After I had filmed the overnight radio traffic from the successful summit attempt I filmed Pasang Sherpa arriving with the precious blood samples that had been taken to measure the oxygen levels in the summit climbers. He took just two hours to run down from the Balcony to Camp II – surely a record. The blood was duly tested and filmed.
Next morning, feeling terrible, I was told by the medical officer to head back down the hill. Usha was bundled up and brought down, too. As we approached the top of the Icefall one of my companions clipped into the fixed ropes. At that moment a huge block of ice fell off with a roar and a cloud of white ice smoke. It was no more than two metres from us, it took out a section of ropes, and my heart sank; of all days to have to start abseiling down the bloody Icefall! Ten seconds later and it would have killed all of us.
Eventually we got down and started to get proper attention. Thank God for the doctors on this expedition and particularly Mark Wilson, the medical officer. Wilson organised a helicopter rescue, paid for by the BBC, and Usha was going to come along for free. Her alternative means of descent was a horse.
Next day we were loaded into a huge Russian helicopter that was piloted by an interesting character named Sergei. Both he and his chopper looked like veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He was dressed in polyester slacks and shirt, as if he were ready for a spot of gardening, but he controlled a monster of amazing power and violence – the down-draft was enough to send stones spinning in all directions. We took off and in minutes had retraced the path that had taken us weeks to ascend. Usha slept through the flight, and when we arrived at Jiri we were off-loaded into the hot sun to wait for a Nepalese Army helicopter. Its pilot was under instruction, so we were treated to aerial versions of a three-point turn and an emergency stop. To cap a rather taxing day we had to endure a siren-screaming ambulance in the Kathmandu rush-hour that was even noisier than the Icefall.
I spent a terrifying three days in a hospital in Kathmandu from which I emerged very weak. When I got home the BBC soon made me redundant. Then my beloved sister Jane died. Then my wife, a pragmatical woman, divorced me.
It was clearly time for a major rethink. I wondered what to do next. Clearly life at 29,000ft above sea level was getting a bit tricky, so how about trying a new life at sea level, like Bill Tilman? As ever, I looked into books for answers to fundamental questions.
The Dangerous Book for Boys was that summer’s publishing sensation, winning the National Book of the Year award. It’s packed with information on how to make a bow and arrow, how to hunt and cook a rabbit, and how to build a tree house. It contains a list of ‘Poems Every Boy Should Know’, including If and Invictus, and it also tells you that you must expect to have the occasional accident – that’s how you learn.
It reminded me of the sailing books that I had loved as a boy, and how they had influenced me. There was the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, wonderfully dangerous books for both boys and girls. Ransome was the kind of man I wanted to grow up to be. He was in turn a sailor, an enthusiastic first-hand observer of the Russian Revolution and then a British spy. Escaping from a loveless marriage, he ended up marrying Trotsky’s secretary Evgenia in 1924 and took her to the Lake District, where he wrote the best-selling series for which he is remembered today.
But my favourite Swallows and Amazons book is set in a landscape much closer to London. Just 45 miles from the M25 motorway that encircles the city is a wilderness so deep, so remote, that you could travel across it all day and not see a soul. Immortalised in Ransome’s book Secret Water, the flat islands, creeks and marshes to the north of Walton-on-the-Naze are a surprise to those who think that the county of Essex is all commuter belt.
Ransome’s book deals with two groups of children – the Swallows and the Amazons – who are cast ashore for a week by over-worked parents to fend for themselves and map the area, in the process meeting a horde of savages (in reality, another group of children who call themselves the Eels). When I got home I pulled out my old copy of Secret Water and glanced at the inscription on the title page. It had belonged to my brother Denys when he was about ten years old. I started reading, and slowly a realisation dawned on me. In Ransome’s drawings the yacht Goblin that had carried the children to the island looked curiously familiar. The Swallows’ family were staying in a rented cottage at Pin Mill on the banks of the river Orwell … wasn’t that where Denys now kept his boat on a mooring? I knew that he had bought an old, wooden yacht, so I telephoned him and arranged for a couple of days sailing off the Essex coast. I had to forget about Mount Everest for a while, and think hard about something else.
