by Wade Davis
EVEN AS HINKS engaged Wollaston, he was editing for publication in the Geographical Journal a note on the oxygen problem on Everest written by the one man whose inclusion in the party was taken by everyone as a given, a climber who in fact ought never to have been considered and who, because of this oversight, would be the first to die in Tibet. After some eight expeditions to the Himalaya, Dr. Alexander Kellas had more experience above 19,000 feet and knew more about the approaches to Everest than any living explorer. He had identified the Sherpas as the best native porters. He had considered and rejected as impractical the use of aerial support. His wartime experiments had left him with more knowledge about the physiological effects of altitude and oxygen deprivation than any other scientist, information he had shared frequently with Wollaston in an active correspondence that continued throughout the war, even as Wollaston served in Africa and the North Sea.
In June 1920 Kellas had gone to Darjeeling and with Henry Morshead of the Survey of India initiated a series of scientific experiments designed to test the structural integrity of oxygen cylinders and the practicality of carrying compressed gas to elevation. Reaching as high as 23,600 on Kamet, he concluded that the weight of the apparatus, an obvious detriment, more than offset any advantage provided by the supplemental oxygen. He also determined that the Primus stoves intended for use on Everest were woefully inadequate, difficult if not impossible to use above 20,000 feet. All of this vital information and more he conveyed to Hinks in a report, three weeks in the writing, which he dispatched on January 12, 1921, a day after the launch of the Everest expedition had made headlines in the London papers. A letter from Hinks to Kellas inviting him to join the climbing party must have crossed this document in the mail, for on January 26, from India, Kellas wrote to Norman Collie at the Alpine Club acknowledging that he had been selected for the mountain. On the same day, Kellas sent a cautionary note to Hinks advising him to recruit only British climbers, saying, “The expedition would be to some extent spoiled if any foreign guides were employed. Their use would be a reproach to all concerned, and would seem that we had not learned the technique of the game.”
Such sentiments were bound to delight Hinks, who remained, like many others, blinded by Kellas’s achievements in the laboratory and field, and oblivious to the fact that at fifty-three Kellas was simply too old for Everest. It was a myopia clearly shared by Kellas himself. In a letter written some weeks later, on April 9, after Howard-Bury, Mallory, and other members of the expedition had sailed from England for India, Kellas in all seriousness shared his hopes that another man long past his prime, Norman Collie, aged sixty-two, would indeed join the expedition.
Not all members of the Everest team were so incautious. On January 27 Howard-Bury wrote to Younghusband and promised to give Harold Raeburn, as climbing leader, a completely free hand on the mountain, a deferential gesture that belied the serious doubts he had about Raeburn’s health and fitness. Wollaston was forty-six, Raeburn ten years older. At thirty-seven, Howard-Bury appeared young, though given the task at hand, he was not. For political and logistical reasons the climbing party was limited to four, which made it absolutely essential, Howard-Bury insisted, that the final two slots be filled by young, supremely fit, and seriously accomplished mountaineers.
In all of Britain two men stood out. One, of course, was George Mallory, the finest rock climber of his generation to have survived the war. The second climber proved more problematic and controversial. If George Mallory represented the British ideal, scion of the public schools, graduate of Cambridge, a perfect portrait of Uranian beauty and masculinity, George Finch was a child of the sun-burnt rocks of the Australian outback, the product of a family that defied orthodoxy and gave the lie to illusions of Victorian perfection, the kind of man the empire had been content to send to the slaughter, yet reluctant to acknowledge as one of its own. He was, to be sure, a complex personality. But on ice and snow he had no equal, and this is what counted for Percy Farrar, who had singled him out for Everest as early as March 1919.
George Ingle Finch was born in New South Wales in August 1888. As a boy he grew up in the open air, riding a pony ten miles each way to school, his closest companions being his brother, Max, and the poisonous viper he kept as a pet and fed with small saucers of milk. His father, Charles, forty-five when George was born, was the fourth son of a wealthy rancher. His mother, Laura, twenty-four years younger than her husband, had been married off to cover her own father’s debts.
