Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (12 page)

7

Miserable Failure

The Cho Oyu team stayed in Namche Bazar for two days before continuing their upward journey, but Pugh, who was exhausted and finding it difficult to keep accurate records, decided to wait until he was better acclimatized before going any higher. He remained at Namche Bazar for another four days, setting up his gas analyzer for the first time and practicing some of the exercise tests he was intending to use.

Physiology apart, he spent most of his time observing the local people.
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Da Tenzing, the Sherpa who was to accompany him on the final part of the trek, took him to the top of the 1,000-foot ridge above Namche where there was a view of Everest. Pugh had great difficulty keeping up with him. Despite the warm weather the Sherpa was wearing the arctic clothing that had been issued to him by Shipton—one of the perks, Pugh thought, that drew Sherpas to European expeditions.

Tenzing invited Pugh to his home in the nearby village of Khumjung. Pugh watched, fascinated, as the Sherpa’s wife prepared tea for him “after careful cleaning of the best china with a precious cake of soap.” The tea was proffered with salt and some “very hard, dry fruits.” Afterward, Tenzing took him to the Buddhist temple which had four magnificent brightly painted Buddhas. The walls inside had rows of pigeonholes containing packets of paper which Pugh thought must be prayers.

Pugh left Namche Bazar on April 24 with Da Tenzing, the Sherpa’s fourteen-year-old son Mingma, and four porters. Passing “lovely dwarf irises” and red, pink, and mauve rhododendrons in full flower, they walked up the valley of the Bothe Khosi river toward the 19,050-foot Nangpa La (
La
meaning “pass”), an important trading route between Nepal and Tibet, near Cho Oyu. In three days they reached Lunak, the small settlement at 17,500 feet below the Nangpa La, where Shipton had established his base camp. Later that day, the climbers came back from reconnoitering possible routes up Cho Oyu, bringing disastrous news.

There appeared to be only one feasible route up Cho Oyu, on the western side, which had to be approached from the Tibetan side of the Nangpa La. This meant that at least one camp would have to be placed in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Without the camp they would not be able to make a full-scale assault on the summit.

Shipton was unwilling to establish a camp in Tibet. He had witnessed the Chinese Revolution of 1950 when he was British consul general in Kunming, the southernmost province of China, and had seen people shot in the back of the head or thrust indiscriminately into prison. Having escaped from China only with great difficulty, he was convinced that the Chinese would regard a group of British men camping on Tibetan territory as spies. Not wanting to risk them all being arrested, he was strongly against putting in a full camp on the Tibetan side of the Nangpa La. Instead he proposed to create an advanced base camp on the Nepalese side, just below the pass, at Jasamba, at 18,500 feet, and to send a much-reduced assault team to attempt Cho Oyu straight from there.
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If this plan was followed, Pugh would not be able to do any physiological work on Cho Oyu, but Shipton promised him what seemed like a very acceptable alternative: “Shipton wants to defer physiology to second half of the month after return to Namche & to devote 14 days to it in Everest region.”
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For the next ten days not much happened. Most of the climbers had infections and were suffering from the altitude. Pugh wrote: “Shipton and Bourdillon have pharyngitis, and Secord has a severe paroxysmal cough. Riddiford still has diarrhoea. Hillary had 2 days’ fever at Chule. Colledge sleeps much of the day . . .”
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Shipton and Tom Bourdillon had such bad throat infections that Pugh urged them to go down to recuperate for a couple of days. They left for Thame (12,300 feet)—a village on the path back to Namche Bazar—on April 30.

Shipton had brought his team, already suffering from altitude symptoms, too quickly up to the 17,500-foot base camp. He had then sent them immediately to reconnoiter Cho Oyu, which meant, Pugh noted disapprovingly, that they “will have gone as high as 20,000 feet.” The accepted modern rule of thumb for acclimatization is to allow one day for each rise of 1,000 feet, with a day off every third day and no upward movement if there is any sign of altitude sickness. Shipton had come up 10,000 feet in just three days.

