Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Humboldt called them the ‘shamrock’, three – of five – Bavarian brothers, Hermann, Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit, sons of a Munich ophthalmologist, Joseph Schlagintweit. Hermann was the oldest, born in 1826, but still only in his late 20s when the three of them left for India in 1854. The three had published works on the geography and geology of the Alps and in their Alpine travels come close to making the first ascent of Monte Rosa, second highest mountain in Western Europe. These were mountaineers from alpinism’s Golden Age, the only ones from that era to make it to the Himalaya. They did so with Humboldt’s support and his contacts with the East India Company. Their stated mission was the magnetic survey of India, the earth’s magnetic field being a subject close to Humboldt’s heart. They would bring home with them a vast treasure of geological, zoological and botanical specimens, theories on glaciology, capable watercolours of the mountains, as well as a great deal of ethnographic material, enough to launch their youngest brother, Emil Schlagintweit, on a lifelong career as a Tibet scholar. Charles Darwin later wrote to them seeking knowledge on the breeding patterns of the yak, after the brothers spoke at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Dublin in September 1857.

  The brothers travelled widely in the Himalaya, often independently of each other. In the spring of 1855, Hermann left Calcutta alone, headed for Darjeeling, hoping to follow the Singalila ridge towards Kangchenjunga, a mountain firmly planted in the Western imagination, like the craze for rhododendrons, by Hooker. Adolf and Robert, meanwhile, set off for Kumaon. While Robert waited in the Johar valley, Adolf travelled up the Pindari glacier. Although capable and adventurous travellers, the Schlagintweits were often following in a pioneer’s footsteps: to be reunited with his brother, Adolf made the second crossing of Traill’s Pass, linking the Pindari glacier to the village of Milam – not the first, but no less challenging for that. At Milam they hired the future pundits Nain and Mani Singh before crossing the border into Tibet (disguised as Buddhist pilgrims to escape arrest), to reach Gartok, the trading encampment on the banks of the Indus, the first Europeans to do so since William Moorcroft in 1812. British naturalists had passed through the region more recently, taking advantage of the greater access won with the conclusion of the Sikh Wars; Richard Strachey, brother of Henry and John, for example, after collecting specimens in Kumoan, crossed into Tibet and visited the sacred Lake Manasarovar.

  Where Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit were truly innovative was in their quixotic tilt at a summit on their way back south from Tibet, having been rumbled by the authorities in Gartok and expelled. From above the Sutlej valley, the northern view of Garhwal is dominated by the triangular mass of Kamet, 7,756 metres high, a massif, then commonly known as Ibi Garmin, identified and crudely measured by Strachey in 1848. Adolf and Robert decided to explore this group while returning to India and spent over two weeks camped at 5,200 metres under the mountain. They made one determined attempt on the summit from a camp at around 6,000 metres and reached a point some 800 metres higher. As the twentieth-century mountaineer Charles Meade showed during his own exploration of Kamet, the brothers had in fact been on the wrong mountain, attempting Kamet’s near neighbour, which rises on the other side of what is known as Meade’s Col. Anyone without a map, which didn’t exist in 1855, setting off for Kamet from the north, might make the same mistake. This second peak, known today as Abi Garmin, flattens itself against its higher, southerly neighbour Kamet, merging altogether in the middle of the day. The brothers took a barometric reading to calculate their high point at 6,778 metres, an altitude regarded for many years as a comfortable record. The discovery in 1999 of haunting and well-preserved mummies of Inca child sacrifices left five hundred years before on the summit of Llullaillaco, on the border between Chile and Argentina at an altitude of over 6,700 metres, has prompted a reconsideration of such records. While there is no physical evidence of humans reaching the summit of the higher Andean peak of Aconcagua, 6,961 metres, it’s a distinct possibility. Given that Tibetan yak herders routinely take their animals above 6,000 metres, it’s logical that Andean people reached similar altitudes.

