Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  For the next seven weeks a staunch and uncomplaining McFarlane would be carried in a cut-away tea chest on the back of an exceptionally strong Nepali porter until he reached the roadhead at Jogbani on the southern border of Nepal. After flying from Calcutta to Christchurch, he would undergo months of plastic surgery to his feet and fingers. He was able to resume a successful career as an engineer. He never climbed again.

  Retreat from the attempt on Makalu II

  The expedition still had the whole of May ahead of them, the best month of the climbing year. The irresistible challenge was on Makalu where a snow route led up to a col at 24,300ft. From here a good route led to the unclimbed Makalu II, 25,190ft. To the south, accessible from the same col, rose the main peak of Makalu I, 27,826ft, but without either permission or oxygen this could hardly be considered a serious option.

  By 14 May, six members of an increasingly fit and well-acclimatised party – Evans, Beaven, Hardie, Harrow, Lowe and Todd – had established Camps 1 to 4 and explored the route most of the way to the col. Ed was less well than the others, suffering especially from pain in his damaged ribs. Nevertheless he drove himself higher, confident that the old fire and strength of 1953 would return.

  But on 15 May at Camp 3 his problems were getting worse rather than better: ‘That night was an unpleasant one for me. I had considerable difficulty in breathing and every cough sent a sharp pain through my chest, but I was still stubborn in my belief that the condition would ease.’4

  Next day he continued upwards to Camp 4 at 22,000ft with Hardie, Lowe and Wilkins, a decision that he later acknowledged was ‘unbelievably stupid’. He was clearly very unwell, lacking in energy, stopping frequently to lean over his ice-axe. That night he felt feverish and was vomiting. He spent another full day at Camp 4 when common sense should have told him to go lower as quickly as possible while he could still move unassisted. By 17 May he was too weak to move.

  I commenced dressing but didn’t seem able to get my boots on. George Lowe suddenly noticed my deplorable condition and realized they must quickly get me down to a lower camp. I managed to walk down the first long slope but then I came to an uphill grade and it was just too much for me. I fell on my face and everything went black.

  I had a period of terrible hallucinations and found myself clinging to the cliffs of Makalu with avalanches falling all around and people screaming for help … I came back to consciousness to find George tying me into a makeshift stretcher. Then followed a long period of semi-consciousness, of heat and extreme discomfort. It is the only time I can remember thinking that maybe it would be easier just to die …5

  For three days the Sherpas carried a semi-conscious Hillary down the ice and then moraine to reach Camp 1, where the thicker air brought him quickly back to a normal state of consciousness. The expedition doctors, Charles Evans and Michael Ball, puzzled over the diagnosis. It might have been some sort of bacterial pneumonia but the chest signs heard through a stethoscope were not striking, and Ed’s quick recovery at a lower altitude was faster than would be expected with a bacterial infection. An outlier was a flare-up of malaria that he might have caught in the Solomons in 1945, but there is no record of Ed having malaria then or later.

  News of Ed’s illness travelled down to the American Makalu expedition on the south side of the mountain, and they sent up some oxygen. When the news reached The Times of London, the paper was alarmed to find it had no obituary for the world’s most famous mountaineer and sent an urgent request to Sir John Hunt.

  With the danger past, the still fit members of the expedition went exploring and made some first ascents, including of the handsome Baruntse, 23,390ft. For Ed and frostbitten Jim McFarlane sitting in his cutaway tea chest on a porter’s back, it was the long walk south to the flatlands at the Nepal–India border.

  In retrospect it is clear that Ed was suffering from one or both of the two malignant forms of high-altitude sickness, pulmonary edema and cerebral edema.6 Evans and Ball could not have diagnosed these conditions in 1954. At that time they were unknown to medical science except in the Andes, where a few astute physicians had described them in miners living at high altitude. In pulmonary edema, fluid leaks from blood vessels into lungs, causing breathlessness and cyanosis as less and less oxygen is absorbed from the lungs. In cerebral edema, fluid leaks into the brain, leading to coma. Suffering either of these is a vicious spiral which will often result in death unless the person is given oxygen or taken to a lower altitude where rapid recovery is a diagnostic feature.

