by Wade Davis
John Morris, photographed by his tent mate, George Mallory, 1922
John Noel captured the last climb in 1922. Within an hour this party would be swept off the face of the North Col, and seven Sherpas, seen here bringing up the rear, would be killed.
Shegar Dzong, with the tents of the 1924 expedition in the foreground, photographed by Noel Odell
The Himalayas from Darjeeling, circa 1890
Henry Morshead, Teddy Norton, Howard Somervell, and George Mallory after their 1922 summit attempt, photographed by John Noel. Only Somervell escaped frostbite.
The 1924 expedition, photographed by John Noel. Back row (left to right): Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, Teddy Norton, Noel Odell, and John Macdonald (translator). Front row (left to right): Edward Shebbeare, Geoffrey Bruce, Howard Somervell, and Bentley Beetham.
The fortress of Kampa Dzong, photographed by John Noel
The burial site at Kampa Dzong of Dr. Alexander Kellas, who died en route to Everest in 1921. Photographed by John Noel in 1922.
The 1921 expedition, photographed by Sandy Wollaston. Back row (left to right): Guy Bullock, Henry Morshead, Oliver Wheeler, and George Mallory. Front row (left to right): A. M. Heron, Sandy Wollaston, Charles Howard-Bury, and Harold Raeburn.
Geoffrey Bruce (left) and George Finch, photographed by John Noel, after their record climb to 27,300 feet in 1922
Teddy Norton in 1924, photographed by Howard Somervell, just before Norton turned his back on Everest at 28,126 feet. In the history of photography, no image has ever been exposed at a higher elevation.
The Rongbuk Monastery with the North Face of Everest in the background, photographed by John Noel in 1922
Members of the 1922 expedition enjoying an English breakfast in Tibet, photographed by John Noel. On the left of the image sit Arthur Wakefield, John Morris, and General Bruce. On the right, Geoffrey Bruce, an unnamed Gurkha, and Teddy Norton. Standing at the rear is the interpreter, Karma Paul.
Camp IV on the North Col, at 23,000 feet, photographed by John Noel, 1922
Seated left to right are Geoffrey Bruce, George Mallory, and Teddy Norton at the Rongbuk Monastery, awaiting the blessings of the high lama, Dzatrul Rinpoche, photographed by Noel Odell, 1924.
George Mallory’s and Guy Bullock’s camp at Pethang Ringmo with Chomo Lonzo soaring behind, photographed by Sandy Wollaston, 1921
Sherpas in 1924 climbing the North Col with the help of Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder. Photographed by Howard Somervell.
Dzatrul Rinpoche, the abbot of Rongbuk Monastery, photographed by Noel Odell in 1924
George Mallory (upper left) and his team of Sherpas, photographed by John Noel on June 7, 1922, as they rested en route to Camp IV. None would make it to the North Col. Within the hour an avalanche would sweep seven of these men to their deaths.
Sandy Irvine with oxygen apparatus, photographed by his mentor, Noel Odell, at Shegar, 1924
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Daniel Taylor, who introduced me to Tibet and the spacious silence of the Kama Valley, where we first spoke of George Mallory and the British expeditions of 1921–24. For an understanding of the story from the Tibetan perspective, I am indebted to Barbara Nimri Aziz, Hildegard Diemberger, Thinley Dondrup, Carroll Dunham, Glenn Mullin, Kalden Norbu, Charles Ramble, Matthieu Ricard, Hamid Sardar-Afkhani, Akhu Sherap, Robert Thurman, Tsering Tsamchu, Lama Urgyen, Joshua Waldman, Lama Wangdu, and Jamyang Wangmo. I would like especially to thank Helen and Michael Schmidt, as well as Trulshig Rinpoche and the monks, nuns, and laity of Thubten Chöling, who welcomed us so generously on several visits to their spiritual community.
For financial support and companionship in the field, my thanks go to Darlene and Jeff Anderson; Sherab Barma; Bob Fleming; Andrew Gregg; Thomas Kelly; Ian MacKenzie; Terry and Mike Matkins; Pat and Baiba Morrow; Chris Rainier; Daniel Taylor and his children, Luke, Tara, and Jesse-Oake; Andrew Wong; and, especially, Dorjee Lhatoo and his gracious wife, Sonam Doma. At a critical point in the research, Dorjee, as a mountaineer, teacher, and guide, was a great inspiration.
