After Everest Read online

  In Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Ed records an argument with himself about whether or not to push on that would have done Hamlet proud. In the end, he says, he decided to go because, if he hadn’t, he would have hated himself for it. He went, in other words, because it was there.

  Ed has it both ways in the documentary A View from the Top—he says that he discovered ‘later Fuchs wanted to be the first person to bring a vehicle to the South Pole. I wasn’t aware of this, and if I had been maybe we wouldn’t have pushed on. But on the other hand, maybe we would have pushed on.’

  His rival, for his part, went to his grave denying any interest in being first to the Pole. ‘It was nothing to do with me who got there first,’ Fuchs said years later, in the same documentary. ‘It wasn’t a race. I’m a man of science. I was interested in science. I wasn’t interested in the glory of getting there first.’

  Ed’s son and daughter have their own view of the journey to the Pole. ‘The media made it into a race,’ says Peter. ‘It wasn’t a race. He is just a driven person. He wanted to go to the Pole. Even to this day it is hard to do anything in Antarctica, and back then it was desperately difficult, so if you get an opportunity like that, you know . . .’

  ‘And I think he got sick of being bossed around,’ says Sarah. ‘They were pretty condescending.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have liked being bossed, because he always liked to be boss,’ Peter adds.

  Ed was clearly setting up his depots and leaving supplies at a speed that would leave him a large comfort zone in which to reach the South Pole long before Fuchs.

  A series of messages were sent—misheard, misunderstood or ignored—flying between London, New Zealand and points in Antarctica. Anything suggesting that they slow down was ignored by Ed, albeit with an appearance of giving due consideration, before he went ahead and did what he was always going to do.

  Eventually Ed had the last word: ‘I am hell-bent for the South Pole—God willing and crevasses permitting.’

  John Claydon was flying regularly between the New Zealand support party and Scott Base, supporting Ed himself with reconnaissance from the air and delivering fuel supplies. He was one of the first to be let in on the semi-secret. ‘John, I want to tell you something confidentially,’ said Ed. ‘I am planning to head to the Pole. Do you have enough aviation fuel to fly in extra supplies to further depots?’

  More fuel would be needed than originally planned, in order to get Ed to the Pole and leave enough to supply the Fuchs party.

  ‘Hell, no!’ was Claydon’s response. But when he got back to Scott Base, he asked British oil company and expedition sponsor, BP, to supply an extra 20 drums of the fuel they had formulated especially for the conditions.

  And he approached US Rear Admiral George Dufek, stationed with the American Antarctic program at McMurdo Sound, who agreed to transport the fuel on a US ship. The drums were sent as deck cargo, but they came loose and ended up going overboard.

  Claydon, who was also flying in telegrams telling Ed to slow down, found himself in a tangled web, and so he rang Dufek: ‘Look, that fuel you sent—it all went overboard.’

  ‘Well, John, what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Well, it’s a hell of a situation and I hate to say it—what’s the chance of flying it down?’

  ‘John, that’s a pretty tall order isn’t it?’

  A week later Claydon got a message from air headquarters asking why he had made a personal request to BP. His report must have been adequate, as he heard no more about it. And thanks to Dufek’s cooperation, another 20 drums were flown in. Without Claydon’s initiative, Ed wouldn’t have got to the Pole.

  Not everyone in Ed’s group wanted to continue past Depot 700—the agreed-upon finishing point, after which they were supposed to return to Scott Base. Only Mulgrew was particularly keen. Engineer Murray Ellis was most reluctant, but Ed was insistent—he had to be, as he could not afford to go without the engineer. They faced off and Ellis ultimately backed down.

  Some say Ed bullied his men into it. Others that he cajoled them. Whichever explanation you accept, there is no denying that not all of them wanted to go, but they went.

