Crossing the Darien Gap

But while Land Rover can fairly claim the credit for both the idea of covering the entire continent and providing the cars that did it, the full story is more complex. The idea of crossing the Darien Gap came first, from the countries on either side which stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars if it were proven to be penetrable. And while the Range Rovers made it through, it was only with significant re-engineering. It was another Land Rover which was arguably the true hero of Darien.

In 1968, the US Congress voted to commit $100m towards the $150m cost of completing the Pan-American Highway, which was interrupted only by the Darien Gap. The boost to local trade would have been worth many multiples of even that hefty investment. A loose alliance of Central and South American countries set out to prove that the Gap could be crossed by car, in the hope that the route found would then become a road.

Oddly, they decided that pasty but plucky Brits would be the most likely to find a way through. Canning House, the organisation which fostered links between the UK and South America formed a British Trans-Americas Expedition Committee under the fabulously monikered, moustachioed and monocled Lieutenant Colonel Julian du Parc Braham, also the Chancellor of the League of Monarchists. He invited a stream of British explorers to the fine old Belgravia house to express their view on whether it could be done.

Among them was John Blashford-Snell, known as JBS, then a 34-year-old major in the Royal Engineers. He’d made his name as an explorer a couple of years earlier with the first complete descent of the Blue Nile, during which he is claimed to have invented white-water rafting, and would go on to found Operation Raleigh. The committee already had a young naval officer lined up to lead the Darien expedition, but Blashford-Snell recommended sending a recce mission first and suggested Brendan O’Brien, an Irish friend who, he alleges, had a looming court date for a speeding offence and was keen to get out of the country.

O’Brien returned very ill, with a sketch map that showed it could be done and a request never to be sent back to that hell. The naval officer had been deployed elsewhere so JBS was asked to lead the mission. Land Rover offered to supply the cars on the condition that they were Range Rovers, and suggested extending the expedition to the far ends of the continent to give it an unarguable ‘first’ to claim; a few cars having been largely floated through the Darien in the past.

The fast road sections on either side of the Darien showed the range of the Range Rover. The cars cruised at 90mph for hours over the high desert roads of Chile: at that rate, they’d have crossed the Darien in under three hours, rather than the three months it took at an average of 2.5 miles per day.

Blashford-Snell only joined the expedition in Panama. From just three men per car through North and Central America, the team swelled to the sixty people and 28 pack ponies required to drag two cars through 250 miles of heavy jungle. The Range Rovers were really just passengers on this part of the trip, and submarines would have been as practical over such terrain.

Land Rover tends not to mention now that they had to be parked for 28 days after they’d blown every spare diff the team had, while engineers back in a wintry Solihull attempted to recreate conditions in steamy Panamanian swamp and work out why they kept failing. Eventually a combination of overloading and the higher torques imposed by the larger diameter swamp tyres were diagnosed. The cars were put back onto standard mud tyres and strengthened replacement diffs flown out.

The toll on the humans and horses was rather higher, and more fatal. Assailed by vampire bats and disease, only five ponies made it to the border with Colombia. The attrition rate was almost as high for the humans. The suffocating humidity, deep black mud and torrential rains made for fever and trench foot. A constant cloud of flies, gnats and mosquitoes enshrouded them. Ticks and inch-long black ants left deep and painful bites, and swarms of vicious hornets could scatter the column in moments.

The larger fauna – panthers, snakes and deer – were mostly shy and avoided the noise of the expedition. But the white-lipped wild peccary pigs proved an unexpected menace. Dense, muscular and angry, they scythed through the jungle in droves of 300 or more, and on one occasion rampaged across camp and scattered the horses.

Around half of the expedition had to be airlifted out for medical treatment, leaving Blashford-Snell so short of manpower he was forced to co-opt an American hippy he found wandering in the jungle, and barter whisky for the services of 20 Colombian prisoners held in a jail in a town on the Panamanian coast, promising to release them only once they’d crossed the border into their homeland. Most tragically, five Colombian soldiers drowned when their support vessel overturned, and a similar number were killed by FARC rebels.

But one member of the team proved invincible. A crashed Series II Land Rover was acquired at the last minute in Panama City and taken into the jungle with the Range Rovers. While the hero cars were stuck for nearly a month, the lighter Land Rover moved on unaided, acting as a tool carrier for the teams which continued to cut back the jungle on the route. The teams were so attached to the Land Rover that they flew it back to their base in Panama City after they’d emerged from the Darien and the smaller crews in the Range Rovers had continued on the final leg south.

There they donated it to the Panamanian National Guard, whose commander jumped in and drove off before they could warn him about its failed brakes. After three months making the one of the most arduous journeys possible in a car, it ended its remarkable life in a barracks wall.

A road through the Darien Gap was planned along Blashford-Snell’s route but never completed; concerns over national security, the spread of foot-and-mouth and the impact on indigenous people halted its progress. To this day a wide stretch remains roadless, if you fancy the challenge. With the new Range Rover starting at nearly £100,000, I’d definitely take a Series II.