One of the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest is dead at 88. On May 29, 1953 Sir Edmund Percival Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay made history.
Snow and wind held up the pair at the South Col for two days. They set out on May 28 with a support trio of (George) Lowe, Alfred Gregory and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at 8,500 metres (27,900 ft) on 28 May while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning, Hillary discovered his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them before he and Tenzing attempted the final ascent, wearing 30-pound packs. The crucial move of the last part of the ascent was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face later named the “Hillary Step”. Hillary saw a means to wedge his way up a crack in the face between the rock wall and ice, and Tenzing followed. From there, the following effort was relatively simple. They reached the summit at 11:30 am. As Hillary put it, “A few more whacks of the ice axe in the firm snow, and we stood on top.”
They spent only about 15 minutes at the summit. They unsuccessfully looked for evidence of the earlier Mallory expedition. Hillary took Tenzing’s photo, Tenzing left chocolates in the snow as an offering, and Hillary left a cross that he had been given. [wiki]
His own words (via CNN):
“Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.
“Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation — these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed,” Hillary noted.
“But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar (high school) and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn’t believe it.
He said: “I removed my oxygen mask to take some pictures. It wasn’t enough just to get to the top. We had to get back with the evidence. Fifteen minutes later we began the descent.” [CNN]
Hillary was so humble, he refused to say who had reached the pinnacle of Mount Everest first, until well after his dear friend Norgay passed away. He was diffident, too:
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest. A shy man, he relied on his future mother-in-law to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (1954), Sarah (1955), and Belinda (1959).
In 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. [wiki]
Hillary remarried in 1990. Among his many roles in life, he was the Ambassador to India from New Zealand, in the ’80s.
Humble and inspirational:
Hillary summarized it for schoolchildren in 1998, when he said one didn’t have to be a genius to do well in life.
“I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it,” he said before planting some endangered Himalayan oaks in the school grounds.
The planting was part of his program to reforest upland areas of Nepal. [CNN]
Hillary was more interested in contributing to Nepal than receiving glory for his accomplishments.
Hillary never forgot the small mountainous country that propelled him to worldwide fame. He revisited Nepal constantly over the next 54 years.
Without fanfare and without compensation, Hillary spend decades pouring energy and resources from his own fund-raising efforts into Nepal through the Himalayan Trust he founded in 1962.
Known as “burra sahib” — “big man,” for his 6 feet 2 inches — by the Nepalese, Hillary funded and helped build hospitals, health clinics, airfields and schools.
He raised funds for higher education for Sherpa families, and helped set up reforestation programs in the impoverished country. About $250,000 a year was raised by the charity for projects in Nepal.
A strong conservationist, he demanded that international mountaineers clean up thousands of tons of discarded oxygen bottles, food containers and other climbing debris that litter the lower slopes of Everest.
His commitment to Nepal took him back more than 120 times. His adventurer son Peter has described his father’s humanitarian work there as “his duty” to those who had helped him. [CNN]
Everlasting be his memory.
Saddened to hear about this, Anna, and thanks for posting about it.
a kiwi born for Nepal, we could never thank him enough! long time browser first time poster:
Sir Edmund soars ever higher wit his friend Norgay! Edmund Hillary Amar Rahe!
Thanks for this, ANNA.
Damn! You beat me to this post!! I had just started writing it in my head.
Very few in this world are this great.
I hear things went steadily downhill for him after this.
And before you ask, no, those weren’t tears of joy in Hillary’s eyes, just melting snowflakes.
He is gone, Hilla. Godspeed peak-killa.
curses… now they tell me… as he sticks needles in the dead tissue
aye. AYE!! ve belong.
agreed. it annoys me to see the marathoners and triathletes of today waxing on the turds of their endeavor were it a real human accomplishment.
Anna, thanks for blogging this. While Hillary might have been ‘humble’ at a personal level, his achievement with Tenzing Norgay was constructed by the British Press and Establishment then and till much later, in a way that completely foregrounded him, while making Tenzing almost a footnote, a mere ‘Sherpa’ (a word that doubles both as an ethnic identifier and as ‘mountaineering porter and guide’). The fact that he was a porter for mountaineering teams would get played up in almost every mention of his name, and that is the sort of reportage that I grew up reading about him, even as late as the 1970s and 1980s – when Tenzing was the Director of the Indian Mountaineering Institute. This is not a posthumous indictment of Hillary, but it really seemed to me from the way the story was constructed back then that Hillary was the main man, and Tenzing was his ‘native guide and porter’, and since he seemed to have been personally hiumble, I thought this was worth mentioning.