  Team member and fellow New Zealander, Jim Bates, wasn’t worried about upsetting the expedition organisers—he was worried about dying. Ed wanted to go in a straight line. ‘It was too dangerous,’ Bates told the NZ Sunday Star-Times in 2000. ‘There were crevasses everywhere. It made us uptight. We put our foot down and said “We go west”. If Ed had disagreed, that would have been it. We would have gone back. After that we got on well as a team.

  ‘There was quite a bit of friction and tension. Conditions were far from safe. It got to the point that it was something like the Mutiny on the Bounty. We told Ed that unless we were all involved in the decision-making we would turn back. We would have too. He was hurt. No doubt about that. But he had no choice.’

  John Claydon wasn’t surprised that Ed got his way. ‘It was that determination that took him to Everest,’ he says. ‘No question about it. He wasn’t a normal person in that respect. If he had made up his mind to do a thing, he would do it and nobody could do a thing about it.’

  Claydon also observes that Ed’s failure to be selected for pilot training and subsequent training in navigation in the air force was a factor in his success at the Pole.

  ‘On the Polar Plateau you are in the wilderness,’ says Claydon. ‘There are no landmarks, but he was able to navigate. He may have brushed up on his astronomical navigation before he went south. You see, down there in the wilderness you don’t even know where south is. If you are in the wilderness like the Polar Plateau and there is nothing to see anywhere, where would you go? You can only do that by taking sun shots and you have to use navigation tables and all the rest of it. I have copies of his plans of the route he did. It is a very complicated business. So if he had become a pilot and had lived to tell the tale, he wouldn’t have learnt the navigational skills to get to the South Pole.’

  The party was riding on tractors, which progressed in single file, roped together so that if one fell into a crevasse the others would provide an anchor. The group rotated the risky task of being lead tractor driver—that is, first into the crevasse—among themselves.

  The tractors are a big part of this story. Ed used them not just to get to the Pole, but to develop his technique of playing down his achievements in order to highlight them. That the journey was made on Massey Ferguson tractors is repeatedly mentioned in all accounts. The impression given is that on the way to Antarctica he stopped off at the farm and picked up a couple of tractors from the shed. In truth, he had visited Massey Ferguson’s British headquarters and researched the vehicles and their capabilities thoroughly before setting out.

  Doug McKenzie, the official press correspondent travelling with the party, had originally been keen on continuing; but then he began to have doubts and opted to fly back to Scott Base. There he encountered others with doubts about Ed’s plan, including one anonymous team member who said, ‘There are three expeditions going on here. There’s the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the New Zealand Antarctic Expedition, and Hillary’s private fucking expedition to the Pole.’

  McKenzie’s unusually harsh assessment of Ed, no doubt formulated in the midst of an icy wasteland, was expanded upon in his book Opposite Poles (1963): ‘Hillary was principally concerned about Hillary. Behind his easy-going manner he held that threat of ruthlessness which must be possessed in some degree by all successful leaders. With a casualness which was startling to those who met it, he was willing to place members of his party temporarily on the sideline if this became necessary for his major purpose.’

  Ed remained oblivious to any whispers of the controversy raging back home and beyond. New Zealand Prime Minister Walter Nash commissioned a report on whether or not he should intervene: he was told there were insufficient grounds, and that such a move would be most unpopular with the voters.

  Ed reached the Pole on 4 Jan
uary 1958, with little fuel to spare, but fifteen days ahead of his expedition leader. The news of Ed’s arrival was heralded laconically in the Auckland Star, which managed to include a backhanded swipe at Fuchs:

  Hillary scores his second triumph

  NZ Party reaches Pole;

  Dr Fuchs expected there tomorrow.

  Back in London, Buckingham Palace got in touch with the TAE committee. It appeared the Queen had heard the news and wanted to know what might be appropriate. Should she make some acknowledgement or send congratulations to her knight?

  ‘Under no circumstances,’ came the thunderous reply.

  Ed and his party were flown back to Scott Base, where they awaited Fuchs’s eventual arrival at the Pole. At that point, Ed was flown back so as to guide them for the rest of the return journey—not unlike a father having to go out late at night to retrieve an errant teenager.

