to do something about it. His chance came when a small group of Tibetans crossed the border and stole some Nepali yaks. This incursion was the excuse for the infamous Diplomatic Mission to Lhasa of 1904, led by Younghusband, who, on his way to Lhasa, saw the mountain at last:
Mount Everest for its size is a singularly shy and retiring mountain. It hides itself away behind other mountains. On the north side, in Tibet … it does indeed stand up proudly and lone, a true monarch among mountains. But it stands in a very sparsely inhabited part of Tibet, and very few people ever go to Tibet.
Younghusband certainly did go to Tibet, and in some style. He was leading a force of British soldiers carrying Maxim machine-guns and cannon. A force of 2,000 Tibetans attempted to resist at Gyantse with matchlock muskets, spears and swords. Their lamas assured them the British bullets would not harm them, but when the smoke cleared over 600 of their number had died. By the time the British reached Lhasa the casualties were nearly 3,000 Tibetans killed, compared with only 40 British soldiers. This was a lesson on the effectiveness of machine-guns as devices for cutting up men, a lesson that was initially ignored by the First World War generals.
Britain gained privileged access to the closed country, and eventually set up telegraph poles all the way to Lhasa. Trading could begin, although some in Europe were sad that one of the last veiled mysteries of geography had been ripped aside so brutally. Curiously enough, the belligerent Younghusband had a mystical experience on his way back from Lhasa and later became a spiritual writer. He saw Mount Everest from one of his camps ‘poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world’. In later life he said he regretted his invasion of Tibet.
By Mallory and Somervell’s time the new breed of alpinist was thinking about even higher mountains than those in the Alps and the Caucasus, and were organising the first Himalayan expeditions. However, because both Nepal and Tibet were closed to foreigners Mount Everest seemed an impossible dream. This opinion changed subtly after the geographical poles were reached, and particularly after the tragedy of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1912.
Scott’s endeavour was an example of serious exploration in the old style; that is, exploration with a strong scientific purpose. When his last camp was found it was only 11 miles from the next food dump that might have saved his party. And yet they had man-hauled 30lb of rock samples behind them all the way from the Pole.
There was another example of this serious scientific interest. The palaeobotanist Marie Stopes had applied to join Scott’s second expedition. She had been turned down on the grounds of her sex, but following her advice Scott had looked for a specimen of a coal-forming, fossilised fern named Glossopteris. The discovery of this specimen in the dead explorer’s collection established that Antarctica had once formed part of the first super-continent of Gondwanaland.
In his diary entry for 8 February relating to this discovery near the Beardmore Glacier, Scott writes that they spent ‘the rest of the day geologising … under cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams. From the last, Wilson, with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers, also some excellently preserved impressions of thick stems, showing cellular structure.’
Scott’s last words, written as he lay dying in his own lonely tent, made a powerful impression on me as a schoolboy:
For my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last … Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.
There seems to be something in the English psyche that celebrates the concept of heroic failure. One doesn’t see it in Scottish culture, nor do the Americans have any truck with losers. It is hard to disentangle, but both Scott and Mallory are examples of this phenomenon. Franklin of the North-West Passage is another. I’d suggest it might have to do with the English public schools’ paradoxical injunction to try your very hardest, but not to boast of any success. Bragging is considered one of the cardinal sins. The top winning strategy in this contradictory game is therefore to die heroically trying to reach some impossible goal. I believe heroic failure may have played a small part in Mallory’s psychology, as well as in the minds of his predecessors.
Scott and his party had been beaten by the Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen, who pipped them to the post by employing more effective dog-teams, keeping his attempt secret and treating his expedition as a race. Scott thought it was unsporting to use dogs and insisted on man-hauling the sledges, rather as later explorers thought it would be unsporting to use supplementary oxygen to climb Mount Everest. British moral indignation rose in step with Scott’s elevation to heroic status. ‘Amundsen even ate his dogs!’ they cried. Edward Whymper had referred to Everest as the Third Pole, and this term now gained currency. British pride had to be assuaged, and the ascent of Everest would do as well as anything else.
So, after more years of negotiations and the intervention of the First World War, the Dalai Lama reluctantly gave permission for Mount Everest to be reconnoitred in 1921, with a climbing party to be led by General Bruce the following year. This turn of events was largely thanks to the persistence of Younghusband. By then president of the Royal Geographical Society, he was determined to get an expedition out to the mountain. His 1920 presidential address hints at why people still want to climb Mount Everest:
The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit and will give man, especially us geographers, a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the earth, and that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings … if man stands on earth’s highest summit, he will have an increased pride and confidence in himself in the ascendancy over matter. This is the incalculable good which the ascent of Mount Everest will confer.1
Before Younghusband’s address the Royal Geographical Society had staged a talk in March 1919 from a truly remarkable Everester. John Baptist Lucius Noel was another one of those privileged soldiers, his father being the second son of the Earl of Gainsborough. Noel was a handsome man and something of an entrepreneur, as later events revealed. I have an interest in Noel because he was the first man to film on Mount Everest, predating my own filming there by some 70 years.
He stood up to read a paper entitled ‘A Journey to Tashirak in Southern Tibet, and the Eastern Approaches to Mount Everest’. Noel described how, when stationed in Calcutta as a lieutenant, he would take his leave in the baking summer months up in the hills to the north, searching for a way to the highest mountain on earth. As with so many of us he became captivated by Everest. Eventually he crossed the Choten Nyi-ma La, a high pass in Sikkim to the north of Kangchenjunga (I saw this pass in 2009, which is now heavily guarded on both sides by soldiers from China and India). Unseen, Noel slipped across, disguised as an Indian Muslim trader:
To defeat observation I intended to avoid the villages and settled parts generally, to carry our food, and to keep to those more desolate stretches where only an occasional shepherd was to be seen. My men were not startlingly different from the Tibetans, and if I darkened my skin and my hair I could pass, not as a native – my colour and shape of my eyes would prevent that – but as a Mohammedan from India.2
His plan was to find the passes that led to Mount Everest and, if possible, to come to close quarters
