Ben Saunders

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the adventurer Ben Saunders. In his own words, he specializes in dragging heavy things around cold places. He's one of only three people to have skied solo to the North Pole, and he holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey ever on foot.

Presenter0:51

After traversing Russia and the frozen crust of the Arctic Ocean, his next adventure was to triumph where, a century before, Captain Scott and his men failed. Today's castaway successfully retraced that ill-fated Terra Nova route by making the eighteen hundred mile journey through Antarctica and back entirely on foot. He says nothing at home quite compares to the highs and lows I've experienced in a sledge harness, and the quest for those extremes has the potential to burn up all the money you can get your hands on and ruin every relationship you've ever had. So welcome, Ben Saunders. Are you able to feel content in other circumstances, or are you at one with yourself when you are in a parka dragging that sledge at minus fifty?

Ben Saunders1:38

Oh, Crikey. There'll be moments of extraordinary contentment. Certainly on these expeditions. But I definitely feel, you know, I got back from Antarctica and I definitely feel in a different place now. You know, for much of my adult life, there was always sort of a burning ambition to do something big. And I think I finally scratched that itch now with what we did in Antarctica. So I'm certainly not planning another huge journey any time soon. That may change, I guess. The key there might be any time soon, I think.

Presenter2:05

Yes. The key there might be any time soon, I guess. So that really is your job. In your spare time, you're an ultra marathon runner. Do you look at the rest of us and think what a lazy bunch of good for nothing slobs they are?

Ben Saunders2:16

Oh, no, no, no. It was well, absolutely Cherry Joward, who was the youngest member of Scott's Terror Never Exp, he he said none but cowards have need to prove their bravery and I think I'm one of the laziest people going so I have to really goad myself along.

Presenter2:24

And I think I

Presenter2:29

When it comes to your music then, uh what sort of music suits being alone? Because you are somebody who spent a lot of time entirely alone.

Ben Saunders2:37

Yeah, this isn't the first time I've had to choose a playlist to disappear to the middle of nowhere. So I'm normally doing things, normally walking, skiing long distances. So I've had to find music that you can listen to, you know, over and over again. Yeah, my first really big solo expedition in 2004, I found that anything vaguely melancholy had the potential to to send me into these sort of emotional spirals down yeah, so it all had to be quite upbeat, all had to be quite f motivational sort of stuff.

Presenter3:04

Ben Saunders, it's time then for your first piece of music. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear now?

Ben Saunders3:08

This is uh an unusual one. It's a bit of gospel music and I'm not religious at all. It's called Oh Happy Day and this was a real kind of break glass in case of emergency song that I had my long solo expedition in 2004, age 26. And if I was feeling a bit down in the dumps, a bit sorry for myself, a bit lonely, this was uh a song that always put a smile on my face and a spring my step.

Speaker 13:34

For a happy day

Speaker 13:38

Oh a happy day, happy day

Speaker 13:43

When Jesus was

Speaker 13:48

When he was

Presenter3:50

Uh

Speaker 13:51

When Jesus was wiped all shames away happy day.

Presenter4:00

Happy day.

Presenter4:04

That was O Happy Day by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Um I've had a look at uh a photograph of the tent that you were in.

Presenter4:12

It looks like the sort of tent somebody might take to a festival. It looks.

Presenter4:17

I mean, it doesn't look up to the job, to be frank. I did you fully and thoroughly prepare and understand the environment you were going into?

Ben Saunders4:25

I've really tried to be quite professional about these trips and to to focus on the training and the the equipment and the the preparation. Having said that, I'm obsessed by saving weight on these trips because the lighter the sledge is, the less you're lugging around, the higher your chances of success. So the tent everything is stripped down to the bare minimum for survival basically.

Presenter4:27

True.

Presenter4:45

Introducing you today, I called you an adventurer and deliberately did not call you an explorer because you once said, I noticed that you didn't consider yourself an explorer, because explorers are people who find out where the North Pole is, and we already know where the North Pole is. And you said what you are exploring is more the edges of human capability, of how far you can go. Is that fair?

