‘Dyslexia Is My Superpower’: How Learning Differently Helped Richard Branson
Branson felt a failure at school, dropping out at 15. Now the Virgin founder is convinced that his dyslexia was the reason he took risks.
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Sir Richard Branson has a knighthood, a Caribbean island, a rocket and several billion pounds to his name, but he still thinks of himself as a bit of a rebel. Once, when I went to interview him in his Swiss chalet, Britain’s best-known entrepreneur padded down the steps to meet me in his socks. This time, we speak by Zoom and the 71-year-old is wearing a faded orange T-shirt that looks identical to one my teenage son owns. He is in Morocco at his kasbah in the Atlas Mountains—tanned, of course, and with hair bleached by the sun. When he turns his camera off he sounds exactly—eerily—like Tony Blair. He is definitely more Cool Britannia than Little England.
Branson may have 400 companies in his Virgin group, running everything from gyms to planes and even a bank, but he has never been a suit-and-tie kind of businessman. In the ’70s, his record company signed the Sex Pistols and he is happier leaping from planes or hanging out with supermodels than staring at numbers in the boardroom. Having dropped out of school at 15, he lived for years on a houseboat because he couldn’t afford a house—he called it the Duende, which means “the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm.”
He has always been a brand as much as a businessman—a disrupter who loves to “tilt at big companies,” as he puts it. He still thinks of himself as an outsider rather than part of the corporate establishment and tells me that he has learned over the course of his long business career that “it is possible to be a David versus a Goliath and pay the bills at the end of the year.” Last week, he visited Ukraine and met Volodymyr Zelensky—the epitome of the plucky underdog—and saw some of the sites of Russian attacks since Vladimir Putin’s “appalling invasion” began.
Branson prides himself on taking up new challenges and is always pushing himself to the limit, whether flying around the world in a hot-air balloon or beating Elon Musk into space. “I hate saying no; I’m known as Dr Yes,” he explains, and he is convinced that his positivity is one of the secrets of his success. “I think being an optimist is a hell of a lot more fun than being a pessimist. As a leader, it’s so much better to look for the best in people, to praise people and generally be positive. That brings the best out of people.”
Branson expressed his desire to become an entrepreneur at a young age. Getty
There have, he admits, been some close shaves. He has almost died 75 times as result of his daredevil escapades, and flirted with financial ruin on more than one occasion. “But life has been a hell of a lot more fun because I’ve said ‘yes’ rather than ‘no.’ When I was 16 I brought out a magazine called Student and on the back I printed, ‘The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all.’ I’ve lived by that mantra ever since.”
Branson admits that things could have turned out very differently. On the day he left Stowe—the independent boarding school he attended until he was 15—the head teacher told him he would either end up a millionaire or in prison. That turned out to be an accurate prediction. By the age of 22, he had not only set up his magazine but had also opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records, and founded the empire that would make his name.
A few years later the headmaster sent him a letter asking him to sponsor a new girls’ dormitory at the school. “I wrote back saying, ‘Yes, if you name it after my company,’” Branson tells me. The school decided that “Virgin” was not the most appropriate name to have emblazoned above the door of the female sleeping quarters. “I heard nothing more from him for another 10 years, and then he said how much he regretted not just saying yes. He was good enough to acknowledge that the boy had done OK. There’s much that needs to be done so that schooling can be adapted to the individual rather than the ‘one size fits all’ approach that currently happens.”
Despite making billions from business for over more than 50 years, Branson points out that he would still be considered a failure by an education system that defines success purely in academic terms. He is severely dyslexic but was not diagnosed until his twenties, long after he had left school. Once, when he was about eight, he did an IQ test and recalls with amusement, “I don’t think I filled in anything.” His earliest memories of education are “looking at a blackboard and just seeing mumbo jumbo and relegating myself to the back of the class, so I could at least try to look over somebody else’s shoulder to see if I could get some marks, but having no understanding of what was going on and longing for breaktime so I could go out and play.” He remembers the frustration of struggling to read and write. This was the late ’50s, before dyslexia was widely recognized. “I would jumble things up. People just assumed that we [dyslexics] were stupid. I was definitely bottom of the class.”
Branson inaugurates his new airline Virgin Atlantic Airways on the steps of the ‘Maiden Voyager’ in 1984. Terry Disney
There were some moments of real cruelty and humiliation. “I got beaten for not performing. In those days it was pyjama bottoms down and a stick. Those are unpleasant moments for any kid, but for me, it was strangely the best thing that happened to me. It meant that at 15 I decided that the world needed a magazine run by young people, aimed at young people, that could say we don’t want to waste our time just having a completely exam-orientated society—we should be taught things that are relevant and interesting.”
For years, Branson believed that his differently wired brain was a disadvantage but now he sees his dyslexia as a “superpower” that has given him an edge in business and in life. “If something really interests me, I can excel at it,” he says. “The fact that I was dyslexic meant that, from a very young age, I found fantastic people to surround myself with. It taught me to delegate. I think that, by and large, dyslexics are more creative and good at seeing the bigger picture. We do think slightly differently to other people.”
