CHAPTER TWO
George Mallory famously wanted to climb Everest because it was there. Ed Hillary’s actions suggest he wanted to climb it because he wanted to be there first.
Unlike many young people in years to come, Ed did not grow up dreaming that one day he would climb the world’s highest mountain. He hadn’t even seen a mountain until he was sixteen. But from the time he climbed his first ‘decent mountain’ it was his passion.
In the post-war years Ed climbed as often as he could. In 1945 he became an associate member of the New Zealand Alpine Club (NZAC) and that year scaled Kitchener, Sealy, De la Beche, Hamilton and Malte Brun. In January of the next year he ascended Mt Cook with his mentor, the great mountaineer Harry Ayres, who would teach Ed much of the climber’s craft. Some of Ed’s earliest efforts at writing were accounts of his climbs that he penned for the NZAC’s New Zealand Alpine Journal.
As a member of a party that included Ayres and Christchurch climber Ruth Adams, he made the first ascent of the south ridge of Mt Cook on 6 February 1948.
Three days later, there was a character-testing incident when Adams fell and injured herself in an attempt on La Perouse. While the others went for help, Ed stayed with Adams for what turned into a night spent at the scene, relying on supplies that were air-dropped in. ‘Had a party set itself the task of finding the most inaccessible spot in the high central alps in which to become involved in an accident, it could hardly have done better than the main divide between Mt Hicks and La Perouse,’ wrote MJP Glasgow in the New Zealand Alpine Journal.
Adams needed to be stretchered out. It was not possible to return the way they had come, so she was effectively carried over the top of the mountain and down the other side. The rescue party took 48 hours just to reach Adams and Ed. Several other climbers—who would later figure in the history of the first ascent of Mt Everest—were also involved: Norm Hardie, Earle Riddiford and Bill Beaven. It remains one of the most dramatic and difficult rescues in New Zealand’s long alpine history.
Ed liked being first, and he would be the first to climb many New Zealand peaks in the following few years. When his sister June got married in England in 1949, their parents, financially buoyed by an excellent honey season, travelled to the wedding. They stayed on, and early the next year there came a somewhat imperious instruction to Ed to get himself over there as they required someone to drive them around Europe. He did so—and took every opportunity to practise his climbing skills on some European peaks, including the Eiger. At one point he climbed five mountains in five days.
While Ed was in Europe, he received a letter from George Lowe with a most intriguing suggestion.
A Hastings-born school teacher and mountaineer, Lowe was a man of great warmth and wit—and he was almost Ed’s peer as a climber. They had met on a bus at Mt Cook and quickly developed a firm bond. Lowe would remain a lifelong friend and colleague of Ed’s. Both men had had self-doubts to overcome. George’s equivalent of Ed’s earlier scrawny physique was an arm that had been broken and set badly. This had prevented him from serving during the war, but it would not prevent him from doing much else.
George had written to tell Ed that the first-ever New Zealand Himalayan climbing party was being formed. Would Ed like to be involved? He certainly would.
The other two climbers in the party were Earle Riddiford, a lawyer, and the athletic and entertaining Ed Cotter. Back home the four got to know each other, honing their skills in the South Island, where they prepared for the expedition by making the first ascent of Mt Elie De Beaumont from the Maximilian Ridge. It is a difficult mountain to access and is most commonly climbed from the Mt Cook side of the Tasman Glacier.
The purpose of their intended Everest expedition was twofold, as Ed wrote in the Alpine Journal: to see if a practicable route existed up the mountain from the southern, or Nepalese, side; and to find out if the post-monsoon snow conditions were suitable for a major attack on the peak. These were crucial preparatory steps. An actual assault would only come later.
In mountaineering circles there was no greater challenge than a successful ascent of Mt Everest. The world’s highest peak takes its English name from a British surveyor-general of India who never laid eyes on it. In Tibetan it is called more poetically Chomolungma (mother goddess of the universe) and in Nepali Sagarmatha (goddess of the sky). It is 8848 metres high, and natural forces squeeze it up a few millimetres every year.
