Recorded sun sights rest on the credibility of those reporting them, and the texture of Peary’s testimony left many doubters. A 1990 study by the pro-Peary Foundation for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation lent support to Peary’s claim, particularly by its analysis of shadows in Peary’s photographs, but found no hard evidence proving it and was criticized for relying too heavily on Peary’s disputed records.89 Adding to Peary’s side of the ledger, a 2005 reenactment of the outbound journey by British adventurer Tom Avery matched Peary’s overall time, though without achieving any sustained bursts as fast as Peary claimed near the pole or suffering as many delays due to open leads. In short, while comparable, the two expeditions were far from identical. Even Peary’s fiercest critics—the ones accusing him of outright fraud—concede that, in a campaign that went far beyond any prior farthest north, Peary reached closer to one geographic pole than Shackleton did to the other. When coupled with the work of Mawson, David, and Mackay to reach the south magnetic pole, the remarkable efforts of Peary and Shackleton made 1909 the grandest year ever for polar discovery.
Once Peary completed his observations on April 7, his men hoisted the expedition’s five flags on an ice hummock behind camp and, at Peary’s direction, gave three spirited cheers for the American one.90 Having long promised to “nail the Stars and Stripes to the Pole,” Peary had carried this particular American flag on every expedition since 1894, and left a small fragment of it at each previous farthest north.91 The team posed for the grainy photograph that was destined to appear in newspapers around the world. Although Peary could have posed it virtually anywhere on the Arctic ice pack, more than any sextant readings this iconic photograph became public proof that his party had reached the pole. Then, after trying without success to sleep for a few hours, the men left their North Pole camp about 4 P.M. on the 7th, heading south toward the last pair of igloos they had left on their trail coming north.
Cape Columbia lay 475 miles away. The window for sledge travel across the Arctic ice pack was closing fast with the approach of summer.
Chapter 10
The Third Pole
BY AN ODD COINCIDENCE, on the same day in March 1909 that Peary passed the Italian record north of 1900, Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, then age thirty-eight, after a rousing send-off from Turin, the historical capital of Savoy, boarded a commercial steamer in Marseilles for what some viewed as the boldest adventure in a year of adventures. Having made celebrated first ascents in Europe, Africa, and the Americas over the previous two decades, the duke now aimed to set a world altitude record and perhaps summit K2, the highest accessible mountain on earth and one of only three exceeding 28,000 feet. Due to K2’s extreme height, notorious weather, and remote location, the Italian Alpine Club depicted this climb by the duke as “more difficult and perilous” than any of his previous attempts and hailed it on his departure as the “crowning of a brilliant career as a mountaineer and explorer.”1
For the expedition, the duke recruited eleven crack Italian mountaineers to serve in staff or support positions. The former consisted of the duke’s navy aide-de-camp Federico Negrotto as cartographer and two colleagues from his Saint Elias and Ruwenzori expeditions, the already renowned fifty-year-old photographer Vittorio Sella, who took along his assistant Erminio Botta, and Filippo De Filippi, the expedition’s physician and chronicler. The latter included Joseph and Laurent Petigax, who went on the duke’s African expedition, Alexis and Henri Brocherel, veterans of prior Himalayan climbs, and alpinists Emil Brocherel, Albert Savoie, and Ernest Bareux. The first four of these professional mountaineers officially served as guides and the last three as porters, but all seven performed guidelike functions at times and carry that designation here. Certainly as fine a team of Italian climbers as ever before assembled, it rivaled any other of its day.
