I originally wrote Quest for Adventure through 1979 and 1980, setting my start point at the end of the Second World War, a period that was not only within my own conscious memory and the beginning of my own personal quest, but also one which marked so many huge social, economic and political changes. Bringing my investigation up to date covers just over half a century, and reveals some changes in the style and nature of people’s quest for adventure which are not necessarily for the best.

The what and the why of adventure is the reason for this book. I should like to go back to my own beginnings, since I suspect that it is only through one’s own experience that one can analyse motives and feelings. For me it started with a picture book of the Scottish hills, picked up at the age of sixteen. The pictures were in monochrome, showing rolling hills, rocky crags and shimmering waters. I was captivated in a way that I had never been before, longed to be among them, to reach their tops, to see beyond the confines of the page. And then came a trip to stay with my grandfather in Ireland. He lived to the south of Dublin, and from his garden I could see the Wicklow Hills. I caught a bus and set out on my first mountaineering expedition to climb one of the outlying hills but fled, frightened, when a great cloud of cumulus threatened to engulf me. I had no compass and anyway did not know how to read one.

But this was adventure. Tentatively, I was stepping into the unknown, had an awareness of danger – admittedly more imagined than real – and a love of the wild emptiness of the hills around me. The following winter a school friend and I hitch-hiked from London up to Wales. It was the long hard winter of 1951, and the whole country was clad in snow. Viewed from Capel Curig the Snowdon massif had for us all the scale and majesty of a Himalayan peak. Clad in school macs and wearing army boots, we tried our Everest by the Crib Goch Ridge, but were avalanched off a long way from the top. My school friend had had enough and hitched home, but I stayed on and made a solitary attempt on Glyder Fach the next day. It was a brilliant blue, sparkling day with great galleons of cloud sweeping over the tops. Once again I fled, afraid of getting lost, but on the way down stopped to watch some climbers on the Milestone Buttress, just above the road. They were roped together, moving slowly up the sheer rock, one at a time, tiny coloured blobs against the grey of the rock and the white of the snow that covered every ledge. I knew then that was what I wanted to do. I can’t define why or how, had never read a book about rock climbing, didn’t even know that the game existed.

I found a friend of the family who did a little climbing and he took me to Harrison Rocks, a small outcrop of sandstone just south of London. It wasn’t ten metres high. You climbed with the protection of a rope hitched round one of the many trees at the top of the crag. At the end of the day, I knew that I had found something I was good at and loved doing. The basic satisfaction of climbing is both physical and mental – a matter of co-ordination similar to any other athletic attachment. But in climbing there is the extra ingredient of risk. It is a hot, heady spice, a piquancy that adds an addictive flavour to the game. It is accentuated by the fascination of pitting one’s ability against a personal unknown and winning through. Being master of one’s destiny, with one’s life literally in one’s hands, is what gives climbing its fascination.

It also gives a heightened awareness of everything around. The pattern of lichen on rock, a few blades of grass, the dark, still shape of a lake below, the form of the hills and cloud mountains above might be the same view seen by the passenger on a mountain railway, but transported to his viewpoint among a crowd, he cannot see what I, the climber, can. This is not an elitist ethic, but rather the deeper sensuous involvement that the climber has with the mountains around him, a feeling heightened by the stimulus of risk.

These are the elements of adventure that I have discovered in climbing – the physical satisfaction of having complete command over one’s body, a sense of risk in the process, an awareness of beauty and the exploration of the unknown. At its most satisfying this would mean one of the rapidly dwindling unknown parts of the world, but almost equally satisfying is a personal unknown, even if others have trodden that path before. The romantic adventurer has always had strong links with science and intellectual curiosity; the very act of trying the unknown, whether it be a stretch of unclimbed rock, a sheet of polar pack ice or an attempt to be the first to sail alone around the world, holds a challenge of the mind as well as the body.

But there is one more ingredient that appears in almost every adventure, as it does in everyday life – the spirit of competition, gratification of ego, call it what you will. Though today competition climbing has developed its own line of athleticism with set rules, historically and in theory climbing is a non-competitive sport. In practice, however, there is a very high level of competition. At its simplest level, a group of climbers bouldering almost inevitably start to compete, trying to outdo each other, to solve a climbing problem that has beaten the others. On bigger crags or mountains, it is reflected in the sense of urgency to be the first to complete a new route, be it on Scafell, the North Wall of the Eiger or Everest itself. In any activity competition is a spur to progress. Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, I am sure that most of us respond to the stimulus of competition and, having won, enjoy the fruits of success, be it the approval of one’s peers or acclaim from a much wider field.

History has offered plenty of opportunities for the adventurously inclined to sail the seas in search of merchandise or plunder, to trek overland to distant Cathay, but adventure as we know it today is a very recent phenomenon. The concept of climbing mountains or sailing small boats just for the fun of it could only come to those with sufficient wealth and time to indulge their whims. It came on the back of the Industrial Revolution, which brought a certain amount of leisure and money, at least to a privileged minority. At the same time, the growing safety and blandness of urban life sparked the desire to escape and seek the stimulus of the unknown, the thrill of defying danger and enjoying the physical beauty of nature entirely for its own sake. During the first half of the twentieth century, adventure games remained the prerogative of a small, middle-class minority. If you were working a six-day week, with only a week’s holiday each year, even if you were able to afford to buy a small boat, you would not have had time to sail it. It was cheaper to go climbing, but, without a full weekend, there was not enough time to get started. In addition, two destructive world wars consumed the energies and, in many cases, the lives of two generations.

It has only been since the Second World War that the field has been laid open to almost anyone in the developed world who craves such a release. This is the reason why people in their thousands tramp the hills, sail their boats, fly their gliders. The ordinary person has been given both the time and the money to do it. It is also why comparatively few people from the Third World play the adventure game – they have not yet reached this level of affluence or leisure. The Sherpa in Nepal is happy to be a high-altitude porter, frequently enters into the spirit of an expedition, is keen to reach the summit, but he is still doing this entirely professionally. For the Nepalese to organise their own expeditions to their high mountains is still a rare occurrence. The more successful ones could undoubtedly afford it, for they are well off, even by Western standards, but I suspect they are too busy consolidating their newfound positions. They are members of a society in a state of fast transition and it is their children or grandchildren who will, perhaps, feel the restless urge towards adventure for its own sake.

In this book I want to look at a wide spectrum of adventurous activities, to see what they have in common, not so much in motive – the why of it – but rather the ‘how’. In studying what took place in an adventure, be it an attempt to sail round the world, cross one of the poles, or climb a mountain, the reasons for doing it emerge on their own. But the field of adventure is so wide I have given myself a few ground rules in deciding which ventures to study.

To me, adventure involves a journey, or a sustained endeavour, in which there are the elements of risk and of the unknown, which have to be overcome by the physical skills of the individual. Furthermore, an adventure is something that an individual chooses to do and where the risk involved is self-imposed and threatens no one but himself. It could be argued that the man who volunteers to join the army, or becomes a mercenary or perhaps a member of the security services, is also an adventurer answering the tempting call to play the danger game. I am aware that this is what attracted me to the army when I became a professional soldier for a few years. It is something the recruiting posters play upon, but in the end one cannot escape from the fact that the soldier’s adventures and thrills are at the expense of others, and that part of the thrill of adventure can become the thrill of the hunt. This goes outside my own ground rules.

There are different levels of adventure which...