Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (13 page)

Back in London, Laurence Kirwan had received a telegram from Dunlop, the manufacturers of the oxygen cylinders, warning that a cylinder had exploded at the Dunlop factory, killing an operative.
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The Cho Oyu cylinders were not the same type, but the telegram warned that to be sure of safety, the pressure in them should be slightly reduced.

Kirwan had cabled this message to Kathmandu and it was sent on by wireless, and finally, by runner. Instead of slightly reducing the pressure in the cylinders, however, Shipton’s team emptied them completely. All the trial oxygen was lost. Peter Lloyd would never forgive Shipton for this. Whether the climbers would have engaged in any “oxygen training” if the oxygen had
not
been lost remains an open question.

Without oxygen Pugh could not have carried out the most important part of his research. He escaped disaster only because his separate supply of oxygen (obtained for him by Kirwan from the Ministry of Supply) was still at Namche Bazar. As each day went by, however, it was becoming more difficult to get the climbers to cooperate. Morale was extremely low. There was talk of going home, and they were hardly in a mood to give themselves up to the tedium of stepping on and off boxes. Shipton, whom Pugh described as “very depressed and not feeling well,” gave him no support. “Eric didn’t go in much for the science side,” Hillary told me later.

Now, instead of keeping his promise to take a group of climbers to a suitable venue for Pugh to carry out his high-altitude work, Shipton encouraged his men to disband and go off climbing. There was no attempt to ensure that Pugh would have enough experimental subjects for his project, and no question of Shipton setting an example by taking part himself. Tom Bourdillon complained to his wife that he found himself single-handedly trying to prevent Pugh’s project from disintegrating entirely.

Only Bourdillon, Cam Secord, and Ray Colledge agreed to remain with Pugh. Bourdillon felt very torn; he would have loved to have gone climbing, but he also wanted to find out more about oxygen.
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Secord for his part had become friendly with Pugh and was increasingly impressed with his ideas.

Shipton immediately disappeared with Gregory and Evans to visit an unexplored part of the nearby Menlung area, taking with him, as Pugh complained furiously in his diary, “my Sherpa Da Tenzing & my RGS compass & the bungalow tent which I was hoping to get for the physiology.”
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In pain from sciatica, Riddiford left the expedition in disgust at Shipton’s failures of leadership. One small compensation was that Hillary and Lowe agreed to keep detailed records for Pugh of everything they drank and the amount they urinated during their weeklong jaunt on the Tibetan side of the Nup La, a pass to the east of Cho Oyu.

Pugh, Secord, and Colledge descended as far as Chule at 15,500 feet, where Pugh unpacked and set up his respiratory apparatus. It was much warmer now, and Pugh realized that he was, at last, becoming reasonably well acclimatized: “The contrast between my condition now & last time three weeks ago is striking. I can now do a full day’s mental work and climb as well, whereas on April 27th when I first visited Chule, I sat for three hours after arriving, doing nothing at all, with my mind more or less blank. The others noticed similar effects.”
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Pugh only saw Shipton once more, for an hour, when he passed through Chule on his way back from the Menlung La. It was only then that he finally told Pugh of the drastically curtailed facilities he was prepared to provide for the physiology. Pugh wrote in frustration: “I am being given only a week for my physiological work instead of the 10–14 days Shipton promised me. The pass leading to the plateau we are going to turns out to be difficult, so I am having to cut down my equipment drastically.”
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The site on the Menlung Glacier that Shipton had chosen lay at 20,000 feet—2,000 feet lower than Pugh had originally been promised. The promised two weeks in the Everest area, with a full complement of ten climbers as experimental subjects, was never mentioned again. Instead of staying to help Pugh, Shipton was planning to take Evans, Hillary, and Lowe on a trip to the Barun Valley. He led them off with “practically no clothes and a tossed together heap of food.”
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Eventually the four men and their Sherpas ran out of food and were reduced to climbing trees to look for fungi.

