Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (10 page)

Reporting for duty at army headquarters, he found himself accused of desertion. Pugh claimed that he was not court-martialed because, in advance of leaving Kephissia, he had obtained a written order from a sympathetic senior officer to go into Athens on a medical errand. Athens was captured by the Germans on the morning after Pugh’s escape from Kephissia, but since the order did not amount to permission to leave the country, a reputation for being “unreliable” followed Pugh through the rest of the war, blighting his chances of promotion or being rewarded for his achievements. His colleagues at Kephissia were all taken prisoner and only released at the end of the war.

Perhaps in an act of revenge, the RAMC now removed Pugh’s temporary promotion to major and, stubbornly ignoring all requests to allow him to go to Canada, or to Harvard, sent him instead to work in hospitals in Belgium, Holland, and Germany until he was demobbed from the army in October 1945.

6

Excess Baggage

Seven years later, the invitation to carry out research on Cho Oyu was a huge challenge for Pugh. He may not have realized it, but he was following in the footsteps of an earlier pioneer called Alexander Kellas.
¹
Kellas was the only person before Pugh to have tried to measure systematically the impact of supplementary oxygen on mountaineers at very high altitudes. A chemist from Middlesex Hospital Medical School, he studied altitude sickness and the effects of oxygen during eight trips to the Himalayas between 1907 and 1921. He was invited to take part in the first Everest expedition in 1921 and took a supply of oxygen with him, but died on the trek-in and the oxygen was not used. After his death the prescient academic paper in which he had described his latest findings and methods vanished into the bowels of the RGS without being published in Britain. It was not rediscovered until the 1980s.
²

In the absence of a blueprint, Pugh immediately became immersed in planning experiments and choosing the equipment he would need. After a month of fevered preparations, he took advantage of a previously booked Swiss holiday at his usual haunt in Engelberg to practice with his instruments in mountain conditions.
³
Once in his favorite bedroom at the Haldengütli guesthouse, he set up the complicated glass instrument—the gas analyzer—that would be his constant companion in the Himalayas.

This essential tool for measuring the proportions of oxygen and carbon dioxide in samples of exhaled breath was fiddly and awkward to operate. Skill and concentration were needed, and he had to practice working with it in differing conditions. Pugh climbed Engelberg’s highest mountain—the Titlis (10,623 feet)—and collected samples of his breath on the summit to take back and analyze. Later he took the gas analyzer itself to the top of the mountain.

Eric Shipton’s preparations for Cho Oyu were somewhat relaxed. One concession to the newly competitive situation was to recruit what for him was a large team of nine climbers, three of whom—Tom Bourdillon, Earle Riddiford, and Edmund Hillary—had been with him on the reconnaissance the year before, together with Charles Evans, Ray Colledge, Alf Gregory, Cam Secord, and New Zealander George Lowe. Michael Ward was invited but could not get leave from his job. Shipton also agreed to incorporate Pugh and his physiology project into the expedition, and agreed to take along the oxygen equipment assembled by Peter Lloyd.

Despite these arrangements, Shipton was still not fully in tune with what he was supposed to be doing. In the first of a series of dispatches for
The
Times
, he emphasized that his overriding aim was to conquer the unclimbed summit of Cho Oyu.
⁴
The training of climbers for Everest, the physiology, and the practice with oxygen equipment were only “important secondary aims.” He freely acknowledged the urgent need for research, conceding: “We still know lamentably little about the reactions of the human body to great altitudes and still less about the reasons for those reactions.” He also admitted that there were questions about oxygen that needed answering, such as: “From what altitude should it be used?” and “What is the correct oxygen flow at various altitudes?”

Nevertheless, he argued that this type of research should
not
be undertaken on a mountaineering expedition, but by “an expedition of qualified scientists whose sole purpose would be physiological research.” While he had led Laurence Kirwan to believe that he was in favor of Pugh’s project, he now seemed to be implying that it had been pushed upon him.

