Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins an Arctic adventurer’s legacy

Sometime on 20 August 1932, East Greenland’s Steenstrup Glacier calved into the Tugtilik Fjord, creating a wave that capsized Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins’ kayak while he was out seal hunting. Having been taught by the Inuit, he was a skilled kayaker but, sadly, this didn’t save him. It’s not known what happened but it’s presumed that, failing to roll back up, Watkins exited into the water, where survival time would be short. His kayak skirt and belt were later found on an ice floe, so the likelihood is that while he was able to get out of the water, the cold would have been equally debilitating on the floe and he succumbed to hypothermia while swimming to the shore.

Watkins had become Britain’s leading polar explorer of his time and had established a remarkable reputation as an inspiring leader. While at Cambridge, he was influenced by James Wordie, who had been south on the Endurance Expedition and was part of the ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’. Post-war, however, with the economic travails of the 1920s and ’30s, national expeditions fell