Sir Walter William Herbert (24 October 1934 – 12 June 2007) was a British polar explorer, writer and artist.

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.

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.

"[3] In July 1968, having crossed 1,900 km (1200 miles) of rough drifting ice, Herbert and his team (Allan Gill, Roy Koerner, and Kenneth Hedges[4]) established a camp.

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.

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.

[4] His book, The Noose of Laurels: The Race to the North Pole (1989), caused a furore when it was published, and its conclusion is widely debated.

[7] 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.