For example, the BBC reportage of the event, which they reproduce verbatim without a sense of irony:
Link
Who came first? Did anyone think to ask? Hillary was certainly mentioned first in the story, and ever after. BTW, Hillary happened to be a beekeeper in earlier life.
Everest was ‘conquered’on May 29, 1953 and a few days later, on June 2, Queen Elizabeth was coronated. In one of her ‘first official acts’, she knighted Hillary, but not Norgay. He had to wait till 1979. So whether that was classism, or racism, or both, or ‘merely’ a colonialist mindset, the effect of both the symbolic act and the actual reportage – was to severely diminish the individual worth of Norgay’s achievement when put next to Hillary’s.
The Brittanica entry for their previous (unsuccessful)attempt in 1952 describes Tenzing as ‘the sirdar or leader of the porters’.
The fact that Hillary himself refused to say ‘who got there first’ may be due to his humility, as he saw it then (and it is also supposed to be a ‘knightly virtue‘) but it is also possible he realized that it was irrelevant, since they went together all the way to the top. They both got there, and what’s the summit anyway, it can handle two people at the same time, and apparently did. I’m glad you’re not telling us either!
Thanks for this post Anna (and Abhi for composing one in your mind) … I forget that Sir Ed wasn’t just a great New Zealander and all round good bloke – he belonged to the world.
Chachaji, Tenzig couldn’t be knighted because he was a Nepali citizen(you have to be a commonwealth citizen to receive the knighthood).
Chachaji – it will be the latter. Sir Ed is to have famously said to his climbing buddies “We knocked the bastard off”. When they finally came down to the foothills, he was aghast to find a letter to him addressed as Sir Edmund Hillary, KBE …
Also, forget “knightly virtue”, singing your own praises is not a Kiwi thing to do. Ever. Sir Ed would have genuinely seen it as the accomplishment of two men, not one.
Tenzing Norgay’s autobiography Tiger of the Snows was published in the 1950s. The Readers Digest printed an abridged version, which I read. Tenzing Norgay stated clearly that Hillary was first.
Edmund, the other Hillary, didn’t want to be left out of the news, huh?
Doesn’t it more correctly translate to big boss? To this day, mallus call white men and women “sayip” and “madamma”, variants of sahib and madam. Never mind that they might be just ordinary people or even considerably lower than the mallu in SES.
Anyway, hats off to these two. “Who was first?” is truly an irrelevant question since one couldn’t have done it without the other. While it was good that Hillary did not answer this question, when Norgay was alive, why did he start after that?
There is this urban legend kind of story about Hillary Clinton being named for Edmund Hillary. At least the specific spelling using two l’s.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/hillary.asp
Actually, Tenzing was offered Indian citizenship after conquering Everest. He quickly accepted it. Nepal was heartbroken.
he was the only living new zealander to have been put on a currency note ($5). this morning i found a fiver in my jeans that i had washed. the plastic note with his picture was still intact and i remembered how a few years ago, to commemorate the anniversary of the climb, a news crew walked around the streets of auckland asking if people had a picture of Sir Ed in their wallet. most people didn’t have a clue (well i didn’t know either), but after then it just kinda stuck with me. it’s just odd that this is what i was thinking this morning before i found out…
14
May be in Nepal, burra sahib = big man. The same words can take different meaning in different parts of the sub-continent. In many parts of Andhra, the word sahib refers to a Muslim. He is a sahib = He is a Muslim.
His life story can’t be told without the pictures. I consider him to be one of the last of the world’s great explorers. Men and women willing to risk death in the name of profitless exploration.
I have started training to climb one of the Magnificent 7 this July. I’ll be using him for inspiration.
Chachaji, I can’t seem to find it, but I remember reading a strongly-worded article that took exception to the way India shamelessly tried to claim Tenzing for India after the climb. Because then naturally India would get some of the glory! Have you ever come across that, or read any criticism of it?
Hi,
We have created a memorial page to pay tribute to those loved ones who have passed away and to pay tribute and remembrance to those who have touched our lives. A special page has been created for Sir Edmund Hillary at http://www.people-to-remember.com/wiki/index.php/Sir_Edmund_Hillary
Thanks, Josh
A true hero. A true inspiration.
Anna, Thanks for covering this. I echo the comments above. What Hillary and Norgay did with 1950s climbing gear and equipment is amazing. In my mind, the question of who stood on top first is academic because they really “knocked the bastard off” as a team. No other way they could have done it. A life well lived. RIP Sir Ed.
Incidentally, the fact that they spent only 15 mins on the summit of Everest is not surprising. It’s probably what most expeditions spend at the summit even today. I understand the wind and the cold really hit you when you’re relatively immobile so you have to keep moving to stay warm.