As an employer, Branson actively seeks out other dyslexics, and he is working with the charity Made By Dyslexia to encourage other businesses to understand the benefits of neurodiversity. Around 40 percent of top-earning CEOs are dyslexic, according to a 2019 survey, and LinkedIn recently added “dyslexic thinking” to its recognized list of skills. Within days, more than 10,000 people had included it in their profiles. “I have a grandchild who’s just been diagnosed as dyslexic and I was able to ring him up and celebrate and say, ‘It’s something that you and I have got that the rest of the family doesn’t have,’” Branson says. “What I tell parents is, work out what your child is really good at and let them follow that path, and the rest will catch up. Let them excel at the things they enjoy.”
During the pandemic he spent time on Necker Island, his Caribbean home, giving his grandchildren the kind of education he wishes he’d had. “We said, ‘There’s a scarlet ibis over there,’ and then we went on the internet and found out all about the scarlet ibis and how they’d been wiped out in the British Virgin Islands a hundred years ago, then recently reintroduced, and how if a scarlet ibis breeds with a white ibis you get a pink ibis. Then we moved on to flamingos and giant tortoises. We were just getting out and about looking at things that are relevant and exciting. And sadly the conventional school educational system doesn’t really do that.”
He insists that schools should recognize different qualities and talents in children. “We need an education system where every young person is set up to thrive in life, and not just thrive as a result of having good exam marks. The Virgin Group no longer asks people for exam results and I think other companies should do the same. One should talk to people about their personality, about what’s going on in the world, how good they are going to be at motivating and inspiring people.” His children Holly and Sam (with his second wife, Joan, to whom he’s been married since 1989) have set up a charity, Big Change, to campaign for education reform.
Branson and his children Sam and Holly. PA Images
Branson does admit that there was one time when his dyslexia almost killed him. “I had to learn to skydive when I was trying to fly around the world in a hot-air balloon. I jumped, and in a very typical dyslexic way, I pulled the lever that got rid of the parachute, not the one that opened the parachute.” Luckily, there was somebody else coming down beside him. “He had watched where my hand was going, and he did a little bit of a Superman dive in, and managed to pull the spare chute, so saving me.”
Nor has he ever been very good at company accounts. “I was 50 years old when I was having a board meeting, and by then we had maybe the largest private group of companies in Europe, and I asked the question, when somebody gave some figures, ‘Is that good news or bad news?’ One of the directors took me out of the room and said, ‘Richard, I’ve known you for years now, I’ve never really dared ask you, but am I right in thinking you don’t know the difference between net and gross?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve never been able to admit it, but yeah, that’s the case.’ He pulled out a sheet of paper, and he had some crayons and he coloured the piece of paper blue and he said, ‘That’s the sea.’ Then he put a fishing net and some fish in the net, and he said, ‘The fish that are in the net, that’s your profit at the end of the year, and the rest of the sea is gross turnover.’ I have name-dropped net and gross ever since. I realized that Virgin’s net worth is nowhere near as big as I thought it was.”
Branson takes part in a pilates class at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia in 2019. Don Arnold
Yet, Branson is convinced that his dyslexia has made him a better businessman because he has an original perspective, is more innovative and willing to take risks. “I’ve never seen myself as an entrepreneur; I’ve seen myself as a creator. I’m not really interested in making money per se; I’m interested in the things that I create surviving. It doesn’t really matter if you failed elementary maths, as I did at school all those years ago. Somebody else can add up the figures. I’ve just got to deliver a product that exceeds expectations. Take Virgin Atlantic—38 years ago we flew with one second-hand 747 across the Atlantic. Everybody thought we were mad. We were taking on British Airways with 300 planes. . .If I’d gone to the accountants and asked them to do some figures to see whether it was a good idea to go into the airline business, they would have told me, ‘You’ll never survive.’”
Branson was born in 1950 in Blackheath, southeast London, the son of Ted, a barrister, and Eve, a former actress, ballet dancer and air hostess. His mother, who died last year from Covid at the age of 96, was an enormous influence as well as his first investor. “She found a necklace and handed it in to the police, but nobody claimed it, so she sold it for £100 and gave me the money to help me get the magazine up and running.” From an early age she encouraged her son to be independent. “She shoved me out of the car aged five or six and told me to make my own way to Granny’s house, which was four or five miles away. She would have got arrested today, but I survived and I’m grateful to her for making us stand on our own two feet from a young age.”
Even as a schoolboy, Branson had an entrepreneurial zeal, although his first business ventures were a disaster. “I had heard that budgerigars bred enormously quickly, and so I bought a few pairs of budgerigars, and you could buy 1,000 tiny little Christmas trees for £3, and if you waited 5 years, when they were 6 feet tall, you could get a good return. The Christmas trees got eaten by bunnies, and somehow or another rats got in and ate the budgerigars—or my mother let them out, because she got fed up with feeding them when I was away, I’m not quite sure. They were both abject failures.” But, he insists, “We need to embrace failure. There are so many entrepreneurs who failed once or twice before they went on to become really successful, and you learn an enormous amount from failure.”
