Only a few seconds in the icy depths would be enough to kill most mere mortals.

But yesterday, protected by nothing more than a pair of Speedo trunks and his extraordinary central heating, Lewis Pugh took the plunge and became the first man to swim at the North Pole.

The 36-year-old Londoner spent almost 19 minutes at minus 1.8C as he front crawled for a full kilometre - more than half a mile in the coldest water a human has ever swum.

"It was like jumping into a dark black hole," he said. "The pain was immediate and felt like my body was on fire.

"I was in excruciating pain from beginning to end and I nearly quit on a few occasions. It was without doubt the hardest swim of my life."

But he said that a colleague ski-ing on pack ice alongside him looking out for hungry polar bears spurred him on.

"I just kept on looking at Jorgen Amundsen ski-ing next to me, encouraging me. I will never ever give up in front of a Norwegian! Let alone a relative of Roald Amundsen (who beat Britain's Captain Scott to the South Pole.) There is just too much rivalry between our two nations for that."

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