Explorers' artefacts

Hubert Sagnières' collection of letters, maps and logbooks reveals stories of icy frontiers, unimaginable cold, and relentless human resolve...

- INTERVIEW BY EMMA LONGSTAFF

I've always had a spirit of adventure; an urge to discover what lies beyond the horizon. I was born in France, raised in Algeria, and as an adult I've worked all over the world. Wherever I was posted, I sought out new challenges. My inspiration often came from the travellers of the 18th and 19th centuries some well-known, others much less so - who set sail into uncharted seas and ventured across unmapped lands, often at tremendous risk.

For the last 30 years, I've been trying to recreate some of their journeys. In the South Pacific, for example, I retraced the voyage of French navigators Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse. Both continued the work of James Cook and charted the Pacific Islands, like Tahiti, Samoa, and New Guinea. Since the late 1990s, when I moved with my family to Canada, I've been on more than 20 winter polar expeditions to the Arctic, travelling on skis or with a dog-drawn sled. I was inspired by intrepid 19th-century explorers, many of them British.