In Britain I found many friends. My thanks to Daphne and Micky Astor, Gerry Bodeker, Arabella Cecil, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Chili Hawes and the October Gallery, John and Sukie Hemming, Richard House, Stephen and Christine Hugh-Jones, Bea Kayser, Christina Lamb, Leander and Stephanie McCormick-Goodhart, Andrew Nurnberg, Carol O’Brien, and Tristram and Louisa Riley-Smith. Among scholars I thank Grant Guyer, as well as Richard Blurton, David Field-house, John Keegan, Andrew Porter, Glyn Williams, Jay Winter, and, especially, Patrick French, Alex McKay, and Audrey Salkeld. My thanks in America go to Broughton Coburn, George Martin, Thom Pollard, Peter Steele, and Dale Vrabec. For assistance in sourcing photographs my thanks to Trevor Frost, Susan Hare, Kate Holiday, Thomas Laird, Sandra Noel, Peter Odell, Jamie Owen, Peter Smith, Charles Wakefield, Ed Webster, Joy Wheeler, and Cathleen Wright.
It was a privilege to meet and come to know climbers who understand Everest in ways the rest of us only imagine. Reinhold Messner and the late Sir Edmund Hillary were both insightful and generous with their time, but my true guides along the way were Conrad Anker, Pete Athans, David Breashears, Ed Douglas, Tom Hornbein, Dorjee Lhatoo, and Ed Webster, all giants in their own ways.
The family members of the British climbers of 1921–24, in both Canada and the United Kingdom, were exceedingly helpful. My thanks to Ronald Bayne, Sheila and Richard Hingston, Jill Hingston, Graham Hoyland, Sally Izod, Sandra Noel, Richard Norton, Bill Norton, Susan Robertson, Anne Russell, and, especially, to Peter Odell, Julie Summers, Charles and Donna Wakefield, Robert Wakefield, and John Wheeler. Without the letters, diaries, photographs, and personal insights shared so openly, this account of their fathers, granduncles, and grandfathers could not have been written.
Several friends and colleagues read all or parts of the manuscript. Thanks to Caroline Alexander, Roger Barrington, Keith Bellows, Ed Bernbaum, Tom Buri, George Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Leslie Cockburn, Lavinia Currier, Carroll Dunham, Karen Davis, Simon and Cindy Davies, Terry Garcia, Andrew Gregg, Dan Jantzen, Peter Matson, Joel McCleary, Scott and Corky McIntyre, Gail Percy, Travis Price, Johan Reinhard, Daniel Taylor, Robert Thurman, Chuck Savitt, Tim Ward, and Jann Wenner.
The real heroes of this project, however, are the curators, librarians, archivists, and keepers at some fifty institutions in Canada, Germany, the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. My thanks to Greta Connell, Gerald Davies, Lucy Dillistone, Margaret Ecclestone, Susanah Farmer, Mary Farrell, Aude Fitzsimmons, Rita Gardner, Livia Gollancz, Francis Herbert, Michael Holland, Beverley Hutchinson, Marian Keaney, Bob Lawford, Sheila MacKenzie, Sharon Martins, Carol Morgan, Roger Nixon, Helen Pye-Smith, Paula Rodino, Maggie Roxburgh, Joanna Scadden, Yvonne Sibbald, William Spencer, Sarah Strong, Andrew Tatum, Tim Thomas, Julia Walworth, Anne Wheeler, and Nigel de Winser. I would especially like to thank the Board of Trinity College Dublin and to acknowledge Marian Keaney for her scholarly devotion to the memory of Charles Howard-Bury.
