The Explorers Page 11

  It wasn’t until 1847, after the rest of India had been entirely mapped, that Waugh and his surveyors reluctantly focused their attention on charting the Himalayas. Their efforts were hampered each October to December by monsoons, and the peaks were so massive that the surveyors could only make accurate readings by placing their tools more than 100 miles away. Yet by August of that year, Waugh’s team had succeeded in measuring a peak that the locals called Kangchenjunga. After taking readings from three different angles, the Grand Trigonometrical Survey certified that it was 28,156 feet high, making it the tallest mountain in the world.

  The news would have been cause for celebration were it not for one thing: when Waugh went out in the field to observe Kangchenjunga, he noticed a second peak directly behind it that appeared to be slightly taller. Waugh named this “Peak B” and ordered his surveyors to march into the mountains to make more accurate measurements. Five long years later, Radhanath Sikdhar, the head of the survey’s computing office, rushed into Waugh’s office without knocking. “Sir,” Sikdhar announced. He wore a high white turban and a bushy black beard. “I have discovered the highest mountain in the world!”

  But what to do about it? This summit that Waugh soon renamed Peak XV (then renamed it for Sir George Everest, the surveyor-general of India from 1830 to 1843 and vice president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1862 until his death in 1863) was so remote that even finding a path to its base was problematic. Navigating the nips and tucks of its many valleys and ridges to find a route to the top would be a monumental feat of exploration in and of itself.

  So for seventy-five long years Everest just sat there, as it had since the beginning of the world. The mountain represented Earth’s last great exploration challenge. The poles had been reached and the great rivers charted when, finally, in 1921, seventy-four years after Sikdhar’s pronouncement to Waugh, the British turned their attention to Everest.

  Mountaineering wasn’t invented on Mount Everest (Alexander the Great’s troops climbed the Sogdian Rock in what is now Afghanistan way back in 327 BC). It only seems that way. Mankind’s efforts to climb the world’s seven highest peaks marked a new age in exploration, that of vertical discovery. From Mount KilimanjaroXII in Africa to Mount McKinleyXIII in North America, the race to summit the world’s tallest mountains became a fixation.

  The climbing community was small, a band of like-minded men and women who reveled in doing something previously impossible by defying gravity as they clambered straight up sheer rock faces. Climbers not only invented a new form of exploration, but out of necessity, also designed the new forms of equipment such as carabiners, dynamic rope, climbing harnesses, and even tents that allowed them to sleep overnight while dangling thousands of feet above a valley floor. Traditional duties of exploration such as cartography and anthropology were unnecessary and ignored. Their bodies learned to cope with the rarefied air of high elevations, including a “death zone” above 26,000 feet.XIV A condition known as hypoxemia kicks in at such great altitude, depriving the blood of oxygen. The effects can be gruesome: retinal hemorrhaging, fluid in the lungs, the sort of unsteady walk seen most often in drunks, nausea, severe headaches, and a fatal swelling of the brain.

  No previous band of explorers had ever dealt with such a reality. The use of supplemental oxygen cylinders—in essence, the practice of bringing along their own air—would one day benefit aviation, underwater exploration, and lead to the development of pressurized airplane cabins. It can be said that without mountaineering, modern air travel would not exist.

  Mountain climbing was defined by its panoramic views, feats of balance, legendary bouts of endurance, self-sufficiency, constant threat of sudden death, ability to remain completely in the moment, and the all-too-crucial requirement that getting back to the bottom was as important as getting to the top. “Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end,” wrote Edward Whymper, the Briton who became the first man to ascend the Matterhorn, in 1865.

  Modern readers can also thank mountaineers for another profound, but often unnoted, contribution to exploration. The traditional means of describing an expedition were functional, and even boring, taking their cue from the dry notations in a ship’s log. Later generations of explorers went completely in the opposite direction, overwriting to such an extent that their journals are either detailed research tools or Victorian sleeping pills. I have absolutely no idea how the British public thrilled to the writings of Burton, Speke, and the other great adventurers of the day. Both men write as if they had to validate each and every step of the journey, describing each situation and confrontation in exhaustive detail. Good for guys like me, trying to get inside their heads as I write a book. Not so good for that person hoping for a ripping read on an eight-hour train ride.

  Enter the mountaineers. There were no indigenous people or their habits on which to opine at 25,000 feet. No tidal charts or shoal depths to be measured. Just some of the most stunning and dangerous beauty the world has ever known. Mountaineers were so thoroughly impassioned by what they felt and saw as they climbed, that the words they put on the page were rhapsodic, imbued with a hyperbolic poetry long missing from written accounts of earlier explorations.

  “On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude,” wrote Lionel Terray, a French climber who not only made a number of first ascents (the climbing term for being the first person in history to stand atop of a peak), but also put his climbing skills to functional use while battling Nazi Germany’s mountain troops during World War II.XV

  Terray, who clearly used the mountains as a tonic for the worries of the modern world, would also go on to write that “If the conquest of a great peak brings moments of exultation and bliss, which in the monotonous, materialistic existence of modern times nothing else can approach, it also presents great dangers. It is not the goal of grand alpinisme to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs.”

