Written by John Ridgway and published by Oxford University Press in 1974 (OUT OF PRINT)

Gino Watkins was only twenty-five when he died – drowned in the Arctic waters of Greenland. Yet he had earned a reputation for himself such as few men twice his age enjoy. The leader of several major expeditions to Arctic terrain, he had won the respect of both elders and contemporaries through the strength of his mysterious personality. A passionate enthusiast for adventure, he was yet level-headed and shrewd; pleasure–loving, perhaps cynical in some ways, he was outstanding among explorers for his careful assembling of the details of the intractable wilds into which he journeyed.

John Ridgway, an explorer himself, tells of the background and formative experience of Gino’s life, and then describes in detail the expeditions themselves, bringing to bear on them his own personal knowledge of the hazards they would have entailed.

Postscript 2003 by John Ridgway. It was after a trip to make the first crossing of the Gran Campo Nevado ice-cap in Patagonia, the “Cockleshell Journey”, that I was asked to write this biography. As a child I had been given a book called ‘Men of Achievement’, for Christmas. For ages, I was glued to the book. What had struck me about Gino, was his bold assertion that a man should have achieved everything he wanted in life, by the time he was twenty-five years old. I was already thirty-four….

Writing a biography was serious business. The Series Editor gave me a few clues. I repaired to the Royal Geographical Society in London and sat myself beside the very sealskin kayak in which he had drowned. I pictured myself in it…. And I remembered Chay and me, capsizing our kayak, on that dark winter’s night in that weir on the Thames.

In the Society library, I studied treasured copies of magazines and books, reporting on Gino’s expeditions. There’s a timeless atmosphere about that old building beside Hyde Park. “Surely little has changed in the 43 years since Gino’s carefree laughter rang out here in this room?” I thought.

Mmmm...It is already 37 years since Chay and I rowed across the Atlantic. Oh Blug!

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