Ben Saunders5:06

I've been struggling for years for a sensible sounding job title and I haven't figured it out yet. I couldn't ever claim to exploring in the Edwardian sense of the word. I'm not naming mountain ranges or or planting flags anywhere or drawing maps. So to me the interesting thing is the sort of athletic endeavour, the fact that these journeys are still extraordinary tests of endurance and there's still scope to try to do things that have never been done before. The first bit of each trip is very quite hard. In Antarctica we were dragging huge amounts of weight. We're pulling 200 kilos each, 440 pounds each. So that's sort of two fat blokes in a bathtub each for 1800 miles.

Speaker 15:34

The inant

Presenter5:45

And with what you pull behind you being so important in terms of the strain of doing it each and every day in extreme cold and extreme conditions, what do you leave behind that might surprise us?

Ben Saunders5:56

We didn't really have any special treats. We were eating six thousand calories a day. Each day's food is vacuum-packed into a sealed bag, so there's no temptation to raid the sledge and munch a bit of extra chocolate or whatever it is. I mean, Christmas Day, we had an Antarctica. We had nothing special. There was no special Christmas meal, no mince pie. We did have tiny presents. You know, Tarka, I know, loved drinking tea, and we had no tea on that expedition, so I took him some tea bags and some milk powder. We hadn't discussed this, but he knew that I loved coffee, so he brought me a tiny little disposable fold-out cardboard coffee maker that made one cup of coffee. So we had tea and coffee on Christmas Day. That that was our really looking back, our only luxuries.

Presenter6:04

There was no temptation.

Presenter6:33

I heard you saying in a speech you were giving once that you you packed uh an extra pair of underwear. You packed a set of underwear for three months.

Ben Saunders6:42

We we actually had three spare sets of underwear. It was a luxurious expedient. It was a special occasion. Ev every few weeks you could change a change of pants.

Presenter6:44

Oh, spoiling yourself.

Presenter6:49

Yeah.

Presenter6:50

Let's have some more music, Ben. Tell me what's next.

Ben Saunders6:53

This is The Carpenters. It's a track called Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft and it's a song that my brother and I would listen to on Heavy Repeat in my mum's car as young kids and it was either The Carpenters or Simon and Garfunkel. And this is a song that I loved because I also at the time, we were big into space and big into science fiction and that's a big part of this song.

Presenter7:14

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft

Presenter7:22

Calling occupants of interplanetary ground

Presenter7:29

Holding occupants of the two planetary most extraordinary pride.

Presenter7:38

Deserving heart

Presenter7:44

The carpenters, calling occupants of Interplanetary Craft, you said, Ben Saunders, that you and your brother used to play that a lot in your mum's car. You were born in nineteen seventy seven, then, the eldest of two brothers. What do you remember about those very early years of life?

Ben Saunders7:58

Most of my childhood was in rural Devon and Somerset. I think the border between this, you're going to actually ran through our garden, so we're kind of between the two. Deepest west country, middle of nowhere, and in a lot of ways pretty idyllic. You know, my brother and I were, there's two and a half years between us, he's younger, and we were great friends as kids. I remember long bike rides and hikes and climbing trees and damming up rivers and being outside all the time, really, as a kid. A lot of adventures.

Presenter8:24

these days kids spend a lot more time indoors. I mean, partly because parents are concerned about cars and safety or they're concerned about strangers and safety and so on. That outdoorsy childhood that you spent, was that the sort of imprint for you did you feel most at home outdoors?

Ben Saunders8:37

I think so, yes. I wasn't very athletic as as a kid. I wasn't very coordinated, which I felt terrible at for years until people like Mark Cavendish started saying the same sort of thing, and of course they'd gone in same thing into this endurance sport. So anything with a round ball I was useless at as a boy, so I was always the last to be picked for the football team or idea, terrible at tennis or hockey or anything like that. Rug rugby. No, but I loved the outdoors. I loved walking and I sort of got into running and then cycling and you know

Presenter8:42

Yeah.

