To boldly go where no man has gone before

Whether attempting to conquer Everest wearing pullovers or de-icing the engines of a moving plane with a knife, we've long tested human endurance to the limit

- Charles Harris

THE boundaries of human capability are hard to grasp. Determination, nerve, intelligence or physique produce achievements so far beyond common experience as to seem scarcely credible. Motivations might range from conquest to sport or merely an urge to excel. For example, Kim Collison—who, in 2020, ran 96 miles in 24 hours over 78 Lake District peaks-says simply that he 'loved the hills and the physical release'.

Mountains are a testing theatre. During the 1924 Everest expedition, despite blizzards, delay and exhaustion, four Englishmen climbed within 1,000ft of the wind-whipped, icy summit -wearing pullovers, tweed jackets and gaberdine smocks. Two, George Mallory and Andrew Sandy' Irvine, were thereafter seen ‘moving with considerable alacrity only 650ft from the top and may, indeed, have achieved it, if not for their fatal fall.

The 1924 expedition to Everest traverses the foot of the ice wall of the North Col

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's climb in 1953 was fuelled by oxygen. Yet, by 1986, Italian super-climber Reinhold Messner, despite losing seven toes to frostbite, had climbed all 14 of the world's highest peaks 'by fair means'—without oxygen. An astonishing blend of will, skill and enviable lungs.

Ocean sailors have a triple problem: where are they, will the sea overwhelm them and can they survive the pressures of a lengthy voyage? Ferdinand Magellan sailed into the unknown with five ships in 1519. Shipwreck, mutiny, tempest and scurvy harrowed his fleet. He was killed attacking a Philippine island resisting conversion to Christianity. Only Victoria continued, captained by the dogged Juan Elcano (previously chained for months by Magellan as a mutineer), to be the first to circumnavigate the world.