley’s boots, repaired with canvas from his tent during the 1887-89 Emin Pasha Relief expedition.

By the door, relatively unnoticed in a sober business suit stands who I had come to track down: Colonel John Blashford-Snell; Royal Military College Sandhurst, Royal Engineers, Order of the British Empire (OBE), Doctor of Science, Doctor of Engineering, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Within the hour, in the great lecture hall he is recounting tales from 40 years of expeditionary life to help raise funds for the International Trust for Nature Conservation.

Blashford-Snell is difficult to tie down. We were to meet next at a London gathering of the Scientific Exploration Society (SES), which he helped to found in 1969.

Now, some years on after our first meeting, I am at the Society’s headquarters deep in the English countryside, ready to pick up our conversation. It is an historical moment for him. A month ago, he stepped down as Chairman of the SES after almost 40 years to follow the many other passions on his agenda.

The telephone rings incessantly, bearing messages of progress from the latest expedition or inner city project as I begin to unravel an extraordinary life.

HIS REPUTATION AMONG modern-day explorers has inspired admiration, controversy and a feeling that he is perhaps Britain’s answer to Indiana Jones. He led the first descent of the Blue Nile and forced the first vehicular passage through the jungles of the entire Darien Gap between North and South America. He navigated 2,700 miles of the Zaire River. In the wake of these expeditions, he set up Operation Drake and Operation Raleigh to give young people exposure to expeditions and responsibility.

More recently, he has tackled aid and conservation projects in the Mongolian Gobi Desert and discovered giant elephants, lost cities and unknown tribes. Headlines have been made by other equally exotic projects: lengthy voyages on reed boats along South American rivers, delivering a grand piano from the UK to the music-loving Wai Wai people of Guyana, and discovering a two-nosed dog in Bolivia.

Now 71, Blashford-Snell is very much a product of the British Army: just over six feet of durability, quiet authority, and a clipped, no-nonsense delivery.

As we rewind his life and career, the pale blue eyes at times resemble gun sights which look through you, preoccupied with the next logistical challenge in some far-flung corner of the world.

The family history is, like his life, unusual. The Snells were common in the south-west of England. The Blashford came from a small hamlet in Hampshire to where the family had moved. Around the late 1700s they went to Jersey in the Channel Islands, which he regards as his roots. Grandfather Blashford-Snell was a sea captain who commanded a packet steamer between Jersey and the south coast. John Blashford-Snell’s aunt thought many of the ancestors were pirates; and she was probably right. He recalls with fondness, great uncle Albert, a beard to his navel, sitting in his great deck chair looking out to sea with a telescope to a bloodshot eye. Everyone thought he was looking at the ships but he wasn’t, he was watching the women on the beach.

A childhood he describes as “heaven”, was split between Jersey and Herefordshire, where his Army Chaplain father had a parish. The only child of adoring parents - “my father prayed for several hours when he saw me arrive” - he began life as a shy, sickly child with a slight disadvantage. This was a withered arm from a difficult birth. Mother was a determined woman who claimed an impressive assortment of forebears, including King Louis XV of France and Oliver Cromwell, leader of Parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars of 1642-51. Using her considerable skills with animals, she put the arm into a splint to stretch it and encouraged exercise.

Blashford-Snell’s early health problems persisted. Shortly after he was born in October 1936, a nurse at the hospital dropped him on his head and split his head open like an egg. “I’ve got the scars to this day,” he tells me, bending to allow me to see if I can detect the evidence of this early trauma. “There were all the mothers around Hereford saying what lovely babies they had and there was me, this awful, bawling creature with a crack down its skull and a withered arm. So I wasn’t a pretty sight. It probably accounts for a lot of things.” He recalls wryly being treated for asthma at a London hospital in the 1940s. Each day, ten minutes was spent in therapy, lying down trying to keep a feather airborne above his laboured breaths.

Such a life-start would have made less determined mortals resigned to their fate. But JBS, as he is known, doesn’t understand the ‘can’t do.’

A career in uniform began seriously at Sandhurst Royal Military College that has seen many of history’s most famous figures pass through its doors. It was the start of 37 years within the British Army. There followed the Royal Engineers, where he was taught to build bridges, lay mines, dig trenches, survey roads and pump water. Ever one to see what is possible, this initiation also appealed to his playful destructive side; being part of a group which derailed an Army train by accident and blew up a row of washbasins in the officers’ quarters.