My thanks to all those who offered assistance at: the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa; the Whyte Museum, Banff, Alberta; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York; Deutscher Alpenverein, Munich; Trinity College Dublin; the Custodians of Belvedere and Westmeath County Library, Mullingar, Ireland; University College Library and Archives, Cork, Ireland; the Ministry of Defense, Army Personnel Centre, Historic Disclosures, Glasgow; the University of Glasgow Archives, Glasgow; the Regimental Museum of the Royal Scots (the Royal Regiment), Edinburgh; the National Library of Scotland, Manuscripts Collection, Edinburgh; the Welch Regiment Museum, Cardiff; the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum, Caernarfon Castle, Wales; the Royal Leicestershire Regiment Museum Collection, Leicestershire; the Fell and Rock Climbing Club Archives, Cumbria Records Office, Kendal; the Kendal Local Studies Library, Kendal; the Gurkha Museum, Peninsula Barracks, Winchester; the Royal Green Jackets Museum, Peninsula Barracks, Winchester; the National Army Museum, Chelsea; the Royal Artillery Museum
, Woolwich; the Royal Engineers Corps Library and Museum, Chatham; the Winchester College Archives, Winchester; the Charterhouse School Archives, Godalming; the Eton College Library, Windsor; the Magdalene College Archives, Cambridge; the King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge; the Scott Research Institute, Cambridge; the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the Merton College Archives, Oxford; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Studies, King’s College London; the Institution of Civil Engineers Library, London; the Theatre Museum Archives, London; the Principal Probate Registry Reading Room, High Holborn, London; the Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents, London; the Institution of Civil Engineers, London; the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, London; the BBC Archives, London; the Natural History Museum Archives, London; the National Trust; the British Library, Manuscript Collection, and India Office Records, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, London; the Oriental and India Office Library, London; the National Archives, Kew; the Alpine Club Library and Archives, London; the Royal Geographical Society Archives, Foyle Reading Room, London.
In London I would like to thank Will Sulkin, Tom Drake-Lee, and Suzanne Dean at the Bodley Head, and, especially, Michael Sissons, a former soldier, who understood this book from the start. At our first meeting Michael recited a litany of his family members who had been killed in the First and Second World Wars. Only toward the end of his military career, he added, did it dawn on him that he and his peers would not have to die for their country, as had their fathers and grandfathers.
At Knopf Canada I would like to thank Louise Dennys, executive publisher, and Deirdre Molina and Amanda Betts. And at Knopf in New York: Maria Massey, Gabrielle Brooks, Erica Hinsley, and, especially, Andrew Miller, a wonderful editor who was unfailing in his support. David Lindroth created the maps. Editorial help came from many quarters, and I would like as well to acknowledge my friend Keith Bellows, editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler magazine, who worked through the entire manuscript as we traveled together for a month to a dozen countries. I also had the invaluable editorial insights of Jonathan Cobb, an old-school editor if ever there was one. Finally, I cannot express strongly enough my thanks to Ash Green and Sonny Mehta, who never lost confidence in the book, even as the years piled up to a decade. I don’t know of another editor or publisher who would have stood by a writer as they did. The same must be said of my agent and friend at Sterling Lord, Peter Matson.
Roger Barrington worked with me as a research partner for virtually the duration of the project. Unfailingly upbeat and thoughtful, he made this effort his own, and his wizardly ability to source primary documents never ceased to amaze me. In Nepal, Carroll Dunham introduced all the key Tibetan players, even as she showered me with books and suggested readings, translations of sacred texts, massive tomes and small prayers. Carroll’s mind, as all who know her attest, is dazzling, but what makes her such a beloved figure in Nepal is her bodhisattva heart.
Finally, of course, there is my family, my sister, Karen, a constant light of love, and Gail and our daughters, Tara and Raina, for whom the saga of this book has shadowed half of their lives. Gail helped in so many ways, with research in the early years in London, and with editing and advice on each draft of the manuscript. For her love and support, and for the beautiful and kind young women that Tara and Raina have become, I am so very grateful.
Washington, D.C.
February 12, 2011
Annotated Bibliography
My interest in this story began in the spring of 1996 as I completed a four-thousand-mile overland journey from Chengdu, in western China, through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa and on to Kathmandu. Leading that ecological survey was a good friend, Daniel Taylor. Raised in the Himalaya, the son and grandson of medical missionaries, Daniel was a veteran of some forty-five expeditions to Tibet and had been largely responsible for the creation of the QNP, the 14,000-square-mile nature preserve that encompasses the approaches to Everest.
As it happened, we passed by the mountain just as events unfolded that were later chronicled in two remarkable books: Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer (New York: Villard Books, 1997); and The Climb, written by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Like many in the climbing community, Daniel was deeply disturbed that the commercial transformation of Everest had resulted in such loss of life. In 1949, his father was a member of the first expedition officially sanctioned to enter Nepal. By 1996, thousands of foreigners were flocking to Everest each year—and those with the means to pay as much as $65,000 to be guided aloft, often with fatal results.
In the late fall of 1997, Daniel and I returned to Tibet, intent on photographing clouded leopards, among the most elusive of the great cats. Our journey took us from Kharta south into the Kama Valley along the same trails traveled by the British expeditions of the 1920s. Daniel had grown up with tales of George Mallory; his father was a close friend of Howard Somervell’s. The British climbers were his heroes and role models when he was a boy, intrepid men who had walked off the map for hundreds of miles just to find a mountain that no European had encountered at close quarters. Their Everest was the mountain of Daniel’s imaginings, not the ignoble scene of today.
