Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Nansen and Johansen were back in Norway by mid-August. There was still no word of the Fram. But meanwhile, Sverdrup had piloted the frozen ship through another year’s vicissitudes, and had been at last able to fire up its engine and cut through disintegrating ice into the North Atlantic. The ship completed its voyage just as planned. Nansen and Johansen got the welcome news by telegram on August 20. The next day they boarded the Fram and embraced their teammates.

  In the strict terms of completing the mission on which Nansen had set his heart—being the first to reach the North Pole—the expedition had failed. Yet the whole world saluted the triumph of the extraordinary voyage, and of the team’s establishing a new landmark farthest north.

  Nansen lived for the rest of his life on the fame his expedition had won him. The Fram went on to a lasting renown of her own, serving the 1910–12 expedition under Amundsen that attained the South Pole.

  For Johansen, however, the glory was fleeting. According to Nansen’s biographer Roland Huntford, he bitterly resented Nansen’s treatment of him in Farthest North, though the modern reader can find little in the book to warrant such disenchantment. Chosen for Amundsen’s Antarctic voyage more than a decade later, Johansen had a falling out with his leader and was left behind at the base camp hut by the party that reached the pole.

  Johansen declined into heavy drinking and depression. Back in Norway in early 1913, he committed suicide by shooting himself, leaving behind a wife and four children.

  Nansen went on to as storied a career as any explorer ever enjoyed. After World War I, he became Norway’s delegate to the League of Nations, and for his work in resettling refugees from the war, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

  For the rest of his life (he died in 1930), Nansen was the leading éminence grise among polar explorers. Yet his record farthest north lasted only five years. On April 25, 1900, members of an expedition led by another great explorer, Luigi Amedeo, the Duke of the Abruzzi, pursuing a more conventional campaign launched from none other than Franz Josef Land, reached 86˚ 34' N, besting Nansen and Johansen’s mark by a mere 25 miles.

  According to Huntford, Nansen was inconsolable. He later agonized over whether Amundsen, once his protégé, had stolen his place as Norway’s greatest explorer.

  For more than half a century, the world accepted Robert E. Peary’s claim to have been the first to reach the North Pole in 1909. Yet beginning in the 1970s, long-simmering doubts about the extraordinarily rapid times on Peary’s final dash prompted a rigorous reexamination of his data. The consensus today is that Peary probably got within 100 miles of the pole, but faked the rest. Worn out by seven previous attempts to reach 90˚ N, his toes sacrificed to frostbite, he took refuge in a hoax rather than confess another failure to the world.

  The first human beings to stand at the North Pole, then, were the crew of a Soviet military plane that landed there in 1937. The first “explorers” to reach the pole by travel across the ice were Ralph Plaisted’s self-taught amateurs, who arrived by snowmobile on April 20, 1968. A few days later, they were downing beers back home in Minnesota.

  TWO

  BLANK on the MAP

  Between 1933 and 1951, Eric Shipton was a member of five Mount Everest expeditions. In 1933, he reached 27,400 feet on the northeast ridge. By 1953 there was no other Everest veteran half so experienced on the world’s highest mountain, yet at the last minute he was fired from leadership of the team that placed Hillary and Tenzing on the summit. He was replaced by Colonel John Hunt, who organized the massive overkill of the successful first ascent along strict military lines.

  Shipton always disdained big teams and regimented ranks. He once said, “If an expedition cannot be organized in a pub on the back of an envelope in a couple of hours, it isn’t worth going on.” By 1953, his notions were considered quaint and out-of-date. Ironically, he is now seen—along with his best friend, H. W. (Bill) Tilman—as a retroactive hero of the avant-garde. The two men pioneered the light-and-fast alpine style that would eventually supersede the heavy logistical assaults that claimed the first ascents of all but one of the fourteen highest mountains in the world between 1950 and 1964.