Before Ed, the name most associated with Everest was that of George Mallory—that most romantic of mountaineers. Mallory was a member of the first British Everest reconnaissance expedition in 1921 and several subsequent expeditions before the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition, during which he perished on the mountain. Many other people had died trying to scale the peak, including seven Sherpas in 1922 alone and an eccentric English soldier and mystic, Maurice Wilson, who attempted a solo climb in 1934. For the misfit, scrawny, shy kid from the ‘odd’ family, being the first person to climb the world’s highest mountain would redeem it all.
A turning point in the history of attempts on Everest came in 1950 when the Nepalese Government agreed to allow parties to attempt the mountain from Nepal, on the southern side. Previous missions had attacked from Tibet, on the northern side of the mountain. The Nepalese Government decided to allow a different country every year to have a go.
The members of the New Zealand expedition gained valuable experience of climbing conditions in the area when Riddiford and Cotter made the first ascent of 7242-metre Mukut Parbat. Riddiford had been fighting illness, and Ed reported later, in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, that the lawyer’s success on this occasion taught him a valuable lesson about just how willpower could be deployed to overcome physical obstacles. Ed himself developed formidable strength of will, but in years to come he would find out that even the strongest willpower was not enough for some challenges.
Ed’s social conscience was also reawakened by the gap he observed between the poverty that was so prevalent in this part of the world and the high standard of living back home in New Zealand.
The party was headed to New Zealand when they received a telegram that could fairly be described as a letter bomb, so great was its divisive effect on them. The missive was from the esteemed Everest pioneer Eric Shipton, who had made his first assault on the mountain in 1938. It contained an invitation to join another British reconnaissance expedition.
According to Ed, he had written to Shipton when he had heard that the Englishman was planning such a mission—effectively inviting Shipton to invite the New Zealanders. At the same time, NZAC had written to their northern counterparts suggesting there were some well-qualified climbers in the club who could be an asset to the British expedition.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime. The only problem was that the invitation stipulated that the climbers would have to provide their own supplies; and it was for only two people. But which two?
Ed Hillary, obviously, as far as Ed was concerned. He knew he should get back to the bees, but the chance to get to Everest outweighed any scruples about leaving Rex to mind the store yet again. And he could afford it, because he still had the remnants of a nest egg acquired during six weeks’ work on a South Island hydroelectric project.
George Lowe and Earle Riddiford obviously felt the same way. The dispute that developed was too much for the genial Cotter, who withdrew any claim for inclusion. And it has to be said that someone who could walk away from that fight probably wouldn’t have made it to the top of Everest.
It appears that Lowe and Riddiford acknowledged Ed should go, as he was the superior climber. On skills alone, Lowe would seem to have had the next best claim, but he was broke whereas Riddiford was still flush. Riddiford also told Lowe he didn’t have the necessary drive. Lowe was livid, but he also lost the argument.
Ed described being haunted by the sight of Lowe’s disappointed face as the party split up. For himself, he had lost the chance to fulfill a dream with his best friend; he would instead be travelling with a fellow climber he admitted he disliked.
Ed sent a telegram to Percy telling him the bees would have to get on without him. Although Ed was now in his thirties, he still felt dominated by his father, and the letter included a plea to ‘forgive your erring son’. Not that there was any way Ed would change his mind.
Ed would now have to prove to Percy that he was doing something worthwhile—a tall order when, for Ed’s generation, to be in your thirties and have neither a job nor wife and children was out of the ordinary. According to Tom Scott, Ed at this stage felt like a borderline failure, which of course only fuelled his desire to prove himself.
Shipton was an explorer to the core—he would never take the same route twice to a destination if he could try an alternative. On this trip, while some of the party were left to explore the forbidding Khumbu Icefall—the first obstacle to an ascent—he and Ed went climbing together and chanced upon the Western Cwm, a hidden valley that appeared to provide a previously undiscovered southern route to Everest. This was yet another turning point in the history of attempts on the mountain and would remain—along with his success in talent-spotting Ed and, eventually, George Lowe—Shipton’s greatest contribution to the ultimately successful effort.