Life on an isolated and remote cattle station did not sit well with a young woman born to privilege who always carried with her a silver box containing a single piece of Melba toast, with which to instruct hotel waiters as to the proper preparation of her breakfast bread. When George was six, his mother attended a lecture in Sydney by the theosophist leader Annie Besant and was so inspired by the talk of latent powers and universal brotherhoods that she persuaded her husband to take the family to Paris, where in 1902 they settled into a mansion overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. When, after a year, his father had to return to Australia, his mother refused to go. His heart broken, Charles Finch would continue to support the family for the rest of his life, though never again would he see his sons or utter the name of his wife. Not that it mattered to her. She had already fallen in love with a French painter, who gave her a new child, even as she flung herself into the bohemian life of Paris. Spiritualism, the occult, legends of the cosmic east, all distilled in the writings and ravings of Madame Blavatsky, became her obsessions. The further she slipped toward the mystic, the more estranged she became from her son, who never forgave her for what she had done to his father.
George despised the metaphysical nonsense, as he saw it, that had shattered his family, and with each academic opportunity he moved closer to the precision of the rational. He studied first at the École de Médecine, in Paris, and then attended the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, before completing his studies of physical chemistry in Geneva. Awarded a gold medal as the top student in his school, he sold it immediately to finance a climbing expedition. He was first drawn to the mountains while living in Zurich in 1907, and from the start he brought to the sport the discipline and inventive curiosity that allowed him, throughout his career, to thrive as a scientist. At a time, for example, when most British climbers wore the same Norfolk tweed jackets they might don for a country walk, Finch designed and produced a light windproof anorak, unprecedented in its utility. For Everest he would invent the first down coat. In an article published in 1913 he celebrated the techniques of modern climbing, and provocatively reminded members of the Alpine Club that their average age was over fifty. Finch considered the traditional reliance on local guides, said to be the only “proper” way to climb for an English gentleman, an outdated and even dangerous practice that dulled the senses of the athlete.
As strong as any guide, and quite incapable of yielding control of his fate to anyone, Finch climbed alone or with his brother Max, sometimes with the sun, sometimes at night, always planning his routes with meticulous care, taking into account conditions of snow and ice, the play of light and shadow, the shifting temperatures over the course of a long alpine day. His reputation grew with each first ascent: the north face of Castor in 1909, the southwest ridge of the Aiguille du Midi in 1911, the west ridge of the Bifertenstock in 1913. In 1909, only two years after Finch began seriously to explore the heights, the highly regarded Italian mountaineer Count Aldo Bonacossa described the young Australian as the greatest climber and the most outstanding personality in the Alps. Tall and physically powerful, with eyes the color of glacial ice and hair long and untamed, Finch had, the count recalled, “an exotic look, quite unlike other men in Switzerland.”
Finch’s unorthodox background did not disturb Percy Farrar, who had himself been educated in Germany and Switzerland. But it deeply unnerved Arthur Hinks and challenged even Francis Younghusband, who, in dismissing Finch, did not deign to commit his name to paper. “As a mountaineer,” Youngh
usband wrote, “this other was all that could be desired; but he had characteristics which several members of the committee who knew him [thought] would cause friction and irritation in the party and destroy the cohesion which is vitally necessary.” In truth, the only mark against Finch was the land and culture of his origins. Though he thought of himself as British, and had responded to the outbreak of war in the true spirit of empire, he would never be able to dispel a certain cloud hovering over his character.
Nevertheless, on February 16 the Everest Committee, encouraged strongly by Geoffrey Young, who had maintained an active correspondence with Finch since 1911, voted to have both George Mallory and George Finch on the 1921 expedition. Finch, who had been first interviewed on February 9, received a formal letter of offer on February 17. In the interim Hinks, in a gratuitously provocative note, asked Mallory whether he would be prepared to share a tent at 27,000 feet with such a man as Finch. Mallory knew Finch well, having met him at Pen y Pass in 1912. As editor of the Climbers’ Club Journal, Mallory had published Finch’s dramatic account of his 1911 effort on the Aiguille du Dru. In the summer of 1920 they had climbed together in the Alps, reaching the summit of the Matterhorn and the Zinal Rothorn. Mallory responded to Hinks that he did not care who he slept with so long as they both got to the top of the mountain.
