HE EVEN ATE HIS OWN DOG TO SURVIVE IN AMAZON!
Benedict Allen’s j ourney across east Anglia next week would have presented little challenge for such a seasoned explorer. His plan was to give a talk at the King’s Lynn Festival on a topic he knows very well – the jungle peoples of Papua new Guinea.
But the chances of the 57-year-old making it to norfolk now look slim – because he has vanished in the very country he was supposed to be speaking about.
Although many are alarmed, those who have followed Allen’s travels through some of the most inhospitable parts of the planet over the past 30 years are more sanguine.
After all, he has eaten his dog to avoid starving in the Amazon, been shipwrecked canoeing to Australia, been shot at by drugs hitmen, sewn up a chest wound in Sumatra with a boot-mending kit, trekked more than 600 miles in the far east of Russia during the worst winter in living memory, and even more impressively still, survived sharing the bed of Jerry Hall.
‘the chances are that Benedict is going to be fine,’ said his friend and former travelling companion, BBc security correspondent Frank Gardner yesterday.
Unlike many other of today’s so - called adventurers and explorers, Allen likes to travel without the creature comforts of a television crew, satellite telephones, or a sneaky night or two in a five-star hotel.
He is very much in the mould of a Victorian adventurer, keen to explore the world almost out of a sense of dynastic duty.
‘ Wanderlust was my family inheritance,’ he once said.
‘My family mapped the tropical belt. they fought in it, they built bridges across it, they edited newspapers and invited Rudyard Kipling out for his first job in it.
‘they flew over it, they wrote books about it, they planted tea on hills of it.’
RAISED near Woodford airfield in cheshire, Allen’s father was a test pi l ot f or t he Vulcan bomber. the family later moved to Buckinghamshire, where he attended prep school before going to Bradfield public school in Berkshire.
‘it was a very supportive environment for a non- conformist like me,’ Allen reflected.
His appetite for adventure was fired by studying environmental science at the University of east Anglia. ‘We went to a volcano in costa Rica and to Brunei, and i headed the university expedition to iceland,’ he recalled.
After working in a warehouse to raise cash, at 23 the fledgling explorer flew to South America to walk the 600 miles from the mouth of the Orinoco river to the mouth of the Amazon.
Whatever Allen’s fate in Papua new Guinea, he will always be remembered for that adventure back in 1983, for the stark and simple reason that he ate a dog he had adopted. named ‘cashoe’, after the native name for dog, the faithful brown-and-white mongrel was picked up in a Brazilian village.
it followed his master even after he had been abandoned by his guides and had capsized his canoe.
Weakened by malaria, and nearing starvation, Allen knew that the only way he could survive was by eating cashoe. in his journal entry for July 25, he recorded: ‘Yesterday i killed my companion. Sharp blow with machete butt to back of skull, then slit the throat.’ Four days later, Allen made it to safety. But when he published his experiences in his first book, Mad White Giant, the explorer was widely vilified; the RSPcA even visited him at home to check on the welfare of his pet dogs.
Killing cashoe was not the only controversy that arose from the book. Some seasoned explorers doubted whether Allen’s account was entirely true, and an invitation to lecture at the Royal Geographical Society was withdrawn. Allen would later admit: ‘this book was unreliable when it came to factual detail.’
nevertheless, the criticism rankled. ‘i think of myself as a very truthful person and it upsets me if people think i’m a fraud.’
Allen has written extensively about his attempts to connect with people untouched by the West. ‘All expeditions became a bid to leave as much of the West behind as possible,’ he said.
While many of the natives that Allen has encountered over his long career have been friendly, the explorer has found that some are less than welcoming.
‘When i was crossing the Amazon Basin, i found myself being shot at and chased by hitmen,’ Allen recalled. ‘they belonged to Pablo escobar and i’d been seen by his camp where they were hiding out. i was in a canoe and they were in their boats, so i just had to keep ducking, until i could run into the forest.’
Allen made it to the trees – just – and hid among the vegetation.
WHILE his expeditions have brought him great risk, they have also garnered acclaim – he is now a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and regularly appears on television.
His good looks have netted him an array of girlfriends, not least the model Hall. ‘ He’s well spoken, posh background and hunky,’ said one observer a few years ago. ‘He’s got some wonderful scars on his body, too.’
it can only be hoped for the sake of his wife and three children that this very eccentric explorer escapes with little more than a few new marks.