by Ed Douglas
some people hear voices at high altitudes. Dr Kellas also heard them at sea level . . . He said that in the mountains, when no other Europeans were there, he answered these voices, and his Sherpas had great confidence in a man who had long conversations with spirits at night.
He remained always sympathetic to local sensibilities, arguing publicly that Everest should be known by its local name: Chomolungma.
Alec Kellas’s greatest mountaineering achievement was his ascent in 1911 of Pauhunri in Sikkim. By then, he knew this stretch of the Himalaya as well as the hills of his native Scotland, having travelled back and forth across it several times in much the same way as the locals did, without a trace of the pomp or comfort imported with larger expeditions. Thanks to an error by the Survey of India, he never knew Pauhunri’s true height was 7,128 metres, a few metres higher than Trisul, meaning Kellas and not Longstaff once held the altitude record. The omission is almost irrelevant: it was his ideas that made Kellas a true pioneer. He recorded and measured as much as he could, trained local men as photographers and sent them to Everest. The use of guides was, he argued, unethical. He theorised about rates of ascent. Kellas believed that a human without supplementary oxygen could only climb three hundred feet (ninety metres) an hour near the summit of Everest, a figure largely proven when Reinhold Messner finally managed the feat in 1978. Arthur Hinks, the dry and often irritable secretary of the Mount Everest Committee wrote to Kellas: ‘no one perhaps in the world combines your enterprise as a mountaineer and your knowledge of physiology’.
As his researches deepened, he became increasingly obsessive and unstable, as though he knew his time was short. He quit his job to focus on Everest. His final winter and spring were spent in frenzied activity, to the extent that when, in the summer of 1921, he joined a reconnaissance expedition in advance of the first attempt on Everest, he was already exhausted. The expedition’s food was poorly managed and several in the team came down with stomach problems that proved fatal for Kellas, who died on the high Tibetan plateau with none of his teammates near him. The expedition’s leader, the austere and disagreeable soldier Charles Howard-Bury, wrote: ‘It does not pay to send middle-aged men out to this country.’ John Noel, who filmed the 1924 expedition, when George Mallory was lost, had shared with Kellas the dream of reaching Everest. The British might have had a chance, he wrote, with ‘the combination of Kellas’ Himalayan knowledge and Mallory’s dash’. It was Mallory’s dash that would achieve immortality; the useful intelligence and open-mindedness of Alexander Kellas would slide from view.
16
Everest Diplomacy
‘I sometimes think of this expedition,’ George Mallory wrote from under the shadow of Everest in the summer of 1921,
as a fraud from beginning to end, invented by the wild enthusiasm of one man, Younghusband; puffed up by the would-be wisdom of certain pundits in the A[lpine] C[lub]; and imposed upon the youthful ardour of your humble servant.
If climbing Everest was a fraud, then it was one Mallory paid for with his life. Three years later, in early June 1924, he disappeared while attempting to reach the mist-shrouded summit, leaving behind one of the enduring legends of exploration and a mystery too: did he reach the summit before he perished? That question will likely remain unanswered; even the discovery of his body in 1999 failed to produce definitive evidence. That most expert opinion concludes Mallory didn’t reach the top only adds to the enduring image, as potent now as it was then, of a human striving against all odds to realise a seemingly unattainable dream. His friend and mentor Geoffrey Winthrop Young, in a letter to the recently widowed Ruth Mallory, called it ‘that magnificent courage and endurance, that joyous and supreme triumph of a human spirit over all circumstances, all mortal resistance’. Mallory himself recognised such talk as a kind of propaganda. In his letter from 1921, he wrote with cynical weariness:
The prospect of ascent in any direction is almost nil, and our present job is to rub our noses against the impossible in such a way as to persuade mankind that some noble heroism has failed again.
There were three expeditions to Everest in the early 1920s, a drama in three acts with Mallory the star. Born in Cheshire, the son of a clergyman, his mother the daughter of a clergyman, he was, in author Patrick French’s words, a ‘public schoolmaster and minor Bloomsbury groupie’. Mallory balanced his restless streak of self-absorbtion with bourgeois respectability. As a Cambridge undergraduate Lytton Strachey lusted after him. (‘Mon Dieu! – George Mallory! – When that’s been written, what more need be said?’) But beyond some unsatisfactory fumbling with Strachey’s brother James, Mallory generally stuck to the rails. As the decade of flappers and modernism dawned, he was a married teacher in his mid thirties with three young children, not quite matching the dazzling brilliance of his more famous friends at Cambridge; the ‘label of Everest’, as Geoffrey Winthrop Young called it when persuading him to go, was an opportunity to stoke the embers of his early promise.
