Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (6 page)

After his first meeting with Pugh, when he found him in the icy bath, Ward went back to his Hampstead laboratory several times before leaving for the Himalayas, and they did some experiments together. The starting point was that nearly all the climbers who had tried using supplementary oxygen at high altitude complained that they had to expend so much energy in carrying the apparatus that it completely offset any benefit.

Pugh suggested that this common complaint might be well founded. The oxygen sets used on Everest between the wars had been adapted from equipment developed for high-altitude flying.
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The supplementary oxygen was given to climbers at the same rates as to airmen—2 to 2.5 liters a minute. However, unlike pilots sitting in their cockpits, climbers had to carry the oxygen sets on their backs while also expending energy climbing. If pilots needed 2 liters a minute, everything suggested that climbers would need much more.

Pugh set up a simple experiment to measure how much energy was consumed by carrying oxygen equipment, with Michael Ward as the subject. The results showed what climbers had always known for themselves—that carrying the equipment consumed a significant amount of energy in itself. Most of the benefit of the supplementary oxygen was being used up in this way. No wonder climbers felt the sets were no use.

To get positive benefits, Pugh suggested that climbers should be given oxygen at far higher rates—perhaps double the rate that had been tried thus far, or even more. It was a simple solution that did not seem to have occurred to anyone over the previous thirty years.

Nonetheless, neither Pugh nor Ward felt they could draw any conclusions from laboratory tests. They both thought that a physiologist should go to the mountains and carry out tests on acclimatized climbers at high altitude.

About six weeks before Ward’s team was due to depart for the Himalayas, legendary mountaineer Eric Shipton returned to England after spending two years as British consul at Kunming in China and agreed to take over leadership of the reconnaissance.
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Shipton had been on all the Everest expeditions of the 1930s, and would bring invaluable experience to an otherwise inexperienced party. He was famously attractive, with a lithe figure, penetrating blue eyes, and a tanned complexion. Such was his impact on women that a frisson of excitement would run through the female staff at the RGS whenever the legendary climber-explorer was in the building. Last on Everest in 1935, he was now forty-four years old, but still fit and ready to have another go.

When Cam Secord dropped out, Shipton invited two extra climbers to join the trip: New Zealanders Edmund Hillary and Earle Riddiford.
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Tom Bourdillon, suffering from the snobbery that was commonplace among Alpine Club members in the 1950s, was mildly surprised to find that he actually liked Hillary, despite the New Zealander not being a “gentleman.” He confided to his wife: “I wish you could meet Ed. He is one of the best blokes I know. Earle is a good man—old N.Z. family, sheep farmer, soldier and now lawyer, 30, and he is a gentleman, which Ed is not, but I would as soon climb or talk with Ed as anyone I know . . .”
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They left England in early August, with Shipton protesting that they had “very little hope of success.” He was wrong. They quickly discovered a viable route up the southern side of Everest, proving Ward’s theory. Not equipped to try for the summit themselves, they realized that they should secure permission for a full-scale British expedition as soon as possible.

In mid-October 1951, while they continued to explore the environs of Everest, Shipton sent a message to Colonel Proud, first secretary at the British embassy in Kathmandu, asking him to apply at once for the following year. Unbeknownst to Shipton, Colonel Proud’s boss, Ambassador Summerhayes, had already taken the precaution of asking the Maharajah of Nepal for a permit for a British expedition the following year, but had learned, to his consternation, that the Swiss already had verbal permission for 1952, precluding a British visit in the same year. The news sent shock waves through the British climbing establishment.

For almost half a century the Royal Geographical Society had labored under the illusion that it had exclusive rights of access to Everest. Since beginning life in 1830 as one of Britain’s gentlemanly learned societies, the RGS had maneuvered itself to the forefront of mapping, measuring, and exploring the fringes of the known world, and had come to be regarded as “the spiritual home of British exploration.” The Society had helped to organize and sponsor heroic pioneering expeditions such as Scott’s and Shackleton’s ventures in the Antarctic, ran courses on mapping and surveying that were heavily patronized by colonial civil servants, and was an important source of geographical information and advice for government departments, including the India Office.
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In the early part of the twentieth century, Mount Everest, as yet unexplored, unmapped, and unclimbed, presented the RGS with a perfect challenge. Many illustrious members of the society were sorely disappointed that Britain, the nation that controlled the largest empire the world had ever seen, had failed to be first to reach either the North Pole (claimed by American Robert Peary in 1909) or the South Pole, where Captain Scott (heavily sponsored by the RGS) lost out to Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1911. Mount Everest was seen as “the Third Pole”; winning it would restore British honor. And in the glory days of the British Empire, it was tempting for the RGS to feel that Everest was their very own mountain of destiny.

The sense of ownership—“Dammit, it’s
our
mountain!”—had been fully confirmed in 1921 when Tibet granted the first permit to climb Everest to the British, represented by the RGS. The RGS immediately turned to Britain’s premier climbing gentlemen’s club, the Alpine Club. The Everest Committee representing both institutions was formed to organize and finance the expedition.

The British government invariably consulted the RGS about the suitability of proposed climbing expeditions to Everest, British and foreign alike, so the Everest Committee was able to influence their fate, and established an effective monopoly.

After the failure of the first three British expeditions in 1921, 1922, and 1924, a Swiss application in 1924 was dismissed as an “attempt to take advantage of the preliminary spade work which has been done and . . . snatch the final victory.”
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A German application in 1925 met with a similar fate, as did a further Swiss application in 1926 and an Italian application in 1928, and so it went on.

