Hunt · 1953
Hunt and Hillary on Everest
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.
A great summit is not won by the man who stands on it. It is won, days earlier and several thousand feet below, by the man who chooses the pairs, weighs the sets, reads the weather, and sends two others up in his place. The leader's victory is a quieter thing than the climber's, and the world tends to forget it within a week of the photograph.
THE COMMITTEE'S CHOICE
Henry Cecil John Hunt was born at Simla on the twenty-second of June 1910, into the Indian-Army officer class that took the Himalaya as part of its working geography. Marlborough, Sandhurst, the Indian Military Academy, a commission in 1930, the Italian campaign in 1944, a Distinguished Service Order. By the summer of 1952 he was a colonel in the Allied Forces Central Europe staff at Fontainebleau, with a reputation for cold planning, and a private list of Alpine seasons behind him that the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society had been quietly tracking. Eric Shipton, the reconnaissance man, was the natural choice and had assumed he was the choice. In July 1952 the Committee replaced him with Hunt. The British had had eight expeditions on Everest since 1921. None had reached the top. The Swiss had been turned back on the south-east ridge in the autumn of that same year by two hundred feet of weather. A French permit was held for 1954, a Swiss for 1955. The window for a British first ascent was the pre-monsoon season of 1953, and there would not be another.
THE SOUTH COL
By the twenty-eighth of May the expedition had been on the mountain for seven weeks. Base camp at the foot of the Khumbu icefall, Camp IV in the Western Cwm, Camp VII above the Lhotse face, and at twenty-six thousand feet on the South Col the high camp from which the assault would be made. Hunt had divided his climbers into two summit pairs and a support party. Bourdillon and Evans, the closed-circuit pair, went first on the twenty-sixth, on the theory that the closed-circuit set, recycling its own exhaled air through soda-lime, would deliver more breathable oxygen at altitude. Hillary and Tenzing, the open-circuit pair, would follow on the twenty-ninth if the first attempt failed. At twenty past four on the morning of the twenty-eighth, in the green Meade tent at minus thirty Celsius, with the wind dropping for the first time in five days, Hunt finished writing the order of the day. The weather window, by the forecasts radioed up from Kathmandu, would hold to about the first of June. After that the monsoon.
THE WEIGHT OF THE SET
The decision the Committee had made in July had narrowed, in seven weeks, to a decision about a brass valve. Bourdillon and Evans had reached the South Summit at twenty-eight thousand seven hundred feet by one in the afternoon, the highest any human being had then stood. Evans's closed-circuit valve had iced. They could not strip it on a knife-ridge in driven snow at nine thousand eight hundred and fifty metres, and Bourdillon, who would have gone on alone, was talked back by Evans. They came down through the afternoon, staggering, snow-blind, Bourdillon weeping with rage on Evans's shoulder at the high camp. They brought with them the first description any climber had given of the ground between the South Summit and the main summit: a knife-edged ridge cornicing east over Tibet, and at twenty-eight thousand eight hundred and sixty feet a forty-foot near-vertical pitch of rock and ice that would have to be led. Hunt heard them out. He had, in the tent with him, his second pair, rested, with the more reliable set and the less generous flow. Hillary was thirty-three, a Auckland bee-keeper, two metres tall, raw-boned, ambitious in a way the British climbers found unEnglish and useful. Tenzing was thirty-nine, born at Thame, sirdar of the Sherpa party, on his seventh Everest expedition, the man who had been with Lambert of the Swiss to twenty-eight thousand two hundred feet the previous autumn and had come down with frostbitten fingers and an unfinished sentence. Hunt knew, as he wrote the order, that he was sending up the pair that wanted it most and had the least margin. He was also sending up the pair that, by every honest reading of the ground, had the better chance. He weighed the closed-circuit set against the open-circuit set, the scientist against the bee-keeper, the deputy against the sirdar, the men he had climbed with in the Alps against the man he had met in Kathmandu in March, and chose the pair he had drawn up for this on a sheet of paper at Fontainebleau the previous October. He wrote out the order at twenty past four, and at the same time took from his pack the small metal crucifix he had carried up from base camp and gave it to Hillary, with the suggestion, by his own later account in The Ascent of Everest, that he might put it on top. He did not stay to see them off. He went down with the support party to Camp VII to make room in the tent and to be below them on the line if anything came down it.