Sir Francis Younghusband, imperialist, mystic and president of the Royal Geographical Society, had as a young man forty years earlier thrilled the British public with his daring traverse of the Mustagh Pass. Climbing Everest was a chance for him to rekindle that youthful fire, if only by proxy. He needed an arrow to aim at the mountain, and Mallory was the best available in a quiver half-emptied by the Great War. (Or as Tom Longstaff put it in a note to the editor of the Alpine Journal: ‘Owing to the War the supply of young climbers is less than formerly.’) Younghusband thought Mallory ‘good-looking, with a sensible, cultivated air’. Later, after Mallory’s death, he was more critical, complaining that Mallory had never grasped the scale of Younghusband’s vision, judging it all to be ‘a bit of sensationalism’. Mallory, prone to striking arch poses in letters to friends, wrote how Younghusband ‘amuses and delights me’. The Everest reconnaissance planned for 1921 had ‘become a sort of religious pilgrimage in his eyes. I expect I shall end by sitting at his feet, hearing tales of Lhasa and Chitral.’ That quasi-mystical strand remains a key flavour in Mallory’s enduring myth, a narrative deliberately frothed up by Younghusband, who had a flair for publicity and was helped in that side of things by the novelist John Buchan and Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who dubbed Mallory the Galahad of Everest.
The Everest expeditions of the 1920s, the first in 1921 an exploratory reconnaissance and then two full attempts in 1922 and 1924, have been characterised as a coda to the horrors of the Great War. Many of those involved had fought, including Mallory. Yet the cultural inspiration was not the sorrow of war and its modernist aftermath; it was instead an attempt to recapture the self-assurance of the Edwardian era. Naturally enough, those, like Younghusband, who drove the project, were older, but the average age of those who went on the 1921 reconnaissance was forty and the average for the specialist climbers was even higher. They may have fought in the war but they weren’t formed in it.
This atmosphere of late imperialism was meshed in Younghusband’s mind with an ill-defined spiritual yearning that preoccupied him throughout the 1920s, years the old soldier spent writing increasingly self-indulgent mystical tracts. Such apparent contradictions were his hallmark. In 1904, just before he marched into Tibet at the head of a potent military force to wage war on a hopelessly outgunned Tibetan army, he had read a book by the Theosophist and political campaigner Annie Besant, whom he had recently met, called Cosmic Consciousness. It offered, Younghusband told his wife Helen, ‘a most intensely beautiful and peaceful idea of the Universe’. It was typical of Younghusband to hold inside his head two potent but contradictory myths about Tibet, as a lost spiritual haven and the imperial adventurer’s blank canvas. In fact, the early Everest expeditions as a whole can be understood both as mystical feats of tragi-heroic mountaineering and part of a decades-long campaign of military and diplomatic intervention by the British in Tibet.
Younghusband wasn’t the only powerful Victorian adventurer with an interest in Tibet. His predecessor as president of the Royal Geographi
cal Society was the more prosaic surveyor Sir Thomas Holdich. In 1906 Holdich had published Tibet the Mysterious, one of several such books published in the aftermath of Younghusband’s invasion. Holdich’s Tibet was in fact not at all mysterious.
Now that our mission to Tibet has returned to the Indian border, [he wrote,] we know how very little there is in Lhasa to justify that mystic fascination . . . The veil has been torn aside and the naked city has been revealed in all its weird barbarity.
Yet it was on Holdich’s watch that pre-war dreams of an attempt on Everest were resuscitated. Before Holdich was the Himalayan explorer Douglas Freshfield, president during the Great War, whose grandfather’s fortune had been made working for the East India Company. Before Freshfield was the political titan Lord Curzon, who as viceroy not only sent Younghusband into Tibet but offered early and powerful support to the Everest adventure. ‘It has always seemed to me,’ Curzon wrote to Freshfield in 1905,
a reproach that with the second highest mountain in the world [Kangchenjunga] for the most part in British territory and with the highest in a neighbouring and friendly state we, the mountaineers and pioneers par excellence of the universe, make no sustained and scientific attempt to climb to the top of either of them.
