by Wade Davis
On January 12 Sir Francis Younghusband convened the first formal meeting of the Mount Everest Committee. Representing the Alpine Club were its president, Percy Farrar, and two of its most prominent members, Norman Collie and C. F. Meade. The Royal Geographical Society brought to the room Younghusband, a Colonel E. M. Jack, and a banker by the name of Edward Somers-Cock, who was appointed honorary treasurer. All agreed that the ultimate objective was the summit, a goal to which the preliminary reconnaissance would be directed. The primary task in the first year was to identify the best route of approach. Should time and conditions permit, the party would be allowed and encouraged to ascend as high as possible, but only once the mountain had been completely reconnoitered and the most viable line of attack determined.
Inevitably, this resolution would be interpreted somewhat differently by the two societies. For the Alpine Club, the climb was all that mattered. The RGS had a broader mandate, which included the exploration and mapping of the unknown lands along the flanks of the mountain. At Younghusband’s insistence the party would include topographers and cartographers recruited from the Survey of India, a geologist from the Geological Survey of India, and a naturalist charged with the duty of compiling a botanical and zoological inventory. One of the first orders of business was the appointment of two honorary secretaries, Arthur Hinks of the RGS and J. E. C. Eaton of the Alpine Club. In short order Hinks, with Younghusband’s tacit approval, would usurp virtually all administrative authority, reducing Eaton to irrelevance and eclipsing even Farrar, himself a dogmatic and formidable adversary; after numerous battles with Hinks, Farrar would ultimately resign from the committee in 1922.
Arthur Hinks was a complex and difficult man. A fellow of the Royal Society, he was a brilliant mathematician and academic cartographer, a world authority on map projections who, ironically, had little interest in exploration and no experience whatsoever of life on an expedition. Before coming to the Royal Geographical Society in 1913, he had spent much of his career sequestered at Cambridge on the staff of the University Observatory, calculating the mass of the Moon. Born in 1873, he had a codger’s disdain for modernity. “The telephone is a great mistake,” he cautioned General Bruce, “and you will do well to be rid of it. I would not have one in my house for anything.” Disagreeable, intolerant, sarcastic, utterly lacking in tact or discretion, he was parsimonious and priggish, enamored of his own genius and convinced always of the infallible wisdom of his opinions. His letters suggest an individual imprisoned in a state of contempt and indignation.
At the same time, he was ferociously hardworking, meticulous, and exacting, with a bureaucrat’s obsession with process and control. From the outset he would orchestrate virtually every aspect of the expeditions, from the raising of funds and the recruiting of personnel to the purchasing of supplies and the design of equipment. No detail escaped his attention, whether the comparative costs of a passage to India or the proper brand of chocolate, the engineering of high-altitude stoves or the appropriate modifications of cameras, fuel supplies, oxygen cylinders, alpine boots, sun goggles, or chemicals for developing film and printing photographs at high altitude. He choreographed all interactions with the press, oversaw all travel arrangements, and negotiated for the publication of expedition reports, the production of documentary films, the sale of photographs and botanical specimens, the drafting of maps, the bookings of the international lecture tours that would play an essential role in fueling public interest in the expeditions. Every decision, conflict, debate, and controversy passed over his desk, and though he never left his London office, he was without doubt the nexus for the entire enterprise, the glue that held everything together. His correspondence fills some forty boxes, scores of files, in the Royal Geographical Society archives. He was liked by virtually no one, and yet without his irascible and indomitable will the expeditions might never have happened.
Even before his formal ascendancy Hinks had begun working behind the scenes, recruiting and vetting men for the team. As early as December 30, 1920, he wrote to John Noel, who was stationed at the time at the Small Arms School at Hythe, in Kent. Noel accepted, with the caveat that the War Office might not be willing to grant him leave, which turned out to be the case. A year later Noel would resign his commission in order to join the second climbing expedition, in 1922. Tom Longstaff, who had spent an easy war in India attached to the Gilgit Scouts until invalided home in October 1917 as a result of a direct blow to the temple by a polo ball, offered to join the expedition as medical officer, with the understanding that he had no interest in actually serving as a doctor. He, too, would have to wait until 1922. In an awkward interlude, Norman Collie, a member of the Everest Committee, proposed himself for inclusion on the roster. He was sixty-two. That such a suggestion could even be tabled reveals how little was known of the horrendous conditions the men would face in Tibet. His offer was politely declined. John de Vars Hazard, a serious climber whom Alexander Kellas had invited to Kamet in 1920, was also denied, though he had been in touch with Hinks about Everest since 1919. Among his challenges were open wounds on his back and one thigh, excruciating injuries that would never heal, sustained at the Somme. John “Jack” Hazard’s turn would come in 1924, when, despite constant pain, he would reach as high as the North Col.
