Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (5 page)

However, it was out of tune with tradition to worry about fluids. Geoffrey Young’s
Mountain Craft
advised that “a certain amount of liquid is essential in action,” but insisted that climbers must keep their thirst under strict control. Thirst was “merely feverish,” and “impossible” to satisfy. It was a “delicious temptation,” but to indulge it too freely “swamps and upsets the human machinery. . . . Some resolute men . . . train themselves not to drink at all during the day,” and “a good manager should never fail to remark a man who is constantly stopping to drink in passing streams. Spartan example in abstinence will do much to check him.”
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Young suggested various ways of resisting thirst, such as sucking a prune stone or a pebble, letting water “run through the mouth, swallowing as a special indulgence only a mouthful or so.” For those on the point of collapse, he advised that “[a] man showing signs of exhaustion should not be allowed to drink more than a mouthful or two at longish intervals.”
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What the climbers did not recognize was that dehydration had a severely debilitating effect on their bodies.

Driven to the limits of human endurance by lack of oxygen, dehydration, and inadequate food, Everest climbers also struggled with poor equipment. They suffered dreadfully from the cold, and regarded frostbite as an unavoidable hazard. “The cold, out of the sun, is almost the coldness of space, and this combined with oxygen-lack must inevitably freeze people,” wrote Frank Smythe in 1938.
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In 1922 George Finch commissioned his own outfit of feather down encased in hot-air balloon cloth. His diary shows that he felt very superior, watching his colleagues shivering in their tweed and gabardine clothes: “Everyone felt the cold except myself—my eiderdown coat, trousers, flying boots and flying helmet keeping me as warm as toast all through.”
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He imagined his fellow climbers were envious, but he was wrong. They simply poked fun at his eccentric costume behind his back. With a tribal love of the old uniform which confirmed one as a member of the upper classes, the Everesters continued to wear their Norfolk jackets, conventional knickerbockers, gabardine suits, Shetland sweaters, and trilby hats, and thus continued to be beset by cold and frostbite. As late as 1951, Noel Odell advised the New Zealanders Edmund Hillary and George Lowe that they needed no special equipment for the Himalayas, but “should take just exactly what we used [for climbing] in New Zealand, an ordinary Alpine tent and the clothing we wore in the Southern Alps.”
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Down clothing did not become the norm for British climbers until after World War II.

On top of the problems caused by the cold, Everest expeditions were plagued by ill health. Sore throats, flu, laryngitis, respiratory infections, and stomach upsets invariably sapped the strength of the climbers. A few doctors questioned whether this was inevitable. Greene, for instance, was keen to improve the hygiene of the local cooks:

It is impossible to deny the danger to health of the filthy habits of native cooks in a country where dysentery is endemic. The Sherpa or Butia sees no sense in the cleaning of pots or washing of dishcloths. Himself apparently immune to any but the most virulent dysentery, he looks upon the boiling of water or milk as an insane whim of the doctor. Only unceasing vigilance will ensure his cooperation . . .
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One of the doctors on the 1922 expedition wrote to the
Alpine Journal
suggesting that high infection rates among local Tibetans and Sherpas might be a contributory factor in the “high-altitude throat” that played havoc among expedition members. He also recommended the strictest medical supervision of the cookhouse to ensure the best possible sanitary conditions, worrying, rightly, that such issues “might be overlooked” on future expeditions.
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But later leaders, such as Shipton in 1935 and Tilman in 1938, took the view that ill health could not be avoided on Himalayan expeditions. Strict supervision of the cookhouse was simply not Tilman’s style. Shipton and Tilman’s unfussy, almost casual approach to mountaineering and their desire to blend in with the local ways were part of their appeal for many young climbers.