At quieter moments, he recalls, nights were spent beneath portraits of those pillars of the British Empire: Napier, Gordon and Kitchener, confirming that discipline and eccentricity were all part of Army life.

IT WAS THE START of a career during which John Blashford-Snell was to organize and lead more than 100 expeditions to some of the remotest parts on earth. He has been both an inspirational and controversial figure. His style has led to a mixture of admiration for what he has achieved and suggestions of him being an egotistical showman, seeking the limelight. He responds to the criticism with a pragmatic view: success in gathering funds and support for any venture is down to selling the idea. And selling the idea means not being a shrinking violet.

He was part of a small group which began Operation Drake in 1978, inspired by the spirit of Sir Frances Drake’s voyage 400 years ago to the New World. This was followed by Operation Raleigh in 1984. He was convinced many youngsters felt the need to be stretched. Modern society was not giving them enough challenges. Direct support for this came from Prince Charles, who told the House of Lords young people were really seeking “some of the challenges of war in a peacetime situation”.

After punishing initiation tests, the youngsters sailed the world, seeking lost tribes in Papua New Guinea, exploring the wastelands of southern Chile and learning about conservation. By 1992 more than 10,000 young men and women from 50 nations had taken part.

Yet it was not all smooth sailing. During the Blue Nile expedition in Ethiopia, Corporal Ian Macleod of the Black Watch and SAS drowned while trying to find a way around rapids.

I ask him how he achieves the balance between safety and the drive to achieve an expedition’s objectives. He thinks carefully before responding. “I make sure people and their next of kin realize the risk before they go. I wouldn’t willingly put people at risk. I try to minimize it. Most of the deaths on expeditions are either mistakes by individuals or something totally unforeseen, like an accident from crossing the road”. If anything, he says, he would probably always err on the side of safety. “If someone asked me to climb Everest, I’d have a scaffold up the side”.

For him, expeditions are not a physical challenge. They have a purpose - to find out something about a place or solutions to a problem. “Trying to be the first over the ice cap or down a river is of secondary importance. I’d rather people carried a boat for five miles to avoid rapids and come out alive”.

Perhaps his most controversial expedition was to the Darien Gap in 1971-1972. A 250-mile stretch of swamp and jungle between Panama and Colombia - called ‘El Tapon’ (the Stopper) - had for centuries prevented a Pan American highway from Alaska to Cape Horn being completed.

The Darien Action Committees of the United States, Panama and Colombia saw an expedition providing the publicity and push needed to raise the US$150 million to build a road. And as Blashford-Snell recalls, clearly the promoters considered the British mad enough to take up the challenge.

This expedition put him closer to failure, humiliation and disaster than any other. The terrain was proving impossible. The rains came early, vehicles kept breaking down, horses were dying and bandits were massing. The expedition was to all intents and purposes stuck, with all the high profile financial and logistical backing from governments and industry likely, as he says, “to go down the tube”. After days of what he admits must have seemed morose behaviour trying to find the answers, he came across a moon-shiner. The old man pointed out a route monkeys took across a gorge narrow enough to allow the expedition to continue. “Another eight hours”, he recalls, “and we would have been stuck in the swamp”.

The Darien Gap gave rise to some scepticism over so many resources (Range Rovers, aircraft, scientists, engineers) being assembled for an expedition which had low chances of success. More than 30 years later, Blashford-Snell is unrepentant. “My view is I take whatever resources are needed to get the job done. It is not physically impossible to build a road through the Darien Gap. But it would be hugely costly. I’d like to think we delayed in some way the destruction of the land and the rainforest through helping the Panamanian and Colombian governments realize the impact a road would have on the people who live there”.

Tramping through the world’s uncomfortable backwaters has delivered sobering lessons of his mortality. He has seen his health under serious attack; and knows the meaning of fear in many forms.

There have been several bouts of malaria. He bled profusely after being bitten by a vampire bat, resulting in 32 anti-rabies jabs in his stomach and backside. At the height of the Darien Gap crisis, with his doctor ill and casualties rife among the expedition, his infected arm swelled to almost twice its size. Pragmatic as ever, he dipped into the medicine chest and took an enormous dose of antibiotics.

During the Blue Nile expedition, he was trapped in a gorge under rifle fire from hostile tribesmen. He knew his group faced death almost daily. “I don’t think the enormity of what had been achieved really struck us until the end; we were more interested in surviving. We were faced with tribes who were determined to kill us - there was no doubt at all; that was the frightening thing.”

