Expedition '69: What happened to a bunch of British teens during one wild Newfoundland summer

The summer of 1969 looms large in our collective consciousness: Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the beginning of the end of Vietnam War, as American troops withdrew.

Those historic events, however, were a world away from how one group of British teenagers spent that summer, bushwhacking through the Newfoundland wilderness in an expedition that — half a century later — remains a vivid adventure,.

The group, of largely 17- to 19-year-olds from Britain's upper crust, arrived on Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula on a trip organized by what was then known as the British Schools Exploring Society. The 60-odd teenagers were meant to camp, learn survival skills and assist in gathering scientific samples.

Physical fitness was one requirement, as was agreeing to an insurance policy that stated in case of death, the cost of shipping back any remains would be done solely on the dime of the participant's family.

"Luckily, nobody on our expedition died," laughed expedition participant Chris Thorp, who lives in the Midlands in the U.K. 

Thorpe and his colleagues marched almost 13 kilometres from a road somewhere near Hawkes Bay into the bush to set up the main camp, with their canvas tents their home for the next seven weeks.

They were well-stocked with an array of not particularly appetizing, but non-perishable foods — Thorp recalls tin cheese, dried onions and "almost flavourless" biscuits on the menu — but little could have prepared them for the unrelenting insects.

"I've done at least 11 expeditions, and it was the very worst of all of them for fly bites," said Martin Blendell, a staff leader on the trip.

"Having been to the tropics right 'round the world, it was without a shadow of a doubt, an awful experience to bear the flies."

Even Joe Coady, the lone Newfoundlander on the trip — he had been enlisted to bring some local knowledge to the expedition — called the flies "frustrating as hell."

He wore an aviator-style full-length jumpsuit taped at the ankles, gloves and a netting over his head, but still vividly recalls eating mouthfuls of oatmeal that were inadvertently peppered with mosquitoes each morning for breakfast.

"You basically learned to eat fresh meat," he said.

Unexpected protein sources aside, Coady said one memorable task was sucking up beetles in a tube, as his group was tasked with collected beetle samples for the Natural History Musuem in London. 

Brendell worked at that museum, and said about 7,000 beetle samples were sent back to the United Kingdom. "My senior staff at the museum was very pleased with what we got," he said, adding those specimens are still in the museum's collection to this day.