Limits of the known -- book review by Paul Caffyn

Title:  Limits of the Known
Author: David Roberts
Published: 2018
Publisher: W.W. Norton UK
Website: www.wwnorton.com
Contents: 306 pp; no photos, 2 maps
Cover: hardbound
Price: $36.46 Book Depository UK
ISBN: 978-0-393-60986-8
Review: Paul Caffyn

David Roberts is not a bad mountaineering adventure writer. His first book titled The Mountain of My Fear was published in 1966, a gripping yarn of four young university students having a go at the committing west face of Mt Huntington in a remote Alaskan range.  From that classic tome of a first blooding with a serious face climb, he went on to author another 27 books about mountaineering, polar exploration, history and anthropology. The closest one to New Zealand being an account of Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition and his incredible survival story (Alone on the Ice  2013).

His latest book and sadly probably his last, is an exploration of what drives the human race to tackle adventures. A prologue relates a 2015 trip by the two surviving members of that first 1966 Alaskan mission back to Talkeetna marking the 50th anniversary of the climb. Talkeetna is an end of road accessible airstrip from where climbers gather to wait for weather to fly in for climbing the likes of McKinley (Denali) or unclimbed virgins.

David noticed a lump on the side of his neck but is assured by his mate it is only a cyst. However, it is not a cyst, and back in the big smoke, a round of scans and biopsies reveal aggressive throat cancer. Rounds of both chemotherapy and radiation leave him a shadow of his former self, barely able to walk a city block with the aid of a stick.

After the initial prologue, David moves onto an assessment of Fridtjof Nansen and what drove him to design a boat what would survive crushing in the Arctic Ice and lead the Fram expedition, which involved sailing the vessel into the ice north of Bering Strait, and then hoping the westward drift of the ice pack would take Fram closer to the North Pole than any other expedition had been. Once Nansen realized the drift would not take them anywhere near the pole, he set off with one companion, a dog team, provisions for a couple of months and two collapsible kayaks. Nansen was keen to attain the North Pole. Long story, but it is a remarkable eight-month story of survival in a winter wasteland of ice. And the Fram eventually was released from the ice pack’s clutches, returning to Norway not long after Nansen and Johansen also returned to civilization.

The second chapter is titled Blank on the Map and if you have read the book by the same name, it is about Eric Shipton and what drove him to his ‘untraveled world’ of Asian mountain ranges, glaciers and valleys that had not been previously sighted by Westerners. Shipton was a member of five Mount Everest expeditions between 1933 and 1951 but didn’t have much time for the big military style organized mountain conquests. Shipton and his mate Bill Tilman pioneered the lightweight expedition style. ‘If it couldn’t be planned on the back of an envelope, it wasn’t worth doing’.

Although I was expecting further chapters on more of the most famous adventurer/explorers, David Roberts moves onto a burgeoning interest in the ancient cliff dwellers of the USA south-west, the people who ground steps out of steep sandstone buttresses providing access to granaries and where they lived. Roberts wrote several books about his research into the remote gorges and mesas, but this seemed to diverge from what I saw as the overall slant of the book, what drove adventurers to do what they did.

The First Descent chapter was of more interest to me, with tales of white-water and rafting adventures that David was tasked to cover as a writer. Particularly in this chapter he writes about how the degree of commitment with expeditions has changed, from the 50s and 60s when even a written letter may have taken months to reach civilization and chance of rescue was zilch, to these days with blogs updated nightly with photos and text and a helicopter evacuation is only a sat phone call away.

The First Contact chapter has much on gold exploration in New Guinea in the 30s, and how the natives viewed sometimes quite savage encounters with the white miners.  The Undiscovered Earth chapter is about caving and the challenge of seeking the deepest (and the longest) hole in the world. New Zealand’s big caves don’t rate a mention but having been the geologist on a 1973 expedition to the highlands of western New Guinea, which was tagged ‘The Search for the Deepest Hole in the World’, I thoroughly enjoyed being brought up to date with the international challenge to get a depth record.

His last chapter titled The Future of Exploration pulls all the threads together, his terrible time with treatment for the throat cancer and the evil cancer metastasis into lung nodules. Writing seems to be his salvation from a physical body slowing down, even though he can’t type anymore and has to either write long hand or dictate to his wife Sharon. The last few paragraphs are tear jerkers.

Apart from an author mugshot on the inside of the dustjacket, there are no photos at all, just two rather small-scale maps that you need a microscope to read the place names.

With most of David Robert’s mountaineering and polar books in my collection, I thoroughly enjoyed his new tome, though saddened and sympathetic to learn of his fight with cancer.