  Maurice Herzog, who along with fellow Frenchman Louis Lachenal became the first men to summit Nepal’s 26,545-foot Annapurna in 1950, wrote beautifully about the strange addiction of shared misery. “Together we knew toil, joy and pain. My fervent wish is that the nine of us who were united in the face of death should remain fraternally united through life.

  When individuals are forced to work together for long periods, in difficult scenarios, their best—as well as their worst—qualities come shining through. “The team,” as French explorer Pierre Chevalier wrote, “must work together as one man and must consist of the best human material.”

  In the case of most of the mountaineers, the intensity of this in extremis bond often lasted only as long as the climb. Afterward came the letdown, and the inevitable search for a new adventure that would match the thrill of the climb. The Annapurna expedition, for instance, was a who’s who of French climbers—Lachenal, Gaston Rebuffat, the indomitable Terray—and Herzog, a Parisian businessman who hired these montagnardsXVI to lead him to the top. Though only two of them reached the summit, all four got very close—so close, in fact, that they were forced to spend the night in a single sleeping bag to avoid dying on the descent. Frostbite later resulted in the emergency amputation of all of Rebuffat’s toes. For good measure, the threat of gangrene meant that Herzog had to have his fingers cut off, too. Yet the four men returned to France as heroes. That should have been enough glory for four alpine purists, but Herzog chose to shine the spotlight only on himself by publishing a heroic account clearly biased in his favor. Annapurna sold eleven million copies and made a legend of Herzog, allowing him to forsake the mountains f
or politics. Among other honors, he was awarded France’s Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest award. He later became a member of the International Olympic Committee.

  But Rebuffat kept climbing. He put up forty new climbing routes in the Alps and advanced the now widely accepted notion that a climber was not conquering a peak, but working in communion with its grandeur.

  The other two died in mountain accidents, with Terray falling from a cliff face at age forty-four and Lachenal plunging into a crevasse while skiing. He was just thirty-four, and five years removed from Annapurna. Appropriately, both men died in Chamonix, the spiritual home of French mountaineering.

  When Lachenal’s journals were on the verge of being published posthumously, Herzog took possession and scrubbed out all references that made himself look anything less than heroic. It was only much later that the actual diaries were discovered. Herzog, it should be noted, did not share his formidable royalties from Annapurna with the men who made it possible.

  So it is that life intrudes on even the idyllic splendor of mountaineering, just as it ultimately imposes itself on all successful explorers. Returning home has always bedeviled the adventurous. The routine and status quo of daily life proved baffling after days and weeks and years of tripping the light fantastic. This was the explorer’s curse.

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  The defining climbing quotation came from Everest’s original and foremost explorer, George Mallory: “The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It’s no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.”

  Or as Mallory later condensed his answer into a more succinct sound bite for a New York Times reporter: “Because it’s there.”

  Between 1921 and 1953, some fifteen expeditions attempted to climb Everest. All but four were British. Twelve people died in that time, with cause of death ranging from avalanche, to pneumonia, brain hemorrhage, exhaustion, falling ice, freezing, and perhaps most chilling of all: disappearance. This was the fate of Mallory, who perished high on Everest in 1924 and whose body went undiscovered for seventy-five years. The bitter cold had preserved his remains, which were buried under a cairn by his discoverers. An Anglican service was held to consecrate the moment. It’s worth noting that at 26,760 feet, Mallory’s is the highest formal burial spot on Earth.

  No one would reach the summit of Everest until 1953, when a young man with a passion for mountaineering finally set foot on the roof of the world. His name was Edmund Hillary, and he was sixteen when he first gazed upon Mount Ruapeho on New Zealand’s North Island during a school field trip. He was immediately smitten by the desire to climb it. Though that marked the first time in his life that the beekeeper’s son had seen a mountain covered in snow, it wouldn’t be the last.

  Eight years later, while serving as a conscientious objector to New Zealand’s participation in World War II (he was eventually drafted anyway), Hillary undertook a meditative journey to New Zealand’s Southern Alps, hoping to discern a career path. He came to the unlikely conclusion that he should dedicate his life to mountaineering. “I retreated to a corner of the lounge filled with a sense of futility at the dull, mundane nature of my existence,” he wrote of a morning at the base of Mount Cook. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as two climbers strode into the lounge, fresh from reaching the summit. “Those chaps, now, were really getting a bit of excitement out of life. I decided then and there to take up mountaineering. Tomorrow I’d climb something!”

