Her marriage to a polar explorer led Dublin-born Marie Herbert to set up an unconventional family life in the extreme conditions of the Arctic, writes LORNA SIGGINS
SHE WITNESSED her husband being “tossed like a rag doll” across ice in 180m/hr winds, and she reared her young daughter on whale blubber in a 61 sq m hut with no electricity or running water.
Dublin-born Marie Herbert was still nursing her first baby, 10-month-old Kari, when she moved with her husband to an island off northwest Greenland for several years. “He told me that the Inuit had been having babies for thousands of years, and they’d help me!”
Her instinct was to say “yes”, simply because “you close the door if you say no”. And so she found herself up in the Arctic in August 1971, with hundreds of jars of Heinz baby food, and using all her best miming skills to communicate with her new neighbours.
Her husband’s plan was to make a film about the community that had adopted them. Wally Herbert had been the first man to complete an undisputed trek by foot to the North Pole in 1969, and he spent many years exploring the polar regions with dog teams and in open boats. Some 60 years before, the North Pole record had reportedly been set by either one of two north Americans – naval officer Robert Peary or medical doctor Sebastian Cook. The resulting row is still the subject of controversy a century later. As some commentators have pointed out, the moving state of the north polar ice pack makes the precise location of the geographic North Pole very difficult to map.
Marie Herbert was working in a public relations company in London when she met her future husband, a year before he embarked on his epic North Pole expedition. She had been brought up in Sri Lanka, was educated in south India and had studied speech and drama in London. They were married on Christmas Eve, 1969, just weeks after his return.
“He had this incredible impetuosity, balanced by the remarkable amount of planning that he put into his trips,” she says.
And plan he did, she recalls. “He would dream about absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong, work out a solution and prepare accordingly,” she says. “Mind you, he did say his worst adventures always occurred when travelling with me! At one point, when I was feeling a bit low, he suggested I make a list of all my fears. We then went through the list and worked out resolutions to each – that was his approach.”
They arrived on Herbert Island, named after an unrelated naval officer, as the long winter darkness was approaching.
Kari adapted quickly, to the extent that her first language became Inuktun, an Inuit dialect. “Whatever culture you are in, mothers tend to form a bond of concern for their children, and then humour goes a long way too,” Herbert recalls.
An Inuit couple, Avatak and Maria, and their seven children became the family’s closest friends, embracing Kari as one of their own.
On one of many hazardous adventures, Wally and Marie became trapped on a glacier in a screaming gale and arrived back a week later than planned. The whole community turned out to welcome them.
Herbert relates her experiences in one of five books she has published, entitled The Snow People, while Kari, who founded the Polarworld publishing house, has written of her memories in The Explorer's Daughter.
“Life was so dangerous, for everyone there, that you felt very much alive,” Herbert says. “You would think you would remember every experience, but it doesn’t happen that way. Wally advised me to keep a daily diary.”
The family’s return to England, when Kari was three, was challenging. But there would be more expeditions, including a trip to live with the Sami peoples in Lapland when Kari was four. When Kari was nine, there was a return visit to Greenland which proved to be quite traumatic in its own way, as she had forgotten the language.
“Wally had loved the wilderness to the extent that he had become quite shamanic, which is part of the Inuit culture. I had taken an interest in becoming a therapist at this stage, and I think that helped him in the transition to becoming an artist and writer.”
Wally Herbert passed away in 2007. The couple’s second daughter, Pascale, died in a freak accident at the age of 15. Herbert’s response was to spend some time with native Americans in New Mexico, where she became interested in the concept of wilderness rites of passage.
“I have seen people who have lost children, and have seen how the light went out of their lives,” she says. “I think that after a great trauma, part of your life splits off and you have to claim it back.”
Sadly, the Inuit community she knew has quit Herbert Island for a life on the mainland, where children are exposed to some of the worst aspects of western culture.
“And they are experiencing the terrible consequences of global warming – restricted from hunting as they no longer know when ice is secure, and there is no certainty to their seasons anymore.”
Lady Marie Herbert will speak on Sunday at the ninth annual Ernest Shackleton Autumn School, which runs at Athy Heritage Centre Museum, from October 23rd to 26th. More details at athyheritagecentre-museum.ie