The party split up and planned to return to the area the following year. But this time, Ed made sure George Lowe was included. The 1952 group would not, however, be attempting the world’s highest peak. Hanging heavily over them was the knowledge that the Swiss had the right to attempt Everest this year. Britain’s turn would come a year later. Ed had a twinge of resentment when he first heard this—he was already experiencing proprietorial feelings about the mountain.
Once he was back home, he saw to the paperwork and filed an expense claim with the Alpine Club in London; he even claimed reimbursement for money spent on cups of tea. In reply, the club gently explained to its colonial offspring that ‘gentlemen are expected to pay for their own cups of tea’. Ed was quick to point out that, being New Zealanders, he and Earle could not possibly be gentlemen—and the club eventually gave way on the point.
The main focus of the Shipton group’s efforts in 1952 was an attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—on 8201-metre Cho Oyu. Ed, of course, did not stop at one mountain. He and George Lowe roamed the region, successfully climbing eight peaks, attempting the Changtse and exploring the Barun peaks, with the occasional day off in between. They concluded their peregrinations in the village of Sedua before floating down the wild Arun River on airbeds. George Lowe reported, in a piece he wrote for the NZAC Alpine Journal, that Ed punctuated the hair-raising journey by tossing off quips such as ‘How long can we last on a chocolate bar?’ and ‘Obviously we can’t go on like this forever.’
The expedition also provided much valuable experience of living and climbing in high altitude and extreme conditions—knowledge that would be invaluable when it came time to take on Chomolungma itself. They were as well prepared as it was possible to be, and all the signs were favourable for a Shipton-led attempt to climb Mt Everest in 1953. Until Shipton was fired.
His replacement was John Hunt.
Britain was desperate for this mission to be a success and had already made numerous errors in earlier attempts. Leadership had been one of the problems. ‘They had put a lot of bad people in charge,’ says Pat Booth, the Auckland journalist who would cover Ed’s career over several decades. ‘An Australian climber by the name of George Finch [father of actor Peter] had got to 8320 metres in 1922 with Mallory. He was an expert on oxygen but he and Mallory didn’t get on and for various reasons he didn’t go again.’
Hunt was a veteran of three previous Himalayan expeditions. He had won the Sandhurst Sword of Honour, commanded an Indian brigade in World War II and been awarded the DSO in Italy. He had trained troops in snow and mountain warfare, so was used to leading men in Himalayan-type conditions.
‘The Poms had just won a war, but lost the peace,’ says Tom Scott, explaining the mindset. In 1953, Great Britain placed much hope in the new Queen, who would be crowned that year. ‘England was still a bombsite with rationing and queues for this and that. It owed America a fortune. At the start of a new age with a beautiful young Queen they wanted to celebrate the coronation with a gift that would be the last terrestrial prize.’
Firing Shipton had been a tough decision for the organisers, and was a terrible personal blow not just for Shipton but for Ed, who was distraught at the news. But history shows the choice was correct, even if it was hard to see at the time. It also taught Ed a valuable lesson—that affection and sentiment were not sufficient qualities to earn someone a place in a team. When it came to choosing the right man for a job, it was talent and ability alone that would decide the matter. Feelings didn’t come into it.
Despite two concerted efforts, the Swiss did not reach the summit of Everest during their year. But they came close. Included in their team was a most experienced Everest hand—the Sherpa sirdar (head man) Tenzing Norgay, who had already been involved in four attempts on the mountain. He and Swiss climber Raymond Lambert had been forced to turn back just 300 metres from the summit the previous year.
According to Scott, Ed and Lowe had thought it unsporting of the Swiss to have two tries—one in the spring and one in the autumn. ‘They were sick with worry the Swiss would get there. Ed desperately wanted that mountain. He was the best climber in the world. George was the second best. So when the Swiss failed Ed was delighted. Next it was the English turn. In 1954 it would be France’s turn. They had only one climbing season in which to do it.’
Looking back at the failed Swiss attempt, Ed used the special tone of patronising graciousness that he reserved for people who tried and failed to do something that he achieved. ‘We wished the Swiss no harm at all and they’d really put in a very good assault on the mountain,’ he told Tom Scott in his documentary Hillary: A View from the Top.
