Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (32 page)

Pugh also went to Antarctica in December 1957 with an American expedition led by Nello Pace and Will Siri, financed by the US Office of Naval Research. It was part of the “International Geophysical Year,” when scientists from many different countries converged on Antarctica to carry out cooperative research.
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Pugh was to study acclimatization to cold and had persuaded Vivian Fuchs to let him use the TAE as his chief source of experimental subjects.
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Pugh and Jim Adam—an MRC colleague—pitched camp on Hut Point Peninsula near “Scott Base,” the New Zealand station established by Hillary.
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In early January, Hillary returned to Scott Base after several months out on the frozen wastes, and was delighted to see Pugh again. He told me: “I said to Griffith, ‘Why don’t you come and stay with us?’ And he did, like a shot . . . he carried [out] a lot of his experiments over at Scott Base, and he really in many ways became just part of our team. And he and I got on very well indeed.”

Using Hillary’s team as experimental subjects, Pugh found little evidence that people who spent long periods in cold conditions felt the cold less than new arrivals, nor did they need fewer clothes, as many people—including Vivian Fuchs—believed. With this research topic proving a dead end, Pugh’s thoughts were straying to a subject that had been on his mind since Everest: the possibility of arranging his own scientific expedition to high altitude to continue the work begun on Cho Oyu and Everest. The sight of a great many Antarctic scientists hard at work in comfortable huts, similar to those Pugh had admired at the White Mountain Research Station in California, was an additional inspiration. His aim would be to find out how well lowlanders could acclimatize to altitude over the longer term. This had not been investigated in depth before, and Pugh felt that an attempt on Everest without oxygen would be a great way of testing how far his climber-subjects could adapt to altitude.

With his Antarctic venture nearing its end, Hillary had begun to contemplate an attempt on Everest without oxygen from the Tibetan side. This was an ambitious goal in light of his dreadful experience on Makalu, but Pugh, who had admired Hillary’s performance on Everest, his “speed over the ground,” and his exceptional tolerance of lack of oxygen, saw him as the ideal man to have a go. They made a tentative plan for a joint expedition.

Hillary’s interest in a joint expedition with Pugh was nevertheless surprising, given his openly expressed skepticism about science. In his book
High Adventure
, written shortly after Everest, he had even gone so far as to highlight the moment when, as he put it, “my faith in science and scientists disappeared forever.”
¹⁹

In 1952, at base camp on Cho Oyu, Pugh had measured the level of hemoglobin in Hillary’s blood, and had found a lower concentration than in most of the other climbers. The competitive Hillary thought that a high concentration of hemoglobin indicated fitness and good acclimatization. Believing himself to be the fittest member of the team, he was not impressed. Rather to my chagrin, I found he had repeated the story fifty-four years later in his autobiography,
View from the Summit
, where he again emphasized that his “confidence in this aspect of high-altitude science disappeared, never to return.”
²⁰

This single blood test result, puzzling though it was to Hillary, struck me as a rather flimsy justification for losing all faith in science and scientists “forever.” I asked Professor John B. West, one of the authors of the textbook
High Altitude Medicine and Physiology
,
how much credence should be attached to it. “The single blood measurement means almost nothing,” he replied, adding that, among other things, the result might have been affected by how much water Hillary had been drinking.
²¹

Now, before I could broach the subject with Hillary, he started telling me the same story yet again. I had to restrain myself from protesting, “But Ed, you, of all people, benefited the most from Griff’s science on Everest! You must know that! Why are you putting him down?”

Fortunately, I held my tongue and said nothing, because later Hillary went out of his way to acknowledge my father’s contribution to Everest. “Griff was hammering away at us to drink all the time,” he said. “In fact, his constant, almost boring, talk about drinking fluid did play, I think, a big part in our success.”

He in a way made it possible for us to actually climb Everest because he emphasized that it was enormously important for us to drink lots of liquid—a thing that one hadn’t thought about before. So I certainly drank a lot. I followed his advice and it seemed to have a very good effect . . . All expeditions now know they have to drink.