Officials at the India Office generally found it “impossible not to sympathise” with the committee’s desire for exclusivity, though they worried that it was “not a sportsmanlike attitude.” But having accepted that it was in Britain’s interest to keep the competition at bay, British diplomats used three lines of defense against foreign expeditions. The first was to refuse to pass foreign applications for Everest on to Tibet, telling aspirants they had no chance of success due to the “sensitivities” of the political situation.

In cases where this tactic would be politically embarrassing, applications
were
passed on, but diplomats put pressure on the Tibetan government to refuse them in consideration of “favours” granted to Tibet, such as “the helpful attitude we took up when the Dalai Lama asked for arms and ammunition during the tension with China.”
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Britain’s own requests for Everest were often refused, but the diplomats succeeded in ensuring that other countries were refused as well, guaranteeing that when permission
was
forthcoming, it was granted only to the Everest Committee.

This approach worked well until, in the mid-1930s, the Club Alpin Français was inspired to circumvent the British by asking the Chinese to pass along their Everest application to Tibet. The Chinese did so, and Tibet immediately granted permission.

Horrified, the British now resorted to a third line of defense made possible by the fact that all expeditions had to start in India and trek through Sikkim to reach Tibet. Carefully disguising the true reasons, the government of India refused the French team access to “facilities in India,” and made sure they didn’t obtain a permit to cross Sikkim.

Recognizing the British power of veto not just over Everest, but throughout the Himalayas, foreign teams understood they must tread carefully. Protests were muted, and applications were often dropped without fuss when Britain’s displeasure became evident. Other countries became quite bitter: German climber Paul Bauer, who received permission to attempt Kanchenjunga in 1929, told the
Daily Telegraph
that he “originally hoped to attack Mount Everest,” but his plan had been “thwarted by the jealousy of the English,” who “flatly refused permission.”
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Now, in mid-October 1951, after half a century of such politicking, the Swiss had seized their opportunity with Nepal, while, as they put it, “the British were asleep.”

The British were particularly upset that the Swiss had not told them of their plans earlier on. The Swiss had received verbal permission in May 1951. Shipton only learned about it when he got back to Kathmandu after the reconnaissance. The ambassador telegraphed London: “Shipton thinks it can hardly be possible that the Swiss climbing people . . . would be planning an expedition without any word to our people, and with the idea of trying the route he has been testing.”
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The Swiss were perhaps taking their revenge on Shipton, who had refused to allow top Swiss climber René Dittert to go with him on the reconnaissance, but then invited New Zealanders Hillary and Riddiford to join him. The Swiss reticence about their expedition was ominously reminiscent of Roald Amundsen’s failure to tell Captain Scott that he intended to race him to the South Pole, even when Scott had visited him shortly before setting out. Scott made his plans and began his journey in June 1910, innocently unaware that he had competition, only to lose the race to Amundsen and perish with the rest of his team on the way home. RGS members comforted themselves by denigrating Amundsen as a cheat.

On December 11, 1951, Eric Shipton appeared in front of the Himalayan Committee and dropped the double bombshell: Everest could be climbed from the south, and the Swiss rather than the British had permission to attempt it by the new route in the following year. Adding insult to injury, a message from Ambassador Summerhayes put forward a most unwelcome suggestion: “It would seem a good solution if next year’s expedition could be a combined one.”
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Hearing this for the first time, the committee could hardly believe it. Ten days later reality dawned, and Basil Goodfellow grudgingly went to Switzerland to discuss the possibility of joining in with the Swiss.

There proved to be several difficulties with a joint venture, but negotiations broke down over the issue of who would lead the expedition, with the British insisting that Shipton be appointed leader of any joint enterprise, and the Swiss advocating a joint leadership. But Basil Goodfellow privately admitted the other important reason to his Foreign Office contact (a certain Mr. R. H. Scott). Scott noted: “Mr. Goodfellow told me for my confidential information that another factor in the British decision was that the Alpine Club were not quite ready for a full-scale permission this year.”
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The Foreign Office, who had been pursuing a policy of strategic cooperation with the Swiss in the Far East, was surprisingly unsympathetic to the committee’s difficulties, pointing out: “The Swiss offer seemed worth looking at carefully; otherwise the Swiss might get up by themselves and beat us to it!”
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Another member of the Himalayan Committee, Laurence Kirwan, secretary and director of the RGS, met with a similar response from his contact in the South East Asia Office, who said, “We would deprecate making a political issue of climbing Everest and should like to avoid international bickering about it.”
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Disappointed that the committee had rejected a joint Anglo-Swiss venture, the Foreign Office was less than enthusiastic about Goodfellow’s alternative proposal. This was to send a British “training expedition” to Cho Oyu, another mountain in the Everest region, while the Swiss were on Everest, and, on the assumption that the Swiss would fail, to follow that up with an exclusively British attempt on Everest in 1953. Mr. Scott commented:

Goodfellow . . . was obviously hoping that I would endorse what had been done, but I refrained from doing so and instead left him in no doubt that I was very disappointed to hear this news. I warned him that the Alpine Club were taking a risk that the political atmosphere would be right for an expedition next year, and I warned him that the responsibility for this risk lay entirely with the Alpine Club.
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Turf Wars