Within days of the official announcement of the expedition, even as Hinks considered the list of established British climbers, scores of unsolicited applications poured into the RGS. From Texas a William Russell Bradford wrote of a sacred fire burning within him, an inner strength that had never failed. He also, it was noted, could ride and shoot well. From India came a letter from an ambitious policeman fluent in ordinary and honorific Tibetan, Nepali, and Bengali. An RGS fellow employed with Barclays Bank offered his considerable talents as a stenographer and typist, along with his skill at driving cars and handling “various native tribes.” The majority of applicants were ex-servicemen. A plaintive appeal came from an F. Vankinsburgh, who had been severely wounded at Gallipoli and later nearly killed when his hospital ship was torpedoed. “I served all through the Egyptian, Palestine and Syrian campaigns [sic],” he wrote. “I’m 24 years old. Since being demobilized in March 1919 I have worked in a warehouse, and I feel stifled. I’m always thinking of the open spaces of the desert and I think I’d give anything to get out abroad somewhere.” From Birmingham came a letter from a Lionel Mason, who flaunted but a single credential: the man had served at the front from November 1914 to April 1919, and in all that time had spent but a week in the hospital. He was evidently both tough and astonishingly lucky. That he had never been on a mountain was clearly, to his mind, irrelevant.
Perhaps the most unexpected appeals came from two veterans of ill-fated Antarctica expeditions. Ernest Joyce had served under both Scott and Shackleton, and his application to Hinks was supported by references from none other than Sir Clement Markham, former president of the RGS and a well-known patron of polar exploration. In 1915 Joyce had set out from the Ross Sea to establish a relay of supply drops for the Shackleton expedition, which was expected to be coming across the continent by way of the South Pole. Marooned from their ship, the Aurora, Joyce’s party covered eighteen hundred miles in six months, struggling overland across the ice, sometimes making as little as two miles in a fifteen-hour march. Suffering from scurvy, tormented by delirium, three men would die. Joyce, surviving on raw seal meat, patiently awaited an expedition that never appeared. For two years he was totally stranded, with no contact with the outside world and no knowledge whatsoever of the fate of the expedition he had risked his life to provision.
Shackleton had sailed from London on August 1, 1914, the day Germany declared war on Russia. He offered to turn back, but was urged not to abandon his mission by Churchill himself, as First Lord of the Admiralty, who wired a single word: “Proceed.” On January 18, 1915, within sight of land, Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became stranded in the Weddell Sea, where it lay frozen for nine months before being crushed by the pack ice.
The crew, camped on the floe, drifted for another five and a half months before reaching open water and Elephant Island, a rocky crag eight hundred miles from South Georgia, the nearest point of rescue. Shackleton, in one of the epic sea journeys of all time, set out in an open dory with five of his crew, washing ashore on South Georgia seventeen ferocious winter days later. When they finally reached a whaling station on May 20, 1916, they were to learn that war still raged in Europe. After recuperating for only three days, Shackleton returned to sea to rescue his men. Beaten back repeatedly by the weather, he would not make landfall on Elephant Island until his fourth attempt, fully eighteen weeks after he had departed. Not a man was lost. In January 1917, in a separate mission, Shackleton plucked Joyce off the shore of the Ross Sea.
Among the rescued at Elephant Island was Theodore Orde-Lees, who would repeatedly write Hinks seeking a place on the Everest expedition. He noted his record of “73 parachute descents from aeroplanes” and, in a letter dated January 26, 1921, enclosed a classified photograph of himself in free fall, just before his parachute opened. Convinced that the mountain would never be scaled without the aid of supplemental oxygen—a conviction certain to offend Hinks, a mountaineering purist—he outlined a plan to drop gas cylinders from the air. When this letter provoked no positive response, Orde-Lees wrote a final note on June 14, 1921: “My age is 42. I am a public school boy (Marlborough), 20 years military service, and was with Shackleton on his last expedition. Six months on an ice floe, 4½ under a boat on a dessert [sic] ice-covered island, very little food and never washed nor had my clothes off for 10½ months. I can stand anything and, though impious by instinct, I made up my mind never to use an expletive on that expedition, and never did, nor even lost my temper.”
If such letters from Joyce and Orde-Lees failed to sway Hinks, one can only imagine his reaction to a request forwarded by the India Office from an Austrian, a military officer who had served the German cause throughout the war. On September 23, 1921, Hinks responded acidly to Leonard Wakely, whose office had passed along the application: “I thank you for your letter of September 17 asking that we shall undertake to reply to Herr Lechner, and I have today sent him a formal statement that in my opinion there is no possibility of employing him on the expedition. I have hitherto put straight in the waste paper basket all applications from ex-enemies to take part in this expedition.”
Hinks was adamant that the expedition be exclusively British, a conviction that undercut Farrar’s desire to recruit the very best of international climbers, such as the distinguished Swiss cartographer and surveyor Marcel Kurz. The exclusion of all foreigners, including those untainted by the war, a position endorsed by the committee, raised a fundamental challenge, which Tom Longstaff identified in an understated note to Sydney Spencer, editor of the Alpine Journal: “Owing to the War the supply of young climbers is less than formerly.”