Over the years, the indefatigable expedition doctors who studied these subjects came to the conclusion that the climbing of Mount Everest was “as much a physiological problem as a mountaineering feat.”
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However, none of them was a specialist in the field.
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Hingston was an RAF doctor. Charles Warren was a pediatrician. Above all, their work revealed the need for systematic study of the problems by specialists. But the idea of taking non-climbing scientists on expeditions—be they physiologists, geologists, naturalists, or geographers—had never been popular, and became even less so with the small-expedition ideal. Bill Tilman did not even want to take a doctor with him in 1938, and had to be forced to do so by the Everest Committee.

In 1937, Dr. Charles Warren suggested that high-altitude deterioration “required a great deal more investigation.”
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But nothing happened. After the expedition of 1938, Raymond Greene taunted the Everest Committee: “Supposing we go on sending out expeditions which return one after another but get no nearer the summit than the last; people will get rather tired of Everest expeditions and ask, what is the interest of these continued failures? Everybody will know, of course, that they are gallant failures . . . but the fact remains that one party after another fails to reach the top.”
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Greene pointed out that vast sums of money had already been spent on failed expeditions that kept coming home with nothing to show for their efforts, and things were getting worse. It was regrettable, he believed, “that
[scientific work] on the more recent expeditions to Everest has been in no way encouraged, but rather discouraged by those responsible both for their organisation and their leadership.”
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Insisting that the situation could no longer be justified, he called for future expeditions to be “planned primarily on a scientific basis” so that even if they failed, they would, at least, bring home some useful information. Provocatively he went on to suggest the unthinkable: The next expedition to Everest “should go out primarily as a scientific expedition accompanied by a small climbing party which, if the opportunity arises, will undoubtedly reach the top.”
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Suitably horrified, Dr. Tom Longstaff stood up and intoned: “The idea of sending a scientific expedition to Everest is really deplorable; there could be no worse mixing of objectives.”
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At which point the British efforts to climb Mount Everest were interrupted by World War II.

3

Mountain of Destiny

Had it not been for Michael Ward, there would have been no British Everest Reconnaissance in 1951. The British had halted all attempts to climb Everest during World War II, and had disbanded the Everest Committee. It was not until 1947, the year of Indian Independence, that the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club formed a new Himalayan Committee and began to think, unhurriedly, about reviving the Everest campaign.
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Ward and other young climbers like him were frustrated by this lack of urgency from the old guard.

The climbing establishment’s leisurely attitude toward Everest was partly due to their perception that changes in the political landscape had blocked off any viable access to the mountain. Previous expeditions had approached Everest from the north through Tibet. But Tibet had closed its borders to outsiders in 1947, and in 1950 it was invaded by the Chinese, who enforced their own ban on Western visitors. The only other route to Everest was from the south, through Nepal, a country that had been closed to almost all foreigners for the previous hundred years. Now, however, Nepal was gradually relaxing its restrictions, and the first Western expeditions were beginning to explore and map its territories, which included eight of the fourteen highest summits in the world.

In 1949, a small Swiss expedition, led by René Dittert, reconnoitered mountains on the border between Nepal and Tibet and claimed a virgin summit; in 1950, the French stunned the climbing world by making a successful ascent of Annapurna, the tenth-highest mountain in the world, and the first peak above 26,250 feet to be climbed.
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Later that year, two members of a small American-led exploratory expedition, Charles Houston and the English Everest veteran Bill Tilman, briefly reconnoitered the southern approach to Everest. Misreading the mountain, they pronounced an ascent from that side unlikely to be feasible.
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Believing that the chances of climbing Everest from the south were at best “forty to one against,” the Himalayan Committee remained apathetic.
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Besides, the British had enjoyed priority over Everest for so long that they remained confident no other country would presume to muscle in on their territory. Michael Ward and his climbing friends, however, were shocked by the exploratory trips in Nepal, especially when they heard that yet another party who was “not English” was planning to visit Everest. In early 1951, fearing the British were about to be “caught napping by foreigners,” Ward took positive action.
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First, he had to determine whether Everest could be climbed from the south. Poring over forgotten photographs in the library at the RGS, he discovered what he thought was a feasible route to the summit and began to agitate for an immediate British reconnaissance of the south side of the mountain. He had great difficulty, however, in drumming up any enthusiasm from the committee, who regarded him as a young whippersnapper.

