Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  Shipton, Bourdillon and Ward

  Of the six men sharing their meal of rice and local spinach that night, four – Ward, Shipton, Hillary and Bourdillon – were, or would become, major players in the history of Everest. Ed would not have heard of Mike Ward, but in 1951 he was more important than anyone else. It was thanks to his imagination and enterprise that the 1951 Everest Reconnaissance was taking place at all. He had been converted to mountaineering as a schoolboy at Marlborough by Edwin Kempson, a member of the Everest expeditions of 1935 and 1936. Cambridge University and its Mountaineering Club followed, and a medical degree in 1949. While completing National Service in 1950, Ward had the spare time to do some research on Everest at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London. The traditional northern route used by British expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s had been closed by the Chinese following their occupation of Tibet in 1950 but at the same time Nepal had opened the unexplored southern approaches. Was there a route from this direction?

  George Mallory in 1921 was the first to see the beginnings of a route in the chaotic and dangerous Khumbu Icefall. This led into the Western Cwm, a deep, high-walled trench whose upper reaches were hidden from view. At 26,000ft the South Col too was visible, but not the route from there to the summit. Nor was it known whether there was a climbable route from the floor of the Cwm up to the Col. ‘I do not much fancy it would be possible,’ was Mallory’s gloomy opinion.

  Wondering whether there might be some forgotten evidence, Ward searched the archives of the RGS for photos from the south. They were scattered and incomplete but they were there. Aerial photos taken in 1933, 1945 and 1947 showed a south-east ridge at a moderate angle rising from a broad South Col of wind-swept ice and rock up to the summit. The last thousand feet looked more promising than on the northern route. The big unknown was the terrain between the head of the Cwm and the Col. Was there an impossible headwall cutting off access or was it a slope of climbable snow and ice?

  Ward was unaware that in November 1950 a small group led by eminent mountaineers H.W. (Bill) Tilman and Charles Houston had already entered Solukhumbu, the first foreigners to do so. They were distinguished climbers, but they the lacked time, fitness, acclimatisation and youth (Tilman was 52) to reach a point where they could see the head of the Cwm and the terrain from there to the South Col. Tilman’s final summary for The Alpine Journal of 1951 was that ‘although we cannot entirely dismiss the South Side, I think it is safe to say that there is no route comparable in ease and safety at any rate up to 28,000 feet to that by the North East’.7 This was true but also irrelevant now that the Tibetan approach was no longer available. And the last piece in the topographical puzzle, the route to the South Col, had still not been found.

  By June 1951, Mike Ward had persuaded the Himalayan Committee to support a small reconnaissance expedition from Nepal. Bill Murray and Tom Bourdillon had signed on as members, the latter from a new generation of English climbers who were taking on big routes in the Alps that had previously been the preserve of continental climbers. At the last minute Eric Shipton had appeared out of South China following the closure of his position as consul-general in Kunming. Here was the ideal leader for the expedition, and he accepted.

  Shipton and Ward both had fathers who had worked in the outposts of empire. Ward’s father had worked in the Malaysian civil service and been in Singapore when the Japanese invaded in February 1942. His mother had escaped in one of the last boats to leave the colony, but his father spent the war in a concentration camp. Eric Shipton’s father had been a tea planter in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) but died before Eric was three years old.

  Is there an element of paternal deprivation in the make-up of mountaineers?

  Shipton’s mother, described as a woman of icy detachment, left the tea plantation to travel, taking her small son and daughter with her. Eric, shy and reputedly dyslexic, was sent to Pyt House, ‘a school for failing or delinquent boys’, having failed to gain acceptance into Harrow. He began to come into his own when, working in Kenya as a coffee planter, he met Bill Tilman. They climbed on Kilimanjaro, Mt Kenya and Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon. Sometimes separately, sometimes together, they explored the Karakorum, entered the Sanctuary of Nanda Devi, made first ascents of Kamet and Nanda Devi, and went on the 1930s Everest expeditions. Above all, they wrote with wit and romance of wild and distant places, and their books have enthralled, amused and inspired countless mountaineers, whether armchair or practising.

