Read Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain Online
Authors: Harriet Tuckey
Written in the tone of a dispassionate commentator, Pugh’s appendices explained the physiological impact of high altitude in simple layman’s terms, and went on to describe the key methods for overcoming the problems. Acclimatization, hydration, oxygen-flow rates, coping with the cold—it was all there. Some of the information was extremely detailed; there were tables giving the precise daily rations, diagrams of the closed- and open-circuit oxygen sets. Pugh did not, however, mention that he was the originator of the recommendations, or give any indication that they were based on his own research.
After Everest, Pugh’s methods became a template for virtually all high-altitude expeditions, and over the next few years the changes in climbers’ fortunes were dramatic and immediate. Before 1953, only one of the fourteen mountains in the world above 8,000 meters (26,250 feet) had been climbed. This was Annapurna, which is only 246 feet higher than Everest’s South Col, and was summited in 1950 by French climbers Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal, resulting in the loss of all their toes and nearly all their fingers. Both men were lucky to be rescued by their fellow climbers and escape with their lives. Many of the other top Himalayan peaks had been attempted, but had consistently confounded the best efforts of the greatest climbers in the world, often with tragic loss of life or serious injury. But now, high mountain summit after high mountain summit suddenly began to fall with amazing speed.
Within only three years the world’s six highest mountains had all been climbed—K2, the second-highest, and Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest, were climbed in 1954; Kanchenjunga, the third-highest, and Makalu, the fifth-highest, were climbed in 1955; and so on. Five years after Everest, only two peaks above 26,250 feet remained unclimbed, one of which was inaccessible. This was certainly what has been dubbed “the golden age of Himalayan climbing.” Today, the successes are usually attributed to a sudden blossoming of skill, courage, and fortitude among the legendary mountaineers of the mid-1950s, their hearts and spirits inspired, so it is often said, by the noble British example on Everest.
However, the great Swiss climber Jürg Marmet, who, together with Ernst Schmied, made the second ascent of Everest in 1956, remembered being influenced by Pugh’s recommendations on oxygen consumption for climbing and sleeping, and on acclimatization. He also told me that the results of Pugh’s tests on clothing, equipment, food intake, and energy balances “were incorporated into our planning for 1956,” and “they are still valid today.” Four climbers on his expedition reached the summit. They also made the first ascent of Lhotse—27,940 feet—the world’s fourth-highest mountain.
The American climber-physiologist, Tom Hornbein, who in 1963 made the first ascent of Everest up the difficult West Ridge route, remembered Pugh’s altitude policies as being the accepted rules of high-altitude climbing, “a bit of gospel with the attribution lost along the way.”
Looking back on the early 1950s, the Austrian climber-physiologist Oswald Oelz reflected, “The Swiss would have climbed Everest in 1952 if they had had a scientist like G. Pugh.” Oelz was with the expedition in 1978 on which—twenty-five years after the first ascent—Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner made the first ascent without oxygen. As they did so, one of Pugh’s dictums was constantly on their minds. Every spare minute when they were not climbing was spent brewing sweetened lemonade and telling themselves: “We must drink. We must drink.”
Writing in 2004, the famous physiologist John Severinghaus commented on Pugh’s recommendations for Everest: “What was good fifty years ago is still good today . . . Pugh’s emphasis on adequate energy- and fluid-intake at altitude is as sound today as it was then.”
18
Soon after Pugh returned to work in the spring of 1954, he began to receive invitations from fellow members of the 1953 Everest team to join their future expeditions. In April, Alf Gregory invited him onto an expedition to the Himalayan Karakorum—a mountain range that bestrides the Indian and Pakistani sectors of Kashmir—and sought his advice on tents, boots, and cooking stoves. Shortly afterward, Charles Evans—in Pugh’s eyes, now fully converted to sensible physiological thinking on Everest—asked him to help with preparations for the attempt on Kanchenjunga that Evans was to lead in 1955. Kanchenjunga, at 28,169 feet, is the world’s third-highest mountain, and a far more serious climbing challenge than Everest. Evans asked Pugh to advise on oxygen and plan the low-altitude diet.