The story of Everest is populated by many ‘nearly men’—climbers who almost got there but, for one reason or other, did not. Some—such as the gifted New Zealand climber Norm Hardie, one of the few men in the world besides Ed, Tenzing and Lowe who probably could have made it to the top—did not even get to Nepal. Others, such as George Lowe, were selected for the party but not for the attempt. Harry Ayres missed out for political reasons. He was on the long list and Ed desperately wanted him to come, but Hunt decided to limit the number of New Zealanders to two. And then there were Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon, who came within two hours of the top but turned back because they would not have managed the descent if they had continued.
Norm Hardie still feels the disappointment of not being included in Hunt’s team. There is no questioning his ability. He was in the group of four who were first to climb Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, believed by some to be a more difficult ascent than Everest. Unfortunately, as Hardie says, ‘People still don’t know where Kangchenjunga is. They mix it up with Kilimanjaro . . . even very few in Nepal know about Kangchenjunga.’ According to journalist Desmond Doig, when Hardie reached the top of Kangchenjunga ‘in respect of local sentiment he left the last few tantalizing feet unscaled’.
Hardie might have expected to get the opportunity to join the team. He was a good friend of the expedition’s deputy leader, Charles Evans. ‘When the Everest thing came up Evans pressed Hunt to include me,’ says Hardie. Hunt interviewed Hardie, who made a good impression. But the expedition leader was frank and told the climber that Evans was the only one pressing his claim. He pointed out that Hardie had no Himalayan experience; and he told him he had already accepted Ed and Lowe as members of his expedition. At the time there was no shortage of English climbers from well-established clubs fighting to be included and Hunt was under pressure not to include any New Zealanders at all, let alone three.
This background of national selection helps explain why Hunt chose who he did to make the eventual final assaults on the peak. His first choice was the more politically palatable pairing of his British deputy, Charles Evans, and his British oxygen expert, Tom Bourdillon. His second choice was a Sherpa and a New Zealander, who had shown themselves to be the toughest climbers in the group.
By 13 April base camp had been set up below the Khumbu Icefall. They had six weeks within which to achieve their goal.
The impression of Ed at this time of his life as an energetic mountain goat bounding around the Himalayas from rock to rock is reinforced in a tribute party member George Band wrote at the time of Ed’s death: ‘Ed would be among the first to enjoy a quick dip before breakfast in one of the icy streams flowing down from the glaciers to the north. Then to warm up, he might borrow Mike Westmacott’s butterfly net to try to chase and capture an elusive blue morpho.’
Ed had natural gifts that made him the right man to reach the top of Everest first. He was extraordinarily strong—an everyday strength, not from working out in a gym but borne of day after long day of hard work from an early age. ‘He could lift honey boxes on and off trucks at the age of ten, and they are really heavy,’ says Tom Scott. ‘He had a raw-boned farmer’s strength. That sort of work builds stamina as well. George Lowe was incredibly fit, and he said when tramping no one could compete with Ed or keep up with his phenomenal pace.’
He had also got used to working at high altitude where, at 8000 metres, for example, the oxygen is 75 per cent less than at sea level. ‘I was hoping for the documentary to film his fountain pen diary,’ says Scott. ‘I thought, this will be great, we’ll film pages of his diary at base camp and then later film his handwriting deteriorating [as he got higher]. Here is proof of what altitude does. And he gave me his diary and it was as literate and copperplate at 27,500 feet as lower down. That’s how fit he was.’
Ed was fully conscious of his own physical and psychological advantages on the trip. ‘I knew I could go up the mountainside faster than anybody else,’ he told the New Zealand Listener in 2007, ‘and this also gave me a great deal of confidence—probably why I got to the top of Everest . . . I knew that I could move fast, even at high altitude, and faster than anyone else in the team who were good climbers. I was also somewhat competitive, I have to admit. I was quite prepared to compete with companions on the trip. We were off on a climb up a ridge to get a good look at the possible routes on the mountain and then we would rush down again and I always made sure that I got up higher first and that I got down first. There was simply no doubt in my mind that that’s what I was going to do and I did it. So you know that gave me a great deal of confidence when I knew that even these renowned climbers—that I could leave them for dead if I had to.’