  When Ed met Eric Shipton in 1951, they seemed to develop an empathy. Certainly over the next two months Shipton chose Ed as his climbing companion. Did their shared lack of a university education make a difference? When required to pass Latin for the Cambridge University college entrance exam, Shipton took two years, and his interest in geology was discouraged when he was told the only job would be as a lecturer and then only with a first class degree. Biographer Peter Steele writes, ‘This finished any aspirations he had for going to university, something that would dog him for the rest of his life and always give him a sense of inferiority in the presence of the university men who filled the ranks of the top British climbers at that time.’8 Ed, too, was wary of anyone who assumed superiority because of his education.

  This diffidence seldom showed, and Ed and Earle fitted in well with Shipton’s group. Tom Bourdillon, a physicist, wrote to his wife Jennifer, ‘I wish you could meet Ed. He is one of the best blokes I know. Earle is a good man – old NZ family, sheep farmer, soldier and now lawyer, 30 and he is a gentleman which Ed is not, but I would as soon climb or talk with Ed … as anyone I know.’9 Ed would hardly have understood the English concept of what makes a gentleman but he would have been gratified by his acceptance into this small group of climbers who simply liked him as a person.

  Solukhumbu to the foot of Everest

  From their meeting place in Dingla, the men walked for 10 days through dense forest infested with leeches, brown waving threads that would drop on to bare skin as it brushed past, then swell to the size of slugs as they gorged on blood. On 21 September the party at last entered the valley of the Dudh Kosi, the land of the Sherpas. This ‘had become, for me at least, a kind of Mecca, an ultimate goal in Himalayan exploration,’ Shipton wrote. ‘Whenever we came upon a particularly attractive spot, Sherpas invariably said, “This is just like Sola Khumbu,” and the comparison always led to a long, nostalgic discourse about their homeland.’10 Even today, when 40,000 trekkers visit each year, this is a special place; in 1951 it was pure magic.

  Shipton was loved by the Sherpas who worked for him, and their hospitality could not have been more generous. They supplied the group with eggs, chapattis, butter, honey, potatoes, corn, rice, mutton, pumpkin, peas, tea, and rice beer (chang) and spirits (rakshi). The party bought 10 pounds of honey, described by Ed as ‘granulated and of good flavour’.

  In Namche Bazar, a village of 60 houses at 11,290ft on the trade route to Tibet, they settled into a large house to sort loads before moving higher to Tengboche Monastery where the view opened out to display the great Khumbu peaks rising all around them, with Everest furthest away and displaying the top thousand feet of the all-important south-east ridge above and beyond the Lhotse-Nuptse wall. ‘There are some really stupendous peaks which look quite unclimbable to me,’ wrote Ed in his diary. ‘They are the first peaks I have seen that make New Zealand climbs look easy … I could well imagine spending a year or so in this valley – it attracts me more than any place I have ever visited.’11

  By 29 September the party was camped at 18,000ft in a lateral moraine and confronting the towering presence of Everest on whose flanks they hoped to find a route. Immediately in front of them rose the tumbling chaos of the Khumbu Icefall. Ed noted, ‘Tom, Michael and Bill have not been going well due to altitude. Earle seems to be in good form, as is Eric, and I seem comparatively unaffected by height.’ Three months in Garhwal was making acclimatisation easier and Shipton had the reputation of always being comfortable at altitude.


  The party divided into three pairs, two to enter the icefall while Shipton and Ed climbed to a viewpoint on the slopes of Pumori. They made height quickly. It was an amazing day with an outcome better than they could have imagined. As they climbed, the obscuring ridges fell away and parted to reveal the extraordinary sight of a climbable route to the summit of Everest. The icefall was not looking any easier but, once surmounted, smooth slopes of easy snow led all the way up the Western Cwm to the snow and ice face of Lhotse which, though steep, was nowhere blocked by walls of rock or ice. The route to the South Col was there and waiting for them, and they knew from photos that above it a south-east ridge of mixed rock and snow led at a moderate grade to the South Summit. The ridge beyond that was not visible. Down below they saw two distant figures, whom they recognised as Riddiford and Pasang, making excitingly fast progress to reach a point halfway up the icefall.