Presenter8:59

I was missed at that.

Presenter9:07

Much of your work these days, you know, your paid work, is going to talk to people, to motivating people in adults. But you also do talks in colleges, you also talk to children in schools. What is it they're interested in about what it is you do? What do they ask you most frequently?

Ben Saunders9:22

whether people are five or fifty five is how do you go into the loo at minus forty. That always comes up. And as quickly as possible there is the short answer. There's no particular secret. You've just got to be quick and make sure nothing gets frostbitten.

Presenter9:28

And how do you?

Presenter9:31

Do it.

Presenter9:35

Actually, I was about to ask you a question about frostbite, but I was particularly thinking of your hands and feet. Are they they look all intense?

Ben Saunders9:38

Yeah.

Ben Saunders9:39

Yeah, I do.

Ben Saunders9:42

I've got two funny fingernails. That's my only frost-related injury.

Presenter9:47

Let's have some more music, Ben Saunders. Tell me about this. We're we're gonna hear your third.

Ben Saunders9:50

This is Take Me Home Country Roads by John Denver. My dad was in a country and western Ben, so that's where this sort of comes from. That's why I was exposed to this kind of music. And yeah, it's a song that brings back uh a lot of a lot of memories, I guess.

Presenter10:06

Take me home to the place. My b

Speaker 110:13

West Virginia Mountain Mama

Speaker 110:20

Uh

Presenter10:21

Yeah.

Speaker 110:21

Uh

Presenter10:21

Take me home.

Presenter10:24

Country Road

Presenter10:28

All my memories

Presenter10:32

Take Me Home, Country Roads. That was John Denver. So tell me, uh, Ben Saunders, you said that lots of memories there of your father who was in a band.

Ben Saunders10:38

Mm.

Presenter10:39

That wasn't his day job, though.

Ben Saunders10:40

No. Well I say lots of memories. A few memories. He and my mum split up when I was very young. I was five and a half, I think. My brother I would see him every few weeks up until I was ten or eleven I think and then he vanished.

Presenter10:52

Well

Ben Saunders10:54

Well, just stopped visiting, stopped writing. There were no calls, nothing

Presenter10:57

Was it explained to you at the time?

Presenter10:59

Not

Ben Saunders11:00

Really? No, I d I don't I don't think so. He was a builder, he was a bricklayer. He's an orphan as well, so he grew up in a home, no parents, no family at all, really. So the trail went cold really, and I think we made a couple of attempts to try and find him. Yep.

Presenter11:13

It's not a set of circumstances that i is entirely unfamiliar to lots of people. You know, there are things about twenty percent of fathers who entirely lose touch with their children.

Ben Saunders11:20

Absolutely.

Presenter11:21

There can't ever, I imagine, be a v a good moment for that to happen. But it happened to you when you're eleven and there you are. You're eleven and you're about to be twelve and then you're going to be a teenager and you're going to be a young man. It it happened to you at a time when sons look to their fathers for a version of what it is to be a grown man.

Ben Saunders11:25

Hmm.

Ben Saunders11:26

Yeah.

Ben Saunders11:38

Absolutely, yeah. As a very young kid, I remember being impressed by his sort of physicality, he was very athletic. Wi without that sort of role model, I was I definitely looked for men. I was looking for some sort of template, like what okay, what am I supposed to be doing here as a as someone who's becoming a man? And and the people I latched onto were relatively overblown macho caricatures of men. They were the explorers, the mountaineers, the yacht racers, the soldiers, the military leaders, the heroes, you know, so that as a kid, the astronauts, they were my role models.

Presenter12:12

You had your mum, of course, and your stepdad, and you had, crucially, I think, probably, your brother. I mean, do you think that that cement

Ben Saunders12:16

I mean these

Ben Saunders12:18

To G

Presenter12:18

Yeah.

Ben Saunders12:18

Together. We both grew up loving adventure, loving being outdoors in the elements. And we were definitely good mates as children, which I know now is is quite rare.

Presenter12:28

Let's have some more music, Ben.

Presenter12:30

What are we going to hear now?

