The Art of Adventure

Angela Madsen was a US Marine, a three-time Paralympian and the holder of 14 Guinness World Records - and she reached all of it after a botched operation left her paraplegic, and after periods of homelessness, debt and chronic pain. Rowing was the thing that gave her life back. By the time she approached 60, she had crossed oceans around the world and had one ambition left: to row one entirely alone.In April 2020, Angela set off from Los Angeles for Hawaii in her boat, Row of Life, aiming to become the first paraplegic, and the oldest woman, to row the Pacific solo. She turned 60 at sea. She never reached Hawaii.Hugh's guest is Soraya Simi, the filmmaker who told Angela's story. Barely out of film school, Soraya was asked by Angela to document the row, and spent a year working with her before the boat left LA - then followed the crossing from shore, in real time, message by message. Her debut feature, Row of Life, took six years to make and became a very different film from the one she set out to make. Soraya joins Hugh to talk about who Angela really was, the marriage to Deb at the heart of the story, the boat that drifted 4,000 miles and reappeared on a remote Pacific atoll, and what it means to keep going - the idea Angela lived by to the very end.Soraya Simi's film Row of Life is available to rent or buy online. Search for it on Amazon, Apple or YouTube to find it in your territory. YouTube UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW6paF7-GoApple UK: https://tv.apple.com/gb/movie/row-of-life/umc.cmc.4ot0ibynmm3qoclgv4hpvt3oPrime UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.e0e3bbe0-e0bf-42bb-b1fa-916def893012?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wbAngela told her own story in her memoir, Rowing Against the Wind.This episode brings Series 2 to a close - thank you for listening. The Art of Adventure is brought to you by Arthur Beale, outfitters to sailors, adventurers, vagabonds and explorers for over 500 years. Find out more at arthurbeale.co.uk. Listeners get 15% off with the code PODCAST at checkout.

For centuries, Timbuktu was Europe's idea of the unreachable place - an African El Dorado where the roofs were said to be made of gold. The myth had roots in something real: in 1325 the Malian emperor Mansa Musa travelled to Mecca with so much gold that his spending in Cairo devalued the Egyptian currency for years afterwards. By the time European explorers went looking, the city had been in decline for two centuries. Nobody in Europe knew that, because nobody had been there and come back.In the 1820s, the French put up a prize: a small fortune for the first person to reach Timbuktu and return alive to describe it.Two men went after it, and they could not have been less alike. Alexander Gordon Laing was a Scottish army officer who crossed the Sahara openly. René Caillié was the son of a convict, orphaned at eleven, self-taught and self-funded. He spent months learning Arabic, travelled alone and in disguise. One man never returned, and the other discovered something he could have never predicted. Charlie English joins Hugh to tell the story of both men. A writer and journalist, and formerly head of international news at the Guardian, Charlie left the paper to write The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, which braids this nineteenth-century race together with a modern one - the librarians who smuggled the city's ancient manuscripts to safety during the jihadist occupation of 2012.The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English is out now, published in the US as The Storied City.Charlie and a group of academics are raising funds to support the Mohammed Tahar Library in Timbuktu. Search for the Mohammed Tahar Library Project on Patreon.The Art of Adventure is brought to you by Arthur Beale, outfitters to sailors, adventurers, vagabonds and explorers for over 500 years. Find out more at arthurbeale.co.uk. Listeners get 15% off with the code PODCAST at checkout.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed from England with 129 men and two of the Royal Navy's finest ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to chart the last unmapped stretch of the Northwest Passage. They were expected back within three years. They were never seen again.What followed became one of the greatest mysteries in the history of exploration. Scattered bones on a frozen island. Inuit testimony of starvation and cannibalism. A hastily scrawled note in the margins of an Admiralty form. And a Victorian public that refused to believe its heroes could have met such an end. Russell Potter, one of the world's foremost Franklin scholars, joins Hugh to unpick nearly 180 years of searching, speculation, and discovery. He explains what we actually know, what we can only guess at, and why the mystery endures. Both ships have now been found, one remarkably preserved beneath the Arctic waters, but what lies within them has yet to be fully explored.From the fatal decision to abandon ship, to the race between Lady Franklin and the press, to the amateur sleuths and satellite hunters still searching today - this is a story that refuses to give up its secrets. We ask why the Franklin Expedition continues to grip us, what it reveals about the nature of obsession, and whether the answer might still be out there, waiting to be found.Russell Potter's book Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search is out now.

Helen Sharman appears by arrangement with DBA Speakers www.dbaspeakers.comIn 1989, Helen Sharman was driving home from work when a radio ad changed her life. Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary. Britain had no space agency, no human spaceflight programme, and no tradition of sending civilians into orbit. Helen was a 26-year-old food technologist from Sheffield with a chemistry degree and no military background. She applied anyway.Eighteen months later, she was sitting on top of a Soviet rocket - and on 18 May 1991, she became the first British person in space.Helen joins Hugh to tell the full story: the 13,000 applicants, the gruelling selection process, and the live television broadcast that revealed her as one of the two finalists. She describes life at Star City on the cusp of the Cold War's end, the manual docking crisis 200 kilometres from Mir when the navigation system failed and the crew had to act alone, and those evening hours when five people gathered around a porthole and simply looked at the earth. She also reflects on what it actually takes to go somewhere extraordinary — and why the qualities that got her there might be less unusual than we think.The Art of Adventure is brought to you by Arthur Beale, outfitters to sailors, adventurers and explorers for nearly 500 years. Find out more at arthurbeale.co.uk.

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica. His ship never reached the continent. Within months, the Endurance was crushed by sea ice, leaving 28 men stranded in one of the most hostile environments on earth, with no hope of rescue.Historian of polar exploration Henrietta Hammant joins Hugh to unpick the legend of Shackleton: his rivalry with Scott, the 5,000 men who applied for a voyage into the unknown, and the extraordinary 800-nautical-mile lifeboat crossing to South Georgia that should, by any reasonable measure, have failed. But this episode asks a harder question: what does it mean to lead when everything has already gone wrong? And what can a century-old survival story teach us about the kind of leadership we actually want today?The Art of Adventure is brought to you by Arthur Beale, outfitters to sailors, adventurers and explorers for nearly 500 years. Find out more at arthurbeale.co.uk.

On 8th June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine set out from their high camp on Everest. They were spotted once, two small figures moving through a break in the clouds, and then they were gone. Over a hundred years later, we still don't know if they made it to the top.Award-winning filmmaker and author Mick Conefrey, whose book Fallen examines Mallory's final expedition, joins Hugh to separate the man from the myth. What really drove Mallory back to Everest a third time? Was the third attempt an act of heroism, or recklessness? And does it matter whether he reached the summit or not?Along the way, Mick challenges some of mountaineering's most cherished narratives, and asks what "because it's there" really tells us about one of history's most debated climbers.The Art of Adventure is brought to you by Arthur Beale, outfitters to sailors, adventurers and explorers for nearly 500 years. Find out more arthurbeale.co.uk.