  Four days later Shipton, Hillary, Riddiford and Pasang returned in an attempt to reach the Cwm. The sun beat down. ‘We poured with sweat and before long our panting produced a tormenting thirst … Threading our way through a wild labyrinth of walls, chasms and towers, we could rarely see more than 200 feet ahead.’12 By 4 p.m. they were close to the top when a snow slope they were climbing avalanched gently downwards. Pasang, who was in the lead, got a shaft in far enough to hold Riddiford, who was otherwise heading for a crevasse. The party decided to retreat from the icefall until snow conditions improved and the rest of the group became better acclimatised.

  Returning on 28 October, all six climbers with three Sherpas re-entered the icefall. Their hopes of finding a more stable route on consolidated snow were shattered when they found that a large area of the most broken part of the icefall had collapsed, leaving an altered landscape of unstable blocks of ice scattered over huge crevasses. But they persisted, and after a fine lead on a blade of ice by Tom Bourdillon they could see into the gently rising Cwm. They were still cut off by a final crevasse stretching across the Cwm but, given time, a route could be made.

  Returning in a subdued frame of mind, they discussed the route. The Sherpas declared it too dangerous for carrying loads day after day, and it was hard to disagree. The ice was changing constantly and from time to time there would be a major subsidence. On the left-hand side, avalanche fans offered an easier route but were being fed by cliffs of hanging ice above. It was like being in a zone of Force 9 earthquakes with tsunamis of ice. Eric said he would not ask porters to risk their lives in such a place. But when Ed pointed out that if a British expedition didn’t accept the risk someone else would, they knew he was right. And maybe the icefall would be more stable pre-monsoon than now in the autumn.

  That was the end of the 1951 reconnaissance: successful, though overhung by disquiet about the dangers of the icefall. Nevertheless, the group and particularly Ed were confident that the Himalayan Committee would lodge their claim for a British attempt for March–May, the spring season, of 1952.

  It was not to be. Earlier in the year, the Swiss had requested that one of their climbers be invited on the Shipton reconnaissance but the English Himalayan Committee had turned them down. Instead the Swiss applied for, and received, permission to attempt Everest in both the spring and autumn of 1952.

  Predictions that the icefall would be almost unacceptably dangerous and that expeditions would ignore the risk were proved right. There have been some 50 deaths in the icefall, culminating in the catastrophe of 16 porter deaths in April 2014 when an ice avalanche cut a swathe through a line of porters under the ice cliffs to the left of the icefall.

  As it turned out, the British were lucky the Swiss got in ahead and made their experience available to those who succeeded them in 1953. The shambles that was the British Cho Oyu expedition of 1952 showed that the British were in no way prepared for a climb as demanding as the ascent of Everest, and had they tried that year the result would have been a humiliating failure. Possibly the French would have been first to the summit: an outcome that would have been as discomforting as when Norwegians were first to the South Pole.

  – CHAPTER 9 –

  Everest from Tibet, 1921 and 1922

  The ascent of Everest in 1953 raises the question why it took so long – 32 years since the first attempt in 1921. In 1852 the peak known to nearby Tibetans as Chomolungma was identified by Indian surveyors from a hundred miles away as the highest point on Earth. They gave it their own name, Mount Everest, after the British surveyor-general of India. It was on the border between Nepal and Tibet, but both countries forbade entry: it was not possible to learn more. Nevertheless, high mountains were being climbed, and in 1909 the Italian Duke of Abruzzi struggled breathlessly to reach 24,600ft in the Karakorum Range. Another 4,400ft higher would have seen him on top of Everest itself. Climbing into the thin air of its peak seemed, from a distance, to require just a track to its foot and some determination.