Refusing to admit defeat, Ward organized his own trip with the help of the top Scottish climber and mountaineering author, W. H. (Bill) Murray, with whom he had climbed in the Alps in the 1940s. Murray rejoiced at the prospect of taking part in a spontaneous project involving just a handful of climbers and praised Ward in the most extravagant terms for his inspirational initiative. It was, he said, something that “suddenly sprang up out of nothing through what Plato would have called a divine madness coming over you. . . . These are the sort of expeditions that are worth going on.”
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Ward and Murray persuaded Cam Secord, the Canadian mountaineer, to join them. Secord had climbed in the Himalayas with Bill Tilman and another famous Everest veteran, Frank Smythe. As an economist in the Cabinet Office, he also had better establishment connections than either Ward or Murray. With his help, the committee was finally persuaded to seek permission for the reconnaissance and provide £600 toward the estimated costs of £1,800.
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Basil Goodfellow, honorary secretary of the committee and a leading member of the Alpine Club, approached the Foreign Office, stressing the committee’s traditional sense of entitlement over Everest:

Through our long series of expeditions between 1921 and 1938 we have firmly established our leadership in attacking the greatest problem remaining outstanding in mountain exploration and adventure. Meanwhile the successes of other nationalities in the Himalayas have inevitably turned their interest in the direction of Everest. The Himalayan Committee feels it is essential to give expression to the continuing British interest in Mount Everest by sending a further expedition to Mount Everest as soon as possible.
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At first, this conventional appeal to national pride went down well with the Foreign Office. A telegram was sent to Mr. Summerhayes, the British ambassador in Kathmandu, asking him to apply for permission to attempt Everest and requesting as usual that “[s]hould the Nepalese decide against granting permission I trust it may be possible to ensure that permission is similarly refused to any other applications to prospect Everest this year?”
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A reassuring reply came from Summerhayes, affirming that permission for the reconnaissance had been granted, and that all similar “foreign” requests had been refused.
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At this point, Ward and Murray invited Tom Bourdillon, a popular and influential young climber, to join their expedition. He and Ward had helped set up the Alpine Climbing Group, an exclusive group composed of young mountaineers who wanted to improve standards and persuade British climbers, who were lagging behind their European counterparts, to be more daring and adventurous.
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Bourdillon had inspired great admiration by climbing the north face of the spire-shaped Aiguille du Dru in Chamonix, which Ward described as “the first modern route . . . of a really classic Alpine calibre to be climbed by an Englishman.”
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The preparations for the expedition were rushed, and Ward and Bourdillon, lacking previous Himalayan experience, were guided mainly by what they could find out from the reports of past expeditions. When Ward took charge of the medicine chest, Bourdillon said that his father wanted to advise on the contents. Bourdillon’s father, R. B. Bourdillon, a founding member of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club, had been an enthusiastic Alpine climber in his youth until stopped by ill health.
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Qualified in medicine and chemistry, he was the director of the Electro-Magnetic Research Unit of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Stoke Mandeville, where Ward went to see him.

They soon fell into an animated discussion about the altitude problems on Everest. Both feared that the air pressure on the top of Everest—which had never been measured—would prove to be too low for human survival. Looking at the RAF altitude tables showing the relationship between altitude and air pressure, they found it hard to credit how men like Edward Norton could have climbed above 28,000 feet on Everest without using supplementary oxygen. Like most people—except meteorologists and physiologists—they did not appreciate that because Everest is geographically near the equator, the atmospheric pressure on the summit is actually higher than the pressure predicted by the simplified altitude tables used in international aviation. Nevertheless, the summit of Everest is still very near the limit of human survival.
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The conversation ended with Bourdillon sending Ward to seek advice from Griffith Pugh, a distant work acquaintance of his who was known to have studied altitude and survival in the mountains.