Ben Saunders12:31

It's a piece of music by Philip Glass, American composer, called Mad Rush. I remember listening to this in my headphones on a train journey and I was travelling to give a talk in Wales somewhere. And I'd just spoken to my mum on the phone and she'd let me know that her mother had just passed away and it was a grandmother that I'd never known. I'd never met her, I don't think. How come you've never met her? I don't know. My mum's founding pretty desperate as well. I just never, I think she'd sort of left home at a very young age, fallen out with her parents and I just never really had any contact. So, you know, the rest of the train journey, just sort of thinking about that, thinking how odd.

Presenter12:51

Yeah.

Ben Saunders13:03

You know. And it's a lovely bit of music and I love the fact that it's got sort of r reflective, quiet bits in it, but it's got moments of real urgency as well.

Presenter14:19

Part of Mad Rush, composed and performed there by Philip Glass. You were accepted for officer training at Sandhurst, and I'm surprised you didn't complete the training. What what happened?

Ben Saunders14:28

What

Ben Saunders14:29

It was a a weird twist of fate really. Well, I managed to sweet talk my way into Sandhurst because I I don't have a degree. I never made it to the university. I'm still my gap here in in some ways, age age thirty eight. But I'd managed to convince them. I'd I'd worked for John Ridgway up in Scotland and that was a seminal year of my life if you were to go to the bottom.

Presenter14:44

And that was a sort of adventure feeling at the time.

Ben Saunders14:45

Yes, at the time he called it the John Ridgway School of Adventure and it was a sort of an outward bound centre on steroids. He was an extraordinary mentor and role model for me. John of course crossed the Atlantic in a rowing boat in 1966 and someone I looked up to enormously as he was a young person. And he of course was ex-army as well. He was an orphan, one of many Sir Ranald finds. I think his didn't know his dad. There's a whole list of

Presenter15:11

Who else is on the list?

Ben Saunders15:12

Oh, Crikey. In cycling, which is sports a big part of my life. Lance Armstrong. Braddy Wiggins. Braddy Wiggins, yes. There's a long list of men who've had this missing father figure in it.

Presenter15:15

Brad Wiggins.

Presenter15:20

In Sandhurst and officer training, you thought, well, maybe this is the thing where I can express my masculinity, be an officer, be in charge of men.

Ben Saunders15:22

Use

Ben Saunders15:26

It seemed like the logical career path. A lot of the guys I looked up to had had had a military career. And Sandhurst actually was the first time I felt this sort of universal sense of external approval of what I was doing. You know, I'd finally made something of myself. Everyone seemed happy with me. Although after a while I realized that I didn't like be told what to do. I didn't didn't respond very well to that that authority. Yeah. And I found it quite oppressive, you know, living behind barbed wire and signing in, signing out, you know, eleven months was the the span of my military career.

Speaker 115:43

Okay, everyone's

Presenter15:50

Authority.

Presenter15:58

But it was only a twelve months course, so what

Ben Saunders16:00

Yeah, I left not long before I was commissioned. It would have been commissioned. I was in a car crash, injured my leg. So I was hobbling around on crutches for six weeks, I guess. And it was the first chance I'd had to actually reflect on what I was doing there. And I suddenly thought, you know, I'm not sure this is the right life for me. So I left entirely of my own accord. But what did your mother.

Presenter16:21

But what did your mum say?

Ben Saunders16:22

She was very supportive, but I think she must have been horrified, because I'd had the first sensible job of my entire life, and there I was l turning my back on it. The first job I had when I left the army was working in a shop, and it was working in the same shop that I'd worked in part-time as a teenager when I was at school. So I'd gone completely full circle. There I was four years, five years down the line, and I had no money, no job, no prospects, actually ever right working back in a shop again.

Presenter16:46

You said to me earlier that there was a time, a couple of times, that you had a go at tracing your dad and and it came to nothing. What age were you when that happened?

