Himalaya
Page 42
For several decades, the botanists discovering those plants in the eastern Himalaya weren’t British but French. The Lazarist missionary Armand David, known as Père David, is well known for the colossal study he made of China’s natural history. That work included botanising along the eastern fringes of the Himalaya in what is now western Sichuan during his second collecting expedition, which began in the spring of 1868 and lasted over two years. His most famous discoveries were the giant panda and the handkerchief tree, whose whole genus, now named Davidia in his honour, was new to western science. Yet the breadth of the herbarium he collected was no less impressive. A native of the Pyrenees, he had as a father a doctor with a broad interest in natural history, who taught his son well. David was a brilliant naturalist. He sent 676 plant specimens from Sichuan to the natural history museum in Paris where the botanist Adrien Franchet discovered among them a hundred and fifty new species: a dozen rhododendrons, including Rhododendron aureum, primulas, violets, cotoneasters and willow. Despite suffering ‘more fatigues, pains, privations, and diseases, than it is advisable to say’, Père David reached Beijing via the Qinghai plateau just so he could see for himself the turquoise waters of Kokonor, the largest lake in China.
Other French missionaries followed David’s example, the most remarkable being Jean-Marie Delavay, who like David grew up in mountains but on the other side of France in Haute-Savoie, where he developed a lifelong passion for alpine flowers. He arrived in Canton in 1867 and, to begin with, gave whatever he collected to the British consul Henry Hance, who shared his passion for botany. During a trip home in 1881, he met Père David who persuaded him to collect instead for the Paris natural history museum’s Adrien Franchet and la patrie. The change galvanised Delavay and when he returned to China in 1882 he based himself in north-west Yunnan, possibly the first European to visit the deep gorges of what was then a remote region of the far eastern Himalaya. He worked alone, like David, amassing a vast collection of dried specimens, the finest, Franchet said, he had ever seen, comprising four thousand species of largely alpine flora, of which fifteen hundred were new discoveries. Among these was the blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia, which Franchet described. Seeds from this were grown at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, then enjoying a golden period under the directorship of Isaac Bayley Balfour. (Whether this meconopsis and Meconopsis baileyi are the same species is a matter of debate; betonicifolia was on display in London in 1926.)
Without the retinue of helpers other plant hunters relied on to carry equipment and specimens, the amount of material Delavay collected from each species was small and as a result only a few of his discoveries were successfully introduced into Europe. That task fell to the next generation of plant hunters in the eastern Himalaya: the Dutch-born American Frank N Meyer, working for the US Department of Agriculture, a new entrant to the world of Himalayan exploration; Ernest Henry Wilson, who went to Yunnan for James Veitch & Sons to find the fabled dove tree, Davidia involucrata, and later worked for the Arnold Arboretum in Boston; and George Forrest, a Scot recruited by Bayley Balfour, who was the most successful collector in Yunnan, one of the most biodiverse regions on earth. Forrest got help along the way from the French missionary Jules Dubernard who had by then lived in the upper Mekong valley for forty years, converting former slaves to Christianity. On his first collecting expedition to Yunnan in 1905, Forrest witnessed the aftermath of a violent insurrection by Tibetan monks, triggered in part by the British invasion of Tibet the year before, against Christian missionaries and Qing officials. Having fled the rebel monks, Forrest returned to discover that Dubernard had been decapitated and he was himself a hunted man.
As the Qing dynasty began its death spiral, China’s Tibetan marches became increasingly dangerous for plant hunters. William Purdom, the tall and likeable son of a Northumberland gardener, had steadily worked his way up from garden boy to the post of junior foreman at Kew. Having been fired, apparently without reasonable cause, he went to work for Veitch and the Arnold Arboretum, collecting in Gansu, the province bordering the north-west Tibetan plateau. Though the collecting was mixed, Purdom proved a talented photographer, capturing some of the only images of the ‘old dance’ festival at Chone monastery, when the spirits of the dead return. Chone sat at the heart of an independent Tibetan enclave with its own lineage of rulers dating back to its founding in the late thirteenth century as a Sakya monastery under the patronage of Kublai Khan. Purdom showed an ethnographer’s eye, catching echoes of this deep history in his photographs.
