How a Man Survived Arctic Solitary Confinement: An Icy Path to God
"We…had suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory…seen God in all his splendors, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man." -Sir Ernest Henry Shackelton, explorer.
(United Kingdom)—Writing for Inspire Magazine, Jeremy Scott shares the story of his uncle, Gino Watkins, who in 1930 led a group of 13 relatively inexperienced men to chart a flight over the Arctic, thus paving the way for future passenger air travel.
The group sailed up east Greenland with two open-cockpit biplanes on board, surveying the coastal mountains by aerial photography and also flying deep probes into the interior. Then five men started out to establish a met station in the country's interior, manned by relays of two. In late October a party of six set out to relieve the station and install the pair who would remain for the winter. They met with appalling conditions, says Scott—hunger, frostbite, deadening silence—and since there was no longer enough food at the station to support two men, one man, August Courtauld, volunteered to stay at the station himself.
According to Scott, Courtauld turned to his Bible and the book The Imitation of Christ for solace and sanity. "I came to realize," wrote Courtauld, that "I was held by the Everlasting Arms."
In his book Dancing on Ice: A Stirring Tale of Adventure, Risk, and Restless Folly, Scott reveals that before being rescued by Gino five months later, Courtauld had discovered the presence of God in the midst of grueling hardship.
Concludes Scott: "The expedition succeeded in opening an air-route still flown today, but Courtauld had discovered a certainty and peace that would last him all his life."
