Hunt

At twenty past eleven on the morning of the twenty-ninth of May 1953, on the south-east ridge of Mount Everest at twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet above sea level, Edmund Hillary, thirty-three, the New Zealand bee-keeper of the British Mount Everest expedition, and Tenzing Norgay, thirty-nine, the Nepalese-born sirdar of the Sherpa party, stepped onto the summit. They had been sent up from the high camp on the South Col at twenty-six thousand feet on the previous morning by the expedition's leader, Colonel John Hunt, forty-two, on the second of two summit attempts (the first, by Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans on the twenty-sixth of May, had been turned back at the South Summit at twenty-eight thousand seven hundred feet by exhausted oxygen sets). They stayed on the summit for fifteen minutes. They left behind a crucifix Hunt had given Hillary before the climb, a chocolate-bar offering from Tenzing in the Buddhist offering tradition, and a Union Jack and Nepalese flag. They were back at the South Col by the evening. The news reached London by the diplomatic-pouch telegram of Times correspondent James Morris (the future Jan Morris) and was published in The Times on the morning of the second of June 1953, the morning of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The Coronation crowds in central London learned of the first ascent of Everest as the coronation processions reached the Mall.

Read the story →