Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  For the official account of fate of the Newfoundland Regiment, see: General Sir James Edmonds and Major A. F. Becke, eds., History of the Great War: Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1916 (London: Macmillan, 1932). See also: Richard Cramm, The First Five Hundred of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment (Albany: C. F. Williams & Son, 1923).

  The wreck of the Letitia dominated the front pages of the Halifax Herald on August 2 and 4, 1917. The program for the service at Great Gable, preserved in the papers of the FRCC, reads: “War Memorial: Unveiling and Dedication of Bronze Tablet Great Gable, The Fell & Rock Climbing Club, Whit-Sunday, June 8th, 1924 2.PM.” It includes the full text of Young’s address, the names of the dead, and the words to the hymns sung that day. For Wakefield’s correspondence with the Mount Everest Committee, see RGS Box 13, File 5.

  2: Everest Imagined

  George Nathaniel Curzon wrote a dozen books, including Persia and the Persian Question (2 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, 1892); Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (London: Longmans, Green, 1889); and British Government in India (2 vols.; London: Cassell, 1925). For his account of his travels to meet the emir of Afghanistan in 1894 and his explorations of the Pamirs, see: Tales of Travel (New York: George Doran, 1923), and The Pamirs and the Source of the Oxus (London: Royal Geographical Society, Edward Stanford, 1896). For biographies of Curzon, see: David Gilmour, Curzon (London: John Murray, 1994), and Kenneth Rose, Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon and His Circle in Late Victorian England (New York: Sterling, 2001).

  For a sense of the spirit and character of what has been called the British century, there is no better source than Jan Morris’s astonishing trilogy. See: Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (New York: Harcourt, 1968); Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (New York: Harcourt, 1973); and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). The wonderful phrase describing India as the “peacock bird in the gilded cage” is hers. See also two fine books by Lawrence James: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), and Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997). See also: Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs (London: John Murray, 2002); David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Moorhouse, India Britannica (New York: Harper & Row, 1983); and Valerie Pakenham, Out in the Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics (New York: Random House, 1985). For the Great Trigonometrical Survey and the discovery of Everest, see a truly splendid book: John Keay, The Great Arc (New York: Harper-Collins, 2000), and J. R. Smith, Everest: The Man and the Mountain (Latheronwheel: Whittles, 1999).

  For Tibetan history, most especially the complex diplomatic maneuverings between 1880 and 1950, there is no better source in English than Hugh Richardson, who served as British diplomatic representative in Lhasa from 1936 to 1940, and from 1946 to 1950. A brilliant linguist, fluent in Bengali, Richardson spoke, according to the Tibetan historian Tsepon Shakabpa, “impeccable Lhasa Tibetan with a slight Oxford accent.” Like Charles Bell, he felt that Britain, the only European power to have treated with an independent Tibet, had betrayed its obligations. He wrote several books, including: Tibet and Its History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), and, with David Snellgrove, A Cultural History of Tibet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995). Other writings on Tibetan history and culture appear in an essential collection: Hugh Richardson, High Peaks, Pure Earth (London: Serendia, 1998). Included is a vital source: “Tibetan Precis,” a book-length summary of the history of British diplomatic relations with Tibet originally submitted in 1945 as a classified report to the government of India.

  The Tibetan name of the Buriat monk who so aroused British suspicions was Tsenshab Ngawang Lobzang Dorje. Tsenshab is a title, indicating that he was one of seven spiritual tutors of the Dalai Lama. As Russians could not pronounce “Dorje,” it became Dorjev, which in turn became Dorjeiff to Charles Bell and other writers. Adding to the confusion was the Mongolian transposition of Ngawang to Agwang, and Dorje to Dorj. So in the literature, the man I am calling Agvan Dorzhiev after Alex McKay, Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre, 1904–1947 (Richmond: Curzon, 1977), has been identified by various names, including most commonly, Dorjieff (Charles Bell, Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth [London: Collins, 1946]; Glenn H. Mullin, The Fourteen Dalai Lamas: A Sacred Legacy of Reincarnation [Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers, 2001]).