His impromptu approach of addressing the hostile natives through a megaphone, complete with pith helmet in true British explorer style brought only a temporary halt to the aggression. Today, such an approach may seem quaint or even naive. But it was 40 years ago, and the world has moved on, becoming a more dangerous place.

Once in Ethiopia, he was reduced to incoherence after an eight-foot crocodile attempted to take his arm off while walking across a jetty. Blashford-Snell had the presence of mind to pull the trigger of the rifle he was holding, which was halfway in the reptile’s jaws. “I was shaking like a leaf afterwards from shock, babbling like someone possessed.”

Such close brushes with death have not made him superstitious. But, like Indiana Jones, he does make concessions to some of the basic human frailties; he always carries on expeditions a St. Christopher medallion given to him by his mother.

IN A WORLD WHERE A LIFETIME OF ADVENTURE is becoming a rare commodity, this innovative engineer, social worker, youth leader, soldier, animal lover and conservationist retains delightful touches of a bygone age. His selection of pith helmets, the favoured headgear of British Imperial pioneers, has become his trade mark. His first was provided by the famous London hatters Moss Brothers as a joke. One grew mould and is in a museum somewhere. “One in fact saved my life when I landed on my head after coming off a mule,” he says. “People laugh at it but it’s a good combination of safety helmet, gives shade, you can pick things up in it and use it as a pillow”.

Ask him about the unusual ventures he sets up with others to give people a sense of adventure, and he will go over the routine: up by five thirty, on the elephants by six, carry out the game counts or dung sampling, back by eleven, have a wash and shave, some brunch, snooze for half an hour, three thirty get mounted on the elephants again, back by six thirty, have supper and a de-briefing, and go to bed. “Some people wouldn’t regard that as a holiday. But we are not talking about Tarzan or Jane. It’s set up so most people can manage. We have a nice camp, the odd bottle of Scotch around, but we do work hard.” For some, it has a lasting impression. “The wife of one banker told me I’d taken inches off his waist and added ten years to his life. He now goes to dinner parties and talks about elephants, instead of the Nikkei Index”.

Such expeditions have taught him much about people and their psychology - who reacts best under pressure; who do you wish you had left back home; where are the “rotten apples” which can surface among the ranks of any expedition. “Those without fear can be dangerous to the overall expedition,” he says. “Physical courage does not equate to moral courage. The two are different. I have never met a person with moral courage - take the tough decisions, speak out and say something which needed saying - who lacked physical courage. Yet those with physical courage don’t necessarily have moral courage”.

Unlike the Victorian explorers who wrote florid descriptions of their travels, Blashford-Snell does not keep a private diary. He writes an expedition’s official log and recalls moments and events from photographs taken at the time. Private thoughts could be embarrassing in the wrong hands, should anything happen to him.

Most of his thinking is done en route, on the back of a camel, elephant or mule, or on foot. Solutions for the next situation are very often worked out around the nightly camp fire while sipping a shot of his favourite J&B whisky.

One fellow traveller who watched his style first hand is British actress Rula Lenska, who travelled on an expedition searching for domed-head descendants of the mammoth in Nepal.

“He was always very philosophical and a great calming influence with his view of ‘there’s always another day, it will happen if it is meant to happen,” she says. He was always full of cheer, never suffering the blues as everyone else did periodically, always exploring possibilities and ideas. He’s a one-off, a Boy’s Own Hero, incredibly knowledgeable, fearless, very much the boss and not prepared to sit back and let some else take control”.

Photo-journalist and mountaineer Chris Bonington probably did not share Lenska’s views during the Blue Nile expedition. Bonington was covering the expedition for the London Daily Telegraph Magazine and questioned a decision taken by Blashford-Snell while under fire from tribesmen above the gorge they were navigating. He was told in no uncertain terms “to shut up and do as you’re told. I’m bloody well giving the orders here”.

Blashford-Snell is philosophical about appearing dictatorial. “It doesn’t go down well sometimes but I don’t worry about it. If it is a decision which has to be given for the safety of a group, you give it. People get tired, or get entrenched in their views. Some hate me, some forgive me. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg.”

THIS EXTRAORDINARY ARMY COLONEL continues to plan treks to distant lands and promote scientific research and conservation, while helping the less advantaged. He has no doubts of the relevance of adventure in today’s high-tech world. “Life without risk is not only bloody dull, it’s frustrating. People who go on our expeditions want something challenging to do. They also take expertise as doctors, teachers and scientists to countries where it is needed. And it’s a lot more interesting than going to some holiday resorts.”