Purdom was back in Gansu in 1914 with Reginald Farrer, the man who inspired the rage for rock gardens, a fashion more recently back in favour. Farrer was short, almost dwarfish, and was born with a cleft lip, which he later concealed behind a moustache, although the psychological scars of so many painful operations and the pity of strangers would never leave him. Educated at home in Yorkshire, where his family owned Ingleborough Hall, and then Balliol College, Oxford, he was after making as big a mark as possible and fretted against his conventionally prosperous family. What he wanted, according to his biographer Nicola Shulman, ‘was to be a literary figure of grand repute’; what he became was a lively, endearing gardening writer, whose tendency, more than usual, was ‘to write about himself, no matter what the ostensible subject’.
Hunting for plants in the Himalaya had been a lifetime’s ambition for Farrer and with the public profile he acquired in championing rock gardens it became possible. His original intention had been Yunnan but when he put out feelers for financial backing he discovered from Isaac Bayley Balfour at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh that not only would he not give the amateur Farrer any money but Frank Kingdon-Ward and George Forrest were already hard at work in Yunnan scooping up anything and everything of value. He should go to Gansu instead. Farrer was tougher than he looked, but even so, it was his great good fortune that Purdom also signed up for the adventure. He had been to Gansu before, was tough and brave, knew photography and was happy to let Farrer beat their drum.
Farrer and Purdom discovered Gansu – always bandit country – in the grip of a rebellion that had tipped northern China into chaos. Its insurgent leader, Bai Lang, had been trained in Japan to undermine the new Chinese republic that had replaced the last Qing emperor. His name sounds similar to the Mandarin for ‘white wolf’, which is how Farrer and Purdom termed their adversary. Purdom found himself ambushed by two hundred of Bai Lang’s men who shot dead two of his ponies. He returned fire and then scarpered. In his account of their journey, On the Eaves of the World, Farrer included a photograph of a rakish Purdom, dressed as a local bandit. The pair also found themselves in trouble when a storm destroyed the crops of local villages. The powerful head lama of the local monastery ordered retribution and Purdom and Farrer were confronted by an angry mob brandishing matchlocks. Purdom was able to charm their way out.
If the risks were great, the rewards were magical: Viburnum fragans, also known as V. farreri, still hugely popular in British gardens, its pink-tinged white flowers described by Farrer as ‘blushing stars’; a new buddleia with lavender flowers and the scent of raspberries that ‘hugs only the very hottest and driest crevices, cliffs, walls, and banks down the most arid and torrid aspects of the Ha Shin Fang’; and the tree peony, Paeonia rockii, with its ‘single, enormous blossom, waved and crimped into the boldest grace of line, of absolutely pure white, with featherings of deepest maroon radiating at the base of the petals from the boss of golden fluff at the flower’s heart’. Farrer didn’t collect any of its seeds and the explorer and botanist Joseph Rock has been credited with its introduction, although it’s debated whether what Farrer saw and what Rock collected were the same plants. Rock’s peony was collected in 1926, the year of the blue poppy craze, from the garden of Chone monastery, which Purdom had photographed years before. There was, however, no way for Farrer and Rock to compare notes: Reginald Farrer was already dead, aged forty, in the mountains of Upper Burma, succumbing in the autumn of 1920 to infectio
n and heavy drinking. As though her son had fallen on the horticultural equivalent of the Western Front, Farrer’s mother dedicated a small fountain to him in the gardens of Ingleborough Hall with the inscription: ‘He died for love and duty, in search of rare plants.’