  Other important sources on Tibetan history include: Charles Allen, The Search for Shangri-La (London: Little, Brown, 1999); Melvyn Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Glenn Mullin, The Fourteen Dalai Lamas: A Sacred Legacy of Reincarnation (Santa Fe, N. M.: Clear Light, 2001); Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Tsepon Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History (New York: Potala Publications, 1984); David Snellgrove, Buddhist Himalaya (New York: Bruno Cassirer, 1957); Warren Smith, Tibetan Nation (Boulder: Westview, 1996); and R. A. Stein, Tibetan Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). To see how these diplomatic maneuvers and betrayals played out, with horrific consequences for Tibet, see: Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For extraordinary accounts of espionage and clandestine travel, see: Sarat Chandra Das, Indian Pandits in the Land of Snow (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1893), and A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, edited by Phoebe Folger (Delhi: Book Faith India, 1998); as well as Derek Waller, The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).

  For the Anglo-Russian rivalry, see: Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game (London: John Murray, 1990), and Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999). For a wonderful biography of Younghusband, see: Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (London: Harper-Collins, 1994). The description of Younghusband’s wardrobe I owe completely to Patrick, a friend. He captured in these details a portrait of a lost era of imperial travel, when an expedition leader such as Younghusband brought along not only clothing for every diplomatic and social occasion but also several tents for his personal use, a camp bed and chair, folding tables, a deck chair, a tea basket for picnics, several umbrellas, walking sticks, a box of Mannlicher ammunition, three rifles, and two swords. To carry this gear, the British turned to locals, whom they referred to as coolies, using a Hindu word meaning simply “porter.” Though not considered a pejorative term at the time, it is now, and throughout the text I use the word “porter,” though I retain “coolie” if used in a direct quote. Of greater concern ought to be the manner in which Tibetan porters were treated by the invasion force. At a time when union rules in Britain prevented bricklayers from carrying loads of more than fourteen pounds, the expedition porters—Nepali Sherpas, Rais, Limbus, and Lepchas—regularly hefted two hundred pounds, with some men carrying two or three telegraph poles, each weighing ninety pounds.

  For two other fine Younghusband biographies, see: George Seaver, Francis Younghusband: Explorer and Mystic (London: John Murray, 1952), and Anthony Verrier, Francis Younghusband and the Great Game (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991). Younghusband himself wrote many books. The one that first made his reputation was The Heart of a Continent: A Narrative of Travels in Manchuria, Across the Gobi Desert, Through the Himalayas, the Pamirs, and Chitral, 1884–1894 (London: John Murray, 1904). See also his The Heart of Nature (London: John Murray, 1921), Wonders of the Himalaya (London: John Murray, 1924), and The Light of Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).

  For three very fine accounts of the Younghusband invasion, see: Charles Allen, Duel in the Snows (London: John Murray, 2004); Peter Hopkins, Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Race for Lhasa (London: John Murray, 1982); and Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961
). Save for what they had gleaned from the accounts of the pundits, in 1904 the British knew very little about Tibet. Among the handful of sources that Younghusband, his officers, and the journalists accompanying the invasion force might have read before the expedition were accounts by intrepid individuals who had slipped into Tibet unauthorized. See: Hamilton Bower, Diary of a Journey Across Tibet (New York: Macmillan, 1894); Henry Savage Landor, In the Forbidden Land (2 vols.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899); Susie Carson Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (London: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1904); William Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas (New York: Century, 1891); and Fanny Bullock Workman and William Workman, In the Ice World of Himalaya (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901).

  The first real portrait of Lhasa to reach the West came in the books published in the wake of the expedition. For Younghusband’s own account, see: India and Tibet (London: John Murray, 1910). See also: Edmund Chandler, The Unveiling of Lhasa (London, 1905; reprinted New Delhi: Cosmos, 1981); Perceval Landon, Lhasa (2 vols.; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905; published in New York by Doubleday as The Opening of Tibet 1905); and L. Austine Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries (London: Methuen, 1906).

