Polar Explorers and their Watches

The most hostile environments the planet has to offer have tested, and sometimes bested, scores of intrepid adventurers over the centuries. They are places where poor planning, equipment failings or just sheer bad luck can literally be the difference between life and death.

To that end, one piece of essential kit no explorer should go without is the humble wristwatch. Or perhaps humble is the wrong word. There is no proving ground like a polar expedition to demonstrate a model’s strength or reliability. And that is something many of the top manufactures have taken as the ultimate challenge to their engineering prowess.

Below then is our list of some of the finest watches ever worn at the top or bottom of the Earth.

Roald Amundsen

We can only start with one man; the OG of polar exploration, Roald Amundsen.

The first man to reach the South Pole, the first to reach both poles, the first to sail the Northwest Passage and one of the first to cross the Arctic by air, Amundsen’s life was the stuff of Boy’s Own adventure comics.

With his successful conquest of the South Pole occurring in 1911, to him a watch was far more than merely an instrument to tell the time. A sextant and twopocketwatches from the J. Assman company of Glashütte, Germany were his main navigation aids. Both timepieces were identical, and had been certified by the German Naval Institute, with one set to home time and the other to local.

More recently, another of Amundsen’s watches came to light—a Benrus, presented by the Rotary Club of New York, of which the explorer was one of the first and most high profile members. The small, rectangular-cased piece, dripping in Art Deco nostalgia with, ‘Presented By New York Rotary Club to Capt. Roald Amundsen Jan. 13, 1927’ on the back is safely in the hands of a descendant of Amundsen’s in Oslo and is reportedly in excellent working order despite being nearly a century old.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Ranulph Fiennes, or Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet OBE, to give him his full title, has been described as the world’s greatest living adventurer.

And, as the first man to reach both the North and South Poles by surface means and the first to cross the entirety of Antarctica by foot, it is with good reason.

Between 1979-1982, he took part in the Trans-Globe Expedition, the first and so far only circumnavigation of the globe along its vertical axis from one pole to the other using no aircraft. During the adventure he wore, and appeared in advertisements for, the Rolex GMT-Master, one of the few watches at the time able to cope with the extremes of temperature change between the Poles and the tropics.

Perhaps uniquely, Fiennes gave up his ambassadorship of Rolex in the late ‘90s. But he would go on to lend his credence and design input to fledgling brand, Kobold, established by close friend and fellow explorer Michael Kobold, in 1998. Like Fiennes, Kobold has summitted Everest several times and it was at Fiennes’s suggestion that he was able to find a way to pay back two of the sherpas who had saved his life on the mountain. He brought the men to his Pittsburgh workshop to train them as watchmakers, eventually setting them up in a subsidiary in Kathmandu called the Kobold Watch Company Nepal (Pvt.) Ltd. Here, the men assembled the Kobold Himalaya, a steel 44mm, three-hander automatic, along with a 25-unit limited edition with a dial made of Everest limestone.

Reinhold Messner

Considered one of the greatest mountaineers of all time, Italian Reinhold Messner is listed nine times in the Guinness Book of Records for a litany of incredible achievements which border on the superhuman.

He was the first climber to conquer all 14 of the world’s mountains over 8,000 metres above sea level without oxygen, and the first to traverse both Antarctica and Greenland without dog sleds or snowmobiles.

He achieved the first ever solo ascent of Everest, and was also first to scale the mountain with no supplemental oxygen. On that latter expedition, with fellow climber Peter Habeler in 1978, the pair wore Rolex Oysterquartz Datejusts ref. 17000. Rolex took the opportunity to part sponsor the attempt to try and dispel the notion that quartz watches were somehow more fragile than their mechanical equivalents. It also bookended nicely with the first ever successful ascent of Everest in 1953 by Hillary and Norgay, of which the brand was also a benefactor—a journey which eventually gave rise to the Rolex Explorer.

But Messner describes his greatest challenge as the Würth-Antarktis Transversale in 1989-1990, a journey to ‘man-haul’ across the entire continent of Antarctica. A voyage the man himself pronounced ‘a living hell’, there was only one timepiece deemed suitable to accompany him on such an undertaking, the Omega Speedmaster Professional.

Polar exploration remains one of the peaks of human endeavour. The courageous pioneers who have ventured into terrifying adversity, far beyond anything the vast majority of us will ever experience, physically or mentally, are rightly lauded as true heroes. The iconic watches that accompanied them into the unknown also deserve recognition for their invaluable contribution, playing their part in successes which have captured the imagination of the entire world.