Forty-five years ago next month, a New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary became the first man to conquer Everest. Or, alternatively, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first man to conquer Everest, since it is one of the peculiarities of the conquest of the highest mountain in the world that the precise identity of the first climber to set foot on its peak is still a matter of some dispute.
The British are odd about such matters; they had always been somewhat proprietorial about Everest, even though the Tibetans and the Nepalese had been aware of its existence for centuries and didn't need a British survey to tell them it was there, thank you very much. They knew the mountain as Chomolungma, or "Goddess Mother of the World", and to them it was a sacred place on whose summit the gods dwelt.
The British first mapped the mountain in 1849, initially naming it Peak XV. Since it was too big to be shipped back to Blighty and there was no point in letting the darkies have it - after all, they couldn't even be bothered to climb the bloody thing - the mountain was renamed Everest in 1865 as a kind of demonstration of British ownership, thus immortalising the British surveyor Sir George Everest, who had spent his career measuring India.
Sacred peak
Since they viewed the peak as sacred, the Nepalese and Tibetans were reluctant to give permission to make the climb to its peak. The British respected their wishes, at least until the early years of the 20th century. In 1909, the Americans became the first to reach the North Pole; more galling still, in 1911 the Norwegians beat Scott to the South Pole. Faced with foreign successes elsewhere, the British desire to reach the top of the world, the "third pole", grew noticeably stronger. The fact that climbing Everest was unlikely to be a simple stroll up a modest incline didn't bother the British one little bit. They were, after all, used to hardship; years of watching cricket in the rain does that to a chap. There was no place for whingers in the great British exploratory scheme. Scott, for example, was a little put out when one of his men, close to death after their hellish, doomed 169kilometre trek, appeared to be in low spirits due to the fact that his frost-bitten fingers were beginning to suppurate and his nose had turned black and was starting to rot off. "To my surprise, he shows signs of losing heart over it," wrote Scott. "He hasn't been cheerful . . ."
So, upper lips duly stiffened, the British commenced their efforts to conquer Everest with the first expedition of 1921. And the second expedition of 1922. And the third expedition of 1924, and so on. The first casualty occurred on the 1921 expedition, when Dr A.M. Kellas died while the party was still approaching the mountain. Again, there was a Scott-like suspicion that Kellas had been acting up in an effort to get attention. "No-one considered that there was anything critically serious with him," recalled his fellow climber Sir Francis Younghusband, despite the fact that Kellas had been so ill the porters had to carry him on a litter. The expedition got to 23,000 feet, 6,000 feet from the summit. The mission was pronounced "a total success".
White superiority
During the 1922 expedition seven Sherpas died after an avalanche knocked them over the edge of the cliff. Losing Sherpas was regarded as something of an occupational hazard by some of the British climbers, who retained an admirable sense of white superiority throughout their efforts to climb the mountain. George Leigh Mallory, who would eventually die on his third ascent of Everest in 1924, noted that his team leader, C.K. Howard-Bury, had a "very highly developed sense of hate and contempt for other sorts of people than his own".
It was, perhaps, some residual element of this contempt which eventually led to the assumption that Hillary must have been the first man to reach the top. After further unsuccessful ascents by British and Swiss teams, and the closure of the north-east route following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, Hillary and Tenzing eventually reached the top of Everest on May 29th, 1953. They drank some lemonade, ate a Kendall's Mint Cake and, 15 minutes after reaching the top, they started to climb down again.
When they reached their camp, Hillary was congratulated and surrounded by his comrades. Tenzing, 25 feet behind and still attached to Hillary by a rope, was largely ignored. It was a situation that was to be reversed when the party reached Katmandu. There, Tenzing was exalted while Hillary was not permitted to speak and was eventually introduced as "the second man on Everest". The British responded angrily and Tenzing was denounced, although Hillary had not yet publicly claimed to be the first to reach the top. Threats were made to cancel an invitation to Tenzing to visit England to receive a medal unless he retracted his claims. Tenzing was presented with the Star of Nepal by King Tribhuvan; Hillary received a lesser honour. Subsequently, both Tenzing and Hillary signed a sworn statement indicating that they would never disclose who had first reached the peak.
Lost mystique
Further difficulties arose when the accounts of the climb came to be written. In High Ad- venture, his description of the climb, Hillary fudges the issue and recounts that after "a few weary steps . . . we were on the summit of Everest." Later, in his autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Hillary says that he climbed up "on a tight rope from Tenzing" but he fails to say whether Tenzing was holding the rope from above or below. In his autobiography, Tiger of the Snows, Tenzing says that "Hillary stepped on top first", although others continued to believe that he was only saying that in order not to cause any further trouble.
In the end, it probably doesn't matter. Everest was climbed, its mystique was gone, and over 100 more people would subsequently lose their lives attempting to climb the mountain, including some whose sufferings were reputedly ignored by other climbing teams anxious to reach the peak. The mountain is now littered with discarded equipment, oxygen tanks, tents, containers and, buried somewhere beneath the ice and snow, human remains.