Shipton could not shake off his aversion to large-scale expeditions. However, even as he complained about the “grossly unwieldy and inconvenient” size of the expedition, he also bragged about how easy it was to organize, and how little time he had spent on it: “The organisation was not difficult . . . Lack of funds enforced both extreme economy and simplicity, and only the bare necessities could be taken. A single afternoon sufficed for drawing up a list of all our requirements in the matter of food and equipment.”
⁵

In practice, this meant that Shipton actually planned very little and left everything to others. It was New Zealander Earle Riddiford, already in London, who came to the rescue. His friend Norman Hardie described the situation:

Earle Riddiford visited the Royal Geographical Society office in Kensington and he was horrified to find that there was virtually no action being taken on the gigantic tasks involved in preparations for Cho Oyu. Earle then unofficially took over the tasks of ordering and shipping the considerable amounts of food and equipment which had to be forwarded to Nepal. Shipton, the leader, was hard to locate, and he was most reluctant to make decisions on a number of the planning matters . . . Each morning Earle kept me informed of the frustrations he was encountering. It did not look like a good start for the project.
⁶

On February 18, less than three weeks before the date of departure, Riddiford, who had no medical knowledge and had only been to the Himalayas once before, pleaded with Charles Evans, the expedition doctor, to take charge of the medicine chest: “Dear Evans: I am afraid I will have to ask you to get the medical stores yourself, as unless I farm out some of these jobs I won’t be able to get through everything before leaving . . . Would you please instruct the firm supplying the goods . . . within a week?”
⁷
Despite the rush, everything fell into place. Riddiford managed to marshal the necessary equipment and supplies, Peter Lloyd assembled the “trial” oxygen equipment, and Pugh’s supply of oxygen for his experiments arrived from the Ministry of Supply in time for the departure of the main team by boat on March 7.

Pugh and Shipton left by plane two weeks later, on March 24. Their flight to India crossed directly over Cedars in Lebanon, where Pugh looked down on “the whole of the plateau we used to patrol.” He noticed that “[t]here was still snow down as far as Basharri [Bcharre] at 5,000 feet.” His only comment about Shipton was: “Shipton in trouble with burst eardrums.”

In Delhi, Shipton gave a lecture at the Himalayan Club. Pugh, who had had no opportunity to discuss his project with him before the expedition or during the flight, attended the lecture, hoping to learn something. Shipton spoke about the difficulties climbers faced at altitudes above 23,000 feet—the inability to eat fatty foods, the drastic loss of weight, the mental lethargy, the “sheer physical tiredness”—and described how on the 1933 Everest expedition he and other climbers remained above 23,000 feet for nearly a month, coming down afterward “like skeletons.”
⁸

The next day Pugh and Shipton discussed the research program for the first time. It had been agreed with Bryan Matthews, Laurence Kirwan, and the Royal Geographical Society that Pugh would study the effects of supplementary oxygen on acclimatized men at high altitude and investigate acclimatization, nutrition, and protection against cold. But Shipton now unexpectedly suggested that “the most important research is to study high-altitude deterioration.” The mixed signals were confusing.

Shipton and Pugh parted company, and Pugh traveled on alone from Delhi to Jainagar (near the Nepalese border), where the team was gathering. It was quite a challenge for the absentminded Pugh to keep track of his copious luggage during the forty-eight-hour journey, which involved several train changes. He had already lost his wallet and traveler’s checks while sightseeing in Delhi and assumed they had been stolen, later discovering that he had left them in a shop where he bought a thermometer. His absentmindedness had been a constant worry to him as he prepared for the expedition. Making list after list, he frequently woke in the night worrying about things he had overlooked, and it was already clear that he had left several pieces of equipment behind.

Pugh reached Jainagar at midday on March 30, the last member of the expedition to arrive. Shipton was already there. From the outset Pugh felt like an outsider. He was joining a group of climbers who had spent nearly three weeks bonding with each other on the trip out to India, and, at age forty-one, he was a good ten years older than most of them. The climbers were all members of the English Alpine Club or the New Zealand Alpine Club (which was run along the same lines) and, to a greater or lesser extent, shared the traditional skepticism about bringing a scientist on a mountaineering expedition. They admired their leader, who was their guru of mountaineering, and were strongly attracted to his romantic ideals of traveling light and living off the land. Like him they were instinctively repulsed by lengthy baggage trains and elaborate equipment. Perhaps in the back of their minds was the knowledge that it was Shipton who would choose the Everest team the following year.