His record stores thrived and he used the money to found a music label. The Sex Pistols were one of the first bands he signed and he admits that the recent re-release of God SAVE the Queen for the Platinum Jubilee made him nostalgic for his rock’n’roll days. “I don’t look back a lot, but the Sex Pistols really propelled Virgin from being a hippy company into being a punk company that then attracted the Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel and Genesis. It was a brief whirlwind of a time with the Sex Pistols involving everything from court cases for Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols to rides down the Thames where the police raided the boat, and lots of headlines attacking the Pistols, which of course played right into their hands, and their record sales soared. It taught me a lot about the promotion and marketing of a product.”
Branson celebrates Virgin Galactic’s first spaceflight. Courtesy of Virgin Galactic
There is, he realized, no such thing as bad publicity. When Virgin was prosecuted for displaying the word “Bollocks” in a Nottingham record store window, Branson mounted an ingenious defence. “I rang up Nottingham University’s linguistics expert and told him the problem and he said, ‘What a load of bollocks. They obviously think that bollocks is a derivative of balls. It’s nothing to do with that. Bollocks was the nickname given to priests in the 18th century, so the album really should mean, “Never mind the priests, here’s the Sex Pistols.”’ I couldn’t believe my luck and said would he mind coming along to court to tell the story? And he said, ‘Look, I happen to be a priest myself. Would you like me to wear my dog collar?’ So we had this linguistics expert in his dog collar, and the judge reluctantly found us not guilty.” The Sex Pistols were “charming” to the priest. “John Lydon and the others were just nice lads having a really fun time.”
Branson admits there is a very thin line between success and failure and there have been some occasions when he came very close to being on the wrong side of that dividing line. Does he think he is just very lucky? “I think it’s partly personal resilience, it’s partly just surrounding oneself with fantastic people, and if you have a great group of people, you can enjoy the good times and you can help each other get through the bad times together. Obviously, Covid was a torrid time, we were in all the wrong businesses, but having a fantastic group of people just putting our heads down, determined to prove the critics wrong, all the Virgin companies came out ahead.”
The economic situation is looking even rockier now. In many ways, it is back to the ’70s, with widespread disruption caused by strikes, and flares back in fashion. “It’s obviously sad to see what’s happening in the world right now,” Branson says. “I fought hard against the Vietnam War and the Iraq war and the Libyan war. . .Seeing Russia in Ukraine makes me want to weep. And the effects of that have been devastating on the price of oil for everybody, and therefore the cost of living.” But he warns that there is another factor which is making things particularly tough in the UK. “Obviously, Brexit’s had a negative effect, and not being part of the common market is going to affect people in Britain much more than they realize. It’s already affecting people enormously in Britain. Our companies overseas are doing a lot better because they can trade more freely with Europe.”
Branson floats in zero-gravity during Virgin Galactic’s first commercial flight Virgin Galactic
In over five decades as a businessman, Branson has been to Chequers and had dinner with at least eight prime ministers. He has always avoided being tied to a particular political party or tribe—he was Margaret Thatcher’s “litter tsar” in the ’80s and was put forward for his knighthood by Tony Blair in 2000 for “services to entrepreneurship.” But he clearly finds the lack of long-term thinking in Westminster frustrating. “It’s tough being a politician, I mean really tough—you’re in your job for two or three years, you’re minister for education for a couple of years, then you’re minister of something else, and so by the time you’ve learnt it, you seem to be moved on. I’ve been 55 years travelling the world in business, and I’ve learnt an incredible amount in that time, so I think businesspeople can sometimes see situations more clearly. . .Politicians need to be receptive and good listeners. That’s a very important skill for any leader to have.”
There are rivalries in business as well as in politics. Last year Branson was caught up in a “battle of the billionaires” race to space with Elon Musk, but he insists they are on good terms now. “He’s a friend. When I woke up to go to space that day, he was there with his baby in the kitchen, which was very sweet. Rivals should be friends in the evening but competing hard in the day.” Going to space was, he says, “the most extraordinary day of my life, the biggest ‘pinch me’ moment. Every second was [the fulfillment of] a dream which I’d had since being a teenager, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and standing there, looking up at the moon, and realizing they were standing on the moon, as a kid it was just extraordinary.”
Three of his five grandchildren were there to watch him blast off. “All the grandkids had incredible things to say. Etta [who is 7] thinks I was once a pirate dumped on Necker Island years ago by other nasty pirates, and she pulled me down to her and whispered in my ear just before I went, ‘Papa, do you know you’re going to be the first pirate ever to go into space?’ Lola, who’s three years old, said, ‘Papa, you come back for me.’ It was just too magical. I’m a Peter Pan fan and to be floating in space looking back at this incredible Earth that we live on was mind-blowing.” Branson will turn 72 this month but the boy who never grew up has no plans to retire. “I’ve been incredibly blessed—blessed with dyslexia, blessed with faults, blessed with positive things as well. Not everything has worked out how I planned it, but I can’t think of anything that I would want to change. I’m just learning all the time and life is so fascinating as a result.”