AT THE TIME, SOME doubted if humans could survive for long at extreme altitudes. No one had yet climbed higher than 24,000 feet, with the reigning record recently set on Kabru, an Indian mountain near the easily accessible British hill station of Darjeeling in the eastern Himalayas. This allowed for short times at high altitude and rapid returns to low, long-inhabited levels. Climbing K2, in contrast, posed colossal physical and logistical challenges simply to begin the assault, much more to finish it. The mountain rose from a remote, uninhabited glacial valley, which itself stood higher than any peak in the Alps. Base camps would be higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. The cumulative effect of remaining at such high altitudes for long periods, some experts then thought, could prove fatal. Certainly they would test the known limits of human endurance. Nevertheless, on April 9, two days after Peary turned back south from his pole, the duke and his team disembarked with nearly 7 tons of climbing supplies and equipment in Mumbai, India. There they boarded a train bound north toward the Karakoram, which some geographers considered a northwestern extension of the Himalayas and others classified as a distinct range. Legendary British climber Bill Tilman later called the duke’s effort “The original Himalayan expedition in the grand style.”2
“The name Himalaya denotes no mere chain of mountains,” De Filippi explained. “It denotes a complex system of ranges, of immense table-lands, of intricate valleys and of mighty rivers that has no rival upon the face of the earth.” Running roughly 1,500 miles in length from the Afghan border in the northwest nearly to Myanmar in the southeast, and up to 500 miles in width, the Himalayas divided the subcontinent of India, then ruled by Britain, from Central Asia, then dominated by Russia. In 1909, the Karakoram was a remote and sparsely populated region of the wider Himalayas, which itself remained a place of mystery to Westerners. “Many of the valleys are nearly desert for hundreds of miles, with sparse and squalid villages, where a scanty population just contrives to wrest a bare living from the arid stony waste,” De Filippi stated of the Karakoram.3 Its high mountains and vast glaciers appeared as lifeless as the polar regions—even the locals avoided them. Yet by 1900, those very mountains and glaciers were attracting the sort of adventure-seeking, Gilded Age Westerner drawn to explore the unknown and climb the unclimbed. This was the Karakoram: like the poles, a virtual blank space on Western maps.
“It is separated from the Himalaya proper by the upper course of the Indus, and lies nearly 200 miles from the capital of Kashmir,” De Filippi wrote about Karakoram and its isolation. “It is accessible only to expeditions organized for distant exploration, and on this account it has been seldom visited.”4 When the Great Trigonometrical Survey of British India reached the region in 1856, it measured many of the Karakoram’s major peaks from a Himalayan observation post on Mount Harmukh, 130 miles south of K2. From this distance, Thomas Montgomerie first saw and sketched the mountain. Because of its location, K2 was not visible from settled areas and, at least so far as Montgomerie knew, was utterly unknown.
Reports of the unnamed mountain’s staggering height and stunning beauty soon reached the world. The Trigonometrical Survey had a policy of labeling mountains by their local names, but K2 had none. It received the bureaucratic designation of Karakoram #2, or K2. By the century’s end, geographers recognized K2 as second in height only to the central Himalayas’ Mount Everest, which Nepal and Tibet had closed to foreigners.
Because it remained little explored and included many of the world’s highest peaks, the Karakoram Range called to the duke. He knew it contained the largest glaciers outside the polar regions, some not fully mapped, and twenty-nine mountains over 24,000 feet, none yet climbed. His expedition could make major geographical discoveries and set climbing records even if it failed to summit on K2. The range, which runs southeast to northwest for over 300 miles at the intersection of modern-day Pakistan, India, and China, was typically approached from the south or west, whereas K2 rises in the east near the Chinese border. Several British expeditions had explored the western Karakoram around the Hispar, Chogo Lungma, and Biafo glaciers during the 1800s. In 1899 and 1902–03, the wealthy American climbing couple William and Fanny Bullock Workm
an, together with a small army of guides and porters, crisscrossed these glaciers and climbed their adjacent mountains, leading to a series of new altitude records for a female climber. From a 20,000-foot summit in 1899, Fanny Workman reportedly became the first Western woman to see K2, but neither she nor her husband ever ventured near it or into the eastern Karakoram. Returning to Kashmir in 1908, she set an altitude record for women of 22,735 feet that stood for nearly three decades.