  Despite his identification with Everest, Shipton preferred exploring unknown regions to making first ascents. In 1937, with his pal Tilman, on one of several expeditions the two masters of light-and-fast travel would share, Shipton realized his dream to near perfection. In the rugged Karakoram Range of Pakistan, a vast region north of the Baltoro Glacier and K2, the world’s second highest mountain, had never been mapped. On the charts of the day, as Shipton later wrote, “Across this blank space was written one challenging word, ‘Unexplored.’ ” Expeditions trying to climb K2 had followed the Baltoro to the mountain’s southern approaches in 1902 and 1909. The first two thoroughgoing attempts on the peak would follow the same route in 1938 and 1939. But no explorer had penetrated the maze of peaks and glaciers to the north, a region that constituted the bulk of the great Karakoram, a realm that still challenges the best alpinists today. A few intrepid travelers—Sir Francis Younghusband in 1887, Kenneth Mason in 1926, Ardito Desio in 1929—had touched on the borders of that terra incognita, leaving behind a handful of wildly inaccurate sketch maps and scraps of geographical certitude.

  Shipton’s plan to explore and map the region was an immensely ambitious one, but in his typical jaunty fashion he at first proposed tackling it with a single companion, the redoubtable Tilman. In the end, he put together a four-man party. The two other principals happened to be the brothers of two of England’s most famous poets. John Auden was a geologist who had traveled extensively in the Himalaya and had done a fair amount of climbing in Europe. Michael Spender was a surveyor with experience in Greenland; he had also been a member of Shipton’s 1935 expedition to Everest. One would give much to be able to listen in on the conversations the four men must have had in many a camp that summer about art and literature and politics, but Shipton’s expedition narrative is silent on the subject.

  From his previous expeditions Shipton knew how valuable Sherpas were in high-altitude exploration, and he managed to recruit seven of the best, even though it meant arranging their passage by railroad from Darjeeling across India to Srinagar. As Shipton later vowed, “During the expedition I frequently regretted that I had not brought double the number of Sherpas.” As sirdar, or head Sherpa, Shipton enlisted Ang Tharkay, already a veteran of five expeditions with Shipton. Ang Tharkay would become a legend in Himalayan annals on a par perhaps only with Tenzing Norgay. He would leave his own account of the 1937 expedition in a fugitive memoir dictated in English, published in French, and translated back to English only in a 2016 edition. Rounding out the party were four Balti porters whose knowledge of their home country on the fringes of the Karakoram would prove invaluable.

  Blank on the Map is not the best of Shipton’s six mountaineering narratives, but it remains a blithe evocation of an exploratory experience the likes of which no one can have today. Yet Shipton was convinced that he lived in a decadent age, and he rued the fact that explorers before him had lived more boldly and more truly. In a curious chapter early in the book, titled “Of the Real Value of Climbing,” he laid out a manifesto for his vagabondage. “Every time I start an expedition,” he wrote, “I feel that I am getting back to a way of living which is now lost.” He wished he had climbed in the Alps in the days of de Saussure, at the end of the eighteenth century, “before they had been civilized out of their wild unspoiled beauty and tamed into a social asset.” Unabashedly, Shipton hankered for the “good old days.” In the 1930s, he complained, so many human activities were undertaken for all the wrong reasons: “for publicity, for sensationalism, for money, or because it is the fashion to do them.” Only in the great ranges such as the Himalaya and the Karakoram could an explorer discover a world as unspoiled as the Alps of de Saussure. In the summer of 1937, Shipton claimed, the wilderness taught him and his companions “a way of living in the beauty and solitude of high remote places
.”

  Reading those words today, I long to set Shipton straight. He lived in a golden age that we moderns would give much to recapture. There are no more blanks on the map of the world in 2017. And there are few adventures as stirring and all-encompassing as the lyrical summer he and his teammates spent wandering among the unknown peaks and glaciers of the Karakoram. It is we who were born too late.

  There seems to be an organic linkage between the style in which Shipton and Tilman traveled and the style in which they wrote. The ­expedition books of the 1930s, chronicling German attempts on Kangchenjunga and Nanga Parbat and the British on Everest (unless Shipton was the author), tended to portray the efforts in grimly serious, military language. The prose is full of siege and assault, advance and retreat, conquest and defeat. But Shipton and Tilman chose an ironic tone, glossing lightly over hardships and celebrating successes in the most modest language. It is a style that has been much imitated in adventure narratives ever since, but seldom with the dexterity and panache of the original masters. In Srinagar, for instance, the team shops for eating utensils, determined to keep the weight at an absolute minimum. The men debate whether each of them needs his own knife, rather than sharing a knife between two members. Writes Shipton, “Tilman was strongly opposed to our taking plates, insisting that one could eat everything out of a mug. I maintained that if we happened to be eating curry and rice and drinking tea at the same time it would be nicer to have them served in separate receptacles.”