Pugh saw that the climbers’ faces and hands were bluish, and, whereas they had always been talkative in camp during the trek, there was now a “striking reduction in conversation, gaiety, and general activity”—indeed, a subdued silence. He interpreted these as signs and symptoms of exhaustion and “the depressant effect of oxygen lack.” The poor health hampering the expedition—due in part to the slack hygiene—was being compounded by a lack of acclimatization. Pugh was not adapting well himself. Despite the care he had taken, he was still battling with disturbed breathing and a sense of overwhelming lethargy: “Apart from physiological work for 2–3 hours a day I spend nearly all the time sleeping or eating. Sleep at least 12 hours a day.”
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It had already occurred to Pugh that, when Everest was approached through Tibet, climbers would have to undertake a six-week trek across the Tibetan high plains at altitudes of 13,000 to 17,500 feet. This acclimatized them to intermediate altitudes before they reached the mountain. But the trek through Nepal was only seventeen days, and the passes were only 3,000 to 10,000 feet, so climbing teams were arriving at the high mountains far less acclimatized than when they came in through Tibet, without apparently recognizing the difference.

Eric Shipton had spent so much time at high altitude that he acclimatized exceptionally quickly himself and was insensitive to the problem.
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But the danger was obvious to discerning prewar observers. Dr. Charles Warren (Everest doctor in 1935, 1936, and 1938) wrote in 1939:

To reach Mount Everest from India it is necessary to go into Tibet and approach from the north. No doubt a quicker way would be through the native state of Nepal . . . but . . . it seems doubtful whether the shorter route would prove a real advantage, for one of the essential factors in bringing about acclimatisation is a certain length of time spent living at high altitude, and what could be better for such a purpose than the long march through Tibet?
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Another major advantage of the walk through Tibet was that it presented an opportunity to get fit. The British amateur climber rarely trained for an expedition. Taking fitness too seriously carried the stigma of professionalism. In
Mountain Craft
, Geoffrey Young recommended a little skipping and, possibly, a little swimming, but “above all, the morning cold bath.”
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The first time Shipton went into serious training for an expedition was not until 1959, when he furtively carried a 70-pound sack of pig nuts up and down a hill in Shropshire, apparently hoping he wouldn’t be noticed.
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Appalled at the general lack of fitness in Shipton’s team, Pugh reported that the Sherpas were much fitter and stronger than the climbers: “Only Hillary had a performance in any way comparable with theirs.”
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Pugh developed a cough and walked down to a lower altitude to recuperate shortly after Shipton and Bourdillon. He was not at Lunak when they returned, a few days later, still not fully recovered, to find the rest of the team in a state of fractious dissent about Shipton’s decision to abandon the full assault on Cho Oyu.

Shipton, being a consensual leader who liked to talk over issues rather than hand out orders, tried to persuade his climbers that it was right not to establish a camp in Tibet. But Edmund Hillary wanted to put a camp on the Tibetan side and make a full assault despite the risks. The unity of the team had degenerated so far that when Cam Secord and Earle Riddiford took the same view as Hillary, Hillary claimed they did so “not because of any urgent desire to climb Cho Oyu,” but “because of their intense reluctance to accept any of Eric’s ideas on principle.”
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Criticism of Shipton was only acceptable to Hillary if he himself was doing the criticizing. “Eric handled the situation badly,” he wrote afterwards. “By arguing all afternoon . . . he demoralised all of us . . . he should have made a firm decision.” Secord was said to have protested, “This is no good, Eric; you can’t fly an aeroplane by having a debate.”
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In public, Hillary would always remain one of Eric Shipton’s most stalwart supporters and admirers, yet later in the expedition, in the privacy of his diary, he was positively scathing about the quality of Shipton’s leadership: “In my opinion Eric is now quite unsuitable as an Everest leader, as instead of a powerful combining and shaping factor in the expedition he disturbs people’s confidence, saps their enthusiasm, and fills them with doubts entirely because he has now little or no confidence himself and is jealous of positive judgements of others.”
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Riddiford eventually became so frustrated with Shipton that he went from tent to tent trying to persuade the climbers to let him take over and lead a full assault himself, but he failed to drum up any support. Despite everything, Shipton’s plan was confirmed, and the team moved up and established the advanced base camp at Jasamba, just below the Nangpa La, ready to begin their assault.
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Pugh, still coughing and very tired, rejoined the expedition at Jasamba on May 7, only to find that the assault team consisting of Evans, Hillary, Lowe, Gregory, Secord, and Bourdillon had set out for Cho Oyu the previous day. Shipton was too ill to go with them. Riddiford was crippled by severe sciatica. Colledge was still very unwell. The trial oxygen equipment Peter Lloyd had worked so hard to get ready had been brought up to Jasamba, but they did not take it with them, wasting what would prove to be their last opportunity to try it out in realistic conditions. Nor did they take enough food.