Until the duke’s expedition, only a small handful of Westerners had even seen, much less explored, the glaciers and mountains of the eastern Karakoram. Returning from a reconnaissance mission to China in 1887, the youthful British army lieutenant Francis Younghusband became the first European to cross the 18,000-foot-high Mustagh Pass near K2 and, by doing so, see the mountain’s north face. Five years later, British mountaineer Martin Conway led the first expedition to traverse the entire length of the eastern Karakoram’s Baltoro Glacier, which offers access to K2 from the south. Conway claimed first ascents of two lesser peaks on the glacier’s flanks but never approached K2, which rises on the north side of a tributary glacier named for the Trigonometrical Survey leader Henry Godwin-Austen. Looking up the Godwin-Austen Glacier from its junction with the Baltoro to view K2 and its companion peaks for the first time from base to summit, Conway’s Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen exclaimed, “They don’t know what mountains are in Switzerland!”5
In 1902, Oscar Eckenstein, an original member of Conway’s 1892 expedition, returned with four other Europeans to climb K2. Fearing espionage in the tense border region, British agents initially stopped Eckenstein from entering Kashmir. A socialist critic of imperialism and son of a Jewish immigrant to Britain, Eckenstein was a tempting target for security-conscious border officials, especially since he was traveling with Aleister Crowley, a Cambridge-educated hedonist and avowed Satanist. Eckenstein and Crowley were gifted climbers with elite connections, however, and ultimately pulled enough strings to gain entry. Their party established its base camp below K2’s east face and made several unsuccessful attempts to scale the mountain before turning back due to a toxic mix of bad weather, altitude-related illnesses, and revolts against Eckenstein’s authoritarian leadership. The expedition’s Swiss physician, Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, returned proclaiming that K2’s northeast ridge was climbable, while Crowley, the better mountaineer, came back touting the southeast ridge. These pronouncements caught the eye of the duke, who was looking for a worthy distraction from his failing romance with Katherine Elkins. Unlike Eckenstein, he traveled with the full support of India’s British overlords and the blessings of King Edward VII.6
EVERY PRIOR EXPEDITION TO the eastern Karakoram had encountered bad weather. Climbing was only possible in the region during the summer, but even this season posed problems. July and August, the best months for mountaineering in the Alps, brought the summer monsoon to India, the duke explained. By the time the weather improved in September, the days were cold and short. “I decided to start the exploration at the beginning of June,” he stated. “This month, although the mountains can still be in unfavorable conditions, the days were long.”7 Eckenstein’s party enjoyed its only brief spells of fair weather during June, though Conway found it as bad as other months. This timetable gave the duke less than two months to move men and supplies from Mumbai to the mountains and a month or so for climbing, depending on when the monsoon began. Once unimaginable given the distance, terrain, and political and cultural obstacles involved, British occupation made it possible. The duke took full advantage of his wealth and position.
Cleared through customs without the normal inspections, on April 9, the same day they arrived in Mumbai by steamship, the Italians departed the city with their tons of supplies by train, escorted by a British army officer. There began a royal cavalcade through British India from south to far north. A classic adventure of the Edwardian era ending in the deepest exploration to date of the eastern Karakoram, it captured the essence of the Raj as privileged Europeans saw it at its pre–World War I height.
Without exiting past the station at any stop, the Italians reached the railway’s northern terminus at the garrison town of Rawalpindi in two days. “Temples and shrines, old forts and ruins, pass rapidly before our eyes,” De Filippi wrote of the train trip. “Alas! We see nothing but the railway stations.”8 Arriving in Rawalpindi on the evening of April 11, by the next day their caravan began moving north by the new post road to Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital of the multiethnic protectorate of Jammu and Kashmir. A princely state within the British Empire in India, the protectorate had come into being a half century earlier through the forced union of Hindu Jammu with Sunni Muslim Kashmir and lesser realms. These included the Shiite Muslim domain of Baltistan, or “Little Tibet,” which the Anglocentric 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—the reference book of empire—described as a thinly populated “mass of lofty mountains” capped by K2.9
With their climbing supplies and equipment prepackaged in two hundred sixty-two parcels of 50 pounds each, the Italians covered the 200 miles from Rawalpindi to Srinagar by all manner of carriage, oxcart, and horse wagon—some fast, some slow—using every vehicle that they could commission or commandeer, none of them motorized. On April 14, the two luxury landau carriages carrying the duke and his immediate party crossed from British India proper into the British-controlled protectorate, with a representative of the reigning maharaja, Pratap Singh, greeting them at the border. Francis Younghusband, then serving as the British Resident in Kashmir, paved the way, arranging an exemption from taxes and inspections for the expedition’s supplies and equipment. He also engaged the local British agent A. C. Baines to obtain and oversee porters, ponies, and fresh food for the expedition in the protectorate.
