Red Széll

But certainly those early journals were fascinating.

And actually, it was the journals of James Cook.

And a book about Ferdinand Magellan that really inspired me to want to start adventuring.

Really?

Oh, God.

Yeah, absolutely.

I was given a wonderful compendium, a book of discovery that was basically the choice cuts from all these great adventurers journals.

And when I was, what, about nine or ten years old, it had wonderful maps of how the world was expanding because of these adventurers.

All the way up to Shackleton and Scott in the Antarctic.

And you can see it was a very short jump for me to go from Scott and Shackleton to actually picking up The White Spider by Heinrich Haare, who was one of the first men to climb Shackleton.

the Eiger in Switzerland, that sort of terrible rock face that has claimed so many lives.

And as a 13-year-old novice climber, I was hooked.

It was journeys into the impossible.

It was journeys into the unknown.

It was journeys into the limits of human endurance.

Yeah, but it's funny.

I remember talking to Stuart Turton, the mystery thriller writer, whose second book, The Devil in the Deep Water, is an account of the Batavia case.

disaster uh or scandal uh a dutch east indies ship that uh had a mutiny and i won't give any spoilers but he was telling me that he read these original accounts of these sailors exactly that and and they did the homework for him yes he he had to write a thumpingly good mystery plot around it

It's the truth element.

And this is why I love authors who have actually travelled, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.