  That passion drove Hillary for the next thirty years of his life. Though seriously injured in a plane crash in the South Pacific during the war, Hillary went ahead with his ambition once the conflict ended. He was pleased to discover that he was a natural mountaineer. By 1951 Hillary had climbed all over the world, and visited the Himalayas for the first time as part of an all-New Zealander expedition to Nepal. Within three years he was participating in a British-led expedition to climb Everest.

  The original leader of the expedition was famed mountaineer Eric Shipton,XVII but he was replaced at the last minute by John Hunt, a veteran climber and World War II veteran who was said to have been a distant relation to Dick Burton. Hillary was chosen as one of Hunt’s two teams that would attempt the summit. When the first two-man group turned back due to exhaustion, Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay belatedly got the nod. On the morning of May 29, 1953, they set out from their tents at 6:30 a.m. Hillary fell at one point and suggested turning back, but without further discussion they went on. The pair reached the South Peak by 9:00 a.m., and then followed the saddle leading to the very top. By 11:30 they were on the summit. Hillary was first, followed by Tenzing. They stayed on the peak for a half hour. Hillary snapped a picture of Tenzing, but the Sherpa didn’t know how to use a camera, so there is no picture of Hillary on the roof of the world.

  The news of their accomplishment reached London on June 2, 1953,XVIII the very day that Elizabeth was crowned queen. As one of her first official acts, she knighted Hillary.

  Exploration haunted those who pursued its calling. Passion is the reason. The proof isn’t in the journey, but in what happened afterward. Once an explorer returned home and the public acclaim died down, what followed were almost inevitable thoughts of getting back out there so they could do it again, do it better, and travel farther into the unknown. A single expedition would have been a life-changing experience to a normal wanderer, but an overwhelming majority of history’s most successful explorers were not satisfied with just one. They wanted more. And more. Until in many cases it not only cost them their lives, but also consigned their corpses to mutilation and anonymity. Which is why great passion also requires great discretion if it is to be properly harnessed. The lack of this key attribute was the downfall of many a great explorer.

  Edmund Hillary narrowly avoided this fate. He returned to the Himalayas in 1954, only to lose an expedition member in a deep crevasse and break three ribs trying to save the man’s life. The following year he crossed Antarctica from one side to the other by a motor-powered Sno-Cat, becoming the first man in history to do so. In 1960, Hillary returned to the Himalayas once again, this time on an unsuccessful hunt for the abominable snowman.XIX It was only after his wife and teenage daughter were killed in a plane crash in 1975 that Hillary retired to his bee farm outside Auckland.

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  The great polar explorer Roald Amundsen, however, was not so lucky. In the course of his career, he traveled to the South Pole and the North Pole. He was definitely the first man to reach the former, and there’s evidence he may have also been first to the latter. Amundsen designed and sailed the small ship Maud through the Northwest Passage (over North America) and attempted the Northeast Passage (over Siberia), neither of which had been accomplished before. He endured polar winters and polar bear attacks. One time, he deliberately allowed the Maud to become frozen in pack ice so that she might simply float with the currents. Amundsen was an explorer his entire adult life. He knew nothing else. So even when he’d conquered the poles he kept coming back for more, as he did in 1928, when he went looking for Italian explorer Umberto Nobile, wh
ose dirigible had crashed while flying over the North Pole. Nobile was subsequently rescued, but Amundsen was not the man who located him. Amundsen’s body is still out there,XX despite years of intense search efforts. The most likely reasons for his disappearance were either death by drowning or an attack by polar bears, who dine on both fresh kills and carrion.

  Captain James Cook also suffered from lack of discretion. He retired after his second voyage of discovery and was rewarded with a well-paying and prestigious job onshore, only to grow despondent for the explorer’s life within weeks. He begged to return to the sea for what would become his ill-fated third voyage. As we’ve already seen, his body suffered the indignity of being cooked and eaten.

  The great African explorer David Livingstone, who should have been veteran enough to be the standard-bearer for discretion, also fell prey to the siren’s song of exploration. Like Amundsen and Cook, he too embarked on one last ill-fated voyage. To read Livingstone’s words as he set out on that final journey is to assume that his life was carefree. In fact, he was burdened by failure. Livingstone screwed up more often than he succeeded. He was once almost eaten by a lion. His eldest son felt so abandoned by his perpetually absent father that he snuck off to America, enlisted in the Union Army, and died in the Civil War. Livingstone’s wife became an alcoholic and threw herself at men—bad form for anyone, particularly the wife and daughter of missionaries. When Mary Livingstone summoned the courage to join her husband on a trip up the Zambezi River, she promptly made a cowardly nuisance of herself before dying of malaria. On that same expedition during the years 1858–64 (Livingstone would return home just in time to referee the Nile Debate) the group’s physician declared that Livingstone was “Out of his mind and an unsafe

  leader.”

  This lunatic of whom the good doctor is speaking is the same David Livingstone who was considered the greatest, most beloved, and most famous explorer of his day. Livingstone’s worldwide fame was so great that one poll showed only Queen Victoria to be more popular.