He reiterated this point at least four times over the two hours of our meeting, though he was keen to temper his praise with an assertion that Pugh knew very little about “mountaineering.”

We were all climbers and knew a great deal more about mountaineering than [Griff ] did. But he had much more knowledge about the possible effects of altitude than we did . . . I always regarded Griff as a rather brave man, because even though he had a considerable lack of knowledge of what one does in the mountains, he would always give it a go. And he wouldn’t let anything stop him, really.

Griffith was less ignorant of the mountains than Hillary thought, but it was still a fulsome endorsement. Hillary also told me that he personally had been more helpful to Pugh on Cho Oyu and on Everest than any of the other climbers, partly because, coming from a New World country, he was less burdened with the prejudices of his British counterparts: “I did carry out his experiments . . . they didn’t want to, but I was always agreeable to doing such things . . . I think I had more contact with him [on Everest] than anyone except perhaps Mike Ward . . . I was always ready to cooperate with Griff, and he put me into some very uncomfortable positions as a consequence.”

The more Hillary spoke, the better he conveyed to me the tensions my father had to cope with on Cho Oyu and Everest as he sought to get the climbers to listen to his advice rather than simply laugh at him and write him off as the expedition fool:

Griff was a lonely soul. He didn’t mix freely with the other members of the party. That’s understandable, because the other members of the party were mountaineers. But he could be very quiet. I mean, I didn’t know he was around at times, but then when he got a bee in his bonnet about something, he would speak up at considerable length. He had strong ideas. We didn’t always accept what he said, but he would go on about it. He had a wide knowledge of altitude and he would inflict this knowledge on us too. But a lot of it was really good stuff.

The contradictions in what Sir Edmund Hillary said to me about science made it clear that he was able to embrace more than one point of view. He recognized the value of Pugh’s work, but when the climber in him had the upper hand, he ceased to be sure if he really believed in scientists and their ideas at all. He was a man who was always in a hurry, easily irritated by the perfectionism or meticulousness of the scientist. Without a scientific background, his impatient personality probably took precedence over everything else.

While Pugh was in Antarctica he witnessed Hillary behaving in a headstrong and, some would say, foolhardy way—disobeying the instructions of his expedition leader, and risking the lives of his teammates. Vivian Fuchs had set out to complete what the newspapers described as “the last great journey of the world,” a journey first attempted by Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914–16. Shackleton’s ship the
Endurance
was crushed by polar ice before he could even begin his trip across the Antarctic continent.

Hillary had had doubts about how well he could work with the imperial-minded Fuchs early in their relationship, when it became clear that Fuchs did not intend the New Zealanders to accompany him across the continent, or even to the Pole, but merely to lay a chain of supply depots for the second half of Fuchs’s journey. It was the British who were to get all the glory. Fuchs set out from the Weddell Sea on the far side of the Antarctic in late November 1957. A month earlier, five New Zealanders led by Hillary had left Scott Base to establish the depots on the New Zealand side, stopping 500 miles short of the Pole to await Fuchs’s arrival, as instructed. Their only role thereafter was to guide the British team back to Scott Base.