Compared to the British expeditions of the 1920s, our monthlong sojourn in the Kama Valley was a trivial undertaking. Nevertheless, the extremes of altitude took a toll, as did the blizzards and the cold. From our camp at Pethang Ringmo, at the base of the Kangshung Face, we stared up at a mountain that has killed one climber for every ten that have reached the summit. It is a formidable sight. Though we were standing on ground higher than any in North America, the mountain rose two miles above, with fluted ribs and ridges, gleaming balconies and seracs of blue-green ice, shimmering formations ready to collapse in an instant. The thought of those early British climbers, “dressed in tweeds,” as Daniel put it, and “reading Shakespeare in the snow” as they confronted such hazards, filled me with admiration, curiosity, and awe. Who were these men, and what was the spirit that drew them on?
On my return to Canada I dropped by a bookstore owned by an acquaintance in Vancouver. As we chatted, I noticed directly behind him on a shelf of rare books first editions of the three official accounts of the early Everest expeditions: C. K. Howard-Bury’s Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921 (London: Edward Arnold, 1922); C. G. Bruce’s The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922 (London: Edward Arnold, 1923), and E. F. Norton’s The Fight for Everest, 1924 (London: Edward Arnold, 1925). These became the first acquisitions in a research collection for this book; it would grow to include more than six hundred volumes.
After reading the early accounts, I turned to classic biographies of Mallory, one written by his son-in-law, David Robertson’s George Mallory (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), and a second by a close friend of the climber’s: David Pye’s George Leigh Mallory (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). Those interested should see also Dudley Green, Mallory of Everest (Roughlee: Faust, 1990), reissued as Because It’s There: The Life of George Mallory (Brimscombe: Tempus, 2005), and Showell Styles, Mallory of Everest (New York: MacMillan, 1967).
Next came three fundamental sources: Tom Holzel and Audrey Salkeld, The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986); Kenneth Mason, Abode of Snow (New York: Dutton, 1955); and Walt Unsworth, Everest (London: Oxford Illustrated Press, 1989). See also: Ian Cameron, Mountains of the Gods (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984); Ronald Clark, Men, Myths and Mountains (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976); Howard Marshall, Men Against Everest (London: Country Life, 1954); Micheline Morin, Everest (New York: John Day, 1955); W. H. Murray, The Story of Everest (Letchworth: J. M. Dent, 1953); Stanley Snaith, At Grips with Everest (London: Oxford University Press, 1938); James R. Ullman, Kingdom of Adventure: Everest (New York: William Sloane, 1947); and Walt Unsworth, Hold the Heights (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994). For three more recent books on the history of climbing and Everest, all grand in scale and insight, see: Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, Fallen Giants (New H
aven: Yale University Press, 2008); Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2003); and Michael Ward, Everest: A Thousand Years of Exploration (Glasgow: Ernest Press, 2003).
Many of the men on or associated with the expeditions published personal memoirs, which became my next level of engagement. See especially: F. M. Bailey, Mission to Tashkent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946) and No Passport to Tibet (London: Travel Book Club, 1957); Charles G. Bruce, Himalayan Wanderer (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1934); Norman Collie, Climbing on the Himalaya (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902); George Ingle Finch, The Making of a Mountaineer (London: Arrowsmith, 1924); Tom Longstaff, This My Voyage (London: John Murray, 1950); David Macdonald, Twenty Years in Tibet (London: Seeley, Service, 1932); John Morris, Hired to Kill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis/Cresset, 1960); John Noel, The Story of Everest (New York: Little, Brown, 1927), later reprinted as Through Tibet to Everest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989); and T. Howard Somervell, After Everest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936).
Ian Morshead and Nicholas Wollaston wrote fascinating and deeply moving biographies of their fathers. See: Ian Morshead, The Life and Murder of Henry Morshead (Cambridge: Oleander, 1982); and Nicholas Wollaston, My Father, Sandy (London: Short Books, 2003). Among his many books, Francis Younghusband wrote two specifically about the Everest adventure: The Epic of Mount Everest (London: Edward Arnold, 1926) and Everest: The Challenge (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1936). Obituaries of all of the key players in the Everest adventure appeared in both the Alpine Club Journal and the Geographic Journal, the official publications of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. Another fundamental source is: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).