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Omega Reveals a New Speedmaster Ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics
Your first look at the new Speedmaster Chronoscope, designed in the colour theme of the Paris Olympics.
The starters are on the blocks, and with less than 100 days to go until the Paris 2024 Olympics, luxury Swiss watchmaker Omega was bound to release something spectacular to mark its bragging rights as the official timekeeper for the Summer Games. Enter the new 43mm Speedmaster Chronoscope, available in new colourways—gold, black, and white—in line with the colour theme of the Olympic Games in Paris this July.
So, what do we get in this nicely-wrapped, Olympics-inspired package? Technically, four new podium-worthy iterations of the iconic Speedmaster.
The new versions present handsomely in stainless steel or 18K Moonshine Gold—the brand’s proprietary yellow gold known for its enduring shine. The steel version comes with an anodised aluminium bezel and a stainless steel bracelet or vintage-inspired perforated leather strap. The Moonshine Gold iteration boasts a ceramic bezel, and will most likely appease Speedy collectors, particularly those with an affinity for Omega’s long-standing role as stewards of the Olympic Games, since 1932.
Notably, each watch bears an attractive white opaline dial; the background to three dark grey timing scales in a 1940s “snail” design. Of course, this Speedmaster Chronoscope is special in its own right. For the most part, the overall look of the Speedmaster has remained true to its 1957 origins. This Speedmaster, however, adopts Omega’s Chronoscope design from 2021, including the storied tachymeter scale, along with a telemeter, and pulsometer scale—essentially, three different measurements on the wrist.
While the technical nature of this timepiece won’t interest some, others will revel in its theatrics; turn over each timepiece and instead of finding a transparent crystal caseback, there is a stamped medallion featuring a mirror-polished Paris 2024 logo, along with “Paris 2024” and the Olympic Rings—a subtle nod to this year’s games.
Powering this Olympiad offering—and ensuring the greatest level of accuracy—is the Co-Axial Master Chronometer Calibre 9908 and 9909, certified by METAS.
A Speedmaster to commemorate the Olympic Games was as sure a bet as Mondo Deplatntis winning gold in the men’s pole vault—especially after Omega revealed its Olympic-edition Seamaster Diver 300m “Paris 2024” last year—but they have delivered a great addition to the legacy collection, without gimmickry.
However, at the top end of the scale, you’re looking at 85K for the all-gold Speedmaster, which is a lot of money for a watch of this stature. In comparison, the immaculate Speedmaster Moonshine gold with a sun-brushed green PVD “step” dial is 15K cheaper, albeit without the Chronoscope complications.
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The Omega Speedmaster Chronoscope in stainless steel with a leather strap is priced at $15,725; stainless steel with steel bracelet at $16,275; 18k Moonshine Gold on leather strap $54,325; and 18k Moonshine Gold with matching gold bracelet $85,350, available at Omega boutiques now.
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Here’s What Goes Into Making Jay-Z’s $1,800 Champagne
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In our quest to locate the most exclusive and exciting wines for our readers, we usually ask the question, “How many bottles of this were made?” Often, we get a general response based on an annual average, although many Champagne houses simply respond, “We do not wish to communicate our quantities.” As far as we’re concerned, that’s pretty much like pleading the Fifth on the witness stand; yes, you’re not incriminating yourself, but anyone paying attention knows you’re probably guilty of something. In the case of some Champagne houses, that something is making a whole lot of bottles—millions of them—while creating an illusion of rarity.
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This precisely crafted Champagne uses only the tête de cuvée juice, a highly selective extraction process. As Allen points out, “the winemakers solely take the first and freshest portion of the gentle cuvée grape press,” which assures that the finished wine will be the highest quality. Armand de Brignac used grapes from various sites and three different vintages so the final product would reflect the house signature style. This is the fourth release in a series that began with Assemblage No. 1. “Testing different levels of intensity of aromas with the balance of red and dark fruits has been a guiding principle between the Blanc de Noirs that followed,” Allen explains.
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Bill Henson Show Opens at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
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Bill Henson is one of Australia’s best-known contemporary photographers. When a show by this calibre of artist opens here, the art world waits with bated breath to see what he will unveil.
This time, he presents a historically important landscape series that chronicles a time in New York City that no longer exists. It’s a nostalgic trip back in time, a nocturnal odyssey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a long-lost America.
Known for his chiaroscuro style, Henson’s cinematic photographs often transform his subject into ambiguous objects of beauty. This time round, the show presents a mysterious walk through the streets of Manhattan, evoking a seedy, yet beautiful vision of the city.
Relying on generative gaps, these landscapes result from Henson mining his archive of negatives and manipulating them to produce a finished print. Sometimes, they are composed by a principle of magnification, with Henson honing in on details, and sometimes, they are created through areas of black being expanded to make the scene more cinematic and foreboding. Like silence in a film or the pause in a pulse, the black suggests the things you can’t see.
