Gino Watkins: The Greatest Explorer You've Never Heard Of
About this episode
Nic Watkins shares the story of his great-uncle Gino Watkins, a remarkable explorer who led significant Arctic expeditions and mysteriously disappeared at a young age.
In 1930, a 24-year-old Cambridge undergraduate named Gino Watkins led fourteen men to the east coast of Greenland on one of the most ambitious Arctic expeditions of the twentieth century. Their mission: to prove that aeroplanes could fly the Atlantic by mapping an unmapped coastline, discovering unknown mountain ranges, and manning a weather station in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet — through winter, in the dark, in winds of 130 miles per hour. Gino Watkins never lost a man. He discovered the highest mountains in the Arctic, became the first non-Inuit to master the Greenlandic kayak, and is now regarded as the godfather of British kayaking. By twenty-five, he had led three major expeditions and earned the Polar Medal from the King. And then, on a solo hunting trip during his next expedition, he disappeared - leaving only his kayak and his trousers behind. He was twenty-five years old. Nic Watkins, Gino's great-nephew and a filmmaker who has spent nearly a decade piecing together his story, joins Hugh to tell the full tale: the expeditions, the rescues, the family tragedies that shadowed Gino's short life, and what it was like to finally stand in the base camp where his…
People in this episode
Host: Hugh
Guest: Nic Watkins
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Chip Taylor Communications, bridgingtheicedoc.com, nicwatkins.com
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