The assault party crossed the Nangpa La and started up the lower slopes of Cho Oyu, making a camp at 19,500 feet. The next day they pushed up over slopes of shale and snow to a desolate ridge at 21,500 feet, where they put in another camp. There was a lot of snow on the mountain for the time of year. The weather was appalling; the visibility was bad, and they made little progress over the next two days. Evans, who had laryngitis, was getting worse, coughing all night. On the third day he was forced to descend, escorted by Secord and a Sherpa, leaving the remaining four climbers, in Hillary’s words, “short of food and demoralised.” At around 22,500 feet, an ice cliff that was 1,500 feet high barred the way forward. Hillary and Lowe, being the superior ice climbers, led the way up, followed by the other two.

Down at Jasamba, Shipton was finding Pugh’s presence a burden. On May 8 he wrote to his friend Pamela Freston: “Pugh is another problem. In the circumstances I can’t send him up onto the mountain to do his physiological work, and there is nothing much for him to do here—it’s a difficult period.”
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Pugh had brought most of his equipment up to Jasamba, but his diarrhea was so bad by this time that he felt incapable of doing any experiments or attempting to go higher. He did not worry because he was expecting to get fourteen days with the climbers in the Everest area to accomplish his project. He had no idea that Shipton was already thinking of going back on this promise.

Despite their poor health, Shipton and Riddiford now decided to go up and join the assault. Pugh commented: “Seems mad to me to attempt to climb under these circs.” But they were too late anyway; the assault team had already given up.

On the ice cliff, Bourdillon and Gregory had become concerned that the snow conditions were dangerous, and had called to Hillary and Lowe to turn around. They complied, but afterward Hillary bitterly regretted giving up so soon: “Nothing could wipe away our sense of complete failure on Cho Oyu . . . in retrospect it would have been better to have abandoned Cho Oyu before dissension divided the group, and gone off to attempt one of the many other great virgin peaks in the area.”
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Having failed to get to within 5,000 feet of the summit of Cho Oyu, and having thrown in the towel at a far lower altitude than most of the prewar Everest teams, the climbers limped back to Jasamba, not happy at all. Apart from Hillary and Lowe, all of them were suffering from infections.
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Shipton now decided to abandon the attempt on Cho Oyu. Perhaps a little obtusely, Pugh imagined that the climbers might be willing to remain at Jasamba for a few days and allow him to carry out some experiments with them. He was sitting in his tent after lunch when he realized they were about to go down. He rushed out and “managed to persuade people to be weighed before leaving. . . . We suspended the spring balance from the roof of the croft tent. Most of us had lost weight.”
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Then he packed up and followed them down. When they got to Lunak they discovered they had brought down “practically no food.” The Sherpas had to return to Jasamba to fetch food and equipment but came down with the wrong things. Their sugar ran out on the May 13. It was a shambles.

Quite apart from Pugh’s physiological project, another of the “important secondary goals” of the expedition was to test Lloyd’s trial oxygen equipment. This was Shipton’s responsibility. Hillary and some of the others clearly knew about it, but they were no more enthusiastic about oxygen trials than they were about Pugh’s project. Shipton did not insist that they participate in it either. Hillary wrote: “Some tests were to be carried out on oxygen equipment but Shipton agreed that George and I should head off on a trip by ourselves—I think he realised we weren’t very happy about our Cho Oyu efforts.”
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Not long afterward, the entire supply of trial oxygen would be lost without having been used once.