  The scale of the Schlagintweits’ work in the Himalaya, in the pattern of Humboldt, won them many admirers on their return. The fate of Adolf, who disappeared after electing to travel home overland and separately from his brothers, only added spice to their reputation. The Indian authorities, including Richard Strachey’s brother Henry, took great trouble to discover Adolf’s fate: he had been beheaded without trial in Kashgar, accused of being a Chinese spy. His head was eventually recovered in 1859 by a Kazakh soldier and scholar, Shoqan Walikhanov, inspiration for Rudyard Kipling in his short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. While their work was published in important British journals, the multivolume record of their travels was not translated, and the Schlagintweits faded from view in the English-speaking world, their mountaineering exploit a spontaneous adventure hidden behind a forest of academic detail.

  In the years after, the Survey of India expanded its work across the Himalaya and Karakoram, as we have seen, claiming a number of summits along the way, but just as in the Alps or the Caucasus, where military surveyors reached high vantage points, the purpose was information, not sport. The first Himalayan expedition dedicated purely to mountaineering had to wait for another twenty-five years. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was cited by contemporary alpinists as one explanation for the pause; there were also many exploratory challenges remaining in the Alps in the 1860s. As rail networks robbed the Alps of their wildness, alpinists began visiting more remote ranges, like the Caucasus, which provided a useful laboratory for the Himalaya. With Britain’s grip on India extending deeper into the mountains, access to the Himalaya became easier.

  In February 1883, a freshly minted barrister called William Woodman Graham arrived in Mumbai with the Swiss guide Josef Imboden. It’s somehow appropriate that this progenitor of Himalayan climbing should be such an enigma, a man whose reputation hovers between adventurer, maverick and fraud. Graham’s Alpine experience was deep, despite his years, and yet the Alpine Club had, the previous December, blackballed him. This was surprisingly common at the time, and often personal, but in this case, the vote against was overwhelming. The explanation remains uncertain, but that summer Graham had bagged the first ascent of a dramatic and much prized granite tower above the mountain town of Chamonix called the Dent du Géant. In doing so, he relied on some shameful ironmongery and fixed ropes placed by an Italian team. Graham hadn’t quite shot the fox, but he’d stood on the shoulders of men who had.

  Others might have taken it personally, but Graham didn’t hesitate to offer the Alpine Journal a full account of his Himalayan expedition, which he read to an audience at the Royal Geographical Society. The story he told was impressive, a sustained campaign over several months that saw him start in the Kangchenjunga region north of Darjeeling, move on to Garhwal for the summer and then return to Sikkim in the autumn. His guide Imboden returned after the first leg feverish and homesick, finding the mountains too wintry for climbing. In his place came Emil Boss, proprietor of the Bear Hotel in the Swiss village of Grindelwald, famous for its proximity to the Eiger, with the guide Ulrich Kaufmann. The two men had almost climbed Mount Cook in New Zealand the year before and were a formidable pair. In Garhwal, travelling in the monsoon, they were plagued with leeches, from which a French member of the Alpine Club they picked up on their travels, a Monsieur Décle, fled in horror. The plan was to climb Nanda Devi, highest mountain wholly within India, but after a spirited effort at accessing the formidable Rishiganga Gorge, Graham had to settle for a strong attempt on Dunagiri, reaching a height of almost 7,000 metres, some 150 metres short of the summit, before worsening weather drove him and Boss down. He also claimed a mountain that surveyors had dubbed A21, later known as Changabang. The idea Graham might have climbed this notoriously difficult peak was laughed out of court; it was finally done in 1974, with all the advantages of modern equ
ipment and techniques. It was likely a case of mistaken identity, as Graham tried to square an indifferent map with the country as he experienced it.

  Back in Darjeeling, he reunited with his ‘sirdar’, meaning ‘boss’, a ‘sturdy, honest Tibetan’ called Gaga, who had organised his porters that spring, and in early October, from a camp at around 5,600 metres, Graham said he came within ten or twelve metres of the summit of Kabru, one of Kangchenjunga’s mightier neighbours. Kauffman, ‘one of the fastest step-cutters living’, had managed to climb its final steep ice slope only because it was covered with a skin of frozen snow. The summit itself was ‘little more than a pillar of ice’, but too hard and steep to overcome. They were back in camp late in the evening having, on the face of it, come within a hair’s breadth of climbing a peak of 7,412 metres, almost certainly the highest any human had been before.