  Ed could hardly have suspected it then, but this was the first episode of a form of high-altitude sickness that would recur throughout his life, and at a lowering altitude ceiling. He always believed that some lasting damage had been done in 1954. He had been unwell before the crevasse incident and in a letter to Jim Rose described lack of appetite, sore throat and fever. Brian Wilkins described a persistent, undiagnosed malaise: ‘Something was wrong with [Ed] prior to the crevasse accident, though the signs I observed during several weeks in close contact with him were too convoluted to be interpreted clearly … in the weeks before the crevasse accident I had seen him battling, almost daily, against a persistent problem.’7

  These are interesting observations. Ed believed that it was the injury to his ribs and lungs during the crevasse rescue that caused permanent damage. The pain from cracked ribs would have made his illness in 1954 worse by limiting the deep breathing which is an important defence against mountain sickness. But another possibility is that he was developing an increasing hypersensitivity to the hypoxia which is the cause of altitude sickness. It seems bizarre that someone who had been so strong at altitude only a year earlier should now have developed such a sensitivity – but even now our understanding of the processes underlying high-altitude illness has large gaps.

  – CHAPTER 18 –

  Employment opportunity in the Antarctic

  By mid-1954 Ed was back in Auckland, where he would stay for most of the next 18 months. He resumed his work in the honey-gathering partnership with Rex, though with the bees deep in their winter hibernation there was not much to be done. The Sunbeam Talbot motor car, gifted to Ed and Louise while they were in England, arrived and was christened Jaldi, the Hindi word for quick. They moved into a cottage at 8 Patey Street, Remuera, while they built a house at 278a Remuera Road. Their son Peter was born on 26 December.

  The land at Remuera Road, valued at £1700 and with sweeping views over the Waitematā Harbour and the Hauraki Gulf beyond, was a gift from Jim and Phyl Rose after it was subdivided from their own property. Gummer & Ford, a well-known firm of architects, was commissioned to design the house. It rose two storeys on a steep site, with a half-acre of grass, orchard and mature trees dropping away below. A long, narrow terrace formed the footprint, giving each room full sun and a view to the north. A kitchen, large living room and Ed’s office occupied the ground floor, all decorated with Tibetan carpets and a host of memorabilia and photographs. It was the hub of a busy life, and when Ed was away – as he was often, and for long periods – Louise had her parents next door for company and child-minding.

  Ed’s first autobiography, High Adventure, financed the £6802 house build, but he had already ventured into the literary world with his account of the summit day in John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest. Some reviewers felt The Ascent of Everest was a bit dry, but it contains a wealth of well-told information and was an instant success with the reading public. Considering the stress of completing the book within a month, Hunt’s achievement is remarkable. At the launch of the French edition in Paris on 21 November 1953, Louise noted in a letter to her parents that ‘Poor John is not at all well & has an abscess on his neck.’1 Ed was learning some French. When asked by a radio journalist to say what it was like getting to the top of Everest, he replied without hesitation, ‘C’était très bon.’

  Meanwhile, Ed had begun on High Adventure. In July Hodder & Stoughton had offered him an advance of £5000 for his personal account of Everest
– an amount which, even after the Himalayan Committee had taken its 40 per cent, compared favourably with the £400 per annum earned from the bees. A year later, George Lowe helped supplement this when he introduced Ed to literary agent George Greenfield, whose sharp eye quickly spotted that the Hodder contract failed to include serialisation rights – which Greenfield was able to sell to John Bull, a high-circulation English literary magazine, for £7500. Greenfield remained a good friend and trusted agent for all Ed’s later books.

  Ed liked the challenge of writing and recognised it as part of his new persona. Louise wrote from London in December 1953: ‘Ed worked at the typewriter until midnight … He really is a wonderful writer … very enthusiastic just now and can think of nothing else.’2 Even on the Barun expedition, writing occupied his spare time. Brian Wilkins, with whom he was sharing a tent, wrote in his diary: ‘We are in a tent 5000 ft higher than the summit of Mount Cook. Ed is banging away on his typewriter, thinking hard, and periodically reading the result to me for comment …’3

  High Adventure begins with a dedication to the four people to whom he owed so much:

  TO HARRY AYRES for his superb mastery of snow and ice

  TO ERIC SHIPTON for his inspiration and unquenchable spirit

  TO JOHN HUNT for his courage and singleness of purpose and

  TO MY OLD FRIEND GEORGE LOWE for so many years of cheerful comradeship

  The focus of the book is Everest, with only seven pages describing his life before the Shipton reconnaissance of 1951. The story of the big climb is sharpened into the form it will take for the rest of Ed’s life, though with room for different emphases. Reviewers liked it. The prose was direct, engaging, straightforward, good-humoured, spare, dramatic, nonchalant; its author was self-effacing, humble, a good story-teller. It was not all praise. For some it was too plain. Elizabeth Cox in The Spectator wrote: ‘Sir Edmund Hillary is not interested in Tenzing’s feelings, or in any feelings, not even his own.’4 Some complained that the inner Hillary did not reveal himself, but Ed, like most of his countrymen, would have been shy of attempting to reveal the inner Hillary, even if he knew what it was.

  Tenzing’s autobiography, Man of Everest, was published at the same time as High Adventure. There was a cultural labyrinth to be traversed as the narrative crossed from non-English-speaker Tenzing, by way of Nepali-speaking friend Rabi Mitra, to American writer James Ramsey Ullman, but there is no mistaking that parts of Ed’s account in The Ascent of Everest rankled with Tenzing. Ed’s description of the climbing of the Hillary Step is an example:

  After an hour’s steady going we reached the foot of … a rock step some forty feet high … I could see no way of turning it on the steep rock bluff on the west, but … on its east side … running up the full forty feet of the step was a crack between the cornice and the rock. Leaving Tenzing to belay me as best he could, I jammed myself into the crack, then kicking backwards with my crampons I sank their spikes deep into the frozen snow behind me and levered myself off the ground … As Tenzing paid out the rope I inched my way upwards until I could finally reach over the top of the rock and drag myself out of the crack on to a wide ledge. For a few moments I lay regaining my breath and for the first time really felt the fierce determination that nothing could stop us reaching the top.

  I took a firm stance on the ledge and signaled Tenzing to come on up. As I heaved hard on the rope Tenzing wriggled his way up the crack and finally collapsed exhausted at the top like a giant fish when it has just been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle.5

  Tenzing commented:

  I must be honest and say that I do not feel his account is wholly accurate … He gives the impression that it was only he who really climbed it on his own, and that he then practically pulled me, so that I finally collapsed exhausted at the top like a giant fish…

  Since then I have heard plenty about that ‘fish,’ and I admit I do not like it. For it is the plain truth that no one pulled or hauled me up the gap. I climbed it myself, just as Hillary had done … I must make one thing very clear. Hillary is my friend. He is a fine climber and a fine man, and I am proud to have gone with him to the top of Everest. But I do feel that in his story of our final climb he is not quite fair to me: that all the way through he indicates that when things went well it was his doing, and when things went badly it was mine. For this is simply not true …6

  The fish disappeared from subsequent accounts. It had been a misplaced attempt to add a colourful simile to the story, not an assertion that Hillary was in better physical shape than Tenzing – which was certainly untrue. There were differences between the New Zealand beekeeper and the Asian sardar, but there were also similarities. Both came from humble backgrounds; both were competitive, and nurtured an intense ambition to prove themselves by climbing Everest; both were thin-skinned and sensitive to slights whether from within an expedition or from the larger world into which they had been propelled by their fame.

  In August, a couple of months after publication of their books, Tenzing used his friend Rabi Mitra to write to Ed:

  My dear Hillary, You don’t perhaps know how very anxious I am to meet and talk to you. Believe me, I still have the same warmth of feeling and love for you as I had in those lone and trying days we were together on Everest. I admit certain unpleasant things have happened after our return from Everest and these have cast a shadow over our achievement – which, no doubt, is extremely regrettable.

  Everest has been a great teacher to me. I now realise the truth of the saying that – We ourselves become great by appreciating greatness in others. I am much more humble now and I fervently pray that the glow of love may shine forth again and dispel the darkness that seemed to have gathered in the corner of our hearts. As a token of my deep love and friendship, I am sending you a casket of two pounds of best quality Darjeeling tea and a copy of my book, which I am sure you and your wife will appreciate.

  If, however, you find mention of certain things (relating you) in my book which you don’t quite seem to agree to, – ‘Leave that aside’ will be my request to you. I see and think with my own eyes and brain and so you with your own. Our viewpoints, naturally therefore, may not exactly be the same in all cases. We may differ and disagree on certain points and issues, but for that reason we should not allow ourselves to be separated from our mutual love and esteem for each other. We are and should remain friends forever and in eternity. Let nothing again stand in between us.

  Here are my arms extended in love to offer you my EVEREST embrace and to your charming devoted wife my warmest good wishes.

  Looking forward in much eagerness to hear from you soon.

  Ever yours, Tenzing7

  Ed replied:

  My dear Tenzing, I was delighted to receive your letter. I too have felt that it is time that small things should be forgotten and that the main things to remember are those great moments we had together on the mountain. These minor shadows are soon dispelled and the world, after all, is still applauding the primary fact that two men, each helping the other, managed at last to reach the summit. Please be sure that I have nothing but the warmest affection for my old Everest comrade.

  I have read your book and enjoyed it. It only increased my admiration for a man who could start life with few material advantages and through his own courage and strength become a national – and world – hero. I did not expect your story in all minor details to coincide with mine – each man must observe for himself. But I have only scorn for the newspapers and people who revel in pointing out minor differences. I hope you will view my own book with tolerance.

  At the moment I am fully occupied with the organising of a New Zealand Expedition to the Antarctic. The problems are rather different from the Himalaya but the snow and ice are the same. I may be returning from England to New Zealand next April through Calcutta and if so I will make every effort to pay a visit to you in Darjeeling. It would be a great thrill to meet my old comrade again and also to greet once more all my friends amongst
the Sherpas.

  It is very generous of you to send me such a fine gift of tea and your book. I also will be sending you a copy of my book which has been recently published. I am enclosing in this letter a photograph of my little family. Please give my kindest regards to your wife and two charming daughters.

  Yours affectionately, Ed8

  Vivian Fuchs and the Trans-Antarctic Expedition

  George Lowe met Fuchs casually at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) in London after Everest, but the more significant meeting was in November 1953,9 when Fuchs invited him to a meeting, gave him a copy of Plans for a Trans-Antarctic Journey, by V.E. Fuchs, M.A., Ph.D., and invited him to be the expedition photographer. Fuchs had added a request that might have been the most important item on the agenda: ‘If you will also write to Ed Hillary and sound him out, I’d be glad. I want to know if I can get a New Zealand party interested.’10

  A few days later, Ed met Fuchs in the expedition office in London. ‘I really knew nothing about him,’ wrote Ed, ‘in fact I’d only heard his name the first time from George – but I was immediately impressed by his forceful personality and his air of determination and confidence … he was powerfully built and obviously kept himself in fine physical trim.’11

  Fuchs explained that the overall concept was a crossing of the Antarctic continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, an attempt to replicate the expedition planned by Shackleton in 1914–15 but terminated when his ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea pack ice. The total distance of the crossing was 2300 miles, two-thirds of it across the 6000–12,000ft high Polar Plateau, in the middle of which is the South Pole.