As soon as Hillary realized that Fuchs was behind schedule, however, and still nowhere near the Pole, he put pressure on his companions to carry on to the Pole, deliberately creating the impression of a Scott Amundsen–style race. Fuchs, with his slow, expensive Sno-Cats costing £8,000 apiece, was the ponderous old imperial power.
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The New Zealand team led by Hillary, driving ordinary farm tractors costing £700 each and cleverly adapted for polar travel, was the speedy little dominion opponent. Fuchs sent him furious messages telling him to stop. He ignored them all. “I just would read their messages and carry on.”
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Hillary arrived at the Pole on January 3, long before Fuchs. “Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest, and his dead-tired Polar Expedition reached the South Pole today,” the
Chicago Daily News
announced. “They were winners of an Antarctic Race and the first men to trek to the pole in 46 years.” Fuchs reached the Pole more than two weeks later, completely upstaged and made to appear foolish and slow, while Hillary basked in glory. Hillary’s maverick behavior was played down by the deferential British press,
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but it was reported in the foreign press and often criticized as an egocentric publicity stunt. Writing in
Paris Match
, well-known French journalist Raymond Cartier observed: “Few men have come into contact with [Hillary] without having reason to complain of his egocentricity . . . One knew he would want to go to the Pole and that he would be pushed into it by the chauvinistic clamour of his country.”
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Fuchs eventually made it to Scott Base on March 2, having traveled the full 2,158 miles across the Antarctic continent.

Hillary admitted that he had been lucky to get away with his escapade. He arrived at the Pole with scarcely any fuel to spare. He had taken risks with his own life and those of his teammates when he dumped his emergency tents, camping gear, and ration boxes en route, to save weight.
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If he had made even a minor navigational error, his petrol would have run out and he would have had to continue on foot across the icy wastes in the cruel polar weather, without the right equipment and without enough food. No doubt he could have summoned up air support if he had run into serious problems, but he was still sailing close to the wind. “I thought the race was great fun,” he recalled later, “although I was scared stiff at the time.”

Pugh followed the unfolding drama from the radio room at Scott Base. He had been critical of Fuchs himself, deploring his old-fashioned food supplies and clumsy scientific equipment. Far from being shocked by Hillary’s behavior, he found it highly entertaining, and did not seem concerned that it was rather foolhardy and egotistical. His only criticism was that Hillary had “made mistakes in the difficult art of leadership and was not sufficiently frank about his intentions early on.” Pugh was even prepared to overlook the fact that Hillary had upset the scientists in his team by requisitioning their tractors for his race to the Pole, preventing some of them from undertaking the once-in-a-lifetime research projects they had come out for.
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He failed to spot any warning signs for his own planned collaboration with Hillary.

20

Everest without Oxygen

Hillary returned home from Antarctica in April 1958, “rather shaken” by the “violent” press criticism of his maverick race for the South Pole.
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Stung by the thought that some people now considered him not a hero but a mere publicity seeker and opportunist, his first instinct was to give up his adventurous lifestyle, find a “responsible position in business or society,” and transform himself into a “reliable family man.” But he soon discovered, as he said, that “the ability to get a tractor to the South Pole didn’t count for much in business.” The “directorships and good government jobs” he hoped for did not materialize, and apart from lecturing and writing books, he was reduced to his former occupation—beekeeping. After a few months he began to get itchy feet.

In April of 1959, Griffith Pugh sent him an outline proposal for the joint expedition they had discussed the previous year. The very first sentence left no doubt about the eye-catching historic goal Pugh had in mind. “The primary mountaineering objective,” he wrote, “would be to climb [Everest] without the use of oxygen equipment.” And Pugh went on to emphasize, repeatedly, that he considered climbing Everest without oxygen to be a perfectly achievable goal: “I believe that with at least six months’ preparation and personnel of proven ability to tolerate extreme altitude, the mountain could be climbed without oxygen equipment.”
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The main scientific purpose behind this exercise was to test whether climbers, with six months of acclimatization, would become better adapted to altitude. This would mean staying at high altitude for most of the winter before attempting Everest the following spring, and it raised the obvious question of how to survive in the high mountains at the most inclement time of the year.

Pugh’s proposed solution was to provide two huts for the team to live in—one at the foot of the Khumbu Glacier at around 18,000 feet, on the south side of Everest, and the other at 20,000 feet, on the Western Cwm just above the notorious Khumbu Icefall. The huts would be comfortably fitted out and—like the huts that had so impressed Pugh in Antarctica and at the White Mountain Station in the Sierra Nevada—would have all the facilities necessary for a reasonable standard of comfort and recreation.