Into this group Pugh now came with his ten bulky pieces of luggage. As soon as he stepped off the train he started to feel harassed and on a different wavelength from the rest of the team:

Coolies seized my baggage and carried it away on their heads—I following. They led me to a stone building where I found the rest of the expedition and all its baggage stacked in piles on the veranda. . . . Everyone was in a bustle breaking down the baggage into loads and I was told to have my physiological stuff ready to move off by 5 a.m. next morning. Result—rearranged my stuff hurriedly and now no longer know where anything is.
⁹

The expedition set out early the next morning with six Sherpas and six bullock carts. In his report for
The Times
,
Shipton, who was clearly irritated by the burden imposed by Pugh, stressed that 15 of the “90 loads of 60lbs each” in the baggage train consisted of the oxygen and physiological equipment.
¹⁰

The trek to Namche Bazar took seventeen days. The first two were spent crossing the flat, sandy countryside between Jainagar and the Himalayan foothills, the Swallicks, dotted with small villages, mango plantations, and fig trees in full bloom. On the third day the bullock carts were replaced by porters recruited at Chisapani, and the next six days took them across hilly countryside, seldom rising above 2,500 feet, to the village of Okhaldhunga at 6,000 feet. From then on the countryside was dramatic and beautiful, the ascents and descents more challenging, rising and falling between 6,000 and 12,000 feet.

While the team walked in groups of two or three, Pugh walked mostly alone, occasionally keeping company with Cam Secord. The weather was intensely hot and the sun very strong. In Jainagar, Shipton had sent everyone to buy umbrellas for shade, but only he and Pugh, who had both spent time living in hot countries in Asia, wore thin cotton pajamas to keep the sun from their legs. The others found the pajamas eccentric and chose to wear shorts, and thus suffered badly from sunburn.

Having had no time to gather physiological benchmarks at Jainagar, Pugh threw himself into his research from the first day. He weighed the climbers, estimated their body fat with calipers, and recorded their pulse rates. He took blood samples to chart the increases in hemoglobin that occur at altitude. He noted what the men ate, and began a study of drinking habits and hydration, recording his own fluid intake and going around at the end of each day asking how much everyone had drunk and how many times they had urinated. He also kept records of the climate, measuring temperatures, humidity, and wind speeds at regular intervals.

Pugh soon discovered that Shipton had not told the climbers they were supposed to participate in the physiology project, nor had he explained what Pugh’s research was about. Least of all had he told them that Laurence Kirwan, the Royal Society, and important figures in the Whitehall medical establishment expected Pugh’s research to make an important contribution to the forthcoming Everest expedition. Most of the climbers were tolerant of Pugh, but they were skeptical too.

Shipton portrayed him as a bizarre figure indefatigably going about his work while the rest of the team enjoyed the trek: “For Dr. Pugh . . . it was a busy time . . . He marched with his rucksack bristling with test tubes and glass retorts, and coiled about with lengths of plastic tubing. With tireless application he counted our heartbeats, measured our haemoglobin and recorded our liquid intake . . .”
¹¹

The expedition doctor, Charles Evans, reported that the Sherpas mistook Pugh for a holy man: “Griff Pugh strode along in pale blue pyjamas, a startling figure with red hair, in his left hand an aluminium measure, and in his right a whirling hydrometer, which the Sherpas mistook for the latest thing in prayer wheels. They whirled it for him intoning ‘om ma pade hum’ and looking on Pugh himself, at first, as a lama.”
¹²

If the climbers were amused by Pugh’s single-minded application, there were also tensions, particularly over hygiene. On the day he arrived at the campsite at Jainagar, Pugh had already seen the climbers behaving in ways he strongly disagreed with: “At first two meals was shocked to find complete disregard for hygiene. Water from shallow village well being drunk unboiled and flies crawling all over tea mugs—no fly protection at all. Doctor doing nothing about it.” Although it was not his role, he lost no time in protesting, causing Charles Evans to note in his diary, “Pugh bellyaching about water supply.”