Frank Kingdon-Ward’s 1924 expedition to Tibet’s mysterious Tsangpo gorges, accompanied by the young aristocrat John Campbell, fifth Earl Cawdor, was a coda to the Romantic age of Himalayan plant hunting. Along with sober commissions from Kew and the Natural History Museum, he also agreed to collect seeds for the thirteenth Dalai Lama to grow in the gardens of his summer palace, the Norbulingka, sending primula and meconopsis seeds: ‘showy plants’ that ‘could be easily raised’. When Kingdon-Ward first saw the blue poppy, flowering among bushes some three hundred kilometres east of Lhasa, he thought at first he’d seen the plumage of some fabulous bird. ‘The flowers,’ he wrote, ‘flutter out from amongst the sea-green leaves like blue-and-gold butterflies.’ Although he would spend the rest of his life exploring the highlands of Asia, and Himalayan botany is no less relevant today, in the public’s imagination there would never be another moment quite like Kingdon-Ward’s discovery. The blue poppy proved the perfect emblem of the Himalaya as a remote Eden, and the bloom of that vision was never as strong.
15
The First Mountaineers
On a summer’s evening in 1895, a young Welshman, piggy-eyed and burly, sat on a wall in a remote shepherd’s enclosure on the west side of Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest peak, watching the slaughter of a sheep. The Honourable Charles Granville Bruce was a man of gargantuan appetites and having been on the go for more than thirty hours, the young Gurkha officer was ravenous. The night before, spent at 5,800 metres on the south side of the mountain, had been bitterly cold and sleepless. Bruce had travelled to Nanga Parbat in haste; his warm mountaineering clothes were still in his trunk in Kashmir. Not yet recovered from a bout of mumps, he had shivered through the night in a sweater and light flannel suit, one of his puttees wrapped around his middle, legs stuffed in a rucksack. But as the sheep’s liver went on the fire, Charlie Bruce was feeling more like his usual boisterous self. ‘Nothing rejoices me so much as the prospect of food,’ he wrote of that moment, ‘especially under such conditions.’
Forty years later, and a retired brigadier, Bruce was famous as the leader of the first attempts to climb Everest. To young mountaineers of the 1930s, he was a figure from legend. The Everest climber Raymond Greene, older brother of the novelist Graham, was Bruce’s doctor in his later years and had served in Bruce’s first regiment, the ‘Ox and Bucks’. They were still telling stories about the old general four decades after he left. Bruce’s father, Lord Aberdare, had served as William Gladstone’s home secretary, passing licensing laws making it an offence to be drunk in public. His youngest son met that challenge in spectacular fashion. Bruce once wagered he could run from London to Brighton in a day stopping for a drink at every pub he passed. He could swear without repetition for minutes on end, an ability that left his fellow climber Tom Longstaff ‘transfixed with envy’. His appetite for physical activity in the Alps earned him the nickname the ‘Mad Mountain Machine’.
Bruce is now categorised as supporting cast in the imperial drama of Everest, a boisterous cartoon of a man, a high-altitude roisterer. He was shrewder than that. His Himalayan career spanned the rich but little known period from the 1890s to the years immediately after the Great War. In the popular imagination, Everest was a step into the unknown, but mountaineering in the Himalaya did not start with Everest. By 1922, leading the first full attempt on Everest, Charlie Bruce had thirty years’ experience of the world’s highest mountains and the challenges peculiar to them: their scale and extreme altitude. There had been decades of thought and debate about the pros and cons on a host of issues: the problems of hypoxia, diet and equipment, the debate over enlisting guides from the Alps or relying on local men, something Bruce favoured. As a soldier stationed in the Himalaya and a member of the Alpine Club, Bruce was in the right place at the right time. As a consequence, he came to know almost all the small cast of unusual characters who set the stage for Everest.
He took up climbing as a young officer in the mid 1880s, when the ethical framework that underpins mountaineering emerged for the first time in its modern form. Put simply, climbers needed to address a fundamental question: what was mountaineering for? Should it serve some wider, moral or scientific purpose or was it simply an end in itself? The activity had emerged in the late eighteenth century on a wave of Romanticism, scientific enquiry and an adventurous extension to the grand tour. Men, and women too, could make a name for themselves by scrambling up a peak: Victorian ‘selfie’ culture. This self-regard dismayed someone like John Ruskin, who felt the aesthetic glory of mountains was compromised by the antics of tourists. When the Alpine Club was formed in 1857, staking an interest in the world of science, Charles Dickens mocked its pretensions:
the scaling of such heights as the Schreckhorn, the Eiger, and the Matterhorn contributed about as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weather-cocks of all the cathedral spires in the United Kingdom.