  There are still people who are violently exercised by Ed’s decision to go to the Pole—and his success. The key complaint seems to be insubordination. Fuchs was the boss. Ed had a job to do and should have stopped when he had done it, rather than exceed his job description.

  But while he may have resorted to some subterfuge in planning his scheme, and some aggressive leadership in persuading his men to carry it out, Ed did not interfere with Fuchs’s plans. Fuchs completed his geological survey and became the first person to cross the Antarctic continent on land. If that achievement has been overshadowed by Ed’s, then that is because Ed casts a longer shadow.

  Pat Booth describes this assessment as ‘very tolerant. I wonder what Ed’s attitude would have been if he had been aiming to scale Everest from the south face and there had been a team put in to make supply dumps and one had gone on to make the ascent. He would not have been amused.’

  Official footage shows the two explorers greeting each other with the most cordial of handshakes. In fact, Fuchs could not afford to be seen to resent Ed: only by holding himself in check could he hope to silence, or at least mute, any of the many legitimate criticisms of Fuchs’s performance that Ed could make.

  Ed delighted in telling the story of how, as the party now made its way to Scott Base, Fuchs forced him to sit in the back, where cold and boredom were his companions. Every so often, however, the party would stop and Ed would have to be let out so he could look around and tell them in which direction they should be going.

  Somehow Ed and Fuchs managed to coauthor a book on the expedition, from their very different perspectives. But Ed was personally stung by the criticism that came his way. Over the years he would reveal an abundant ability to dish it out, but less of a knack for taking it.

  ‘I tried to infer it didn’t affect me,’ he said. ‘It did. I didn’t like all the hullabaloo. It was the first time I’d struck unfavourable publicity about something of this nature. On my return I went to ground for quite a while. It was the last time I did any beekeeping.’

  Significantly, he was not invited to celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the expedition—although he was invited to the twenty-fifth and the fiftieth anniversaries. And Fuchs managed to find one final way to annoy Ed, who was, if not quite a prude, conservative in his attitudes to personal relationships. When the two men went on a speaking tour of South Africa together, Fuchs was accompanied by a woman when he greeted Ed: ‘Ed, you’ve met my wife?’

  Indeed he had, but this wasn’t her. Ed knew full well that the woman he was greeting was Fuchs’s former secretary. Ed’s sense of honour precluded pretending that people were who they were not, but for once he went with Fuchs’s plan and played along.

  ‘I was a bit annoyed actually,’ he later told Tom Scott.

  CHAPTER 6

  TRIPLE PEAK

  Most of Ed’s classic adventuring occurred in a relatively short period, between Everest in 1953 and the Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition (HSME) of 1960–61. This last would indirectly lead to what Ed considered his greatest achievement—his work in Nepal through the Himalayan Trust.

  The HSME was also known as the Silver Hut Expedition because of the futuristic-looking hut, like a giant drainpipe coated in aluminium paint, that was built to provide shelter for the party while they wintered at 5791 metres before attempting the assault on 8481-metre Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain.

  This was three expeditions in one: a hunt for the yeti; a physiological study of existence at high altitudes; and another attempt to climb Makalu, this time without oxygen (the French had summited Makalu with oxygen in 1955).

  Ed had already discussed with physiologist and Everest veteran Griffith Pugh the possibility of spending a long time at high altitude to measure the effects on the human body—and also to see whether, over a long time, the body would adapt and learn to survive with less oxygen. This would, of course, be a precursor to an eventual attempt to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen—one of Ed’s list of firsts that he was still hoping to knock off.

  It was a major enterprise, another long expedition, planned to take place in the nine months between monsoon seasons. It was also a media event: world-famous zoologist Marlin Perkins, host of the popular American TV show Animal Kingdom, joined the team. As team member Desmond Doig—a Calcutta-based journalist who co-wrote with Ed an entertaining account, High in the Thin Cold Air—explained, it was the first Himalayan adventure Ed had been involved in that counted what he called ‘arty types’ among its personnel. Ed’s definition of arty types included journalists and makers of television programs.