Henson’s illustrious career has spanned four decades and was memorably marred by controversy over a series of nude adolescent photographs shown in 2008, which made him front-page news for weeks. This series of portraits made Henson the subject of a police investigation during which no offence was found.
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His work deals with the liminal space between the mystical and the real, the seen and unseen, the boundary between youth and adulthood.
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Polar Opposites
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My wife, Cathy, and I are among the first group of tourists aboard Ponant’s new expedition icebreaker, the world’s only Polar Class 2–rated cruise ship (of seven levels of ice vessel, second only to research and military vessels in ability to manoeuvre in Arctic conditions). Our arrival on July 14 couldn’t be more different from explorer Robert Peary’s on April 6, 1909. On that date, he reported, he staked a small American flag—sewed by his wife—into the Pole, joined by four Inuits and his assistant, Matthew Henson, a Black explorer from Maine who was with Peary on his two previous Arctic expeditions. (Peary’s claim of being first to the Pole was quickly disputed by another American, Frederick Cook, who insisted he’d spent two days there a year earlier. Scholars now view both claims with skepticism.)
Our 300-plus party’s landing, on Bastille Day, features the captain of the French ship driving around in an all-terrain vehicle with massive wheels and an enormous tricolour flag on the back, guests dressed in stylish orange parkas celebrating on the ice, and La Marseillaise, France’s national anthem, blaring from loudspeakers. After an hour of taking selfies and building snow igloos in the icescape, with temperatures in the relatively balmy low 30s, we head back into our heated sanctuary for mulled wine and freshly baked croissants. Mission accomplished. Flags planted. Now, lunch.
As a kid, I was fascinated by stories of adventurers trying to reach the North Pole without any means of rescue. In the 19th century, most of their attempts ended in disaster—ships getting trapped in the ice, a hydrogen balloon crashing, even cannibalism. It wasn’t until Cook and Peary reportedly set foot there that the race to the North Pole was really on. Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the first to reach the South Pole, in 1911, is credited with being the first to document a trip over the North Pole, which he did in 1926 in the airship Norge. In 1977, the nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika became the first surface vessel to make it to the North Pole. Since then, only 18 other ships have completed the voyage.
Visiting the North Pole seemed about as likely for me as walking on the Moon. It wasn’t even on my bucket list. Then came Le Commandant Charcot, which was named after France’s most beloved polar explorer and reportedly cost about US$430 million (around $655 million) to build. The irony of visiting one of the planet’s most remote and inhospitable points while travelling in the lap of luxury doesn’t escape me or anyone else I speak with on the voyage. Danie Ferreira, from Cape Town, South Africa, describes it as “an ensemble of contradictions bordering on the absurd”. Ferreira, who is on board with his wife, Suzette, is a veteran of early-explorer-style high-Arctic journeys, months-long treks involving dog sleds and real toil and suffering. He booked this trip to obtain an official North Pole stamp for an upcoming two-volume collection of his photographs, Out in the Cold, documenting his polar adventures. “Reserving the cabin felt like a betrayal of my expeditionary philosophy,” he says with a laugh.
Then, like the rest of us, he embraces the contradictions. “This is like the first time I saw the raw artistry of Cirque du Soleil,” he explains. “Everything is beyond my wildest expectations, unrelatable to anything I’ve experienced.”
The 17-day itinerary launches from the Norwegian settlement of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost town in the Arctic Circle, and heads 1,186 nautical miles to the North Pole, then back again. As a floating hotel, the vessel is exceptional: 123 balconied staterooms and suites, the most expensive among them duplexes with butler service (prices range from around $58,000 to $136,000 per person, double occupancy); a spa with a sauna, massage therapists, and aestheticians; a gym and heated indoor pool. The boat weighs more than 35,000 tons, enabling it to break ice floes like “a chocolate bar into little pieces, rather than slice through them”, according to Captain Patrick Marchesseau. Six-metre-wide stainless-steel propellers, he adds, were designed to “chew ice like a blender”.
Marchesseau, a tall, lanky, 40-ish mariner from Brittany, impeccable in his navy uniform but rocking royal-blue boat shoes, proves to be a charming host. Never short of a good quip, he’s one of three experienced ice captains who alternate at the helm of Charcot throughout the year. He began piloting Ponant ships through drifting ice floes in Antarctica in 2009, when he took the helm of Le Diamant, Ponant’s first expedition vessel. “An epic introduction,” Marchesseau calls those early voyages, but the isolated, icebound North Pole aboard a larger, more complicated vessel is potentially an even thornier challenge. “We’ll first sail east where the ice is less concentrated and then enter the pack at 81 degrees,” he tells a lecture hall filled with passengers on day one. “We don’t plan to stop until we get to the North Pole.”
Around us, the majority of the other 101 guests are older French couples; there are also a few extended families, some other Europeans, mostly German and Dutch, as well as 10 Americans. Among the supporting cast are six research scientists and 221 staff, including 18 naturalist guides from a variety of countries.