19
Later, Norman Hardie, to whom Evans had given the job of organizing the high-altitude diet, begged for Pugh’s help with the high-altitude food boxes too.
20
The MRC forbade Pugh to take part in any more mountaineering expeditions, though he was able to give Evans’s team the advice they needed. The oxygen was being supplied by the firm Normalair, of Yeovil in Somerset, which had provided some of the oxygen equipment for Everest. Sir Eric Mensforth, the head of Normalair, who had not met Pugh before, heard him contributing to a seminar on oxygen in October 1954, and was so impressed that he immediately invited him to become his firm’s “consulting physiologist.”
21
Pugh drove to Yeovil every week for a couple of months to work with Tom Bourdillon, Charles Evans, and Norman Hardie on the expedition’s oxygen. Evans subsequently led his team to triumphant success on Kanchenjunga. Four climbers—George Band, Joe Brown, Norman Hardie, and Tony Streather—all reached the summit.
22
Although Pugh was extremely interested in altitude and its problems, he was still fretting about his Channel-swimming studies, which had been in their infancy when Michael Ward dragged him out of the cold bath in his laboratory in the spring of 1951. The studies were an important branch of research into hypothermia. He had continued with them in the months after Ward’s visit, before having to drop them altogether in January 1952, when he gave himself over to the preparations for Cho Oyu. None of his early findings had yet been written up, and Pugh was afraid that if he didn’t get back to them quickly, other members of his department would be only too ready to step into his place.
17
Braving the Cold
The perfect opportunity for Pugh to continue his Channel-swimming studies presented itself when, after a three-year hiatus, the international cross-Channel swimming race from France to Britain was revived in the summer of 1954 by Billy Butlin, the irrepressible founder of Butlin’s holiday camps. The work Pugh did in this field was part of a long-running engagement with the subject of hypothermia which had begun during the war at Cedars and continued until the end of his career.
Pugh’s first research project at the MRC was a commission from the Royal Navy to study hypothermia and survival at sea. Survival at sea was an immense problem for all shipwrecked sailors.
1
Some sailors drowned, but more died from hypothermia, which, if it did not kill directly, often caused them to drown when they became unconscious or lost the ability to swim because of it. Given enough time in the water, these unfortunate victims would doubtless have died of hypothermia anyway.
Hypothermia wasn’t only a serious problem for the world’s navies—it was the curse of all the armed services. When the Russians invaded Finland in World War II, they lost 200,000 soldiers, many from starvation and exposure to cold. Catastrophic numbers of German soldiers died of exposure in the icy Russian winter of 1941–42 during Hitler’s invasion of Russia. And when in 1943 the Americans launched an offensive in the north Pacific to retake the island of Attu from the Japanese, for every soldier who died of his injuries, another died of cold.
But nowhere was the problem worse than in the water. The German U-boat crews in World War II had the highest mortality and casualty rates of any service, and most of the 28,000 crewmen who died, died of hypothermia, or of drowning caused by hypothermia. Hypothermia had an equally devastating effect on the Royal Navy. Two-thirds of all fatal naval casualties in World War II died of drowning or hypothermia, and of the 30,000 men who lost their lives in this way, the great majority did so from hypothermia.
This huge problem led many countries to embark on research programs. The Japanese carried out secret cold experiments on American and Chinese prisoners of war in Manchuria during the war. Highly unethical hypothermia experiments were conducted at the German concentration camp at Dachau, where naked prisoners were immersed in cold water while their body temperatures were measured until they died. Although some scientific progress was made, five years after the war, hypothermia was still not fully understood, and the best methods of avoidance and treatment had not yet been established. Even the Royal Navy’s traditional advice to shipwreck victims was being called into question.
The advice at that time was to avoid struggling or striking out for the shore and to concentrate on staying afloat by clinging to a lifebelt or a piece of wreckage. However, in 1950, E. M. Glaser, a physiologist writing in the academic journal
Nature
,
claimed that his research had demonstrated that this was the wrong advice, and that lives had been lost as a result: “Fit men who are in danger . . . in cold water might be advised to swim or struggle as hard as they can for as long as they can. If they try to preserve their strength by clinging to wreckage or floating on their lifebelts, they will die from cold. Perhaps more lives would have been saved in the past if this had been understood.”