When the British did finally make their first visit to Everest in 1921, the enterprise was not only launched from within the imperial worldview these men shared, it followed a physical route made viable by Curzon’s aggressive policy and the 1904 invasion. Permission for the expeditions required considerable diplomatic effort, bringing into play high-ranking political officers. While the climbers got the headlines, it was the intervention of these singularly placed diplomats that gained them access to the mountain. After Mallory’s death, there would be no further attempts in the 1920s. Ostensibly, this was because of offence caused to the Tibetan government. The true reasons for this rupture went far deeper, revealing a structural fault-line in the British Empire’s strategy on its Himalayan frontier, a strategy whose origins emerged from the smouldering wreckage of the rebellion of 1857.
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On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria’s proclamation appointing Lord Canning as her first viceroy in India was published at Allahabad, formalising the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British crown. Victoria promised toleration of race and creed and acknowledged herself bound by ‘obligations of Duty’ to her new Indian subjects, a new contract built on justice, an attempt to turn the page on the horror of civil war. Another commitment was aimed at India’s elite.
We desire no extension of Our present territorial Possessions; and while We will permit no aggression upon Our Dominions or Our Rights, to be attempted with impunity, We shall sanction no encroachment on those of others.
That pledge reassured Indian princes anxious about their future status. It also signalled a shift in perspective. The Company’s violent struggle for control of India was ended, beginning a period of consolidation under the aegis of a just and protective monarch. This didn’t prevent millions of Indians dying miserably in a sequence of famines, particularly those of the late 1870s, when laissez-faire economics devastated southern India. The then viceroy Lord Lytton was more anxious about external threats, particularly the Russian Empire: the Great Game, although the term hardly existed before Kipling popularised it in 1901 with the publication of Kim. The bulk of this confrontation took place in Central Asia, to the north-west of India, but as years passed and British policy developed the Himalaya was drawn in. Victoria’s promise to avoid the acquisition of new territory wouldn’t prevent the British Raj from consolidating its influence in the hodgepodge of states along its Himalayan marches, whether they liked it or not.
Viewed from Lhasa, the British arrival in the Himalaya in the early nineteenth century must have looked like a wildfire spreading out of control. The Dalai Lama, whom the Qing had made temporal head of state in 1750, was boxed in by China’s ambans in Lhasa, the demands of an ancient and often fractious aristocracy and the immense power of Tibet’s enormous monastic institutions, which controlled much of the economy. Buddhist Tibet’s instinct was simply not to engage with the belligerent power occupying the holy land where the Buddha had preached. And with the East India Company anxious not to antagonise the Qing, British dealings with Tibet had been almost non-existent in the first part of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s it was a different story. War with Nepal had given the Company control of Kumaon and Garhwal. The bullish militaristic regime in Kathmandu might have dragged the Company into further damaging and expensive wars. Instead, a combination of geography, internal rivalries and diplomacy meant Nepal, unlike Afghanistan, became a model frontier state, at least from the British point of view.
Things looked different from Tibet. Far from being pacified, Nepal’s charismatic leader Jang Bahadur sought to recover lost prestige elsewhere. In the early 1850s, with the Qing Empire embroiled in its devastating civil war with the Christian millenarian Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and Tibet distracted by the death of the eleventh Dalai Lama, Jang invaded Tibet, swiftly occupying the familiar mountain trade routes through the Kyirong and Bhote Kosi valleys. Thousands of Tibetan troops retreated to the desolate plain of Tingri, so familiar to early Everest climbers, to defend the approaches to Lhasa. Although Jang faced stiffer resistance than anticipated, he forced the Tibetans to sign the Treaty of Thapathali, restoring a good proportion of Nepal’s old trading privileges and returning a Nepali ambassador or vakil to Lhasa, a diplomatic presence that would become immensely beneficial to the British.