Ben Saunders16:55

I remember driving down there to the last address we had in Plymouth in my early twenties. I remember sort of walking down the garden path and knocking on the door and that was harder than any of the first steps on any of the expeditions I'd done. They could have heart in my mouth. And the lady that opened the door had never heard of him. So the trail went cold. Someone said, Have you tried the Salvation Army? So I wrote to them and I thought, A, he's probably dead. B, it'll probably be the starter process that will take years. And it happened very quickly. They found him straight away.

Presenter17:27

More in a second. For now, Ben Saunders, uh tell me about your next piece. We're going to hear your fifth.

Ben Saunders17:33

This is uh a bit of hip-hop, which is a sort of guilty pleasure of mine. Uh it's a track called They Reminisce Over You, Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth.

Speaker 217:42

Negative, rumor woman the master Mother Queens rise in the chapter Deja vu, tell you what I'm gonna do When they reminisce over you, my god

Speaker 117:55

So

Speaker 117:59

Yeah, so lovely. That's how we like to do it in the 90s

Speaker 218:09

When I date back, I recall a man off the family tree. My right hand propaganda Took me from a boy to a man so I always had a father when my biological didn't bother Taking care of this, so who am I to be

Presenter18:23

They reminisce over you with Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth. So Ben Saunders, you were explaining to me there just before we heard your fifth choice that that you were at this point where you decided to ask the Salvation Army for help in tracing your father because you'd come to a dead end. And indeed rather quickly they were able to help you. So what was reuniting with them like?

Ben Saunders18:44

We so we met in the summer of twenty thirteen, which was before I left for Antarctica. And we clicked straight away. There was none of the animosity that I feared I might fear towards him. But also I realized there was someone I didn't know at all. Very strange feeling. So he's he's obviously my dad. We look the same.

Presenter19:03

And what about his explanation of what had happened? There is obviously always two sides to every story.

Ben Saunders19:09

Two sides of the story, yeah. And it's it's very sad really. My mum remarried fairly quickly. My stepdad f came from a relatively wealthy family. And I think when he was still on the scene he would turn up on our house and there would be new cars and there was a big house and we'd be wearing smart school uniform and we even sounded different. Yeah, we sort of picked up these plummy accents. I think from his point of view

Ben Saunders19:27

there wasn't a lot he could contribute. That's what he felt and that's and really sad for him to say, well, I just didn't want to cause any trouble.

Presenter19:34

And so here was this set of familial circumstances that at the time, even though maybe as a young man you didn't quite understand it, had propelled you on to the road of adventuring, of proving yourself to be a man, of maybe even would this be fair getting a degree of attention for who you were.

Ben Saunders19:41

Stop.

Ben Saunders19:51

Yeah, I thi I think there was a lot of ego tied up in my early motivation, wanting to f not only test myself, but to sort of prove something and and to show off really.

Presenter20:02

You've spoken about the preparation that you do for your expeditions and have done subsequently. Though for that first expedition, it was with Pen Haddow in 2001. Was it true that you actually you prepared for a possible encounter with polar bears at a service station? Explain that to me.

Ben Saunders20:11

And two.

Ben Saunders20:18

Explain that to me. Well, Pen lived on Dartmouth at the time, so I'd often drive down the A303 to go and sort of spend weekends with him in Devon planning and training. And we practiced what to do in the case of a polar bear encounter in the car park of a little chef, halfway down the A303. And we we pretended that Pen's car was the bear. The theory is you can't really outrun them. They're the the largest land-based carnivore in the world. They can do thirty miles an hour if they want to. So our top speed pulling heavy sledges was about one and a half miles per hour. You have to stand your ground and try and convince the bear that you're scarier than it is, really.

Presenter20:47

We're going to listen to your Sixth of the Morning then, Saunders. What is it?

Ben Saunders20:51

This is an acoustic version of Seals Fantastic. I think it was probably one of his biggest hits. Crazy. I had this on my big solo North Pole trip in 2004. So the first time I had music on an expedition, and this was one of many songs, but it was one that I listened to over and over again because you can hear the crowd. And I was on my own for 72 days on that trip. And you can hear people clapping and whistling. And there was something magical about that, about being transported back to civilization and back to this sort of warm, happy human live performance of a great bit of music.