The first six days are more about the journey than the destination. Cathy and I settle into our comfortable stateroom, enjoy the ocean views from our balcony, make friends with other guests and naturalists, frequent the spa, and indulge in the contemporary French cuisine at Nuna, which is often jarred by ice passing under the hull, as well as at the more casual Sila (Inuit for “sky”). There are the usual cruise events: the officers’ gala, wine pairings, daily French pastries, Broadway-style shows, opera singers and concert pianists. Initially, I worry about “Groundhog Day” setting in, but once we hit patchy ice floes on day two, it’s clear that the polar party is on. The next day, we’re ensconced in the ice pack.
Veterans of Arctic journeys immediately feel at home. Ferreira, often found on the observation deck 15 metres above the ice with his long-lensed cameras, is in his element snapping different patterns and colours of the frozen landscape. “It feels like combining low-level flying with an out-of-body experience,” he says. “Whenever the hull shudders against the ice, I have a reality check.”
“I came back because I love this ice,” adds American Gin Millsap, who with her husband, Jim, visited the North Pole in 2015 aboard the Russian nuclear icebreaker Fifty Years of Victory, which for obvious reasons is no longer a viable option for Americans and many Europeans. “I love the peace, beauty and calmness.”
It is easy to bliss out on the endless barren vistas, constantly morphing into new shapes, contours and shades of white as the weather moves from bright sunshine to howling snowstorms—sometimes within the course of a few hours. I spend a lot of time on the cold, windswept bow, looking at the snow patterns, ridges and rivers flowing within the pale landscape as the boat crunches through the ice. It feels like being in a black-and-white movie, with no colours except the turquoise bottoms of ice blocks overturned by the boat. Beautiful, lonely, mesmerising.
Rather than a solid landmass, the Arctic ice pack is actually millions of square kilometres of ice floes, slowly pushed around by wind and currents. The size varies according to season: this past winter, the ice was at its fifth-lowest level on record, encompassing 14.6 million square kilometres, while during our cruise it was 4.7 million square kilometres, the 10th-lowest summer number on record. There are myriad ice types—young ice, pancake ice, ice cake, brash ice, fast ice—but the two that our ice pilot, Geir-Martin Leinebø, cares about are first-year ice and old ice. The thinness of the former provides the ideal route to the Pole, while the denseness of the aged variety can result in three-to-eight-metre-high ridges that are potentially impassable. Leinebø is no novice: in his day job, he’s the captain of Norway’s naval icebreaker, KV Svalbard, the first Norwegian vessel to reach the North Pole, in 2019.
It’s not a matter of just pointing the boat due north and firing up the engine. Leinebø zigzags through the floes. A morning satellite feed and special software aid in determining the best route; the ship’s helicopter sometimes scouts 65 or so kilometres ahead, and there’s a sonar called the Sea Ice Monitoring System (SIMS). But mostly Leinebø uses his eyes. “You look for the weakest parts of the ice—you avoid the ridges because that means thickness and instead look for water,” he says. “If the ‘water sky’ in the distance is dark, it’s reflecting water like a mirror, so you head in that direction.”
Everyone on the bridge is surprised by the lack of multi-year ice, but with more than a hint of disquietude. Though we don’t have to ram our way through frozen ridges, the advance of climate change couldn’t be more apparent. Environmentalists call the Arctic ice sheet the canary in the coal mine of the planet’s climate change for good reason: it is happening here first. “It’s not right,” mutters Leinebø. “There’s just too much open water for July. Really scary.”
The Arctic ice sheet has shrunk to about half its 1985 size, and as both mariners and scientists on board note, the quality of the ice is deteriorating. “It’s happening faster than our models predicted,” says Marisol Maddox, senior arctic analyst at the Polar Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “We’re seeing major events like Greenland’s ice sheet melting and sliding into the ocean—that wasn’t forecasted until 2070.” The consensus had been that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2050, but many scientists now expect that day to come in the 2030s.
That deterioration, it turns out, is why the three teams of scientists are on the voyage—two studying the ice and the other assessing climate change’s impact on plankton. As part of its commitment to sustainability, Ponant has designed two research labs—one wet and one dry—on a lower deck. “We took the advice of many scientists for equipping these labs,” says Hugues Decamus, Charcot’s chief engineer, clearly proud of the nearly US$12 million facilities.
The combined size of the labs, along with a sonar room, a dedicated server for the scientists, and a meteorological station on the vessel’s top deck, totals 130 square metres—space that could have been used for revenue generation. Ponant also has two staterooms reserved for scientists on each voyage and provides grants for travel expenses. The line doesn’t cherrypick researchers but instead asks the independent Arctic Research Icebreaker Consortium (ARICE) to choose participants based on submissions.
The idea, says the vessel’s science officer on this voyage, Daphné Buiron, is to make the process transparent and minimise the appearance of greenwashing. “Yes, this alliance may deliver a positive public image for the company, but this ship shows we do real science on board,” she says. The labs will improve over time, adds Decamus, as the ship amasses more sophisticated equipment.