When Ed was roped to Wilfrid Noyce, who was in charge of boots on the expedition, and Noyce was following faster than Ed liked, Ed sped up until the rope was taut, and he made sure it stayed taut.
The expedition used aluminium ladders to get across the many crevasses they had to negotiate. It was a hair-raising means of transport that involved placing the ladder across the gap then gingerly crawling over rung by rung. Ed insisted on being first across.
Other members might have been fitter, or more ambitious, or had more experience. Some were definitely better technical climbers. But Ed had the right combination of qualities to get to the top.
‘He resented being classified as a simple uncomplicated climber who happened to be in the right place at the right time,’ says Scott. ‘There was more to it than that. No Ed Hillary, no Everest. There are defining moments on that mountain where if Ed hadn’t been there it would not have been climbed. He was resented for it, but he was just so much better than the others. It’s hard to handle when someone is that conspicuously better. The Poms thought it was their mountain, but there was one Pom who . . . knew he could get to the top and gave him uncritical approval—Eric Shipton. He knew Ed had greatness in him.’
Initially Ed and George Lowe did much together, but Ed was planning from the start to maximise his chances of getting to the top and knew Hunt would be unlikely to send two New Zealanders under any circumstances.
‘When it became clear to me I wouldn’t be allowed to climb with George Lowe,’ says Ed in A View from the Top, ‘I looked around for someone of equal fitness and strong motivation. The most likely person seemed to be Tenzing.’
If there was a moment when Ed and Tenzing became a team, it was when they were moving roped together and Ed, instead of crossing a crevasse on the nearby ice bridge, decided to jump across. As he did the edge of the ice snapped and he fell. Tenzing jammed his axe into the snow, the rope between the two went tight and Ed gradually returned to the surface. As John Hunt wrote: ‘That no harm came of it was due to the foresight and skill of Tenzing.’
Fellow climber Graeme Dingle says Ed and Tenzing had one unlikely characteristic in common that played a part in their success. ‘Curiously both Tenzing and Ed carried a similar kind of chip. In spite of the drive that the British should be the first at the top, the irony is they didn’t get there. The two foreigners got there first and they both positioned themselves to do that. They both had sufficient inferiority complexes to achieve it and the physical ability to do it.’
Ed did much to draw Hunt’s attention to his fitness and other exemplary qualities. He and Tenzing persuaded Hunt to let them do a fast climb from base camp to advance base and back to test the open-circuit oxygen equipment. This was a demonstration of ability and stamina that was clearly designed to show their suitability for a summit attempt. According to Alexa Johnston, ‘they had climbed 1,200 metres in just over four hours, instead of the usual nine hours spread over three days’. Hunt noticed.
At another point, a group of Sherpas staged a kind of mutiny and refused to go on to complete an essential stage of the mission. Ed asked Hunt to let him and Tenzing go up—a four-and-a-half-hour trek—and spur them on. Hunt agreed. Tenzing exhorted his men to carry on and he and Ed accompanied them to their goal before returning. This was a major turning point in the expedition, and one that no other members would have had the physical ability or moral authority to bring about.
Hunt had decided there would be two attempts on the summit. The first would be by Evans and Bourdillon using closed-circuit oxygen equipment. If that failed Tenzing and Hillary would be sent up with the open-circuit gear. The former system involved recirculating oxygen carried by the climbers; the latter used oxygen taken from the atmosphere.
There was never any doubt Ed deserved his place—he was, simply, the best. Still, emotions ran high when the choice was made. Mike Ward, team doctor and superlative climber, was furious when he found out that he had been placed in the reserves, and lashed out at Hunt. George Band later described the New Zealanders as pushy. It’s an accusation seldom made against New Zealanders, but Ed and George Lowe would have been the last to disagree with the assessment.