  There are several anecdotes concerning the background to this expedition. According to Peter Mulgrew, Ed wanted to scale Everest from the northern side.

  The initial spark occurred in 1959, which was also the year in which Ed and Louise’s third child, Belinda, was born; and when he travelled to Chicago to make a short film for the publishers of the World Book Encyclopedia—the start of a long and happy working relationship with this company. Ed’s affable Kiwi-bloke persona was a character the Americans had not encountered before; and his modest appearance—and financial requirements to match—went down a treat with the corporates.

  In conversation with the company’s PR director, John Dienhart, Ed outlined his plan for an expedition with a physiological bent. According to some, he threw in the idea of a yeti hunt on the spot, to spice it up a bit. Dienhart was very keen and Ed suddenly found himself with a sponsor.

  Another explanation of the background to the expedition was the official view of the Soviet Union, as outlined by one I Andropov, a foreign affairs official: ‘Sir Edmund took rocket experts from New Zealand and the United States on the expedition which was financed by the United States Air Force. He was more interested in spying on China than looking for the abominable snowman.’

  ‘As uninterested’ might have been a fairer description. It is most unlikely that practical, pragmatic, hard-nosed and -headed Ed ever believed the yeti (or the Abominable Snowman) existed—even though Eric Shipton counted himself among the believers. But many of Ed’s Nepali friends and acquaintances were convinced they had encountered such a creature; some even when they were not under the influence of chang, the local alcoholic beverage. However, he was canny enough to know that this romantic quest would attract attention and money.

  Ed assembled a particularly talented group, mixing old hands such as Griffith Pugh, Norm Hardie, Michael Ward and Peter Mulgrew with enthusiastic youngsters such as Mike Gill. Gill had been enthralled by Ed since before Everest, and had been at a talk Ed and George Lowe had given about their time on the Shipton reconnaissance expedition. He later became a lifelong friend and colleague of Ed’s.

  The inherent flaw in the yeti hunt was that Ed was setting out to test the existence of something that wasn’t there—trying to prove a negative. However, although there were no yetis, there was plenty of evidence that yetis existed, available at a price. As Pat Booth put it, the team failed to find a yeti but they discovered a yeti industry. They passed up the offer of a yeti skeleton on the gro
unds that it was that of a dog. Yeti fur frequently came their way, but nearly always turned out to be that of a blue bear.

  Some monasteries held sacred yeti relics. One, at Khumjung, was home to a yeti scalp, which Ed and some of his party were not just shown but were allowed to try on. Eventually they negotiated to borrow this scalp and take it abroad for testing. After a grand tour of laboratories in Chicago, Paris and London it was proved to be a fake made from the hair of the goat-like serow—albeit a couple of centuries old.

  That left only the question of explaining away numerous sightings of footprints unlike those of any known creature; these were what had convinced Shipton. Some prints were reputed to show a toe perpendicular to the main part of the foot, which seemed inexplicable until this deformity was noted in Sherpa feet. Others were simply too big for any creature that lived in the area. Ed eventually employed cool logic to show that these prints were the result of a smaller creature’s prints that the sun had melted and merged into one. Now, perhaps, they could get on with their expedition and more productive research.

  Those in the Silver Hut spent their time working and training—there was a lot of stationary bike riding with a splendid view of Ama Dablam, as yet unclimbed.

  Ed had been in New Zealand organising supplies, and was en route from Kathmandu when four of his team achieved the first summiting of this mountain’s 6856-metre peak. Unfortunately, permission to make the attempt had been neither sought from, nor granted by, the Nepalese Government, which had grown increasingly firm about the need for outsiders to seek permission to climb its mountains. This was a body so pernickety it maintained a time difference of ten minutes with neighbouring India.

  The Nepalese were not pleased. Permission to climb Makalu was withdrawn and the Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition of 1960–61 was told to leave the country.