  Climbers attempting K2 today usually fly to Skardu, then take trucks to Askole, near the foot of the Baltoro Glacier. The 1937 party had to walk all the way from Srinagar, 416 miles to Skardu and another 70 to Askole. To carry the gear and food the team would need for four months in the Karakoram, the men hired porters and ponies in Srinagar. Such a trek today might well be worth a book in its own right, but one has to read between the lines of Shipton’s account to conceive of the monumental effort it took simply to get to the launching point of the expedition itself. “Mountaineers are notoriously bad walkers,” Shipton claims, and “Tilman declared dejectedly that we would certainly be turned out of any self-respecting hiking club in England.” The entourage, however—“sahibs,” Sherpas, Baltis, porters, ponies, and all—covered the march from Srinagar to Skardu in fourteen days. Shipton does not bother to calculate the rate, but the reader can easily do the math and discover that the average march was 30 miles per day. So much for bad walkers.

  The dusty ride by jeep or truck from Skardu to Askole takes about seven hours today. Shipton’s team needed five harrowing days. The biggest obstacles were two huge rivers, the first of which was the mighty Indus. The only ferry was a big wooden barge propelled with oars and paddles.

  The Sherpas were in a great state of excitement as we cast off, shouting wildly and bombarding those on shore with dried dung. They then seized the paddles and wielded them in the wrong direction. However, as the craft relied for its progress mostly on the oars and the poles, their efforts did not hinder us much, and soon they abandoned paddling for the better sport of splashing each other with water. We were carried downstream by the current at an alarming rate and seemed to make very little progress across the river. However, we eventually stuck in the mud on the opposite side and landed our belongings.

  It took two relays and three hours to get the entire party across the river.

  The Shigar River was even more dicey. Instead of a wooden barge, the natives relied on rafts made of twenty sheepskin bladders each, tied together and reinforced with strips of wood. Writes Shipton, “It was a terrifying experience to entrust our lives and our belongings to such ridiculously frail craft, on a racing river with ugly rapids in sight ahead. The most alarming moment occurred when the crew downed [paddles] to blow up the leaking bladders!” The ponies had to swim the torrent. After four haphazard ferries and many heart-stopping moments, the team gathered itself on the far bank.

  Askole stood as the last outpost of civilization. The first major challenge for the team was to get its one and a half tons of gear and food up the Baltoro and across a virtually unknown pass into the huge, unexplored labyrinth of glaciers that drained into the Shaksgam River. Shipton had counted on hiring porters in Askole. At first, this seemed like a routine matter, as the locals assumed the team simply wanted to ascend the Baltoro the way the parties attempting K2 had previously done. “When at last it dawned on them,” Shipton noted, “that we intended to cross the range, their faces fell, and they told us no one would consent to come with us.” That pass, the natives swore, had only once been traversed, and that by a much better-equipped party, and in the proper summer season. Yet “after some hours of diplomatic argument we managed to convince them that we were not so incompetent as we looked, and that we were willing to pay well for any help we received.”

  Readers of the classic expedition narratives of attempts from the 1930s through the 1960s on the world’s highest mountains tend to hurry through the first hundred pages or so. The details of load carries, porters, negotiations to forestall strikes, and the endless problems of getting enough food, stoves, and tents to the right camps make for tedious going. Yet only after scaling this mountain of logistics can the actual mountain be attempted. Shipton’s challenge in 1937 was several times more difficult than those that had faced the previous attempts on K2 or Everest. He needed to get all the impedimenta that his reconnaissance required not to some base camp on a straightforward glacier, but across the main spine of the Karakoram, simply to begin the team’s explorations. In Askole, the men hired one hundred porters—ethnic Baltis, whom in the language of the day Shipton often refers to as “coolies.” Even with so much manpower, the task was herculean. Once again, loads had to be stripped to the bare minimum.

