A backpack left unattended for a matter of minutes may have cost Taiwan its only visual record of a landmark polar sailing voyage.
Two external hard drives holding the sole footage from a two-month, 7,300-kilometer crossing of the Southern Ocean and South Atlantic were stolen this week from a hostel in central London, according to the sailor who shot them and a statement released by his team. No backup copies exist. What remains — handwritten logs, sextant readings, and position records — can prove the voyage happened, but cannot show what it looked like.
Who was affected, and how
The drives belonged to Chen Huai-Pu(陳懷璞), a 23-year-old Taiwanese sailor who set out from the Falkland Islands in March and reached South Africa in May, sailing without engine power or GPS and navigating instead by sun, moon, stars and sextant — a technique known as astro-navigation. Along the way he passed through the "Roaring Forties" and "Furious Fifties," wind belts notorious for some of the roughest sailing conditions on the planet, and recorded ten-meter waves, icebergs, and Southern Ocean wildlife largely unseen in footage shot by an Asian sailor.
The theft happened on June 25 at the Astor Hyde Park Hostel, near the Royal Geographical Society in London — the final stop before Chen's return home, after he had already made it through the ocean crossing itself. He has since filed a police report, notified the hostel's management, and contacted Taiwan's representative office in the United Kingdom.
"The hardest part isn't losing the drives," Chen said. "It's losing a human experience that can never be filmed again."
Why the loss goes beyond a hardware replacement cost
Working with limited funding and no film crew, Chen said he handled navigation, photography, drone operation and equipment maintenance by himself over the course of the voyage — meaning the footage represented not just his own record of the trip, but effectively the only outside documentation of it. He has described the crossing as an attempt to give Taiwan a visual foothold in the history of polar exploration, an area where sailors from Asia have historically had little to no first-person footage of their own to draw on, relying instead on documentaries produced abroad.
The voyage builds on a North Atlantic crossing Chen completed last year and put him within reach of Yachtmaster Ocean, the Royal Yachting Association's most advanced sailing certification; he currently holds the RYA's Yachtmaster Offshore qualification. Chen's team has described him as on track to become the youngest sailor from Asia — and the first from Taiwan — to earn the Ocean-level certificate, a claim tied to his own certification progress rather than to an independently audited record.
Chen has said that, unlike sailors from countries with established polar expedition infrastructure and funding pipelines, independent Taiwanese sailors typically have to secure financing, equipment, and documentation largely on their own. In his account, the stolen footage was meant to help close that gap — not just as proof of one voyage, but as a contribution to Taiwan's broader record of ocean exploration and a resource he hoped Taiwanese children could eventually watch.
"Nature didn't break me," Chen said. "But coming back to the civilized world is where I took the hardest hit of my career."
What was taken, and what Chen's team is offering to get it back
The stolen items are two SanDisk Extreme PRO USB4 4TB SSDs, bearing the serial numbers 254930400296 and 254930400439. Chen's team says it is offering a reward of £10,000 — well above the drives' retail value — for their safe return, and is asking Taiwanese communities in the UK, secondhand electronics dealers, photography groups, and the international sailing community to watch for the devices surfacing for resale.
The bigger picture
Chen is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, was a delegate to the Third UN Ocean Conference, and served as Taiwan's sole youth delegate to the Seventh Our Ocean Conference. Should the drives not be recovered, his team says the setback would extend beyond his own archive: the footage was intended as a rare firsthand visual record of Southern Ocean sailing from an Asian expedition, at a moment when Chen was also nearing one of ocean sailing's most demanding certifications.
For now, the search continues — run largely through word of mouth, secondhand marketplaces, and a reward posted online, the same resourceful, self-funded approach that got the expedition across the Southern Ocean in the first place.
