Original vintage 1980s Rolex advert for the company's Explorer watch, celebrating legendary polar explorer Wally Herbet, "There isn't much room on a sledge. Wally Herbert's Rolex had to earn its place."
 
Of note, Herbert's research challenged Robert Peary's claim to have reached the North Pole in 1909. The National Geographic Society, which had supported Peary's original expedition, hired Herbert to assess a 1909 diary and astronomical observations, which had not been accessible to researchers for decades. Herbert concluded the explorer had not reached the Pole and must have falsified the records.
 
His book, “The Noose of Laurels: The Race to the North Pole’ (1989), caused a furor when it was published, and its conclusion is widely debated. The Foundation for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation, commissioned by the National Geographic Society to resolve the issue, disagreed, and concluded that Peary had indeed reached the Pole. Since then, however, the National Geographic Society has come to accept Herbert's version of events.
 
Dimensions: 8 inches wide by 11 inches high.
 
The Rolex Explorer
With its three-hand simplicity and discreetly wearable size, the Rolex Explorer is, more than any of the Crown's sport watches, the one that skirts the line dividing the tool watch from the dress watch. And yet it's also a Rolex most plainly made for legibility in adverse conditions and exposure to the elements.
 
The Explorer has come to embody what many see as the ideal "one nice watch" to own. Its simplicity and classic design allow it to go anywhere, not only far-off mountaintops. And the reference 1016 in particular, which spanned an incredible 29 years of production, from 1960 to 1989, stands as a true vintage hall-of-famer. With its subtle 36mm size, no-date simplicity, and crisp black dial – whether gilt or matte – it's the sport Rolex that doesn't turn heads – the anti-hype Rolex, if you will. The "if you know, you know" Rolex.
 
The Oyster Perpetual Explorer and Oyster Perpetual Explorer II evolved from Rolex’s deep involvement with exploration. The Swiss brand tested its Explorers by equipping polar, mountaineering and caving expeditions over many years. Some of the world’s most intrepid explorers, mountaineers and scientists took these watches to places that tested their reliability in the toughest conditions.
 
Beginning in the 1930s, Rolex equipped numerous expeditions with its Oyster Perpetual watches. Rolex watches have taken part in some of humanity’s greatest adventures – to include the 1953 expedition to Everest, led by Sir John Hunt, on which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa become the first to summit the world’s highest mountain. Feedback was used to develop what became known as the Professional category – watches that serve as tools, namely, the Explorer and Explorer II.
 
Rolex launched its Explorer in 1953 with a simple design and highly legible black dial with characteristic 3, 6 and 9 numerals and large index hour markers. Nearly two decades subsequent, the company introduced the Explorer II in 1971 and, in the same spirit as the Explorer. With its 24-hour display comprising an additional, orange hour hand and an engraved bezel, the Explorer II allows the wearer to clearly distinguish daytime from night-time hours – a practical option in places where distinguishing day from night is difficult, such as at the poles at certain times of the year, and in caves – or to read the time in a second time zone.
 
Polar Explorer Sir Walter William Herbert (24 October 1934 – 12 June 2007 - read his obit here)
Herbert was a British polar explorer, writer, and artist. In 1969 he became the first man fully recognized for walking to the North Pole, on the 60th anniversary of Robert Peary's disputed expedition. He was described by Sir Ranulph Fiennes as "the greatest polar explorer of our time."
 
During the course of his polar career, which spanned more than 50 years, he spent 15 years in the wilderness regions of the polar world. He travelled with dog teams and open boats well over 23,000 miles; more than half of that distance through unexplored areas. Among his several books, which he illustrated, were works dealing with polar exploration. He also had solo exhibitions of his drawings and paintings. In 2000 he was knighted for his polar achievements.
 
In 1955, when Herbert was 21, he carried out surveying in the Antarctic with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, during which he became an expert in dog sleighing. On a journey along the Antarctic Peninsula from Hope Bay to Portal Point, he sledged some 5,000 km (3000 miles). This experience with dogs led him to a job with the New Zealand Antarctic program, which commissioned him to purchase dogs in Greenland for the Antarctic. There he learnt Inuit methods of dog driving.
 
As leader of an exploration party in the early 1960s, Herbert surveyed a large area of the Queen Maud range and followed Shackleton (1908) and Scott's (1911) route up the Beardmore Glacier. Denied a request to proceed to the South Pole, his party ascended Mount Nansen and descended a route taken by Amundsen in 1911, thus being the first to retrace these explorers' traverses. In 1964 he trekked the routes taken by Sverdrup and Cook from Greenland to Ellesmere Island in the Arctic.
 
From 1968 to 1969, Herbert led the British Trans-Arctic Expedition, a 3,800-mile overland crossing of the Arctic Ocean, from Alaska to Spitsbergen, which some historians had billed as "the last great journey on Earth." In July 1968, having crossed 1,900 km (1200 miles) of rough drifting ice, Herbert and his team established a camp.
 
Because they could not reach a position where the drift of the trans-Arctic ice-stream was in their favor, they were forced to stay for the winter, as they drifted around the pole. Only when sunlight returned the following year could they continue their journey, finally reaching the North Pole via the Pole of Inaccessibility on 6 April 1969. Their feat was recognized by the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as "a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history," and which Prince Philip stated "ranks among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance."
 
In recognition of his polar achievements, Herbert received several honors and awards: among them the Polar Medal and bar; the Founders' Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the gold medals of several Geographical Societies, and the Explorers Medal of the Explorers Club. He has a mountain range and a plateau named after him in the Antarctic; the most northerly mountain in Svalbard named after him in the Arctic.
 
When he returned to London in 1969, he married Marie Herbert – together they lived with the Inuit and Saami in Greenland, Norway and Sweden. They had two daughters who travelled with them; between 1979 and 1981 Herbert and Allan Gill attempted to circumnavigate Greenland by dog sled and umiak, a traditional boat.
 
It was planned to take 16 months to cover the 13,000 km (8000 miles) but poor weather made it impossible. Near Loch Fyne, Herbert wrote: “We were forced to take to the land and haul the sledges across steaming tundra and rock bare of snow, swollen rivers, baked mud flats, sand-dunes, swamps and stagnant pools. We were blasted by duststorms and eaten alive by mosquitoes.”