When I arrived at the boat she looked the very image of Goblin, although my brother protested that he had little recollection of the book, and certainly wasn’t consciously trying to re-create a childhood dream. A wooden, single-masted cutter, she had once been a rich man’s fancy, and when built had cost the same as the house in which we grew up. Vastly more characterful than the plastic boats of today, these deep-hulled old yachts feel firmer and more stable in the choppy North Sea. Inside there is so much hand-carved joinery it’s rather like sailing in a vast piece of furniture. Ransome had based Goblin very largely on his own boat, Nancy Blackett, named after one of the characters in the book, and as I boarded I felt that I was stepping back into an idealised version of the 1930s. Smells of varnish, cordage and tea rose from below, and the June sunshine made the teak decking hot underfoot.
We ghosted down the river past the last low hills of Suffolk, past the great cranes and gantries of the container port of Felixstowe, and past the disease-ridden cruise liner that had dominated the news that week following an outbreak of projectile dysentery on board. We felt lucky not to be with the cramped tourists aboard.
Soon the north Essex coast emerged from the heat-haze. After living under the world’s highest mountain for months I felt almost dislocated by this landscape. An enormous sky met the North Sea with a pencil-thin line of land in between. Soon that too disappeared, and I found it very hard to steer a straight course in the featureless sea. Turning back towards the coast, we searched for the buoy that marks the entrance to the world depicted in Secret Water. The original tarred barrel has only recently been replaced, and I felt a creeping sensation of the fictional book merging with the factual reality. ‘Ahead, the land seemed hardly above the level of the sea, just a long low line above the water.’
It is here that the third dimension of up and down can seem to disappear, as the water and the land lie so closely stretched together that they change places every tide. It is a fascinating sensation to glide between the two. The old Thames barges used to steer across these waterways until they touched the bottom and then tacked, or went about, hence the expression ‘touch and go’. This captures exactly the trepidation you feel as you wring the last few feet of depth before you go about, and slide across the wind in the other direction.
Before long we found an anchorage for the night. Our chain rumbled into the water, and the anchor dug itself into the mud as the boat gently drifted back in the ebbing tide. Silence. We sipped tea. Somewhere across the marshes a curlew called a long, bubbling cry. Darkness fell.
Inside the warm, wooden cabin the gas ring hissed, and baked beans and sausages sizzled in the pan. The light made the outside very dark all of a sudden. We turned it off and ate on deck, listening to the bubble and suck of the tide. Out there great, glistening flats of mud were being exposed to the night. Land was emerging from the water in a slow, vegetable-like heave. But in 12 hours the water would be back.
In Secret Water the map is slowly filled in from the rough outline sketched by Commander Walker, the children’s father. The children explore and survey their domain in exactly the same way as much of the British Empire had been mapped on charts. Using small dinghies they reconnoitre creeks they call the North-West Passage and the Red Sea, names redolent of British endeavours long before their time. Somehow they know how to take bearings and draw maps.
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nbsp; We were anchored just to the east of the real-life Horsey Island, which in Ransome’s book becomes Swallow Island and is the first to be mapped. After landing, the children unwrap their 1930s Ripping Yarns-style provisions: ‘Three tins of pemmican … Six tins of sardines … One tin of golden syrup … One stone jar of marmalade … Six boxes of eggs.’ In the centre of the island still stands the farm, which the children call a native krall. To the north lies Peewit Island, which becomes Peewit Land. The correspondences with the real landscape are close. To the south is the Wade, a causeway to the town that is submerged at high tide. The three youngest children find themselves trapped in the middle by the rising water and are only rescued in the nick of time by The Mastodon, another child who lives aboard a derelict barge. My brother and I found a few rotting timbers that we imagined could have come from Speedy, his ironically named residence. Because of the literary overlay – the fictional adventures that have been superimposed on these commonplace surroundings – I felt there was something quite magical about the landscape. This is what I felt when I saw Mount Everest for the first time – the shock of a long-imagined reality. Such is the power of childhood books.
