On January 24, 2016, Louis Rudd heard shocking news: Henry Worsley, a man who had taught Rudd everything he knew about the “dark arts” of polar exploration, had died on a quest to walk across Antarctica alone. Nearly three years later, Rudd, a forty-nine-year-old captain in the British Army, plans to honor his friend by embarking on his own solo expedition across the icy continent. He expects to begin following in Worsley’s footsteps in a few days.
Rudd was driving toward his home, in Hereford, England, when a colleague called him to say that Worlsey’s journey had ended tragically. Rudd pulled over to the side of the highway, and, as cars rattled by, thought about his friend. He remembered an expedition that they had gone on together, in 2011-12, in which they had reënacted the race to the South Pole, a century earlier, between the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Rudd and Worsley followed the route of Amundsen, who had beaten Scott by thirty-three days. A competing party traced Scott’s path. (On the return journey, Scott had died, along with his four men.)
The eight-hundred-mile journey was Rudd’s baptism into polar exploration, and Worsley, who had previously led an expedition to the South Pole, patiently taught him how to survive in temperatures that fell to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and amid winds that blew at gale force. He showed Rudd how to navigate through blinding whiteouts and how to identify scars in the ice sheet that marked crevasses: one misstep, Worsley warned, and Rudd would plunge into a bottomless chasm.
Rudd thought about the time when he made a slight mistake that nearly cost him his life. Pausing for a drink, he poured some water into a cup; suddenly, a gust of wind sprayed the liquid, soaking his gloved hand. In an instant, his fingertips froze. Worsley helped him to quickly dry them and restore circulation, and he shared with Rudd some advice that he’d learned from another polar explorer: “Get wet, you die.”
Rudd also recalled that, each night in their tent, Worsley excitedly read aloud passages from Amundsen’s diary, often as a blizzard of ice particles pelted the flimsy roof over their heads. Worsley, who was married and had two children, was a British Army officer who had served two tours with the Special Air Service, an élite commando unit. He was also a polymath who had become a leading authority on the golden age of Antarctic exploration and, especially, on Ernest Shackleton, his hero. (I previously wrote about Worsley for The New Yorker, a story that is now being published as a book, called “The White Darkness,” that includes dozens of photographs from both Worsley’s and Shackleton’s expeditions.) Worsley instilled in Rudd his almost mystical passion for Antarctica, a place as beautiful as it is treacherous. With Worsley guiding their party, they beat their rivals to the South Pole. By then, Rudd revered his friend as if he were Shackleton himself.
On February 11, 2016, Rudd attended Worsley’s funeral, at St. Paul’s Church in London. Rudd looked at the casket, which was draped with Polar Star white roses. At the time, he wasn’t prepared to attempt the solo trek that Worsley had dared. In 1914, Shackleton had hoped to make the first journey across Antarctica—a trip of roughly eleven hundred miles—but his ship, the Endurance, became frozen in ice, and sank. Unlike Shackleton, Worsley, who was fifty-five when he died, attempted the journey alone and unsupported: he had no food caches planted along his route to forestall starvation, and he hauled all his supplies on a sled, without the assistance of dogs or sails. Before Worsley, nobody had ever attempted such a feat, and his death suggested that it might be beyond human capacity.
Rudd soon found an endeavor, only slightly less extreme, to honor his friend. In November, 2016, he had been planning to lead a group of five other soldiers on an expedition to the South Pole, and, with their blessing, he radically altered the route: they would instead follow Worsley’s path across the continent. They would begin on the frozen edge of the Weddell Sea, the southernmost arm of the Atlantic Ocean, and then march more than seven hundred miles to the South Pole; from there, they would continue another four hundred miles, crossing the trans-Antarctic Mountains and finally descending onto the Ross Ice Shelf, which was on the continent’s Pacific side, south of New Zealand. Rudd, in addition to bringing five companions, had made one other concession to reduce risk: at the South Pole, where a U.S. scientific-research base is situated, he and his men would restock their food supplies.
Even with these modifications, the journey was punishing. One member of the party became increasingly weak; his body weight dropped more than forty pounds, and he could barely pull his sled. The other men carried many of his provisions. “He was cold and not mentally in a good place,” Rudd told me recently. Rudd realized that allowing the man to continue on the expedition might jeopardize the rest of the party, and so when the group reached the South Pole he made a difficult decision. “I had to tell him he wasn’t going any further—to end that dream,” Rudd recalled. “He felt like a failure, but that wasn’t the case at all, and it was the right decision.”
Rudd and his remaining men trudged onward. After trekking for a total of a thousand miles, they ascended a glacier pocked with crevasses. The spot was not far from where Worsley, on the verge of collapse, had summoned a rescue plane. Worsley had been transported to a hospital in Chile, where doctors discovered that he had an infection in tissue lining the inner wall of his abdomen. The infection soon spread into Worsley’s bloodstream, and he died from organ failure.
On the glacier, Rudd, who was carrying the compass that Worsley had brought on his final journey, collected some rocks and built a small cairn. “It was about minus forty degrees, and the winds were howling, and we held a short memorial service,” Rudd recalled. They were not supposed to disturb the environment, and after they were done they scattered the rocks and pressed onward.
On January 22, 2017, after trekking for sixty-eight days, the men reached the Ross Ice Shelf. Rudd wrote on his blog, “We have done it.” He added that, for him, one of the most satisfying elements of the journey had been the opportunity to offer a “suitable tribute to a great friend.”
Later that year, an experienced British polar explorer named Ben Saunders, who was also a close friend of Worsley’s, attempted to make an unsupported solo crossing of Antarctica. “I thought he’d crack it,” Rudd recalled. When Saunders reached the South Pole, however, he calculated that he had only enough food for another thirteen days—and that the rest of the journey would take him at least seventeen. On past expeditions, he might have forged ahead anyway, but he thought about Worsley and hesitated. In a dispatch, which Saunders posted on his blog, he wrote that, with “bittersweet feelings,” he had “decided this time to end my expedition.” Separately, he noted, “I made a promise to Henry to get home in one piece. As much as I am determined to finish this trip for him, I need to make my decision based on safety and not let my own determination cloud my judgement. . . . It feels like the most respectful thing I can do after Henry’s fate.”
The fact that someone as skilled as Saunders had failed to claim the prize did not deter Rudd, and he was finally tempted to embark on the mission himself. “It seemed like my destiny,“ he told me, adding, “It’s one of the last great polar challenges that exist.”
On October 25th, he bid farewell to his wife and three children and boarded a plane for Chile. In November, as soon as the weather permits, he will fly to his starting point in Antarctica, near the Weddell Sea, and set out into the white darkness. Rudd made his family one promise: “If I need to pull out, I will.”