On the face of it, things looked pretty disastrous for Pugh; frustrated, let down, yet under pressure to produce results, he was left with less than a week to complete his program. But he was nothing if not flexible and ready to make the best of things. He also now had a sympathetic companion in Secord with whom to let off steam. However disappointed he was, once he began experimenting, the thrill of discovery took over, and he became immersed in his work. Waiting at Chule while Bourdillon collected food and the physiological oxygen from Namche Bazar, he wrote: “I am employing the time doing physiology. . . . I am getting surprisingly consistent results. . . . It is a pleasant place and life seems very good.”
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On May 21, Pugh’s small party packed up and set off for the Menlung Glacier. From May 24–28, he, Bourdillon, Secord, and Colledge worked intensively—particularly Pugh, who had to analyze the results as well as manage and take part in the experiments. His diary records that on successive days he spent eleven hours doing physiology, retiring to bed exhausted at five o’clock in the evening. Later, when his boss Otto Edholm saw how exacting this work must have been, he commented to Kirwan at the RGS: “I have been most impressed . . . I think it is most unlikely that any other man would have been able to gather so much information in the time available, and that he must have been working well up to the limits of his ability.”
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One of the most important things Pugh hoped to find out was what difference the heavy oxygen apparatus really made to the speed of climbing. The tests were done using a measured track on a steep snow slope, which the men had to climb as fast as they could at a steady pace, timed with a stopwatch.
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They ascended the track without loads or oxygen to provide a benchmark. They did the same ascent with 23-pound loads (the weight of an oxygen set) but not using oxygen, to measure how much they were slowed down just by carrying the apparatus. Finally, they did the climb wearing the 23-pound open-circuit sets with masks, receiving supplementary oxygen at 2 liters a minute, 4 liters a minute, and finally, 10 liters a minute.

The tests showed that on oxygen at 2 liters a minute, the men climbed at the same speed as they climbed without oxygen. This confirmed what climbers themselves had been saying for years—carrying the sets consumed so much energy that it canceled out any positive benefits. Oxygen at 4 liters and 10 liters a minute
did
increase the speed of climbing, but still only slightly, because of the weight of the equipment. What was strikingly different, however, was that the climbers felt much better during and after the ascent. They were able to breathe more easily and panted less violently, their limbs seemed less heavy, and they recovered from their exertion more quickly.

Pugh reasoned that if climbers used oxygen at these rates for climbing at high altitude, they would have to stop and rest less often. If they didn’t have to stop and pant every few steps, they might be able to climb twice as fast as they could without oxygen. Ten liters of oxygen a minute produced faster climbing speeds than 4 liters, but would also require climbers to carry greater quantities of oxygen. Pugh did not judge the improvement to be sufficient to justify the difficulties, so he recommended that 4 liters of oxygen a minute, delivered through open-circuit sets, should be provided for the 1953 expedition.

Climbers working at peak effort at high altitude may be breathing 120 liters of air a minute, or even more; one of Pugh’s subjects climbing without oxygen reached 171 liters a minute. In this context a mere 4 liters of supplementary oxygen a minute seems rather small.
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However, Pugh reckoned that men climbing at extreme altitudes were so near the limits of human endurance that a tiny proportion of extra oxygen could make a big difference. If oxygen made a noticeable difference at 20,000 feet, it would have far more impact higher up, where the difficulties for climbers were proportionately greater.

Skeptical about the open-circuit, Bourdillon and Secord were both more attracted to the closed-circuit system, which supplied climbers with 100 percent oxygen—that is oxygen at a higher pressure than the normal pressure at sea level.
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This meant they should be able to climb much faster than with the open-circuit. Bourdillon’s father had not managed to get any trial closed-circuit oxygen sets ready for Cho Oyu, but even without the sets, Pugh investigated the impact of 100 percent oxygen by having his subjects ascend the test slope while breathing pure oxygen carried in specially adapted Douglas bags.
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Bourdillon and Secord felt so wonderful on 100 percent oxygen that they both became convinced that the closed-circuit was the only system worth pursuing, and should definitely be used on Everest. However, the closed-circuit suffered from a series of well-known technical problems that Bourdillon and his father were hoping to solve in time for the 1953 expedition.