  Graham’s lecture on his experiences to the Royal Geographical Society was full of incident but laconic; Joseph Hooker, now in his late sixties and in the audience, didn’t much care for this young upstart and challenged Graham’s claim that the altitude hadn’t bothered him much. Hooker was sceptical, having himself been unable to move at such heights without ‘a hoop of iron’ around his heart. Graham also included some sharp observations about the quality of maps being produced by the Survey of India. It pained him, allowing for the hospitality he’d received, ‘but what can I say when we found one whole range omitted, glaciers portrayed where trees of 4 ft. thickness are growing . . . ’ He had come across another traveller near Nanda Devi who described the map they were both using as ‘beautifully inaccurate’. His fellow climber Emil Boss wasn’t just an hotelier; he was a captain in the Swiss army, which produced maps of Switzerland that were second to none. The day after Graham’s lecture, Boss spoke at the Alpine Club. While the Survey’s latest map of Sikkim was admirable, he said, that of Garhwal was a work of the imagination. There had been a long collaboration between mountaineers and military authorities in the preparation of accurate mountain maps. The offer was there for officers of the Indian Survey Department to come to Switzerland to get some Alpine training. Douglas Freshfield, a leading member of the Alpine Club and one of those alpinists spreading the gospel of mountaineering beyond Europe, then spoke in support of William Henry Johnson, a humbly born surveyor whose idea of a Himalayan Club similar to the Alpine Club had been dismissed by complacent Indian authorities.

  If the criticism was meant to be constructive, the Indian Survey Department didn’t take it that way. An anonymous correspondent, describing himself as ‘for nearly 30 years a wanderer in the Himalayas’, wrote a damning dismissal of Graham’s claim to have almost climbed Kabru, which was published in the Allahabad newspaper the Pioneer, where Rudyard Kipling would shortly be working. Letters to the paper quickly followed, from the ‘Indian school of mountaineers’, speaking up for the Survey of India and pouring scorn on Graham. If doughty Tibetans and Sherpas at Darjeeling said it was impossible, then so it must be. Graham, they claimed, had probably confused Kabru with Kabur, a foothill on the approach march, a suggestion designed to insult. Freshfield dismantled the Pioneer’s arguments, reiterated that offers of help were well meant and, in a nod to the Great Game, drew unfavourable comparisons between the nanny-like attitudes of the Indian authorities and the cheerful laissez-faire of the Russians. Graham himself remained silent and soon slipped from view. A rumour surfaced that having suffered some kind of financial disaster he had left for America to become, some said, a cowboy. In 1910 he resurfaced as vice consul in the Mexican city of Durango, a blurry face captured in a few faded cuttings from Mexican newspapers, like a character from a Graham Greene novel, the veneer of his position barely concealing what must have been quite a story, and one we will likely never know.

  It’s sometimes claimed the mountaineering ‘establishment’ turned its back on Graham, but this was far from the case. Douglas Freshfield maintained his support, joined by almost all those alpinists who made their way to Sikkim in the years before the Great War. Those mountaineers who did dismiss Graham’s claims usually had a dog in the fight, like William Hunter Workman, husband of the indomitable New England heiress and explorer, Fanny Bullock Workman. His own, rather creaky claim to the world altitude record, set in 1903 in the Karakoram, relied on Graham’s being discounted. One of the few members of the Alpine Club to express doubts about Graham’s climb, in public at least, was the illustrious Sir Martin Conway: art historian, writer and like the Workmans a dedicated self-promoter. Conway also had a claim to the altitude record, having reached 6,904 metres on Baltoro Kangri during his 1892 expedition to the Karakoram. He dismissed Graham’s ascent while promoting his own record in an entry he wrote on mountaineering for the 1908 Encyclopaedia of Sport. Douglas Freshfield, by then an old-stager of Himalayan exploration himself, locked horns with Conway in the pages of the Alpine Journal, and in the 1911 edition Conway recanted.