2
In 1949, Pugh spent a month at the behest of the MRC on an Arctic cruise aboard HMS
Vengeance
, studying the impact of cold on naval personnel on board ship. Afterward, he roundly criticized the Royal Navy’s duffel coats, which buttoned down the front, and pronounced their waterproof oversuits for use in the lifeboats to be “grossly inadequate.”
3
Reviewing previous research into the relationship between body fat and insulation from cold, Pugh saw that in the late 1930s some American researchers claimed to have “exploded” the popular idea that fat people, insulated by their layers of subcutaneous fat, were better able to survive in cold water and felt the cold less than thin people.
4
The Americans had compared the insulating properties of beef fat and beef muscle and had apparently identified hardly any difference between them.
Pugh decided to test their findings by comparing the insulating properties not of beef muscle and fat, but of
human
muscle and fat. Using samples of human fat obtained from the morgue at Hammersmith Hospital, he and a colleague demonstrated for the first time that human fat did indeed have nearly double the insulating properties of human muscle.
5
The fat study led to an idea that was to become the hallmark of Pugh’s career. On joining the MRC he decided not to study survival at sea by gathering data on a large number of people, but instead to focus on a few extreme examples of men who survived in cold water—namely, marathon swimmers. “If you want to study some extreme subject like intense cold,” he announced, “go and find somebody who is good at it.”
The idea came to him when an international swimming race across the British Channel, sponsored by the
Daily Mail
in 1950,
made him aware that long-distance swimmers, who were mostly very fat indeed, were able to survive in relatively cold water for many hours, whereas the victims of shipwrecks normally died of hypothermia within a few hours in water of similar temperatures.
6
The competitors in the
Daily Mail
cross-Channel swim started out from northern France and swam across to England, landing wherever they could along a 10-mile strip of the Kent coastline.
7
The English Channel was particularly challenging, not merely because of the distance of 21 miles, but also because of the relatively cold summer conditions—the average temperature of the water was around 60.4 degrees Fahrenheit—the changeable weather, and the fierce currents and tides. The tides were capable of delaying even the strongest swimmers for many hours, preventing them from reaching the shore and sometimes forcing them to swim up to 50 or 60 miles to complete the crossing.
When the race was repeated the following year, Pugh rushed to Folkestone and made friends with one of the competitors, Jason Zirganos, a cheerful, ebullient, gold-toothed major in the Greek army. Zirganos took 16 hours, 19 minutes to complete the crossing, coming in seventh, beating his time of the previous year. He embodied the classic characteristics of the marathon swimmer in being short, stocky, and very fat, with a gargantuan appetite. During his career as a long-distance swimmer, he competed in most of the recognized marathon swims throughout the world, eventually swimming the English Channel four times. He and Pugh got along so well that he agreed to be studied while swimming in Lake Windermere, where he intended to challenge the record of seven hours for swimming the length of the lake. The average temperature of the water in Windermere is the same as in the English Channel.
After nearly two weeks of training at Windermere with Pugh experimenting on him, Zirganos made his attempt on the record. Amazingly he undertook this not-inconsiderable challenge with a thermometer inserted five inches into his rectum and wearing a mouthpiece from which a tube ran under his body to a Douglas bag attached to a pole. The pole was fixed to the dinghy that Pugh rowed along beside him.
8
Samples of Zirganos’s exhaled breath were collected in the bag and subsequently analyzed to find out how much energy Zirganos was expending at different stages of the swim.
Zirganos swam for over six hours without apparently feeling the cold. Afterward, having beaten the record, he ran up the beach and stood in the open air for a further half an hour without shivering, while Pugh finished his experiments. However, when Pugh (who was very much thinner than Zirganos) embarked on the same swim to compare his reactions with those of Zirganos, he collapsed in less than half an hour. Pulled helpless from the water, he flopped onto the floor of the rescue dinghy and lay shivering violently for 20 minutes.