That the pool of fit and serious players was not large may account for the deeply flawed selection of an irascible Scot, Harold Raeburn, to lead the climbing party. On paper it seemed a reasonable choice. A keen birder who had grown up scaling the sea cliffs of Scotland, Raeburn was an acclaimed climber whose book Mountaineering Art had only just been published to exalted reviews. Climbing without guides and often solo, he had pioneered routes up Ben Nevis, established a strong record in the Alps and the Himalaya, and made no fewer than nine first ascents in the Caucasus. But at fifty-six he was, as Mallory would describe him, a “crabbed and crusty old man,” well past his prime. A serious fall on a Scottish face had robbed him of courage and nerve. He suffered constant abdominal pain, most likely from an undiagnosed gastric or duodenal ulcer. His temperament was dictatorial and defensive, utterly bereft of humor, incapable of calm. In the end he would survive the first Everest expedition, but the effort would drive him mad. A broken man, certain in his delusions that he had been a murderer responsible for the fate of Kellas, Raeburn would himself fade into delirium and pass away at the age of sixty-one, in 1926.
The obvious candidate to lead the overall expedition, including the climbing party, was Charles Bruce, who had been thinking of Everest since 1893, when he and Younghusband first spoke of the mountain on the polo grounds at Chitral. The general’s address to the RGS on November 8, 1920, at Aeolian Hall, in which he reviewed the history and challenges of Everest, had been widely reported in the London and national papers and later published in its entirety in the Geographical Journal, the official publication of the RGS, appearing in January 1921, just as the team was being assembled. As early as November 12, 1920, the newspaper the Western Mall reported that the general had already been formally selected to lead the assault.
Arthur Hinks, whose affection for Bruce was limited, clearly had other plans. Within days of the initial announcement, Hinks, acting on behalf of the Everest Committee, offered the leadership instead to Charles Howard-Bury. On January 21, 1921, Howard-Bury wrote from his estate in Ireland, accepting the position, even as he hinted at domestic political troubles that within months would leave one of his mother’s homes in ashes, noting, “Everything is fairly quiet round here but we never know from day to day what may happen.” A week later Howard-Bury wrote again and generously proposed that Bruce be given the leadership in 1922, pointing out, “It is only right and his due that he should have it when the really serious attempt is made to climb Mount Everest.”
The official news of Howard-Bury’s appointment went public on January 24. General Bruce, it was said, was unavailable, having recently taken up an appointment with the Glamorganshire Territorial Association. On the face of it, this seems dubious. In the summer of 1920 Bruce had formally retired from active duty with his regiment, and his new assignment was less a military transfer than a ceremonial posting typical of what awaited officers of the Indian Army upon their return to live out their last years in England. It is difficult to imagine that Bruce would not have been able to secure leave, as he indeed did in 1922, had the position been offered him. Clearly the Everest Committee believed that Howard-Bury was the better man for the job, as Hinks explained in a letter of January 22 to J. E. ( John) Shuckburgh at the Foreign Office: “The Expedition will announce on Monday night that the Chief of the Expedition will be Colonel Howard-Bury who is already well known to the Govt. of India and the local Tibetans from his successful mission on our behalf last year. I think that the Secretary of State may feel confident that with him in general charge of the expedition everything will be done to make relations with the Govt. of India and the Dalai Lama as smooth and pleasant as they can possibly be.”
Howard-Bury had earned the right to the job and, having established relationships with Charles Bell and other key figures in the Indian government, possessed the diplomatic skills required. Delicacy, tact, and discretion were not among General Bruce’s prominent traits of character. There was also a lingering question as to whether the general was physically up to the task. In closing the November 8 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society at Aeolian Hall, Younghusband, while praising Bruce for his presentation, had also reminded the audience of Bruce’s stellar record in the war: “It is known probably to most of you that in the Gallipoli campaign his presence alone was considered worth a whole Brigade.” Indeed, this was the problem. After what Bruce had endured in combat, it was not clear that he would ever again walk, let alone climb the flank of Everest.
CHARLES BRUCE had been on an expedition in India, en route to Ladakh, when he first heard news of the outbreak of war in Europe. By November 1914, Bruce and his command, the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles, were in Egypt, detailed to protect the Suez Canal, the lifeline to India and the oil fields of Mesopotamia. Initially theirs would be a quiet war. In five months more of his men were hurt playing rugby, scaling the Pyramids, or wrestling their commander than were injured by their Turkish enemy. In the spring of 1915, however, this would change.
The specter of war without end had by then indeed begun to haunt the British. One who shuddered at the thought of generals, as
he wrote, “content to fight machine gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men” was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. As a member of Parliament Churchill refused to gloss over the reality of the trenches: “In the house I say to myself every day, what is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly 1,000 men—Englishmen, Britishers, men of our race—are knocked into bundles of bloody rags every twenty-four hours, and carried away to hasty graves or to field ambulances.” Resisting the notion that the war had to be won in France, he conceived a strategic alternative, a naval assault on the weakest link in the enemy alliance, a bold move on the Dardanelles that would capture Constantinople, knock Turkey out of the war, and bring relief to the Russians by opening a supply line through the Bosporus, from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea.