After Everest

by Paul Little

  Although he could hardly be said to have recovered from his grief, Ed had found the energy and heart to start planning a great adventure. It was an idea that had come to him some years previously—a 2400-kilometre journey up the Ganges River to the Himalayas, with the last 160 kilometres on foot.

  Ed always denied that he was in any sense a professional adventurer. ‘I still regard adventure pretty much as a hobby, to tell you the honest truth,’ he said in his Academy of Achievement interviews. ‘And I think this approach to it keeps one refreshed almost. I think if you just regard adventure as a business, working becomes very boring as many other businesses can become. But even though adventure changed my life considerably, both in what I was doing and even economically, I’ve always regarded myself in a sense as a competent amateur. Because of that, I think a freshness has been brought to it, that every new adventure has been a new experience and great fun. I really like to enjoy my adventures. I get frightened to death on many, many occasions but, of course, fear can be, also, a stimulating factor. When you’re afraid, the blood surges in the veins . . .’

  In that statement we see that Ed had many qualities he shared with all great adventurers: a terror of boredom; a desire to doing something for the sheer love of it rather than the rewards; and a taste for fear and the resulting adrenaline. He was an amateur in the old sense—someone who did what he did for the love of it, and with little expectation of reward.

  A 21st-century adventurer can, thanks to the far greater availability of media sponsorship opportunities, plan a calendar full of year-round escapades from one continent to another. But there was a trace of the Victorian gentleman adventurer in Ed, sallying off on a life-threatening jaunt whenever he came up with a good idea. And anticipation was half the fun.

  ‘When he was planning the next expedition he would change,’ says Hilary Carlisle. ‘He could be sitting around not knowing what to do with himself and then he’d be planning something. He would have this board and he would be writing down things and rubbing them out. He just loved that.’

  In some ways the jetboat journey from the Bay of Bengal up the Ganges and then to its source in the Himalayas was the most romantic and inspired of all Ed’s adventures, albeit the least trumpeted. It combined the icy thrill of the mountains with the colourful landscape of India and its people; it connected Kiwi ingenuity with the spiritual element that could not be escaped when journeying past many of the most sacred sites in Hinduism. The Ganges is one of the most sacred waterways in the world, revered by those who depend on it for their very existence. And, as if to complete the picture, it ended unhappily for Ed, with the ultimate prize withheld from his grasp when it seemed just within reach.

  And yet Ed was still the hard-nosed expedition organiser who chose to take the team he wanted—not the team who wanted to come. Among those who were keen to join the expedition was Peter Mulgrew. Despite his double amputation, Mulgrew had gone on to succeed in business and also to become a formidable competitor in ocean racing. He had been willing to follow Ed to the South Pole, come what may, and he had nearly died on Makalu; but Ed didn’t think he was right for this trip and told his friend he wouldn’t be going.

  According to Alexa Johnston ‘[Mulgrew] was always quite a crusty or difficult man. I think Ed just thought, “This isn’t going to work if he comes. It’s a long trip and we can’t afford to have it fall to bits.” Also it was being filmed and you can’t plaster over the cracks when things are falling to bits. That created a real rift.’

  Those who did accompany Ed included his son Peter, then 23, and now-familiar names such as Mingma Tsering, Max Pearl, Murray Jones, Mike Gill and Graeme Dingle. Relatively new team members were Jon Hamilton—whose father, Bill Hamilton, had invented the jetboats that would make the expedition possible—and Jon’s son Michael. Australian director Mike Dillon filmed the journey.

  The plan was to take three boats as far as they could and then walk to the ancient holy city of Badrinath, before climbing one of the mountains whose peaks, Ed explained in View from the Summit, provided snow that melted and fed into the source of the Ganges. One of the most important incidents on the trip came at Varanasi, the holy city where Hindus hope to end their lives because to die there is to go straight to paradise and be spared the rigours of more incarnations. It would be another turning point in Ed’s recovery.

  He related the incident for HARDtalk. ‘Our trip on the Ganges was perhaps one of the most remarkable adventures we’d ever undertaken. Not only did we have the challenges and dangers of wild water and rock and so on, but we were also absorbed into the vast Hinduism of the river Ganges. All the priests in places like Varanasi welcomed us, blessed us, put dabs of paint on our foreheads and wished us well for the journey on. On one particular occasion—a very ceremonial occasion—this rather wild and furious young man got us to kneel down on the sand beside the river and then he pressed our heads onto the sand. Meanwhile little containers with little candles in them—he put them in the water and they floated away. It was a very emotional moment. I really at that moment felt a slight lifting perhaps of the sorrow that I’d experienced over the previous two or three years.’

  Film footage of this incident bears out Ed’s words to the detail. In the midst of a frenetic Indian scene, the young man’s words cut through the cacophony and it is possible to see Ed, lost in meditative concentration, relax just slightly.

  ‘The Indian people on that trip really were totally in awe of him,’ says Alexa Johnston. ‘There were literally millions of people—brightly coloured things, their turbans looked like hundreds-and-thousands. Everywhere they stopped, they got mobbed.’ It being a river journey, Ed went with the flow. Johnston concludes: ‘It made it easier, because he didn’t have to resist what they were doing. He also said on that trip that they set off to have an adventure, but the people greeting them thought they were making a pilgrimage. By the end, Ed said, “We accepted it. We had a Hindu world view too.” ’

  Ed was asked, ‘These people think you’re a Hindu god. How do you deal with that?’ His answer was the only possible one—both accurate and irrefutable. ‘I know I’m not, so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘He never thought he was anything other than himself,’ says Johnston, echoing the view of many others. ‘That’s hard to accept in today’s world, where you can’t believe that people who get such great accolades don’t believe the myth. But he never believed the myth. That’s something his difficult childhood gave him, I think.’

  Of course, for those who had come along on the Ganges adventure and didn’t experience deification, it wasn’t necessarily easy to put up with seeing your mate being worshipped. Murray Jones admitted as much, while acknowledging he was seen as slightly divine by association.

  ‘If I am honest,’ says Jones, ‘I didn’t behave particularly well. I had great difficulty accepting the adulation the Indian people were giving us. It was like being a rugby star in New Zealand, and sometimes you deserve it and sometimes you damn well don’t. Because we were going on this trip that Ed was organising, the Indian community came out in throngs. Ed caught the Indian imagination, because we were doing something that they regarded as reasonably sacred. You don’t just come down to the Ganges at the drop of a hat, and that caught their imagination.’

  Compared to the vicissitudes of Everest, the challenges of the South Pole and the terrors of Makalu, this adventure seems like a spree, an early form of adventure tourism for some not-so-young people letting off steam. ‘We had fun on those jetboats and seeing those tigers in the wild was fascinating,’ says Jones.

  Eventually a waterfall put an end to the boats’ progress. After reaching Badrinath there was still a mountain to climb. A base camp was set up at 4570 metres. Ed made it as far as a camp at 5480 metres before he began to feel unwell; he was suffering from altitude sickness yet again.

  ‘He developed an issue with altitude that got worse and worse,’ says Peter. ‘I mean, when Dad had collapsed it was only a couple of years after
Mum had died and I thought I was going to lose my father as well. Fortunately, with altitude sickness, if you get to people quickly enough and you get them down, it is a quick solution.’

  Altitude sickness is ‘fluid flowing into your brain and lungs’, explains Peter. ‘It is suffocating. If it was pulmonary oedema, which is what he had, there is pink foam and you are suffocating; you need to sit up so the fluid is at the bottom of the lung. If you lie down it is across the whole lung, which is worse. But if your lung fills up—it’s all over. He hadn’t got that bad, but he wasn’t that good. But we got him down and he very quickly started to recover.’

  Some of his companions thought he was dead or near dead, but he regained consciousness as he was being carried to a lower altitude. They didn’t bother putting him on a stretcher or trying to wake him. They dragged his whole tent—complete with the sleeping bag containing Ed—downhill.

  Murray Jones accompanied Ed to Badrinath and safety, while the others continued their ascent to the top of Akash Parbat, where they sprinkled water that had been taken from Mother Ganges at the start of their visit, completing a magnificent, mystical circle of life.

  It was a disappointing end to a magnificent escapade. Yet again, Ed had overexerted himself and was lucky to be alive. It was as if, as a young man, he had used up so much of his physical resources, his stamina and his all-round superhuman abilities, stretching his body to unimaginable limits, that he was now burning out at the relatively early age of 58.

  In the years to come he would have more life-threatening incidents, simply because avoiding high altitudes would have meant staying away from his beloved Solukhumbu and his work for the Himalayan Trust.

  India and Nepal rekindled such spiritual inclinations as Ed had. He denied that he was a religious person but he had, as we have seen, a thoughtful, philosophical disposition. The youthful involvement with Radiant Living had been a dead end, but there were plenty of other paths to explore, and it was the religions of the East that he found most congenial. ‘I have no particular religious beliefs at all,’ he told the Academy of Achievement, ‘but I am interested in all religions. In Tibetan Buddhism, one of the strongest features is that they believe that everyone must choose their own path in life.’

  Ed was always enormously respectful of other people’s views. ‘He worked very hard to help Sherpas rebuild monasteries,’ notes Tom Scott. ‘When the monastery at Tengboche burnt, he and [climber Reinhold] Messner led a worldwide campaign to rebuild it. I have been to the opening of three or four monasteries with Ed. He thought Sherpas should keep their culture alive as long as possible.’

  Ed would go into battle to protect one religion from another, even when he adhered to neither. Tom Scott tells a story of a group of Buddhist boys from Nepal: ‘Some young guys went to Kathmandu on scholarships. They rang up very distressed, saying the priests were putting pressure on them to convert from Buddhism. Ed was furious. He got on the phone and within 48 hours these kids were shifted to another school, where they could retain their faith.’

  For himself, Ed trusted in Ed, not God: ‘I’ve always had the feeling that, if you’re in a difficult or dangerous situation, doing a little praying, probably you’re chickening out on the deal. It’s up to you to make the decisions and carry on if you want to reach the top.’

  It’s a hard man who sees praying as a sign of weakness. At one time, though, there were as many atheists up mountains as there were in foxholes. ‘I’ll always remember one little incident,’ he told the Listener, ‘I was climbing in the Southern Alps and I was climbing out along a long narrow ridge, and it was quite difficult for me in those days, and quite challenging. You know I was never a very religiously inclined person, but I was sufficiently fearful on this occasion to maybe say a little prayer or two. I would say this little prayer and after I’d gone a little further along the ridge I said to myself, “What are you up to? You got yourself into this problem, you’re the one who has to get yourself out of it.” And I surely did. So I refused to be dictated to by any source really, if there was any possible way of me doing it myself.’

  So Ed’s attempt at prayer confirmed his belief in its lack of efficacy and the need to rely on one’s own resources. When, in his writings, Ed questioned the capitalist system, for instance, his thinking is based on his own close observation and experience—in this case, of the crass consumerism of early 1960s America, which appalled him. In a few years a whole counterculture would be echoing his thinking.

  Many of his qualities—egalitarianism, religious tolerance—are the ones New Zealand would have used to describe itself before the 1980s exalted free-market survivalism to orthodoxy. Near the end of his life, Ed was increasingly out of step with his country philosophically; but he was too big a figure for anyone to point this out to him. ‘I am not one of those people who believe . . . that every American could . . . become President of the United States,’ he said once. ‘. . . But, I do think that virtually everybody that’s born has the ability to be very competent at doing something. It’s far more important to set your sights high. Aim for something high, and even fail on it if necessary. To me, that’s always been more impressive than someone who doesn’t ask for very much and achieves it.’

  The New Zealand public didn’t always agree with his attitudes. Perhaps they tuned out his comments on religion in order to be able to keep him as their hero. Or perhaps they saw his willingness to say what he really thought—even when it might be unpopular—as another kind of heroism.

  It’s hard to know why people kept asking Ed about him being a hero given the number of times he had denied that description. Probably Achilles was the last hero who actually owned up to being one. Yet Ed often described himself in ways that made clear his heroic attributes. It’s heroic, for instance, to feel the fear and climb the mountain anyway.

  Ed enjoyed a ‘sense of challenge’, and that was what kept him going, he said on HARDtalk. ‘I was scared stiff many many times. Being afraid would often force me to take actions which normally I would have regarded as unwise or impossible. Instead I would charge on and carry through the problem and hopefully get to the destination. I believe that being able to do something first in the world is one of the most satisfying experiences that you can ever have.’

  He elaborated on this to the Academy of Achievement: ‘There’s simply no question that, if you’re doing something that has the possibility that you may make a mistake or something may go wrong and you’ll come to a rather sticky end, this, I think, does add something to the whole challenge. You really feel you’re doing something exciting and perhaps a little desperate, and, if you’re successful, it certainly gives you that little bit more satisfaction.’

  Tom Scott, though, is sceptical of Ed’s refusal to accept the hero label. He was present when Ed unveiled a statue to Tenzing Norgay and made a speech in which he claimed that, though he did not regard himself as much of a hero, Tenzing undoubtedly was one.

  Given that their achievements were essentially equivalent, and that Ed by most accounts went on to achieve more than his climbing partner, it’s hard to see how one could be considered a hero and the other not.

  But Ed had an answer for that. He told the Listener that he thought his assessment of himself and the Sherpa ‘was true. I came from New Zealand and I worked hard, but lived in a comfortable environment and I didn’t really want for anything, like most New Zealanders. But here was Tenzing, who really had nothing but a very strong desire to climb Everest, and I respected his determination to do his best on the mountain. I admired him for that.’

  As for statues of himself, he was not happy when a bust was mounted as a tribute at the school in Khumjung. In fact, he never saw it. Tom Scott saw it on a visit to film a tribute to Ed. ‘We are very pleased with the statue of the burra sahib,’ his guide told him.

  ‘I don’t think the burra sahib would be very happy,’ said Scott.

  ‘The statue is not for the burra sahib. The statue is for us.’

  In a
way, this is a metaphor for the way Ed’s own country viewed him. As will be explained later, New Zealanders needed a great man, and he was it. Their feeling was: ‘He’s our great man and we are very happy with him.’

  ‘Although Ed was ambitious and had an ego and knew exactly what he had done and the scale of it, he kept it in proportion,’ says Scott.

  Ed understood that he was, in a sense, a fictional character. ‘The media created a hero of Ed Hillary,’ he said in A View from the Top, ‘whereas I know very well I’m a person of modest abilities. But I do take a little bit of credit for taking advantage of opportunities that arose . . . Although I don’t always follow the rules, I’ve had the good fortune to be ultimately successful.’

  Everyone who knew Ed says there was no difference between the public and the private man. Yet Ed himself said frequently that he had to struggle to keep the two apart: ‘The main thing was that, as long as I didn’t believe all this rubbish that was written, I would be okay. I never did believe it. And I think I’ve survived reasonably well. I never deny the fact that I think I did pretty well on Everest. On the other hand, never for a moment have I ever suggested that I was the heroic figure that the media and the public were making me out to be. The public really like heroic figures that they can look on with great admiration, and whether it’s true or not doesn’t seem terribly important.’

  Ed and Louise leave the chapel after their 1953 wedding. George Lowe (left) was the best man. (Courtesy APN)

  Ed (center) and George Dufek (left) meet Vivian Fuchs (right) at the South Pole in 1958. (Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library)

  On return from the South Pole, Ed became the public man again when giving this speech in 1958. (Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library)