  Perhaps Graham’s most potent detractor was Kenneth Mason, decorated soldier and celebrated geographer, a Survey of India man to his fingertips and later professor of geography at Oxford. His history of Himalayan exploration and mountaineering, first published in 1955, some seventy years after Graham’s expedition, was the Everest of its type and remains influential even now. Mason’s dismissal of William Woodman Graham from the record books was made with the indulgent patience of a parent removing a precious heirloom from their toddler’s sticky fingers. Mason had been inspired as a boy by the exploratory travels of Francis Younghusband, ‘the last imperial adventurer’, who, in 1893, had cooked up the notion of attempting Everest with Charlie Bruce on a polo field in Chitral. (Or at least, that was the yarn. Younghusband had forgotten all about it when Bruce reminded him decades later. That didn’t stop them using the story in a Daily Telegraph puff piece about Everest: ‘if it brings in another twenty quid to the Expedition funds that is all to the good’.) To Mason, and the long sequence of surveyors before him, mountaineering ought to be well organised, productive and useful. It should advance knowledge and fill libraries with maps and catalogues. Mountaineering was not a game, to be played for its own sake; blanks on the map were there to be filled, not relished.

  Mason’s perspective was philosophically different from that of many mountaineers, reflecting a schism, begun in the 1880s, whose consequences would percolate through to attempts on Everest, even up to its ascent in 1953. At its extreme, these differences became polar opposites. One side put result ahead of method; the other did precisely the reverse: how you climbed was more important than reaching a summit. This alternative view saw mountaineering as its own reward, the game for its own sake, producing a more whimsical and slighter literary output. Some in authority found this self-indulgent, believing that risking your neck required a higher purpose, especially a patriotic one. They preferred large expeditions with heavy financial backing, invested with the prestige of institutions, with purposes beyond mountaineering: scientific and geographical. They delighted in packed lecture halls and weighty books, the sort of expedition to advance a career.

  That was certainly true for Martin Conway. He was a strong alpinist, once climbing the Matterhorn from Zermatt and still getting back in time for afternoon tea, but, like most things, climbing eventually bored him. His 1892 expedition to the Karakoram was modelled on Whymper’s Peruvian adventure after the viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, suggested he delete the phrase ‘mountaineering party’ from his request for a permit and replace it with ‘a party of exploration’, since ‘mountaineering is a sport and couldn’t be taken official notice of, at any rate in my case’. He took with him Matthias Zurbriggen, the great guide from the Swiss village of Saas-Fee, later hired by William and Fanny Workman, as well as the young Charles Bruce as transport officer, and the fiery socialist Oscar Eckenstein, an exceptional climber, who introduced Conway to crampons, then rather frowned on. Together, Conway, Bruce and Eckenstein explored the Hispar and Biafo glaciers, which together make the longest glacier passage, 120 kilometres, outside
the Arctic regions. Eckenstein then left the expedition after one political argument too many, starting an enduring feud. Conway moved on to the Baltoro glacier, where he attempted a peak he dubbed Golden Throne, now known as Baltoro Kangri. Knighted in 1895, ostensibly for his efforts in mapping the Karakoram, he later became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge and a ‘coalition coupon’ member of parliament in the 1918 general election. When his peerage was announced, Punch carried a cartoon of ‘The Climber’, and Conway weaved an ice axe into his coat of arms. But he never went to the Himalaya again.

  ‘There are three great Himalayan views familiar to English dwellers in India’, Bruce wrote. ‘Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling, Nanda Devi and Trisul from Naini Tal, and Nanga Parbat from the Murree hills.’ The contrast between Conway’s expedition in the Karakoram and Fred Mummery’s attempt on Nanga Parbat in the summer of 1895 could not have been starker. This was the first time anyone had tried a mountain of such scale and great height, and it happened almost at the start of Himalayan mountaineering, as though the Wright brothers had set off across the Atlantic a week after Kitty Hawk.

  From the Deosai plateau, south-east of the mountain, the impression is even starker; the south face, rising above the Rupal valley, is a vast white shining wall. One of the first Europeans to view Nanga Parbat was the traveller Godfrey Thomas Vigne, welcomed there in the late 1830s by the raja of Baltistan, Ahmed Shah, as the first Englishman he had met. Vigne’s book, the first comprehensive Western account of the region and an instant classic, described the peak from this angle as ‘the most awful and magnificent sight in all the Himalaya’. The Schlagintweits passed Nanga Parbat on their travels in the mid 1850s, translating its Sanskrit name as ‘naked mountain’, capturing in a watercolour how its powerful bulk dominates Kashmir. Many famous Himalayan peaks are concealed from view by intervening ranges: Nanga Parbat is not one of them. From the banks of the Indus, which flows close by, to its summit is a height gain of seven kilometres.