This article was written by Rachel Ingram. Photography courtesy of Mike Horn.
“With a boat, you choose your direction, your speed, and when you want to go. It’s the ultimate sensation of freedom.”
Horn is one of the world’s few remaining professional adventurer-explorers. The Swiss South African has spent the past three decades traversing the globe, making history time and time again as he’s completed expeditions that’ve pushed the limits of endurance in some of the globe’s most remote or difficult destinations. He’s sailed around the world 15 times, climbed some of the highest mountains on Earth without oxygen, crossed the North and South poles, and swam a giant stretch of the Amazon, among other feats.
After all these experiences, it’s at sea that he sees the most potential for modern-day discovery. “I use yachting to take me from one adventure to another, to places where aeroplanes, helicopters, and other vessels couldn’t go,” Horn says.
Dissatisfied with the vessels available on the market, he built his own yacht to access such places. Pangaea is a 32-meter icebreaker sailing boat, built by Brazilian yacht designer Equipe Thierry Stump in 2007 and restored recently by Sunreef Yachts.
Horn is currently underway on a four-year round-the-world expedition he’s titled What’s Left. At 57 years old, he claims it will be his last major mission. The crew, made up of researchers and scientists, will re-visit iconic destinations from throughout Horn’s career, where they’ll study how each place has changed over time, as well as locations left on his bucket list. The yacht will spend up to six months in each destination, including the Arctic, the Amazon, Antarctica, Patagonia, Australia, New Zealand, northern Canada, Alaska, and Asia.
“We think we’ve discovered everything on the planet and mapped the world, but not at all,” Horn says. “We’ve just spent the last five months sailing around Greenland, going into places that nobody has ever been. The moment you go into these corners that we call unshaped diamonds, you become hungry to find these places.”
The explorer’s aim for What’s Left is to take stock of the current state of the Earth and collect and present research that will inspire a “new generation of stakeholders in the planet”. He doesn’t, however, want to be another doom-and-gloom monger. “Today, the environmental anxiety within the youth has never been so prominent,” he says. “We don’t need to tell people to be afraid anymore. Let’s go out and find the solutions for these hotspots and endangered or threatened areas of the natural environment we live in. Then let’s educate people on how we should do things to get the recipe straight away, without creating fear.”
One way Horn plans to encourage rather than scare youths is by inviting school students and young environmentalists onboard Pangaea to partake in fully funded research trips. He’s already run several such exercises through Pangaea X, a not-for-proft organization he founded in 2008. The initiative’s mission is to help young people turn their ideas and passions for the environment into meaningful, practical action.
“We live in a world that doesn’t allow people access to these places—it becomes something that only explorers or wealthy people get to do. But imagine you can give this opportunity to anybody? And then, you hook them in with that opportunity and you start educating them,” Horn says.
“I say, let’s show them the world so they can see it and experience it, and then with scientifc facts and knowledge that we have on board, we tell them what they can do to conserve that natural environment.”
The next phase of Pangaea X’s mission is a competition that asks PhD and masters’ students to submit ideas to solve current environmental problems. Ten of the projects submitted will then be actioned and funded by the organization. The last round had over 100 applications. “It’s so rewarding to see young people engaging into a problem that our generation of people created just to be able to live a better life in the future,” Horn says.
Horn is conscious that his years traveling the globe as an explorer are limited, so he is using his time left to encourage the next generation of explorers and environmentalists. But more than that, he’s hoping that by opening the eyes of the youth, they will bring more adventure into modern yachting, which he says often lacks in excitement. “We tend to all end up in the same marinas around the world, but imagine you go where there are no marinas?” he says. “Tomorrow morning in Greenland, I will decide where I want to go for the day and where I’ll put my anchor the area is completely unknown, which makes some people afraid, but that excites me.”