  Reading between the lines once more, one realizes that sorting out the massive piles of gear and food and porter assignments must have been a nightmarish task. But Shipton recounts it with his usual droll humor. The leaders imposed on themselves a strict limit of thirty-five pounds apiece for personal gear, including sleeping bags and ground sheets. (Thirty-five pounds for more than three months in the field, as any expeditioneer today can testify, is spartan in the extreme.) “Spender cut his tobacco allowance down to one pipeful a day,” Shipton observed, “in order to take with him Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Forster’s A Passage to India. These were a great boon to us in our few bouts of bad weather, though Tilman and I felt ourselves morally obliged to pay with tobacco for the luxury of reading.” There was no use imposing the same regimen on the Sherpas, who had been gathering knickknacks to add to their personal stashes all the way from Srinagar. In Askole their packs weighed twice as much as they had at the start. “They were bursting with an amazing assortment of junk: wooden spoons, packets of snuff and spices, electric torches, nails, filthy rags, and other treasures which they were reluctant to leave behind.”

  The team left Askole on May 26. The next eight days would throw so many obstacles across the team’s path that they seriously considered abandoning the whole expedition, or at least whittling its ambitions vastly down to an easy reconnaissance of the country south of the Baltoro Glacier. It did not help that on the second day of the march, Tilman (normally the toughest man on any expedition) fell ill with a high fever. The men deliberated solemnly and at last decided that Auden would stay with Tilman at the Paiju camp just below the snout of the Baltoro, while Shipton and Spender pushed the army of porters and loads onward to the north. It is a measure of just how canny and independent all four Britishers were that at times during the following months, they happily split up and pursued separate explorations hither and yon, with only a promised rendezvous at a certain spot in the unmapped wilderness to ensure a reunion.

  During most of the next week it snowed heavily. The Balti porters shivered around their campfires fed by juniper boughs, and on the marches, the leaders usually broke trail through knee-deep snow. The pass that the Baltis swore had been crossed only once before, Shipton decided, was out of reach.
Instead, the team proceeded only a little way up the Baltoro before taking a sharp left turn at its tributary, the Trango Glacier. This icy corridor climbs northwest between dazzling granite walls that rise sheer as much as 7,000 feet to distant, spiky summits. Not until the 1970s and 1980s did climbers dare tackle such peaks as Nameless Tower, Great Trango Tower, and Uli Biaho. Indeed, the Trango massif is regarded today as harboring perhaps the greatest collection of severely technical, high-altitude alpine routes of any range in the world. Somewhere near the head of the Trango Glacier, Ardito Desio had in 1929 seen from a distance a pass that ought to lead to the Shaksgam drainage. On that elusive goal all the expedition’s hopes depended.

  Day after day, the terrified porters threatened mutiny, insisting that they be paid and discharged on the spot. Shipton described the “incredible confusion” that ensued. “Everyone shouted at once. No one listened to what was said. Occasionally blows were exchanged between the coolies themselves.” Despite meticulous outfitting by the Englishmen, the Baltis wailed about their shortages: “Some had no glasses; some no warm clothes; some no gloves; some no boots; some no blankets; some had sore eyes; some had boils; and everyone had too much to say.” It was here that the Sherpas played a vital role, as Ang Tharkay and Lobsang berated the Baltis with “torrents of abuse.”

  The fugitive pass, if it existed at all, was invisible from below. On June 2, Shipton, Spender, and several Sherpas ploughed a track through the deep snow of the upper Trango Glacier. Ang Tharkay turned back to exhort the straggling caravan of porters onward. Finally, at an altitude of 18,650 feet, Shipton and Spender stood on the col that led to the unmapped greater Karakoram. Wrote Shipton, “It was a thrilling moment; and all the exasperation and worry of the last few days slid away from our minds. To the north, the Sarpo Laggo glacier curved down towards the desolate rust-coloured ranges of Chinese Turkistan. This was our first view into the country which we had come so far to see.”