British explorer of the Antarctic, one of three men who were the second party to cross the continent and only a tenth to travel overland to the pole. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Charles Burton and Oliver Shepard set out to circle the earth on longitude 0, the Greenwich Meridian, a venture called the Transglobe Expedition, 1981. He is called “The World’s Greatest Living Explorer” in the Guinness Book of Records,
The Fiennes family motto has been “Look for a brave spirit” through a thousand years of courageous and resourceful ancestors, traceable directly to Charlemagne and passed on to Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Raised in Africa, he followed his father’s path into the Scots Greys before joining the elite SAS regiment. Becoming the youngest captain in the British Army, he was dismissed for blowing up the film set of Doctor Doolittle. After serving two years with the Sultan of Oman’s forces, he began a series of adventures. He took a hovercraft up the White Nile and parachuted onto Europe’s highest glacier, forced his way up 4,000 miles of the mightiest rivers of Canada and Alaska and trekked on foot, unsupported, to the North Pole. The cousin of actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, Sir Ran is the descendant of Charlemagne.
He has led over 22 major expeditions to remote parts of the world, including both Poles. Fascinated by the legends of the Lost City of Ubar described by Lawrence of Arabia as the Atlantis of the Sands, Fiennes led several expeditions in the great deserts of Arabia, before finally finding the city in Oman in 1992.
In 1993, Sir Ranulph and Dr. Mike Stroud completed the first entirely unassisted polar journey across the Antarctic Continent, the longest polar journey in history. For 97 days the two men fought pain, starvation and snow blindness, dragging 500-pound sledges across the frozen roof of the world. Their physical struggle against the elements soon turned into a psychological and mental struggle between the two explorers. Sir Ranulph also attempted the last challenge, to cross the Antarctic Continent solo and unsupported, in November 1996 but had to give up because of a kidney stone. Sir Ranulph was described by HRH Prince Charles, the patron of the first circumpolar expedition started in 1979, as “mad but marvelous.” Queen Elizabeth II awarded him an OBE for “human endeavor and charitable services” in 1993, along with other honors. In 1999 he had the temerity to place his frostbitten left hand in a vise and hacked off the petrified fingertips with a fretsaw at his Somerset, England workshop after an aborted solo jaunt to the North Pole.
Fiennes’ 12 books include “Mind Over Matter” as well as “The Sett,” in April 1996, “From Pole to Pole,” 1997 and “Fit for Life,” 1998. His “The Feather Men” was a No.1 bestseller in the UK. He has claimed ten expeditionary world records, each feat designed to raise money for charitable causes, an amount of over four million pounds. He once remarked, “I cannot imagine anything as ecstatic as the feeling of returning from an expedition to a hot bath.”
Link to Wikipedia biography