Amitabh, no, I don’t recall reading about any such controversy. Might have been before even my time! vegimomo mentioned this upthread.
I can’t see how India could have claimed any glory after the fact! Except that, like many other Nepalese-born men, Tenzing
might have beenwas in the Indian Army during WW-2. In fact, I googled to find he was actually a ski instructor during the war years. So perhaps, maybe, on that account, India could have claimed that he developed his mountaineering skills while in the Indian Army.Mountaineering is the one adventure where it is truly all about the journey and not the destination. I did a grueling 16 hour (10 up, 6 down), 6000m climb once to spend just 10 minutes at the top of Mt. Whitney. In addition to the weather, HACE and HAPE are a constant threat. What you learn about yourself is the true prize and guys like this know it well.
Abhi, you may enjoy this television interview with Sir Ed from 2005. Good luck with your adventure.
Well said, Wild Elephant.
And here’s what you find on Patagonia labels: We enjoy silent, human-powered sports done in nature, where the reward involves no audience and no prize other than hard-won grace. These entail risk, require soul and invite reflection. They bring us closer to the natural world and to ourselves.
6000m climb once to spend just 10 minutes at the top of Mt. Whitney BTW, Isn’t Whitney about 4200m? It’s just slightly taller than Rainier, no? Still an amazing climb I’m sure.
Godspeed Hillary.
19 · Abhi said
Slightly off-topic but nevertheless timely, all wannabe mountaineers would also want to read this book for inspiration An eye at top of the world which won the 2007 Himalayan Literature award.
India did sort of claim Tenzing as its own – if not formally, in spirit for sure. Here is what I wrote in my own blog tribute:
taking off on chachaji’s post at no. 9 :
I’m watching CNN and the BBC’s TV coverage of Hillary’s demise: both repeatedly have the newscasters stating this: “He was the first man to climb Mount Everest“.
It rankles, and it rankles good. Knowing what we know of Hillary’s humility, I’m sure it rankled him as well to see Tenzing eclisped thus.
CNN goes on to refer to “…his guide Tenzing Norgay“.
What I can say! Especially when I see brown skinned wealthy Indians here in India kissing the backsides of western foreigners even in the infamous New Economy India. IS there any hope for us Indians living in India?
CNN goes on to refer to “…his guide Tenzing Norgay”.
What I can say! Especially when I see brown skinned wealthy Indians here in India kissing the backsides of western foreigners even in the infamous New Economy India. IS there any hope for us Indians living in India?
I don’t understand – Tenzing was his guide – that was his role in the expeditiion. Whats wrong in stating the fact?
it really seemed to me from the way the story was constructed back then that Hillary was the main man, and Tenzing was his ‘native guide and porter’,
Both chachaji (#9) and Ruchira (#31) are correct. To the western mind, Tenzing was the brave “regimental bhishti,” Gunga Din. However, to us, as children growing up in India, it was Tenzing and Hillary who had conquered Mt. Everest. Of course, we Indians brazenly claimed this Nepali as our own. See? Even my generation used the South Asian “bhai-bhai” concept, especially when it helped enhance our then lowly brown status in the world.
Yes! I meant 6000 ft. I work in meters all day which is why I messed it up. I realized my error while lying in bed after I posted it. Good catch 🙂
His son went up here.
Yes, we covered it here.
My husband (who lived in India for 5 years and went to elementary school during that time) told me that in his school, students were taught that Norgay was the first man to reach the summit.
I can’t see how India could have claimed any glory after the fact! Except that, like many other Nepalese-born men, Tenzing might have been was in the Indian Army during WW-2.
Chachaji, Tenzig Norkay himself acknowledged India factor. He put an Indian flag on the summit, along with 4-5 others, including Nepal. He trained and spent a lot of time in Darjeeling even before the Mt. Everest successful summit. Very early in his life, he was Darjeeling based. His second wife was Indian, and he later became Indian citizen.
Now, his role in the expedition, Tenzig Norkay was involved in seven unsuccessful attempt before Hillary-Norkay climb.
I have read a lot about Everest. He was the only one of the expedition member who intuitively understood Mt. Everest.
Sir Edmud was a great man, and did a lot for Nepal.
Norkay was no potter. He understood Mt. Everest better than anyone else.
Was Tenzig just a porter? No. He was world class climber even before 1953.
From wikipedia:
Tenzing took part as a high-altitude porter in three official British attempts to climb Everest from the northern Tibetan side in the 1930s.
He also took part in other climbs in various parts of the Indian subcontinent, and for a time in the early 1940s he lived in what is now Pakistan; he said that the most difficult climb he ever took part in was on Nanda Devi East, where a number of people were killed.