  The sense of something having been lost in the “unveiling of Lhasa” was captured in a book by John Buchan: The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1923). The opening chapter covers the Younghusband invasion, and the last heralds the campaign to conquer Everest. The frontispiece is a classic photograph of Everest taken by Sandy Wollaston in 1921, and the book is dedicated thus: “To the Memory of Brig.-Gen. Cecil Rawling, C.M.G, C.I.E. who fell at the Third Battle of Ypres, An Intrepid Explorer, A Gallant Soldier, and the Best of Friends.” During the war Buchan was attached to the War Propaganda Bureau and later served as director of information. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps, he wrote speeches and acted effectively as press secretary for Field Marshal Douglas Haig. He also wrote two best-selling spy thrillers: The Thirty-Nine Steps (London: William Blackwood, 1915) and Greenmantle (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917). In 1935 King George V elevated Buchan to the peerage, and for five years, until his death in 1940, he served as Lord Tweedsmuir, governor-general of Canada. Recruited by the Everest Committee to orchestrate all press relations for the 1921–24 expeditions, Buchan as much as anyone promoted and, indeed, personified the impulse of imperial ambition and redemption that ran from Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet, through the cataclysm of the Great War, to the exalted radiance of Everest.

  Joanna Bourke, in Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), argues that after the war the anonymity of death in the trenches and the endless images of maimed and broken bodies came to symbolize the emasculation of a nation. The Everest expeditions momentarily returned meaning and virility to words such as “honor” and “sacrifice” and in doing so offered a promise of regeneration. For a fascinating discussion, see also: Peter Bayers, Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity, and Empire (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003). For more on Buchan, see: Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965).

  For Rawling’s expedition to the source of the Brahmaputra, see: Charles C. Rawling, The Great Plateau (London: Edward Arnold, 1905). Freshfield’s most significant books were: The Exploration of the Caucasus (2 vols.; London: Edward Arnold, 1902) and Round Kangchenjunga: A Narrative of Mountain Travel and Exploration (London: Edward Arnold, 1903). Originally published in 1885, Clinton Dent’s Above the Snowline: Mountaineering Sketches Between 1870 and 1880 was reprinted by Kessinger Publishing in Whitefish in 2007. For Curzon’s proposal to Freshfield beginning with “It has always seemed to me a reproach,” see the Alpine Club Archives, Minute Book 9.

  General Bruce wrote of his upbringing and early days as a soldier in Himalayan Wanderer. See also: Michael Underhill, “A Gurkha in Wales,” Country Life, February 2, 1984. Bluster and laughter aside, Bruce was a battle-scarred warrior. He and his Gurkha soldiers fought with calculated ferocity at Hazara in 1891, in the relief of Chitral in 1895, at Waziristan in 1894–95, and throughout the entire Tirah campaign in 1897–98. As a commander, Bruce was mentioned in despatches on three occasions and awarded six clasps to two frontier medals. Of the Tirah pacification, he wrote in the regimental records:

  The troops under my command have marched everywhere within Orakzai and Afridi limits, and the whole of Tirah has now, for the first time, been accurately surveyed. Our enemies, wherever encountered, have been punished, and their losses are stated on unimpeachable evidence to have been extremely severe. The towers and walls of almost every fortified village in the country have been leveled to the ground, and the winter supply of grain, fodder, and fuel of both tribes has been consumed by the force. The Orakzais have been completely subdued, and have complied with the terms prescribed for them, but the Afridis still hold out, although I have strong hopes that they may before long submit, and thus save their country from a fresh invasion in the spring.

  From the start Charles Bruce was drawn to mountains. In 1892, he and Martin Conway climbed to 22,600 feet on Kabru, a peak just south of Kangchenjunga. Three years later, Bruce was on Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest mountain, when Alfred Mummery and two porters, having attained 22,965 feet, were swept to their death while reconnoitering the Rakhiot face. In 1907, he and A. L. Mumm, along with Tom Longstaff, set out for the Nanda Devi massif in the Garhwal Himalaya to attempt Trisul, a 23,360-foot peak revered by the Hindu as the trident of Shiva, the god of destruction and procreation. In thirteen hours Longstaff climbed 6,000 feet, reaching the summit, before descending 7,000 feet to base camp. For more than two decades this would remain the highest mountain ever climbed.