Thus, despite the concerns of Hinks, Younghusband, and especially Bruce, who profoundly disliked the rogue Australian, George Mallory and George Finch, the two finest climbers in Britain, one a master of rock, the other of ice, were scheduled to sail for India on SS Sardinia on April 8, 1921. They had barely seven weeks to equip themselves and plan their attack.
On March 7 every member of the team—indeed, every major player in the entire Everest saga—came together for a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society called to discuss the organization and logistics of the expedition. The first to speak was Younghusband, who uttered his familiar clarion call, invoking the names of Curzon and the late Cecil Rawling. Norman Collie focused on the scientific promise of the expedition: the expectation that fully 60 percent of the plant and animal species encountered in Tibet could be new to science. Howard-Bury spoke very simply, anticipating “a wonderful expedition, full of interest of all kinds. When we come back I hope we shall have a very interesting tale to tell.” Harold Raeburn emphasized the need to find a route up a sheltered face, with sun in the morning to mitigate the perils of cold and altitude. Colonel Jack described the optical instruments to be taken, the pocket aneroids and the cameras, whereas C. F. Meade, who had reached 23,420 feet on Kamet, dwelt on the importance of sunproof flies for the Whymper tents, solid boots with coverings, and ample and desirable food for the high camps, where appetite fades. Wollaston stressed that the most interesting biological observations would be of the men themselves, their minds and bodies, but mostly their minds. “I have been told when you get above 16,000 feet the temper becomes very short,” he remarked. “What it will be like when they have been to 29,000 feet remains to be seen.” John Noel introduced the challenges and delights of mountain photography, the difficulty of shooting in the snow, the need for yellow filters to reduce the ultraviolet light, and a developing agent that would result chemically in a slow emergence of the image.
Of all the speakers only George Finch, the outsider, had concrete and truly important things to say. The climbers would face, he predicted, great difficulties and hazards. Comparisons to polar expeditions, drawn-out struggles of endurance lasting many months, were pointless. The approach march to Everest would be pedestrian; the ascent to 20,000 feet, assuming a route could be found, without serious dangers. It would be the last 9,000 feet, he noted, the last ten days, that would require a “concentrated effort and strain such as no other expedition has ever demanded … Every one of us will have to call up all he ever knew about snow conditions.” Citing the experiments of Kellas, Finch reminded the audience that on the summit of Everest, temperatures of sixty degrees below zero Fahrenheit were quite likely, indeed highly probable. “That in itself may not at first be considered a serious matter but it must be borne in mind that at high altitudes the rate of evaporation of moisture and the loss of heat from the human body will be far greater than at sea level,” he said. “At high altitudes there are large quantities of ultraviolet light not kept back from the atmosphere. At sea level we are protected. Ultraviolet light rays impinging on the skin literally burn it, and the burning is followed by a feverish condition which hardly seems to me to be conducive to health and well-being.”
It is unclear whether any of these scientific insights registered on Younghusband, who in closing the evening once again invoked British pluck. Difficult as the challenges might be, he said, “You can depend upon these younger men to ascend as far as they can.”
