Mark Georgiou, a Senior Producer with BBC News and recently joined Fellow of the Society. In 21 years with the BBC, he has travelled from the Amazon to the Arctic.

  In October 2007, you asked the Collections for charts of the Northwest Passage. What did you want them for?
The BBC's Environment Correspondent, David Shukman (also a Fellow) and I were offered the chance to sail through the Northwest Passage on the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen.

I wanted to compare the sort of charts used by Franklin and his team in the 1840s with today's modern equivalents. The Society’s Map Librarian, David McNeill, found beautiful examples of work produced by those intrepid Victorian surveyors.

  What did the officers of the Amundsen make of them?
They hadn't seen anything like them! Huge areas are just blank, key channels are missing. It's hard to imagine now, but back then they didn't even know there was a Northwest Passage.

I couldn't help wondering what Franklin would have made of the satellite imagery, radar and sonar information available to the Captain of the Amundsen to help steer a safe passage.

  What became of the charts?
After steaming through 600 miles of the very Arctic waters that claimed the lives of so many brave explorers, we felt the need to mark our small achievement.

So, on our final evening we made presents of the chart copies - one for Captain Lise Marchand, one for the ship (to be mounted on a wall next a picture of Amundsen himself) and one for chief scientist Jean-Eric Tremblay.

  See the BBC website for Mark & David's travel diary