Research scientists and tourist vessels don’t typically mix. The former, wary of becoming mascots for the cruise lines’ sustainability marketing efforts, and cognisant of the less-than-pristine footprint of many vessels, tend to be wary. The cruise lines, for their part, see scientists as potentially high maintenance when paying customers should be the priority. But there seemed to be a meeting of the minds, or at least a détente, on Le Commandant Charcot.
“We discuss this a lot and are aware of the downsides, but also the positives,” says Franz von Bock und Polach, head of the institute for ship structural design and analysis at Hamburg University of Technology, specialising in the physics of sea ice. Not only does Charcot grant free access to these remote areas, but the ship will also collect data on the same route multiple times a year with equipment his team leaves on board, offering what scientists prize most: repeatability. “One transit doesn’t have much value,” he says. “But when you measure different seasons, regions and years, you build up a more complex picture.” So, more than just a research paper: forecasts of ice conditions for long-term planning by governments as the Arctic transforms.
Nils Haëntjens, from the University of Maine, is analysing five-millilitre drops of water on a high-tech McLane IFCB microscope. “The instrument captures more than 250,000 images of phytoplankton along the latitudinal transect,” he says. Charcot has doors in the wet lab that allow the scientists to take water samples, and in the bow, inlets take in water without contaminating it. Two freezers can preserve samples for further research back in university labs.
Even though the boat won’t stop, the captain and chief engineer clearly want to make the science missions work. Marchesseau dispatches the helicopter with the researchers and their gear 100 kilometres ahead, where they take core samples and measurements. I spot them in their red snowsuits, pulling sleds on an ice floe, as the boat passes. Startled to see living-colour humans on the ice after days of monochrome, I feel a pang of jealousy as I head for a caviar tasting.
The only other humans we encounter on the journey north are aboard Fifty Years of Victory, the Russian icebreaker. The 160-metre orange- and-black leviathan reached the North Pole a day earlier—its 59th visit—and is on its way back to Murmansk. It’s a classic East meets West moment: the icebreaker, launched just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, meeting the new standard of polar luxury.
The evening before Bastille Day, Le Commandant Charcot arrives at the North Pole. Because of the pinpoint precision of the GPS, Marchesseau has to navigate back and forth for about 20 minutes—with a bridge full of passengers hushing each other so as not to distract him—until he finds 90 degrees north. That final chaotic approach to the top of the world in the grey, windswept landscape looks like a kid’s Etch A Sketch on the chartplotter, but it is met with rousing cheers. The next morning, with good visibility and light winds, we spill out onto the ice for the celebration, followed by a polar plunge.
As guests pose in front of flags and mile markers for major cities, the naturalist guides, armed with rifles, establish a wide perimeter to guard against polar bears. The fearless creatures are highly intelligent, with razor-sharp teeth, hooked claws and the ability to sprint at 40 km/h. Males average about three metres tall and weigh around 700 kilos. They are loners that will kill anything—including other bears and even their own cubs. Cathy and I walk around the far edges of the perimeter to enjoy some solitude. Looking out over the white landscape, I know this is a milestone. But it feels odd that getting here didn’t involve any sweat or even a modicum of discomfort.
The rest of the week is an entirely different trip. On the return south, we see a huge male polar bear ambling on the ice, looking over his shoulder at us. It is our first sighting of the Arctic’s apex predator, and everyone crowds the observation lounge with long-lensed cameras. The next day, we see another male, this one smaller, running away from the ship. “They have many personalities,” says Steiner Aksnes, head of the expedition team, who has led scientists and film crews in the Arctic for 25 years. We see a dozen on the return to Svalbard, where 3,000 are scattered across the archipelago, outnumbering human residents.
The last five days we make six stops on different islands, travelling by Zodiac from Charcot to various beaches. On Lomfjorden, as we look on a hundred yards from shore, a mother polar bear protects her two cubs while a young male hovers in the background. On a Zodiac ride off Alkefjellet, the air is alive with birds, including tens of thousands of Brünnich’s guillemots as well as glaucous gulls and kittiwakes, which nest in that island’s cliffs, while a young male polar bear munches on a ring seal, chin glistening red.
On this part of the trip, the expedition team, mostly 30-something, free-spirited scientists whose areas of expertise range from botany to alpine trekking to whales, lead hikes across different landscapes. The jam-packed schedule sometimes involves three activities per day and includes following the reindeer on Palanderbukta, seeing a colony of 200 walruses on Kapp Lee, hiking the black tundra of Burgerbukta (boasting 3.8-cm-tall willows—said to be the smallest trees in the world and the largest on Svalbard—plus mosquitoes!), watching multiple species of whales breaching offshore, and kayaking the ice floes of Ekmanfjorden. Svalbard is a protected wilderness area, and the cruise lines tailor their schedules so vessels don’t overlap, giving visitors the impression they are setting foot on virgin land.
Chances to experience that sense of discovery and wonder, even slightly stage-managed ones, are dwindling along with the ice sheet and endangered wildlife. If a stunning trip to a frozen North Pole is on your bucket list, the time to go is now.
