In 1930, a 24-year-old Cambridge undergraduate named Gino Watkins led fourteen men to the east coast of Greenland on one of the most ambitious Arctic expeditions of the twentieth century. Their mission: to prove that aeroplanes could fly the Atlantic by mapping an unmapped coastline, discovering unknown mountain ranges, and manning a weather station in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet — through winter, in the dark, in winds of 130 miles per hour.
Gino Watkins never lost a man. He discovered the highest mountains in the Arctic, became the first non-Inuit to master the Greenlandic kayak, and is now regarded as the godfather of British kayaking. By twenty-five, he had led three major expeditions and earned the Polar Medal from the King. And then, on a solo hunting trip during his next expedition, he disappeared - leaving only his kayak and his trousers behind. He was twenty-five years old.
Nic Watkins, Gino's great-nephew and a filmmaker who has spent nearly a decade piecing together his story, joins Hugh to tell the full tale: the expeditions, the rescues, the family tragedies that shadowed Gino's short life, and what it was like to finally stand in the base camp where his great-uncle had lived, seeing in colour for the first time what he had only ever known in black and white.
Gino Watkins was himself an Arthur Beale customer - head to our website to see the telegram he sent from Greenland asking for an urgent restock of rope: arthurbeale.co.uk.
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