Although adults are almost incidental to Ransome’s tale, there is an underlying tension throughout the story created by the deadline for completing the map in time for their parents’ return. It is as if the father – or indeed the author (Arthur Ransome had an extremely demanding father) – had very high expectations of his children. In particular, John, the eldest child, seems to be driven by nervous anxiety: ‘The expedition had failed. They would be embarking that day with the map unfinished …’ In the end, however, everything turns out all right, and the map is finished. The children are safely picked up by Goblin. The map – and the children – become completed entities.
In the morning my brother and I lifted the anchor and sailed back out to sea, leaving our childhood behind.
The ache of self-induced nostalgia is a pleasant pain, even when it is imagined nostalgia. Ransome’s children never existed, except in his mind. But to me they are as real as the low-lying islands, the mud and the tide.
W. H. Auden called the 1930s ‘a low, dishonest decade’. To adults, perhaps it was, but to Ransome’s fictional children it seems an age of innocence. What parents would now leave their young children to camp on an island unsupervised? With small boats, campfires and marshes that flood at high tide, these children had ample opportunities to harm themselves, but what they succeeded in doing was to become self-reliant, confident individuals.
The last two lines of Invictus read:
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Then I thought: why not sail around the world?
Why not? No one had ever sailed the Seven Seas (that is, the seven oceans) and climbed the Seven Summits. Over 275 climbers have become Seven Summiteers, which means they’ve climbed:
Aconcagua (South America, 6,960m/22,834ft)
Carstensz Pyramid (Australasia, 4,884m/16,024ft)
Denali – also known as Mount McKinley (North America, 6,194m/20,320ft)
Elbrus (Europe, 5,642m/18,510ft)
Kilimanjaro (Africa, 5,895m/19,340ft)
Mount Everest (Asia, 8,848m/29,028ft)
Mount Vinson (Antarctica, 4,892m/16,050ft)
I didn’t know if it was possible. I’d already climbed Mount Everest and Denali, the two hardest mountains on the list. I’d sailed across the Southern Ocean to Antarctica, certainly the hardest sea, so maybe it was possible.
Sailing does have similarities with mountaineering. Both activities involve uncomfortable battles with the elements, interspersed with short moments of pleasure, and both seem to attract similar personalities, although there seems little cross-over between the two. George Mallory, for example, was not a natural sailor. Writing after his passage across the Indian Ocean on the way to Mount Everest in 1921, he states:
The sea is as deeply evil as it is attractive … There’s an unquiet spirit in the ocean … we seem to be pursued by the shadow of its brute nature, not allowed to forget the violence of which it is capable.
I have certainly been more scared at sea than on any mountain. It always seems to be out to get you.
Surely the most remarkable person to be both a climber and a sailor was Bill Tilman. He explored untrodden territory in the Himalayas and elsewhere at a time when there were still blanks on the map. In his 50s, realising that he couldn’t any longer climb to high altitudes, he asked someone to show him how to sail. He learned quickly, bought Mischief, the first and most loved of his three Bristol Pilot Cutters, and undertook some astonishing voyages. His first took him across the Atlantic to South America, through the Magellan Straits to Peel Inlet, where he landed and made the first proper crossing of the Patagonian Ice Cap.
Tilman was a real explorer and, not being a peak-bagger, probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with the Seven Summits. But to me it seemed a meaningful framework for an interesting journey.
Not having much money left after the divorce, I could only afford to buy a sunken boat. By the time I got to Florida the steel ketch had been lifted off the bottom of the canal in which she was submerged and was looking rather forlorn. But she was just what I was looking for. Built in a Dutch yard in 1976 she has a strong steel hull and a centre cockpit, so she can bump ice and protect her crew from heavy weather. She has two masts and a ketch rig, which means that the individual sails are small enough for one man to handle. I decided to name her Curlew after the bird that loves mountains and estuaries.