THE TWENTY-NINTH
Hillary and Tenzing left the high camp at three thirty on the morning of the twenty-ninth, in still air, the temperature about minus twenty-seven. They climbed by the line Bourdillon and Evans had cut, reached the South Summit by nine, traversed the knife-edge through the morning, the cornice falling away ten thousand feet to the east into Tibet, the west face dropping eight thousand feet into the Western Cwm. At a little before eleven Hillary led the forty-foot pitch by a crack between the rock and the east-side cornice, jamming a boot and a shoulder against the ice, and brought Tenzing up on a tight rope. At twenty past eleven they stepped, one and then the other, onto a small dome of trodden snow with nothing above it. They stayed fifteen minutes. Hillary photographed Tenzing with the ice-axe and the four flags; he did not let himself be photographed, because, as he afterwards put it, Tenzing had never used a camera and the summit of Everest was no place to teach him. Tenzing scraped a hollow in the snow and laid in it a pencil his daughter Nima had given him and a small offering of biscuits and chocolate in the Buddhist manner. Hillary laid the crucifix beside it. They shook hands in the British way and then Tenzing, in his own way, embraced him. They turned and went down.
THE TENT AT CAMP VII
Hunt was at Camp VII through the morning, in cloud, with no radio contact to the high camp. He paced the snow outside the tent. He wrote nothing down. At one in the afternoon George Lowe came out of the cloud above with the news, shouting it before he was close enough to be heard properly, and Hunt walked up to meet him and stood for a long minute with his hands on Lowe's shoulders before he could speak. The pair came in not long after, Hillary stiff and grinning, Tenzing quiet. Hunt embraced them both. He had, by every account, expected to feel something larger than he felt. He felt, instead, a particular and unsharable relief, the relief of a man whose plan has come good and who will spend the rest of his life being asked why he was not the one on top.
CORONATION MORNING
The news went down the chain of camps that night by Sherpa runner. James Morris, the Times correspondent, met it at Camp IV, wrote it out, encoded it in the pre-arranged phrase Snow conditions bad advanced base abandoned yesterday (which meant, by the cipher agreed in London, summit reached on the twenty-ninth by Hillary and Tenzing) to defeat the Reuters man at the Embassy in Kathmandu, and put it down the wire from the Indian Army radio at Namche on the thirtieth. It reached Printing House Square in the small hours of the second of June, and was on the front page of The Times at six in the morning. The Coronation procession left Buckingham Palace at ten thirty. By the time the gold coach reached the Mall the crowds had it from the loudspeakers and the early-edition placards, and a generation of Britons received, in the same hour, a new Queen and a summit on the far side of the world. The two events ran together in the public memory of the year, and have not since been separated. Hunt was on the Honours List of the eighth of June, knighted by the Queen he had given the news to. Hillary was knighted on the same list. Tenzing, not a British subject, received the George Medal.
THE LONG DESCENT
Hunt commanded no other expedition. He was made a life peer, Baron Hunt of Llanfair Waterdine, in 1966; chaired the National Parks Commission from 1968 to 1980; led the inquiry into the Northern Ireland security services in 1969; presided over the British Mountaineering Council, the Council for Volunteers Overseas, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. He climbed in the Caucasus into his sixties and in the Pyrenees into his seventies. He died at Henley-on-Thames on the seventh of November 1998, eighty-eight, having outlived most of the men he had sent up the mountain. Hillary, the same age at his death in 2008, spent the rest of his life building schools and hospitals for the Sherpa of the Solu-Khumbu and was, by the time of his funeral in Auckland, the face on the New Zealand five-dollar note. Tenzing, who became Director of Field Training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute at Darjeeling, died in 1986 and was cremated in sight of the mountain.
A leader's hinge is not the moment he stands on the summit. It is the moment, in a cold tent in the dark, when he writes the names of the men who will, and the names of the men who will not. The choice can only be made once and it cannot be made by anyone else. Hunt made it at twenty past four on the morning of the twenty-eighth of May 1953 and went down to make room. The crucifix he handed to Hillary an hour later is now in the Hillary family papers at the Auckland Museum, in a small glass case, the metal still bright.