Before the final attempts there had been a lot of English courtesy on display: ‘After you.’ ‘No, no, after you.’ But mountaineering isn’t an activity that has a lot of room for such niceties. And Ed certainly had no room for it—he always sought to be out in front. While the others were debating precedence he would charge through the middle, yelling ‘Gangway!’ at the top of his voice.
On their return from dealing with the Sherpa mutiny, Tenzing and Ed encountered Evans and Bourdillon beginning the first attempt to get to the top. Their attempt ended in failure, defeated by—among other factors—a diminishing supply of oxygen. It is possible that if they had used the open-circuit system they would have had sufficient reserves to get there and back.
It is an indication of how Ed’s candour developed over the years that, whereas in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win he says he was pleased when the first party set off for the summit, in View from the Summit he says he was pleased when they returned without reaching it.
Ed’s courage and impulsiveness were always balanced with intelligence and planning. On the climb, he obsessively calculated and recalculated how much oxygen he and Tenzing had, could get away with, and needed. It was a great moment when he chanced upon two bottles that Evans and Bourdillon had abandoned, just as his stock was running low. He also felt sure that Tenzing and Lambert had failed to reach the top, a year to the day earlier, because they had not been sufficiently hydrated, having relied on cheese and snow melted over a candle for sustenance. Ed was in charge of melting snow on Primus stoves to provide water, and made sure everyone kept their fluids up.
Ed told the story hundreds of times of how he and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand on the top of Mt Everest. He described the later stages to the BBC in 1999:
‘The oxygen equipment was not all that sophisticated. It only had a pressure gauge on it, so I never really knew just how much oxygen remained. I had to work out from the pressure how much oxygen remained. All the way up my brain was working fairly energetically . . . I don’t remember feeling any particular fear until about halfway along, where there was this rock step which is now called the Hillary Step.’
This was the crucial moment, the very last obstacle between the climber and the summit. ‘The Hillary Step was one of the harder bits of the climb of the mountain and I decided that I would pioneer it, as it were,’ he told the Listener. ‘It had a rock face on one side and a big ice face on the other and I decided that I could scramble up between the rock face and the ice face. So that’s what I did and I got up and got to the top and then I yelled out to Tenzing to come on up and he duly came up and then I carried on cutting steps. I cut steps almost from the top to the bottom of the mountain and I cut steps along the final narrow ridge along the top with Tenzing not too far behind.’
And with that, at 11.30 am on 29 May 1953, placing first one size 12 boot and then the other where no one had ever set foot before, Ed Hillary, closely followed by Tenzing Norgay, achieved what so many others had only dreamed of doing.
His overriding emotion, he always said, was a feeling of relief. He and Tenzing looked at each other. The reserved New Zealander took Tenzing’s hand to give it a hearty shake. The Sherpa, nearly 20 centimetres shorter than his lanky companion, threw his arms around the climber in a joyful embrace.
There was work to be done. Ed photographed Tenzing triumphant, holding aloft his ice axe and the flags they had taken with them and which they would leave there—the ensigns of India, Great Britain, Nepal and the United Nations, but not that of New Zealand. Nor, in a move that would mystify many over the years, did he get Tenzing to take a photo of him. His explanation was always that he didn’t think Tenzing had ever used a camera before and now wasn’t the time to learn.
He turned 360 degrees and took photos at every point, capturing every ridge below so that there could be no doubt that he was shooting from the very top.
He looked around for any sign that Mallory might have been there but could find none. And he gazed across at forbidding Makalu—another apparently impregnable peak—and saw what he thought might be a route to its top. When a French party became the first to summit Makalu, it was this route they followed.
Ed and Tenzing were both carrying a few talismans to be left on the mountain, and these they now placed in the snow. Lollies and a coloured pencil that Tenzing’s daughter had given him; and a cross that John Hunt had asked Ed to carry.
It was time to descend to base camp—to a place in history and a state of celebrity Ed could not have begun to imagine. He took a few stones from the highest point in the world as souvenirs; and finally—his effort to keep his fluids up having been as successful as everything else on this day—he paused to relieve himself on Chomolungma.