Speaker 221:27

I hope I never survive.

Speaker 221:30

Unless you get a little bit

Speaker 221:38

That a sky full of people

Speaker 221:47

That I'm powerful of people

Presenter22:00

So that was Seal with the all-important crowd there listening to him singing crazy. So Ben Saunders, in 2004 then, as we know, you skied to the North Pole. It was a solo trip. You were out there for 72 days.

Presenter22:11

It's important, I think, just to clarify for us all, there's not somebody a mile behind you m making sure that everything's fine, and there's not a chopper up above you just checking that you're progressing as you should be. You're entirely alone, are you, in these circumstances?

Ben Saunders22:24

Very much so. Yeah, I was completely on my own for ten weeks, 72 days. Bleak isn't the right word, because there's a lot going on. You you're travelling over the frozen surface of the sea, which is this sort of shifting, floating crust of of pack ice, which is in a constant state of flux. So the the environment is is always changing around you, and part of the magic is that you're seeing scenery, this extraordinary ice scape, which no one's ever seen before, because it's totally fresh. It might look completely different in the same spot twenty-four hours previously.

Presenter22:52

It's easy, isn't it, to always concentrate on the privations and the difficulties and the horrors, but actually what are the best moments in a trip like that?

Ben Saunders23:00

Hmm.

Ben Saunders23:01

There are moments of real magic and joy and and especially when the weather is bad, you can't see much, you know the cloud comes in and the mist and you're traveling through what's all white out and you can't really tell the difference between the the sky and the snow and there were definitely some moments of travelling through this mist on the top of the world thinking wow, I'm the northernmost human being on the planet right now. You know, everything is south. All the crime and corruption and wars and poverty, all all that stuff is south of me and here I am walking through a cloud on top of it all.

Presenter23:28

Tell me then about the moment you made it. What was the inner sensation and practically what did you do at the point where you actually reached where you'd been heading for all those days?

Ben Saunders23:35

Yeah.

Ben Saunders23:37

Well, in some ways it is the ultimate anticlimax. There is nothing at the North Pole. There isn't even a pole at the pole because the ice is always drifting. Oh, so there's not a literal spot. There is nothing there. Well, there is a spot, but you only know because of a GPS. You're sort of counting down the numbers on the screen. There's nothing to mark the spot because the ice is always drifting. So the the numbers ticked over on the GPS 89, 59.9, so 90 degrees north. And there I was. So I sort of sat on the sledge and and I thought, well I've I've done it, I guess, and I've

Presenter23:47

Oh, so there's not a literal spot?

Presenter23:53

Nothing to market.

Speaker 123:54

Yeah.

Presenter23:55

Because

Ben Saunders24:06

Pulled out the satellite phone. I called three numbers. I called my mum first of all. I called my girlfriend at the time. I called the chairman of the company sponsoring me. And I got three answer phones. Oh no. I did eventually get through to my mum. She was in the queue at the supermarket and I was all quite surreal. I could hear the sort of beep of the shopping, you know, going through the checker. And she said to the girl at the till, it's my son. He's at the North Pole. Silence. And then she said, Look, Benny, I've got my hands full. You know, do you think you could call me back? So I sat on my sledge thinking, this isn't quite how I'd imagined this was going to.

Presenter24:16

Oh no, the

Ben Saunders24:42

Feel

Presenter24:43

We've just been reminded very recently, of course, of how dangerous these sort of expeditions can be. The British explorer Henry Worsley, he died this January after suffering from exhaustion and dehydration. I think he was around about thirty miles short of crossing the Antarctic. He was on a solo expedition.

Presenter25:00

Um you knew him. Ha had you been in contact with him at all throughout the trip?