Fears about Jang’s reaction to the 1857 rebellion were eased after his intervention on behalf of the British at the siege of Lucknow; in subsequent decades, dynastic struggle among his successors gave the British a useful lever. In 1885 Jang’s younger brother and successor Ranodip was assassinated. It was, as so often, a family affair. Four of the seventeen sons, the satra bhai, of Jang’s youngest brother Dhir, entered the palace on the false pretext of delivering a message from the governor general in Calcutta. Bir Shamsher, the eldest, remained a floor below, where the king had his apartments; the others, including another future prime minister Chandra Shamsher, continued upstairs. Here, in the words of the campaigning journalist William Digby, he ‘requited his uncle’s confidence by basely murdering him’. The first bullet grazed Ranodip’s forehead. The second hit him squarely. Digby had written a passionate exposé of British failures during the famines of the late 1870s and was a powerful critic of the Raj who worked for a while for the Indian National Congress. He wrote an account of Anglo-Nepali relations criticising Calcutta for doing nothing in this crisis to help Ranodip’s dynasty, despite his support during the 1857 rebellion.
No public department in any country, despotically or constitutionally ruled, ever had so short a memory, or one more oblivious to history and the claims of justice, than the Calcutta Foreign Office.
For Calcutta’s foreign office, it was simply a question of expediency. For generations the British had wanted to recruit Gurkha troops inside Nepal, something Jang Bahadur and his brother Ranodip had resisted. Bir’s bloody coup gave the British the necessary leverage to negotiate that access.
As far as Tibet was concerned, the British were looking through a glass, darkly. The East India Company had brilliant scholars at its disposal but none of them spoke Tibetan. The Company had invested precious little in studying the vast country to the north. Years before it had given a small allowance to the Hungarian philologist Sándor Csoma de Kőrös, who had met William Moorcroft in Kashmir in July 1822. The two men, both prodigious travellers, became friends: the ever-curious and bullish Englishman and the quiet Hungarian, a born scholar, shy but dedicated. Moorcroft suggested Csoma de Kőrös travel with him to Ladakh to study and translate manuscripts in the Buddhist monasteries there. With Moorcroft’s introductions, the Hungarian became the first European to visit Zanskar, the hauntingly wild region south of the Ladakhi capital Leh, studying with a lama called Sangey Phuntsog at the palace of Zangl
a on the banks of the Zanskar river. Sangey Phuntsog wasn’t a monk, but an amchi, a medical practitioner and also an astrologer. The two men sat on a sheepskin rug huddled against the cold in the Hungarian’s tiny cell, ploughing through the great encyclopaedias of Tibetan Buddhism.
Csoma de Kőrös also visited Zongkhul monastery where he learned more about the practice of Buddhism from the abbot Kunga Choeleg. The abbot wrote a book based on the questions the Hungarian asked him: The Questions of European Skandar, Sándor being the Hungarian version of Alexander. After years of study and intense labour, latterly in Kinnaur on the banks of the Sutlej at the Buddhist centre of Kanam, Csoma de Kőrös travelled to Calcutta where in 1834, he published the first Tibetan grammar in English. He was welcomed into the Asiatic Society of Bengal, working as their librarian for several years before setting out for Lhasa in 1842 at the age of fifty-eight. Crossing the terai on his way to the mountains, he contracted malaria and died at Darjeeling, where he is buried.
Work like that of Sándor Csoma de Kőrös might have seemed peripheral to the business of government but what Calcutta lacked in its dealings with Tibet during the later years of the nineteenth century were precisely his soft skills. The focus in Calcutta for dealings with princely states and foreign powers was the Indian Political Department. Reformed by Lord Ellenborough in 1843, its officers, known as ‘politicals’, were responsible for managing relationships with the leaders of princely states loyal to the British and with regional foreign countries such as Tibet, Bhutan and Nepal. Men like Traill in Kumaon and Hodgson in Kathmandu had proved immensely effective in these roles but building the personal networks required to broker deals and read the complexities of each political crisis, as they had done, required years of dedicated service. George Bogle in Tibet had understood this very clearly and built a good working relationship with the Panchen Lama. Had both men lived, British relations with Tibet might have developed in a more constructive direction. A handful of more perceptive diplomats consulted Bogle’s account of his journey both in manuscript and after it was published in 1876. Yet it took British officialdom until the early years of the twentieth century to appreciate its message. By that time a century had passed and great damage had been done.