  Set against this sanguine view were accounts of the sufferings of those who had actually climbed to such great heights – the breathlessness, the exhaustion, headaches, insomnia, the total debilitation. The stories from balloonists were not encouraging either. The few who had approached the altitude of Everest had been paralysed, rendered unconscious or died. Scientists had become fascinated by the mechanisms underlying the effects of altitude, and this culminated in the magisterial La Pression Barométrique, published by French physiologist Paul Bert in 1878. Having read about the symptoms of travellers crossing high passes in the Andes and balloonists ascending to great heights in France, he built a low-pressure chamber in which he could simulate altitudes up to 45,000ft, a level at which a human loses consciousness in seconds and will die not much later. His experiments proved conclusively that the problems associated with high altitude are not due to low air pressure as such but specifically to the low pressure (pO2) of the single gas oxygen. He also proved that all symptoms and difficulties due to high altitude vanished when breathing pure 100 per cent oxygen in his low-pressure chamber set to the height of the summit of Everest.

  The human body is optimised to function efficiently at sea level where the available pO2 is 160mm.1 On the summit of Everest, the atmospheric pressure is reduced by two-thirds giving a pO2 of around 50–55mm, which will sustain consciousness in a very well-acclimatised subject but is incompatible with life for more than a short time. The record, held by a Sherpa, is 22 hours on the summit without oxygen. The situation is transformed, however, if the climber is breathing 100 per cent oxygen. At an ambient barometric pressure of 250mm on top of Everest, the available pO2 to his or her lungs is 100 per cent of 250mm, more than at sea level. The climber is able to move easily, even when carrying a heavy oxygen apparatus.

  So why was it that on the expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s, the climbers were not insisting on carrying large volumes of oxygen delivered through an efficient apparatus? For a start, they were hardly likely to have read La Pression Barométrique or any other physiological research. They were soldiers, surveyors, teachers and civil servants, trained through their public schools and Oxbridge in the classics and humanities. Science was a technical discipline carried out by people who were usually not part of their social scene. The Alpine Club had more than its share of literate romantics for whom science was an unknown mystery practised by serious people with the reputation of being poor company. In the 1920s and 1930s, and even as late as 1952, the occasional scientist on an expedition tended to be the butt of jokes. Scientists for their part might not be bothered to explain their evidence to unappreciative members of the Alpine Club. Paul Bert reserved his admiration for mountain guides, peasants who had learned their climbing as chamois hunters or crystal gatherers in the Alps and wore homemade metal crampons. He commented wryly that a guide ‘furnished with a piece of bread and a few onions makes expeditions which require of the member of the Alpine Club who accompanies him the absorption of a pound of meat …’2

  Besides, the Alpine Club had its code of ethics which, to begin with at least, forbade the use of such aids as c
rampons, though the ice-axe was always acceptable. An oxygen apparatus, with its heavy bottles of compressed gas, its pressure gauges, reduction valves and mask, was seen as abhorrent in a sport whose essence was its contact with nature at her most sublime.

  Even to those who did not reject oxygen out of hand, use of oxygen was a great deal less simple than a scientific analysis in a French or English laboratory might suggest. Providing pure oxygen to a subject in a low-pressure chamber in a laboratory is easy; the same cannot be said about providing 12 hours of it to a climber above 26,000ft on Everest. It was difficult to demonstrate that oxygen apparatus helped on a high peak in the Himalayas because it had not been tried there. At an accessible altitude in the Alps of, say, 13,000ft, oxygen was close to useless – just a back-pack weighing 15 kilograms with a suffocating mask unpleasantly reminiscent of what one wore during a wartime gas attack. The ambient pO2 in the Alps is not low enough for the advantages of the bottled variety to overcome the disadvantages of its weight and clumsiness. Move above 20,000ft, however, and the benefit of oxygen starts to be felt. Above 26,000ft, the oxygenless climber enters an environment so dangerous it is called the Death Zone.

  What might have happened if oxygen had been offered to Dr Somervell and Colonel Norton on 4 June 1924 as they made their attempt on the summit of Everest? They had spent a sleepless, cold night in their high camp at 26,800ft. With difficulty they had found the energy to melt snow for a drink, but they lacked the appetite to eat anything solid. By a stroke of luck the weather was fine and windless. They climbed upwards with agonising slowness.