I spent three months in the summer of 2009 repairing the damage to the boat’s electrics and engines, then sailed her to Cuba on a shake-down cruise with my girlfriend Gina that winter, which is where most of this book was written. We proceeded to sail across the Caribbean to look for the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. This is one of the British Virgin Islands: Norman Island. Real treasure was recovered there that had been stolen in 1750 from a Spanish treasure galleon, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.
As I write this, I’m still in the Caribbean, and the next leg of my voyage will be to sail to the South American mainland and attempt to climb Aconcagua, the second highest of the Seven Summits, near the Argentinean border with Chile. They’ve built a hotel at Base Camp since I was last there, so I hope to rest in comfort. Then it is down to the Patagonian Channels to ponder the next and most difficult leg of the journey, the voyage through the Southern Ocean to the shores of Antarctica. This is why I wanted a steel yacht, as we might be nudging growlers (small icebergs) on our way to Mount Vinson, the last continental summit to be discovered and climbed. This fact is hardly surprising as it lies well south, at a latitude of 80°. Oh, and Vinson is a long way from the coast.
Then across the Pacific to Irian Jaya for an attempt on Carstensz Pyramid, which was so nearly climbed by Wollaston of the 1921 Everest expedition. There is some very dense jungle here, inhabited by the Dani people, who still live in a Stone-Age world. The men wear penis gourds, and birds of paradise feathers in their hair, while the women wear raffia-grass skirts. Season-conscious climbers will ask: when do you climb Carstensz? Answer: any time, it rains constantly. After this, we’ll head through the South Pacific and land in New South Wales, Australia, then continue west, cross the Indian Ocean and sail around Africa, passing through the South and North Atlantic. I’ve already climbed Kilimanjaro and Elbrus, so I don’t need to stop off in Africa or Europe.
Keen geographers will notice the absence in our itinerary of the Arctic Ocean. This will have to be remedied, perhaps with an attempt on the North-West Passage.
It will be a long journey from Mount Everest. What has been learned? We may have destroyed a legend in 1999 with the discovery of Mallory’s body, but Mallory was still beautiful in a way: the body breathily described by Lytton Strachey as resembling a statue by Praxiteles has now frozen into a white marble-like figure,1 and he died trying his utmost to further the adventure of the
human spirit. It doesn’t matter to me anymore whether he got to the summit or not. His wife Ruth expressed it best:
Whether he got to the top of the mountain or did not, whether he lived or died, makes no difference to my admiration for him; I think I have the pain separate. There is so much of it, and it will go on for so long. If only it hadn’t happened. It so easily might not have.
The pain in her voice still cuts through the years.
I think George Mallory was a wonderful man and that his death was a tragic waste. His last employer, Cranage, put it well: ‘In him we have lost not only a fine mountaineer, but “a very perfect gentleman”, a man of high ideals, willing to spend himself in the service of others.’ I believe he was seduced by Mount Everest, against his better instincts, and paid the price.
I now have mixed feelings about climbing Mount Everest. Is it really worth the destruction of all those lives? Wasn’t Somervell’s life, with his relief of so much human suffering in India, more worthwhile in the end?
In spring 2011 I went back to the mountain for a final farewell. I wasn’t trying to climb it again; my job was to help others to get to the top. I sat down with my diary at Advanced Base Camp – Mallory and Somervell’s old Camp III – and thought about what I had learned in 21 years on the mountain.
As I write these words I can lift my eyes from the page up to the summit of Mount Everest 8,000ft above me. I’m sitting on a flat rock, in hot sunshine, at ABC. My friends from the expedition are climbing down from the summit as I gaze up to the tiny triangle of snow, so high in the sky. There has been another abortive search for Somervell’s camera, and for me this is the last time I shall come to this mountain.
Last Hours on Everest Page 27