PARADIGM SHIP
For those studying polar ice, a berth aboard Le Commandant Charcot is like a winning lottery ticket. “This cruise ship is one of the few resources scientists can use, because nothing else can get there,” says G. Mark Miller, CEO of research-vessel builder Greenwater Marine Sciences Offshore (GMSO) and a former ship captain for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Then factor in 80 percent of scientists who want to go to sea, can’t, because of the shortage of research vessels.”
Both Ponant and Viking have designed research labs aboard new expedition vessels as part of their sustainability initiatives. “Remote areas like Antarctica need more data—the typical research is just single data points,” says Damon Stanwell-Smith, Ph.D., head of science and sustainability at Viking. “Every scientist says more information is needed.” The twin sisterships Viking Octantis and Viking Polaris, which travel to Antarctica, Patagonia, the Great Lakes and Canada, have identical 35-square-metre labs, separated into wet and dry areas and fitted out with research equipment. In hangars below are military-grade rigid-hulled inflatables and two six-person yellow submersibles (the pair on Octantis are named John and Paul, while Polaris’s are George and Ringo). Unlike Ponant, Viking doesn’t have an independent association choose scientists for each voyage. Instead, it partners with the University of Cambridge, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and NOAA, which send their researchers to work with Viking’s onboard science officers.
“Some people think marine research is sticking some kids on a ship to take measurements,” says Stanwell-Smith. “But we know we can do first-rate science—not spin.” Other cruise lines are also embracing sustainability initiatives, with coral-reef-restoration projects and water-quality measurements, usually in partnership with universities. Just about every vessel has “citizen-scientist” research programs allowing guests the opportunity to count birds or pick up discarded plastic on beaches. So far, Ponant and Viking are the only lines with serious research labs. Ponant is adding science officers to other vessels in its fleet. As part of the initiatives, scientists deliver onboard lectures and sometimes invite passengers to assist in their research.
Given the shortage of research vessels, Stanwell-Smith thinks this passenger-funded system will coexist nicely with current NGO- and government-owned ships. “This could be a new paradigm for exploring the sea,” he says. “Maybe the next generation of research vessels will look like ours.”
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Watch of the Week: the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon
The new release claims the throne as the world’s thinnest Tourbillon.
Piaget, the watchmaker’s watchmaker, has once again redefined the meaning of “ultra-thin” thanks to its newest masterpiece, the Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon—the world’s thinnest tourbillon watch.
In the world of high-watchmaking where thin is never thin enough—look at the ongoing battle between Piaget, Bulgari, and Richard Mille for the honours—Piaget caused a furore at Watches & Wonders in Geneva when it unveiled its latest feat to coincide with the Maison’s 150th year anniversary.
Piaget claims that the new Altiplano is “shaped by a quest for elegance and driven by inventiveness”, and while this might be true, it’s clear that the Maison’s high-watchmaking divisions in La Côte-aux-Fées and Geneva are also looking to end the conversation around who owns the ultra-thin watchmaking category.
The new Altiplano pushes the boundaries of horological ingenuity 67 years after Piaget invented its first ultra-thin calibre—the revered 9P—and six years after it presented the world’s then-thinnest watch, the Altiplano Ultimate Concept. Now, with the release of this unrivalled timepiece at just 2mm thick—the same as its predecessor, yet now housing the beat of a flying tourbillon, prized by watchmaking connoisseurs—you can’t help but marvel at its ultra-thin mastery, whether the timepiece is to your liking or not.
In comparison, the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Tourbillon was 3.95mm thick when unveiled in 2020, which seems huge on paper compared to what Piaget has been able to produce. But to craft a watch as thin and groundbreaking as its predecessor, now with an added flying tourbillon complication, the whole watchmaking process had to be revalued and reinvented.
“We did far more than merely add a tourbillon,” says Benjamin Comar, Piaget CEO. “We reinvented everything.”
After three years of R&D, trial and error—and a redesign of 90 percent of the original Altiplano Ultimate Concept components—the 2024 version needs to be held and seen to be believed. The end product certainly isn’t a watch for the everyday watch wearer—although Piaget will tell you otherwise—but in many ways, the company didn’t conjure a timepiece like the Altiplano as a profit-seeking exercise. Instead, overcoming such an arduous and technical watchmaking feat proves that Piaget can master the flying tourbillon in such a whimsical fashion and, in the process, subvert the current state-of-the-art technical principles by making an impactful visual—and technical—statement.
The only question left to ask is, what’s next, Piaget?
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Model: Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon 150th Anniversary
Diameter: 41.5 mm
Thickness: 2 mm (crystal included)
Material: M64BC cobalt alloy, blue PVD -treated
Dial: Monobloc dial; polished round and baton indices, Bâton-shaped hand for the minutes Monobloc disc with a hand for the hours
Water resistance: 20m
Movement: Calibre 970P-UC, one-minute peripheral tourbillon
Winding: Hand-wound
Functions: hours, minutes, and small seconds (time-only)
Power reserve: 40 hours
Availability: Limited production, not numbered
Price: Price on request