Ben Saunders25:05

Yeah, Henry was Henry was a good friend of mine and and we'd actually spent a bit of time together as he was preparing to leave the UK autumn 2015 and he had a a barn that he used as sort of HQ so we spent a while you know tinkering with skis and sledges and clothing and you know packing food and all that stuff. I quite like that sort of getting ready to go it's quite exciting and we'd really hit off we'd known each other for I don't know eight or nine years and he had a real passion for the history, particularly Shackleton. He had incredible encyclopedic knowledge of that Edwardian era, particularly of British Antarctic exploration. I guess I was sort of I don't know fifteen years younger than him and I had a quite a geeky knowledge of the equipment and the training and the nutrition and so we were a good team and over the years we'd swapped advice and experience and wisdom and literally bits of equipment. So he had actually on this trip a pair of skis that I'd given him and a jacket. So it's a very small community indeed and it was a a huge blow. He was as we know so close to the end, 30 miles, which is a a hair's breadth considering the the scale of his journey. And yeah, just a a really sobering reminder that these are journeys not without risk.

Presenter26:20

So you were saying he had a jacket of yours, he had a pair of your skis. You you are a small band of brothers, polar explorers. And of course you have been in situations where I'm sure you've been all too aware of just how dangerous it is and that you are putting your own life at risk. But when somebody you know so well meets their end in these circumstances, what are your thoughts? I I mean not just about him as a friend, but also about what it is you bother to do and why you do it.

Ben Saunders26:43

Middle

Ben Saunders26:47

Hmm.

Ben Saunders26:48

It was a huge blow and and I guess it for me it brings up a whole range of quite conflicting feelings. Everything from glad I'm not planning another trip right now, maybe it is just more risky than I thought, you know, to thinking I would love to go and do that journey as as a tribute to him, and maybe go and try and finish the job. I think Henry was an extraordinary man. He was a great friend, a great mentor, someone I'd admired enormously and it's it's a yeah, really, really sad loss indeed.

Presenter27:18

It's time now for some more music, then. Tell me about this. This is your seventh of the morning, Ben. What are we going to hear now?

Ben Saunders27:23

This is well it doesn't make me sound very cultured, it's a bit of electronic dance music, a drum and bass, it's a track called Just One Second, uh it's the the apex remix of Just One Second by London Electricity and this is a song that was guaranteed to sort of keep my feet moving in Antarctica when things were tough, which was most of the time.

Presenter27:44

The city's beautiful

Presenter27:50

In the early morning air

Presenter27:56

Love the smell of sun rise And everything becomes so clear

Presenter28:08

I wish the time would stand still. If this was part of the film. Yeah.

Speaker 128:13

Yeah. Watch the clip all day like a portrait

Presenter28:20

Just one second by London Electricity. That was the Apex Remix. Ben Saunders, 2013 then, as we know, was this pivotal year. We've discussed it just a little bit. It was so important because it was the year that you set off on this trip that you refer to as the Scott Expedition. You were retracing the route that Captain Scott and his team had undertaken from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole. Obviously an epic undertaking, one that they had not famously completed. Why did you want to do that?

Ben Saunders28:49

That distance, about sixteen hundred miles, is a record that stood until February twenty fourteen. So to me it seemed extraordinary that the high watermark of

Ben Saunders29:00

human athletic endeavor in the toughest place on earth was set more than a century ago. It was it was as if the marathon record had been set hundreds years ago and no one had been able to break it and yet it was set by people who who by our standards were woefully ill prepared, ill clothed, ill fed, ill-equipped. They didn't even have zips on their jackets because zips hadn't been invented yet.

Presenter29:20

When you successfully completed it then, you've spoken about the fact that there is often a sense of anticlimax. Was that the same with this journey? Did you feel a sense that, oh, this thing that I've been dreaming about, planning for, is over and er that's it?

Ben Saunders29:34

Nothing really could have prepared me for the sort of depths that we plumbed on that trip and it was extraordinarily tough. We covered basically sixty-nine marathons back to back in the coldest place on earth, dragging this ludicrous amount of weight. I lost a lot of weight, came back f completely physically broken. And then, you know, at the very end of this journey is this definite finish line and we're sort of getting to that point.

Ben Saunders29:57

stepping across it.

Ben Saunders29:59

And nothing happened.