  Tom Longstaff was an extraordinary figure in the early days of Himalayan climbing. Born in 1875, nine years after Bruce and eleven years before Mallory, Longstaff was in age a contemporary of Arthur Wakefield and Geoffrey Young’s. A physician by training, educated at Eton and Oxford and St. Thomas’s Hospital, he famously disdained the practice of medicine. His 1900 nomination for membership in the Alpine Club lists his profession simply as “Gentleman.” His grandfather had made a great deal of money as a paint manufacturer, and his father had spent a good portion of it—some £25,000, a fortune in those days—underwriting Scott’s first Antarctica expedition. Though independently wealthy, Longstaff himself lived frugally. If Martin Conway and the Duke of Abruzzi established the tradition of enormous expeditions laying siege to a summit, Longstaff set the precedent for what became known as the Alpine approach: small parties unencumbered by elaborate equipment making quick dashes for the heights. He famously lived off the land, eating whatever came his way and sleeping among the stones or on the dirt floor of the most modest of shelters.

  In 1905 Longstaff and Charles Sherring, a deputy commissioner in the Indian Civil Service, crossed the Himalaya to reach Kailash and the sacred lake of Manasarowar. On the Gurla Mandhata massif, south of Kailash, Longstaff climbed to 23,000 feet only to be torn off the mountain by an avalanche that left him battered 3,000 feet below. He was forced to bivouac in the open. The following day, rather than retreating to safety, he retrieved his ice ax and headed back up the mountain, spending a second night in an ice cave. The next day he reached within 1,000 feet of the summit before sheer exhaustion forced him to turn back. Altogether Longstaff spent six months in Tibet in 1905, an expedition that cost him, railhead to railhead, less than £100. Four years later, having turned down an invitation to join Scott’s fateful Antarctic expedition, Longstaff disappeared into the Karakoram, crossing the Saltero Pass to discover the upper reaches of the Siachen Glacier, just one of a score of journeys that would be recognized in 1928 when he was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. See: Norman Collie, From the Himalaya to Skye (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1902), and Charles Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland (London: Edward Arnold, 1906). For Longstaff’s corre
spondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 11, File 1; Box 28, File 7.

  Alexander Kellas played a major role in the initial planning of the 1921 reconnaissance. For his correspondence with the Everest Committee, Hinks, and other members of the 1921 expedition, see: RGS Box 2, File 2. The paper read at the afternoon meeting of the RGS on May 18, 1916, was published as: A. M. Kellas, “A Consideration of the Possibility of Ascending the Loftier Himalaya,” Geographical Journal, vol. 49 (January 1917), pp. 26–48. A modified version of this paper was submitted to the Alpine Club in March 1920 but not published until 2001. See: “A Consideration of the Possibility of Ascending Mount Everest,” High Altitude Medicine and Biology, vol. 2, no. 3 (2001), pp. 431–61. See also: A. M. Kellas, “The Possibility of Aerial Reconnaissance in the Himalaya,” Geographical Journal, vol. 51, no. 5 (May 1918), pp. 374–89, originally presented at the RGS on March 18, 1918. For more on Kellas, see: John B. West, “Alexander M. Kellas and the Physiological Challenge of Mt. Everest,” Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 63 (1987), pp. 3–11, and “A. M. Kellas: Pioneer Himalayan Physiologist and Mountaineer,” Alpine Journal, vol. 94 (1989), pp. 207–13. For correspondence regarding the use of oxygen, see: RGS Box 30, File 5 and, at the National Archives, Kew, FD1/1208, DSIR 36/421, DSIR 36/394 (including reports from the ascent of Kamet and Finch’s experience on Everest in 1922), and DSIR 3/254. See also: N. E. Odell, “Hypoxia: Some Experiences on Everest and Elsewhere,” in Charles Clarke, Michael Ward, and Edward Williams, eds., Mountain Medicine and Physiology (London: Alpine Club, 1975, pp. 67–72).