THERE REMAINED one unexpected hurdle. Less than a fortnight before Mallory and Finch were scheduled to depart England, a plan was floated by Hinks and Wollaston to have the climbers examined by two physicians chosen by the Everest Committee, Drs. Graeme Anderson and F. E. Larkins, who shared a practice at 75 Harley Street in London. Why it was decided to assess the climbers at such a late date was never revealed, but the results were dramatic in the extreme. Anderson’s medical report indicated that at five foot eleven, 159 pounds, with a chest of thirty-five to thirty-seven inches, a pulse of 68, and a blood pressure of 115, Mallory was a “fit type,” or, as Larkins would add, a “man in every respect fit.” Finch apparently was a different story. Larkins’s report, dated March 18, indicated that his nutrition was poor, his general appearance tired, his complexion sallow, his physique fair with evidence of recent exposure to malaria. Seventeen teeth were missing. “The man,” Larkins concluded, “is not at the moment fit. He has been losing weight. He is slightly anemic and his mouth is very deficient in teeth. He may improve with training.” Anderson, writing the day before, had come to a similar conclusion: “sallow, nutrition poor, spare, flabby, physical condition is poor.” On March 18, the same day Finch wrote to Hinks indicating that he had selected berths 45 and 46 on the SS Sardinia for Mallory and himself, these damning medical reports were passed along to Wollaston, who, as expedition physician, had the final say. On March 22 Wollaston conveyed the news to Hinks: “Mallory—excellent in every way, Finch described as ‘not fit at present.’ I am strongly of the opinion that a substitute should be found if possible.” The news was released on March 24. Only days before Finch was scheduled to sail for India, he was informed that he had been dropped from the expedition because of his health.
Both Percy Farrar, the only member of the Everest Committee who knew Finch well, and Finch himself were furious and immediately suspected the hand of Hinks or Bruce. To be fair, questions about Finch’s condition had been floated earlier in the spring. Knowing that neither Kellas nor Raeburn would be able to go higher than 24,000 feet, if that, Mallory had written Geoffrey Young on February 21 and expressed concern about Finch’s fitness. On April 3, after Finch had been rejected, Mallory wrote once again to Young, saying, “Finch always seemed to me rather a gamble. He didn’t look fit and I had no confidence in his stamina. I feel sorry for Finch. The medical exam ought to have been arranged at a much earlier stage. But he forfeits sympathy by his behavior.”
Mallory’s reservations aside, there can be little doubt that George Finch was treated in a cavalier manner by a medical-review process that was at the very least highly subjective. Only a year later these same Harley Street physicians, once again acting on behalf of the Everest Committee, would pass as fit for Everest General Bruce, a man of fifty-six with a diagnosed heart condition requiring medication, who walked on legs weakened by severe battle wounds, and whose own physician had advised him to stay home, lead a quiet regular life, and not travel even to Darjeeling. “Taking the medical details alone,” Larkins wrote of Bruce in his report of October 27, 1921, “one would conclude that this man is unfit; but I must say that looking at it from a wider view, I consider he is very suitable for the undertaking. Various scars due to acc
idents and wounds of no importance.” If Larkins, perhaps encouraged by a third party, was willing to compromise his medical objectivity to yield a diagnosis in favor of Bruce, he presumably would have been prepared under similar circumstances to modify his ethics in order to disqualify Finch from consideration. Or so it would seem from the results of a subsequent and more thorough examination of Finch that occurred within days of his dismissal.
Four days before his position on the expedition was officially given to another climber, Finch, still loyal to the team, traveled to Oxford to work with Professor P. J. H. Unna to improve the performance at altitude of the Primus stoves. Percy Farrar had arranged for him to enter a low-pressure chamber designed during the war to prepare pilots for high-altitude flying. Professor Georges Dreyer, who had pioneered the use of bottled oxygen for the RAF, submitted Finch to a thorough medical examination, mandatory for anyone about to enter the decompression chamber. Dreyer’s report of March 28, just ten days after those of the Harley Street physicians, found Finch to be slightly underweight, but with an excellent physique and such a high degree of physical fitness that he “should be able to stand great exertion at high altitudes better than most persons.” In fact, Finch’s “unusual powers of resistance to the effects of high altitude” were so remarkable that Dreyer described him as the most fit of the thousand young men examined to date by the facility, noting, “We have not come across a single case where the subject possessed the resisting power to such a high degree.” His proportions were normal, chest measurement ideal, lung capacity 40 percent greater than the average, blood pressure slightly below average—all signs of superb physical fitness.