In 1947, he took part in an unsuccessful summit attempt of Everest. An Englishman named Earl Denman, Ange Dawa Sherpa, and Tenzing entered Tibet illegally to attempt the mountain; the attempt ended when a strong storm at 22,000 ft (6,700 metres) pounded them. Denman admitted defeat and all three turned around and safely returned.
In 1952, he took part in two Swiss expeditions led by Raymond Lambert, the first serious attempts to climb Everest from the southern Nepalese side, during which he and Lambert reached the then record height of 8,599 m (28,215 ft).
OK, a slight tangent, but Floridian, Ruchiraji and Kush are saying that both Tenzing himself and India claimed some of the credit for the ‘conquest of Everest’ in 1953. And that Indian schoolkids thought of Tenzing as Indian and it was ‘Tenzing and Hillary’ instead of ‘H&T’. Kush also tells us that Tenzing planted the Indian flag on Everest in 1953.
However, the thing that I remember reading about most in textbooks was Commander MS Kohli’s 1965 successful expedition, when 9 Indians made it to the summit. After this had happened, maybe the value of claiming Tenzing as ‘also Indian’ declined, and it wasn’t played up much after that, even after he had formally become an Indian citizen.
BTW Kush, if you look at the Timeline, which is decorated with national flags with year – India’s flag shows up only in 1965 while Nepal’s flag shows up in 1953, along with NZ and UK. If you have sources for Tenzing planting India’s flag in 1953, perhaps you should correct the wiki!
Also BTW, the Chinese claimed in 1960 to have reached the summit, that was heavily disputed at the time, but it’s in the wiki with their flag, ahead of India!
Chachaji,
Look at the picture carefully, Tenzig Norgay at Mt. Everest.
It has 5 flags, and second to bottom one is India. Here, too.
Tenzig comes from Darjeeling culture where borders do not matter that much. Himalayas is his home, not the political borders. His sons live in Darjeeling.
All his life, Tenzig Norkay was revered in India.
I think the flag ordering was Nepal, New Zealand, Great Britain (Captain Hunt, the leader of the expedition was a Brit), India, United Nations.
Guide ??, Isnt “guide” supposed to have seen and known the place that he/she is guiding to?? If Tenzing was a ‘guide’ then technically he had to have been to the summit way before Hillary went up there.
Any regular ‘guide’ (the colloquial use of the word) is not cut out to go that high. One has to be an experienced mountaineer to be anywhere near that summit.
44 Kush Tandon: “All his life, Tenzig Norkay was revered in India.”
Tenzig or Tenzing? As kids, we used to think it was Ten Singh, a pucca Indian name. We didn’t have very good schools back then.
From Wikipedia “By the end of the 2006 climbing season there had been 3,050 ascents to the summit by 2,062 individuals, and at least 630 more ascents in 2007.”
Any comment on why such a torrent of Mt. Everest conquests after the initial one? Better gear, better mountaineering techniques or just better athletes?
Because now everybody knew it’s there.
I know it’s only the local news, but it’s the local news in NYC. And yet, Ken Rosato, when talking about Hillary’s funeral in NZ, said he “conquered the world with A Sherpa guide.” Not even a name. Sigh.
33 · Sharad said
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blockquote>CNN goes on to refer to “…his guide Tenzing Norgay”.
Well it is a bit insulting to Edmund Hillary to refer to Tenzing Norgay as his “guide”. As if Hillary was a bumbling tourist being lead to the top of Everest by an all knowing local Man of the Mountain.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/01/hillary-rip.html
…This common notion that Norgay was Hillary’s “guide,” as if Hillary was some tourist being dragged to the top by the experienced climber Norgay, is an old chestnut. The whole concept of a “guide” makes no sense when you think about it: It’s not like Mt. Everest was some secret that only local guides knew the path to. It was the biggest mountain in the whole world and nobody had ever climbed it before.
The correct term for Hillary and Norgay is “partners,” but that word is being taken over by the gays, so we’re back to “mountaineer” and “guide.”
There were no tourists and no guides anywhere near Everest back then The Sherpas, due to their genetic knack for high altitude living, were employed as specialist high altitude porters, but they did not have a culture of climbing mountains until the British had arrived and led them up onto the peaks.
By 1953, the best Sherpa porters had learned technical climbing skills from the British Commonwealth mountaineers. So, there wasn’t much of a distinction between Anglo climbers and the very best Sherpas.
aqualung
aqualung, w.e. might have meant 6000ft. mt whitney is 14500ft (little over 4400m), but typically climbers start at about 8400ft.