Located at the heart of the lush, mile-high Vale of Kashmir, an oval plain encircled by lofty mountains, Srinagar was something of a Shangri-La for the British in hot, densely populated India during the early 1900s. Those with the means rushed there in late spring, typically living on houseboats, before moving higher into the mountains for midsummer. “To our party, who had left Italy barely twenty days before, the first impression was one of slight disappointment,” De Filippi confessed. “But to travelers who come to Kashmir after months or years spent in the parched and burning plains of India, or after wearying journeys across the barren waste of Central Asia, it must seem a paradise indeed.”10
The duke referred to Kashmir as “this Switzerland of India” and compared Srinagar, with its canals, to Venice. “The inhabitants are tall and well-proportioned with European features and bright eyes,” he noted.11 Arriving in Srinagar on the third day after leaving Rawalpindi, the Italians remained there until all the various vehicles carrying their supplies caught up with them over the next week.
Departing Srinagar by canal to the start of the overland route across the Himalayas from Kashmir to Central Asia, the Italians traveled on ornate shikara-style barges supplied by the maharaja, each rowed by more than a dozen red-festooned oarsmen. A small colony of houseboats and tents waited at the trailhead for the duke’s arrival, along with ninety-three packhorses supplied for the next leg of the journey. This ancient route over the 11,500-foot-high Zoji Pass linked the humid Sind Valley in the south with the arid Dras Valley in the north. Twenty-five miles in, the expedition reached snow and transferred the load from packhorses to Kashmiri porters—two hundred seventy-one in all, each carrying one of the expedition’s 50-pound parcels plus his own supplies for the fixed fee of one rupee per day. “Their feet are clad in sandals of plaited straw,” De Filippi noted. “Their legs are either bare or covered with puttees.” Snowdrifts exceeded 3 feet deep in places, storms struck frequently, and avalanches posed a constant threat. De Filippi described this stretch as “an interlude of high mountain life between the green garden of Kashmir and the parched and torrid valley of the Indus basin.”12 The expedition carried £450 in small coins simply to pay its hundreds of individual indigenous porters.
Just short of the pass’s summit, thirty more porters sent by Baines from the far side met the expedition to help with the final steep ascent and beat a path through the snow. Then the entire three-hundred-person entourage descended the Dras River Valley to the Indus River, which it followed northwest to Skardu, the capital of Baltistan, a Shiite Muslim prefecture of the Protectorate of Jammu and Kashmir that includes the Karakoram. “There is probably no range of mountains on the face of the earth whose two slopes reveal features so absolutely opposed to one another,” De Filippi observed about the traverse. “The traveller has crossed the great northern barrier of India, and has suddenly entered a country which is physically identical with Tibet.”13
The vivid green of the Kashmir and Sind valleys gave way to the dull gray of the Dras and Indus valleys. The duke called them “stony, arid, and monotonous.”14 Once over the pass and out of the high-country snow, saddle ponies were waiting for the duke and his Italian party, while a mix of packhorses and fresh porters took up the load. Three days or 50 miles brought them to the Indus River, and then five more days northwest took them to Skardu, which an earlier British traveler had depicted as “a scattered collection of houses and hamlets” perched on a bleak plateau 150 vertical feet above the riverbank.15
“The striking peculiarities of the Dras valley had made a strong impression on us. But not until we reached the Indus valley did we realize to the full the nature of this land of desolation and sterility,” De Filippi wrote. “Geological evolution is proceeding with such obvious plainness that the traveller feels as though he were beholding a country in a state of formation and witnessing the modelling of the earth’s crust.”16 The stark mountains, sharp cliffs, and stone-filled valleys seemed of recent creation and ongoing formation. Reaching Skardu on May 8, the party had made the 225-mile passage across the Himalayas in eleven days.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 24