Herbert, Wally 1934-2007 (Walter William Herbert)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 24, 1934, in York, England; died June 12, 2007, in Scotland. Polar explorer, surveyor, and writer. Herbert spent most of his career at the edges of the world. By his own account, he derived great satisfaction from walking where no man had gone before, and he seemed drawn to the coldest, harshest settings he could find. Herbert trained as a surveyor in the British Army, with the Royal Engineers in the Middle East, but the poles called to him. He joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in the 1950s and ended up mapping tens of thousands of miles in Antarctica. When the southern landscape became cluttered with expeditions, Herbert turned his eyes toward the northern hemisphere, whose polar regions remained largely untouched. Herbert is best known for his 3,620-mile trip on foot from Point Barrow, Alaska, across the North Pole to the remote island of Spitzbergen, Norway. The four-person, thirty-four-dog trip, sponsored in large part by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and outfitted with the latest scientific equipment of the day, took more than a year (counting rest stops) and put the explorers in mortal danger, on the ice, for months. Herbert described the team's harrowing but exhilarating adventure in his 1969 book Across the Top of the World. It was neither his last adventure not his last book. Herbert led a filmmaking team to northwestern Greenland, where he, his wife, and their baby daughter lived among the Eskimos for more than a year. He published Eskimos in 1976. In the late 1970s Herbert planned a circumnavigation of the entire island of Greenland by dog sled and boat, but was ultimately stymied by weather and equipment problems. In the 1980s rumors surfaced that Herbert's polar crossing actually displaced the prior claim of Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary in 1909, and Herbert was invited by the National Geographic Society to examine Peary's diary for corroborating details. In his controversial 1989 book The Noose of Laurels: Robert E. Peary and the Race to the North Pole, Herbert reported that Peary had missed the pole by as much as sixty miles. Later researchers determined that Peary's miss, if indeed there was one, might have been by as little as five miles. In the 1990s, beset by heart problems and a diagnosis of diabetes, Herbert retired to Laggan, a small community in the Scottish Highlands, where he occupied himself with writing and painting. His autobiography, The Third Pole, was published in 2003. His artwork was shown in several solo exhibitions around the world and collected in the book The Polar World: The Unique Vision of Sir Wally Herbert, which was published in 2007. Herbert's achievements were celebrated by a knighthood in 2000; other awards included a Polar Medal from the British government, the Founders Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and the Livingstone Gold Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Herbert, Wally, Across the Top of the World, Longmans, Green (New York, NY), 1969.

Herbert, Wally, The Third Pole, Macmillan (London, England), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2007, p. B13.

New York Times, June 18, 2007, Dennis Hevesi, p. A17.

Times (London, England), June 14, 2007, p. 68.