The scientist John Tyndall, whose work on radiant heat is one of the cornerstones of our understanding of climate science, was also a leading mountaineer, in 1861 making the first ascent of the much-prized Weisshorn, a peak near Zermatt in the Swiss Alps. He was also an early member of the Alpine Club but a year after the Weisshorn, having just become vice president, he resigned his membership, infuriated by a light-hearted paper by the young Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, who joked how science was merely an adjunct to the serious business of mountaineering. After the Matterhorn disaster of 1865, when four men, including the son of the Marquess of Queensbury, fell to their deaths while descending from the summit, the air of disapproval became a storm of protest. It wasn’t just an accident; ‘it was the accident’, in the words of an editor of the Alpine Journal, after which alpinists ‘went about under a sort of dark shade, looked on with scarcely disguised contempt by the world of ordinary travellers’.
The impact on the leader of that Matterhorn climb, Edward Whymper, was no less profound. Alpinism had, almost by chance, lifted him out of humble social origins, just as science did for John Tyndall. After the Matterhorn, his excitement and energy for mountaineering congealed; he couldn’t see any value in the innovations and developments within the sport that followed his glory years. After the Matterhorn, his adventures were freighted with heavy purposes: scientific expeditions to Greenland and then Peru, where he made the first ascent of Chimborazo. That mountain is still closely associated with Alexander von Humboldt, who was the inspiration for almost every significant figure in nineteenth-century scientific exploration, including Charles Darwin. If mountaineering had a purpose, it surely lay, for Edward Whymper, within the learned and socially prestigious circumference of Humboldt. The bonus, for a man who spent his working life in publishing, was the prospect of a hefty and indispensable book at the end of it.
After exploring the Arctic, the Himalaya would have been a logical next step for Whymper, not least because of his strong family ties there. His brother Henry trained as a brewer and then left for India to work at the new Murree Brewery in the Pir Panjal mountains north of Rawalpindi, on the road to Kashmir. Edward had a shareholding in the company, and Henry found jobs in Murree for their brothers Joseph and Samuel. Another brother, Frank, worked for the post office, finishing his career as postmaster general in Mumbai. Joseph later moved to Mussoorie, the hill station where George Everest had built his house, some thirty kilometres north of Dehra Dun and the headquarters of the Indian Survey Department. Here he founded the Crown Brewery, where Samuel also worked for a while, before moving on to do similar work at Naini Tal, within sight of some of the Garhwal’s grandest mountains: Kamet, Trisul and Nanda Devi. All three of these peaks, made available as the East India Company sp
read north, were early objectives for Himalayan pioneers, but Whymper was not among them. His nephew Robert later said that Whymper had contemplated an attempt on Everest, whose primacy suited his ambition, but such notions were ‘abandoned as far too expensive’. Whymper had little of the romantic in him: an expedition to Chimborazo made more economic sense. Despite building up a large collection of material on India, and despite his sisters travelling there to visit their brothers, Whymper, the most famous climber of his age, never even saw the Himalaya.
For Humboldt himself, the opening up of the Himalaya came too late, despite his fervent ambition to travel there, and perhaps emulate his attempt on Chimborazo: ‘nothing in my life has filled me with a more intense regret,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, which came in 1859. His ambitions were transferred to the small army of young explorers he supported, an ageing spider at the centre of a web of correspondents feeding him data as he struggled to finish Cosmos, his colossal work on the natural world. In the 1840s, he had helped his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, using his London contacts to generate financial support for Hooker’s travels in the eastern Himalaya. By the mid 1850s, Kashmir, and the southern approaches to Nanga Parbat, had also come under the control of the East India Company, and it would fall to further protégés of Humboldt to make the first attempt on a significant Himalayan peak just for the sake of it, in the course of a remarkable but ultimately tragic three-year expedition.