At the end of the week, Bourdillon and Colledge left on a climbing trip, and Secord and Pugh, having done all they could, trekked back to Kathmandu by the Tesi Lapcha route.
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They marched long distances each day and got back to Kathmandu at 9 p.m. on June 7, where they were received—Pugh in his grubby marching pajamas—by the ambassador, Mr. Summerhayes, a man who “dressed for dinner” every night of his adult life. Later Shipton would accuse them of having packed up and left the expedition prematurely without his permission.

Secord and Pugh broke their flight home at Zurich and went to Engelberg to convalesce for a few days, before arriving in London on July 3 to find themselves summoned to appear in front of the Himalayan Committee the very next day.

8

An Infusion of Strong Blood

While Pugh and Secord were trekking back to Kathmandu, Bourdillon and Colledge finished their climbing trip and rejoined the rest of the Cho Oyu team, who had congregated at Thyangboche, the beautiful monastery village on the route between Namche Bazar and Everest. Shortly afterward the Swiss passed through on their way back from Everest, bringing the news that they had not reached the summit, but that two of their team—Swiss guide Raymond Lambert and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay—had climbed to 28,220 feet, breaking the British altitude record that had held for twenty-eight years.

Despite their ultimate failure, the Swiss had put in a magnificent performance which cast the British debacle on Cho Oyu in a most unflattering light. This provoked a strong reaction from Tom Bourdillon, who drafted an uncompromising letter in Shipton’s name to the Himalayan Committee in London.
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The letter spoke of “dismay in the party” at the way in which “this and last year’s British Everest expeditions had been run,” insisting that if there was to be a “serious” attempt on Everest next year, an “entirely different” approach was needed. “Really urgent and extensive work” to improve the oxygen equipment must begin immediately, he said; there must be action to improve hygiene and prevent respiratory infections; and equipment must be improved. If next year’s expedition was “to stand any real chance of success,” all this work must begin “without delay.” Bourdillon was Shipton’s loyal friend and great admirer, and was evidently attempting to support him by calling for a drastic overhaul of the committee’s organizational approach.

Nonetheless, on the face of it, the letter looked like a condemnation of the way Shipton had run the Cho Oyu expedition and an endorsement of the views of Griffith Pugh. Bourdillon was very much admired as a climber, but history does not record how he managed to persuade Shipton—and indeed, all the other climbers—to put their names to a document that was so critical of the conduct of their expedition.

If Pugh had influenced Bourdillon, Bourdillon certainly did not admit it. He had just spent nearly a week helping Pugh with his experiments, but neither Pugh’s name nor his research project were mentioned in the letter. It was a glaring omission, as if Bourdillon considered Pugh entirely irrelevant to the formidable list of tasks he was asking the committee to carry out forthwith.

The Himalayan Committee responded to Bourdillon’s imperative letter by calling a crisis meeting on July 4. Bourdillon and Shipton were still not back, but Pugh and Secord, who had only arrived home the day before, were summoned to give an account of the expedition. Pugh was still feeling very unwell from the diarrhea he contracted early in the expedition.
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By now it was common knowledge that the attempt on Cho Oyu had been an abject failure, while the Swiss had put in a record-breaking performance on Everest. There were murmurs of discontent on the committee. Doubts were expressed about Shipton’s competence. Questions were asked about why he was not intending to come home immediately.
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The Swiss had permission to try Everest again that autumn, but the weather was likely to be against them so there was a fair chance they might not succeed, thus handing the British one more opportunity to be first to the top. Public interest was rising; other countries were clamoring for their turns, and it was apparent that if the British got another chance and failed yet again, it would be a serious blow to national prestige.

Cam Secord (whom Laurence Kirwan referred to privately as “the abominable snowman”) was the first to speak at the crisis meeting. He had not been party to the letter written by Tom Bourdillon, but had sent the committee a letter of his own, making the same points as Bourdillon, just as forcefully. Like Bourdillon he condemned the casual way in which Everest expeditions had traditionally been organized, giving them “no solid chance of success.” Like Bourdillon he called for a far more professional approach. “Either we must take it really seriously,” he urged, or “leave it to others.”
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