Ben Saunders30:00

And I'm not sure what I was expecting in in in hindsight, but it was a peculiar feeling that I'd spent so much of my life sort of living in the future thinking, Well, things are tough now, but when I get to that point

Ben Saunders30:11

Everything would be different.

Presenter30:13

You've been

Presenter30:15

Very frank with me this morning about the fact that the reason you began this journey of exploration and adventuring was because ego was tied up in it and also a platform to say, you know, hey, look at me, here I am at the end of that in brackets, dad. So have you had very frank conversations with your dad about your achievements, about the records you've broken, the things you've done that no other human being ever has? Has he told you that he's proud of you?

Ben Saunders30:41

Went gan see him.

Ben Saunders30:43

the summer before I left for Antarctica. But there was a twenty five year gap without a dad at all. I I I thought he was dead, I thought he'd gone, you know. Very sad, you know, he sort of pulled out a biscuit Tim with the press cuttings of my whole every trip I'd done for more than a decade. So I don't think that's really sunk in yet, that he'd been following along the whole time and he was proud of what I'd done.

Presenter31:02

I'm not even going to bother to ask you the question that I so often do, which is would you survive on a desert? Because of course you would is the answer. So let's hear your eighth piece of music.

Ben Saunders31:11

I think I'd be quite happy on the design actually. It'd be a nice chance to reflect and think. And yeah, my life's been pretty busy since I've got my friend Hartica. I spend a lot of time on aeroplanes, a lot of time daydreaming. I'm an inveterate daydreamer. I was always criticised again for me to day. I realise now it's been a real advantage. And certainly on the long trips I don't be able to disappear into my own imagination and while away the time. And this is a great thinking, a great daydreaming, great looking out of windows on aeroplanes bit of music. It's called Lone. It's by Thinon. All I know about Thinan is he's a young man who makes electronic music, I'd imagine, on a laptop. For me, it's a great bit of music for thinking too. People will keep asking what's next. I'm trying to figure that out myself. So this is the soundtrack to that.

Presenter32:30

That was Lone by Thinnan. You said, Ben, that that's your thinking music. You like to listen to that on planes. I'm going to give you the books now. You will get the complete works of Shakespeare to take to this island, along with it a copy of the Bible, and you get to take another book. What's your book going to be?

Ben Saunders32:44

Another book. It's going to be... It's a bit of sort of a Bussman's holiday book really. It's called The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry Gerrard. He was the youngest member of Captain Scott's Terra Nova expedition. He wasn't on the final five, the ill-fated final five, the polar party as Scott called it but he was part of a trio that undertook a a winter expedition in pitch black darkness from their hut while the rest of the team were overwintering and sort of hold up waiting for the sun to rise next spring to retrieve a penguin's egg from a colony just along the coast of the Ross Island. I won't spoil the story but it was an extraordinary survival story and he's a brilliant writer. It took him more than a decade to write this book. He was sort of mentored by George Bernard Shaw as a writer who was sort of neighbour of the family.

Presenter32:49

Right.

Presenter32:55

That's enough.

Presenter33:23

That's as a rule.

Presenter33:25

You will have that then and I'm I'm intrigued what luxury you're gonna pick to make l life on the island just a little bit more pleasant.

Ben Saunders33:30

Yeah, I don't know that it's a luxury so much, but it's something I I have on every expedition and something that has been an essential part of staying sane on every expedition. And it's very simple to a notebook and a pen. So I think maybe I can finally start writing the book.

Presenter33:42

That's yours, certainly. And if you could have only one of these eight discs, which one would it be? Oof. I think...

Ben Saunders33:49

It would be uh it's really hard to pick pick one. I think it would be the Philip Glass track, Mad Rush. I I can see myself listening to that over and over again. It's a long bit of music as well, so I get value for money for my one track.

Presenter33:59

It's about 13 odd minutes, I think. Yeah, good value for money. And it is yours then. Ben Saunders, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Ben Saunders34:00

Yeah.

Ben Saunders34:07

Thank you.

Presenter34:48

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.