But his priority has also moved partly towards tackling environmental concerns.”You only have to go into these places, see the beauties of the world, and realize mindless men are destroying it. As I get older, I have become driven by the need to preserve whatever is there, to put something back”.

As SES honorary president, his future is filled with an agenda that would send some of his contemporaries running for cover. He intends to continue assisting the Bolivian government explore huge craters in the jungle thought to be caused my meteorites centuries ago. The Wai Wai people in Guyana will still receive help to protect their environment and way of life, and expeditions are planned for Ecuador, Borneo and Romania.

Meanwhile, back home, as President of the charity ‘Just a Drop,’ he helps drive fundraising to reduce global child mortality through clean water, health education and proper sanitation. Water, he warns, could be the cause of more international disputes. ‘As the planet dries up, as population increases and with the water table dropping alarmingly, there could be real problems among nations.’

Yet in the background is what Blashford-Snell calls one of his most daunting challenges to date: improving the environment of inner city youngsters who may be bored, listless and unemployed. Operation Drake and Operation Raleigh gave him first hand experience of working with young people. It’s a generation that he feels does not always deserve the accusations of drug abuse and anti-social behaviour.

“When I was running the Army-sponsored Fort George Volunteers during the Falklands war, I had close to three thousand youngsters pouring through my doors. They all wanted one thing, to join the army, the navy or the air force and go and fight. They felt they wanted to get in there and be part of it.’”

Blashford-Snell received the OBE for his work with young people and has continued to support their futures. He is involved with groups based in the south-western part of England helping the disadvantaged who are taught how to sail and working with handicapped youngsters.

His drive has led to community development in London’s inner city areas and a youth centre being set up in Liverpool in the north of England known as ‘The Door.’ This thinking is based on a concept from Brooklyn, New York. Troubled youngsters are diverted from a path of crime and drugs into such a centre through an ‘open door’ approach.

“In such a setting, advice can be provided for any conceivable problem - drugs, vocational training, homelessness, crime, pregnancy,” he says. “If a kid says ‘I’ve got a problem’, centres like these have to be so attractive, they can’t resist walking in the door. Providing banks of video games with subliminal messages like ‘winners don’t take drugs’ can be part of it. So youngsters can learn about their body, their health and job prospects as well as shoot Martians.”

He helped set up and is President of the Liverpool Construction Crafts Guild to promote the training of skilled craftsmen in the city.

“If the bored, frustrated, unemployed youngsters can be given training, they’d be paid something. It could get them out of bad areas,’ he says. ‘As it is, many have no hope of ever getting a legal job. And this is one of the biggest problems today. How any government is going to address it, God only knows. It’s not like conquering a mountain or finding a lost city. It’s a huge problem.”

This concern with those down on their luck has an uncanny link with some of history’s great explorers. “Henry Morton Stanley was a hooligan on the streets of Liverpool, an under-priviledged child, consigned to the Victorian workhouse,” Blashford-Snell tells me. “David Livingstone was the son of a poor crofter selling tea on the west coast of Scotland. It is ironic that two of the greatest explorers who ever lived began life with so little opportunity”.

AS I PREPARE TO LEAVE he talks of his schedule ahead and of those closest to his heart, his wife Judith, and their two daughters (one’s a diver who writes best selling cookery books and the other an acupuncturist).

We discuss the state of the world; and as we go our separate ways, I reflect on something he had told me earlier. It was in response to my suggestion that because of the extraordinary things he had done, some people probably do think him slightly mad.

“Only those who attempt the ridiculous achieve the impossible. If someone says it can’t be done, I say why? At heart, I’m an engineer. My training is, ‘here’s a problem, how to solve it’”.

Perhaps not quite what Indiana Jones might say, but close.

A life of recognition

John Blashford-Snell has received the following awards:

• Segrave Trophy following the Zaire River expedition
• Livingstone Medal by Royal Scottish Geographical Society in recognition of his leadership of the Blue Nile, British Trans-Americas and Zaire River expeditions
• Royal Geographical Society Patron’s Medal for encouragement of exploration by young people
• Gold Medal from Institute of Royal Engineers for the advancement of historical and scientific knowledge within military engineering
• Medals for the work of his teams in Bolivia and Colombia

Alan Lane is founder and chief executive of Vasgama, a consulting group specialising in reputation management counselling services to international clients.

© Copyright Alan Lane September 2008
All world rights reserved

Photos: courtesy of the Scientific Exploration Society (with permission)

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