INTERESTED people are invited to attend a Royal Society Lecture entitled 'To the North Pole by Ship: Benjamin Leigh Smith and his little hut on Franz Josef Land' which will be given by John Killingbeck next Tuesday (March 11) at 7pm in the library at Kelly College.

John works as a lecturer for the Russian company Poseidon Arctic Voyages on their special voyage to the North Pole on '50 Let Podedy' (50 years of victory). She is the most powerful icebreaker in the world with 75,000hp. Two voyages are made each summer to the Pole — less than 100 surface ships have made the journey.

Franz Josef Land lies at 80 degrees north and was the last land to be discovered in the Western hemisphere in 1873. Many of the islands have British names even though this has been Russian territory since 1926, due to a little-known British explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith.

In 1882 he lost his ship, crashed by the ice, built a stone refuge at Cape Flora, surviving the winter, and then sailed his four whaleboats across the Barents Sea to Novaya Zemlya. He lost no men. This journey was an inspiration to later explorers such as Fridtjof Nansen and the British Antarctic explorers Scott and Shackleton.

Lecturer John Killingbeck worked with the British Antarctic Survey, taught for many years at Kelly College and has lived with his well-known wife, actress Jenny Coverack and their family near Horsebridge in the Tamar Valley.­