1938, Tilman’s team included Eric Shipton and Frank Smythe: the very two men accused by Ernst Schäfer of using yeti footprints to raise expedition funding. All three of these men had seen strange footprints in the Himalayas. One can imagine the campfire stories about the Abominable Snowman. Rongbuk is an eerie valley at the best of times; I have walked alone there at night with the ghosts of Mallory and Irvine at my back and can imagine that the shifting shadows beyond the firelight might have caused the odd shiver of fear.
These same three climbers had just had a minor spat in the newspapers before the expedition. Smythe had reported his find of what he insisted were bear tracks in The Times of 10 November 1937, perhaps with a view to some helpful pre-publicity for his next book; and Tilman, under the pseudonym of Balu (the bear), had put up a defence of the Abominable Snowman in the letters page on 13 November where he wrote: ‘Mr Smythe’s article, if it was an attempt to abolish that venerable institution, the “Yeti”, was hardly worth the paper on which it was written.’
This was nicely calculated to wind up the irascible Smythe (note that this was one of the first public uses of the term ‘yeti’ instead of Abominable Snowman). Shipton, also writing pseudonymously (as The Foreign Sportsman, one of the Sherpa’s nicknames), had given his own first-hand experience of footprints in the snow, and supported Balu. He wrote: ‘Balu’s contribution to the discussion was welcome. His spirited defence of the Abominable Snowman wilting under the combined attack of Mr Smythe and the Zoological Society reminded me of Kipling’s lines: “Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer, making his supplication rose Adam-Zad the bear.”’
In short, Tilman and Shipton were having a bit of fun taking the mickey out of the presumptuous Frank Smythe and a bunch of self-important scientists. This was altogether more amusing than the annual ‘first cuckoo of spring’ type of letters to The Times, and this controversy between Himalayan rivals, I suggest, may have provided the spark for what I think was the biggest yeti hoax of the century. (But that was to come much later, in 1951, after Smythe was dead.)
Tilman loved the Abominable Snowman story and had had first-hand experience of it. This is what he reported in his Times letter. He told the 1938 Everest party how in the previous year, during his great journey of exploration across the Karakoram with Eric Shipton, he and two Sherpas came across the footprints of a strange animal:
While contouring round the foot of the ridge between these two feeder glaciers, we saw in the snow the tracks of an Abominable Snowman. They were eight inches in diameter, eighteen inches apart, almost circular, without signs of toe or heel. They were three of four days old, so melting must have altered the outline. The most remarkable thing was that they were in a straight line one behind the other, with no ‘stagger’ right or left, like a bird’s spoor. A four-footed animal walking slowly puts its hindfoot in the track of its forefoot, but there are always some marks of overlapping, nor are the tracks immediately in front of each other. However many-legged it was, the bird or beast was heavy, the tracks being nearly a foot deep. We followed them for a mile, when they disappeared on some rock. The tracks came from a glacier pool where the animal had evidently drunk, and the next day we picked up the same spoor on the north side of Snow Lake.
The Sherpas judged them to belong to the smaller type of Snowman, or yeti, as they call them, of which there are apparently two varieties: the smaller, whose spoor we were following, which feeds on men, while his larger brother confines himself to a diet of yaks. My remark that no-one had been here for thirty years and that he must be devilish hungry did not amuse the Sherpas as much as expected! The jest was considered ill-timed, as it perhaps was, the three of us standing forlorn and alone in a great expanse of snow, looking at the strange tracks like so many Robinson Crusoes.13
Tilman attempted to take a photograph but claimed that he managed to make two exposures on the same negative and so nothing came out. This seems odd, as he seemed perfectly competent with his camera on other expeditions. One might begin to smell a horrible, hairy rat. Later, his team saw bear tracks and agreed that they were completely unlike what they had seen earlier. The first set of prints he reported as circular, with no toes. Tilman speculates on the nature of the creature: ‘A one-legged, carnivorous bird, weighing perhaps a ton, might make similar tracks, but it seems unnecessary to search for a new species when we have a perfectly satisfactory one at hand in the form of the Abominable Snowman – new perhaps to science but old in legend.’
They followed the footprints for a mile. His diary notes tersely: ‘Sixteen inches apart and about 6–8 inches in diameter. Blokes say it is hairy like a monkey.’
On The Times letters page, Shipton chipped in with his own sighting. ‘With two Sherpas I was crossing the Bireh Ganga glacier when we came upon tracks made in crisp snow which resembled nothing so much as those of an elephant. I have followed elephant spoor often and could have sworn we were following one then but for the comparative scarcity of these beasts in the Central Himalaya.’
If you are attuned to the Shipton–Tilman dynamic, you might begin to hear the gentle sound of the piss being taken. Then – and here’s a point relevant to Ernst Schäfer’s accusation – Tilman chimed into suggest a search expedition: ‘I notice regretfully that the correspondence appears to be failing and that a zoologist (Huxley) has been afforded space to drive yet another nail into the coffin of our abominable friend having first poisoned him with another dose of Latin. Difficult though it is, the confounding of scientific sceptics is always desirable, and I commend the suggestion that a scientific expedition should be sent out. To further this an Abominable Snowman Committee, on the lines of the Mount Everest Committee, might be formed, drawn from the Alpine Club and the Natural History Museum.’
Were Tilman and Shipton hinting that more public money might be raised to pay for their expeditions, this time to pursue the Abominable Snowman?
Despite including seven strong climbers, Tilman’s 1938 Everest expedition got no higher than the Norton and Somervell high point of 28,000 feet. Food became a point of contention among the team members; in the name of austerity Tilman had refused the gift of a crate of champagne from a well-wisher, and listed porridge and soup as luxuries. Noel Odell, in particular, objected to the ration of two pounds per day of flour and lentils after enjoying quails in aspic and chocolates on the 1924 Everest expedition. He blamed the parsimonious diet for the recurrent illness and weakness of the party. Bill Tilman gave a typically sarcastic response to this in Appendix A of his expedition book: ‘I must confess I was surprised to hear any criticism of the food, except from Odell, who has not yet finished criticising the food we ate on Nanda Devi in 1936 and who, in spite of his half-starved condition, succeeded in getting to the top.’14
However, Odell did have a point: once again, the British had failed on Everest. Little did they know that their youngest Sherpa, 24-year-old Tenzing Norgay, would finally manage to climb the mountain in 1953 with Edmund Hillary. He was described by the leader as young, keen, strong and very likeable. Shipton had employed him on the 1935 Everest reconnaissance expedition, catching his flashing smile in the employment lines. Nor could they suspect that a British woman, Rebecca Stephens, would climb Everest in 1993; a 13-year-old boy, Jordan Romero, would climb it in 2010; or an 80-year-old Japanese man, Yuichiro Miura, in 2013. Surely, they wouldn’t believe that 234 people would reach the top in a single day in 2012. One of the greatest mysteries about mountains is how they appear to lose their difficulty. As British mountaineer and author Albert Mummery said: ‘It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak – The most difficult ascent in the Alps – An easy day for a lady.’15 This is not a topic for this book, but it has been addressed at length in at least one other.16
Once again, the weather was bad that year so they retreated to the Rongbuk monastery, where they had already noticed that someone
