The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze [ax] from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things, but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had “suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.” We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of men.

  Shackleton framed his astonishing feat of endurance as a journey of the soul. He would not be the last to do so. Mallory cited Shackleton as an inspiration. You can feel, in Mallory’s ornate prose, the same longing for self-knowledge. Writing about reaching the summit of the Col du Géant in the Alps in 1918, Mallory had expressed his credo: “To struggle and to understand—never this last without the other; such is the law.”

  The appeal of the highest mountains, or the most distant poles, was not, for these men, principally about geographical or scientific enlightenment—although the rationale for such expeditions was often couched in those terms. It was about the spirit. The adventurers of this period seemed to want to reach, in Shackleton’s words, their naked souls. It is perhaps unsurprising that so many of the early Everest explorers had witnessed the crushing horrors on the front line in the First World War. To Mallory and his pioneering colleagues on those missions of the 1920s, Everest had become a means not only of national redemption, but of personal and metaphysical rebirth. Wilson shared this second impulse, if not the first. You can almost see him, in the Freiburg café, as Mallory’s story lit a fire within him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN MOST AMAZING AIR ADVENTURE EVER ATTEMPTED

  • September 1932–May 1933 •

  For a few weeks, Wilson told nobody of his plans. The thing wasn’t real unless you said it out loud. Instead, on his return to England in September 1932, he started to read about Everest. In that late summer and early autumn in London, news had just come through that the Dalai Lama had given permission for a British mission to the mountain for the following year. The Mount Everest Committee began to assemble a team for 1933. They were worried that the Germans might beat them to the highest peak on earth. Wilson, on his own, and spurred on by the competition, began to make arrangements.

  What Wilson learned about the hardships that the three expeditions of the 1920s had endured should have warned him off. The stories about blizzards ravaging climbing parties, of the avalanche that killed the seven porters in 1922, and the summit climb that killed Mallory and Irvine in 1924, of fiendish, technical rock faces, of the deficit of oxygen, of sickness and blindness, of air so thin it burned your throat, did not seem to mark him.

  Alpine historians have often wondered if Wilson, reading reports from the 1920s, was fooled by the natural British tendency toward understatement into believing that climbing Everest would somehow be easy. But that seems unlikely. The English had been understated in their descriptions of the war, in part because of censorship, and in part because to describe the conflict as it was would have been too appalling for a civilian readership. However, there was not much understatement in the contemporaneous journalism about Everest.

  The Mount Everest Committee, for instance, gave an unsparing account of the hardships of the 1922 mission to a journalist from the Times:

  Mount Everest is a much more formidable mountain than has so far appeared. The cold, for example, was so great that even at Camp III, at the foot of Chang-la (North Col), the thermometer fell to 29 deg. below zero—that is, 61 deg. of frost Fahrenheit—and on the warmest night at this camp the thermometer registered only one degree above zero. All three members speak in terms of the highest possible admiration of the Sherpa and Bhutia porters, and are most deeply grieved at the loss of seven of them, which has just been reported. Nothing could exceed their pluck and endurance and the cheeriness with which they undertook their most trying work.… Dr. Longstaff reports that all members of the expedition were suffering gravely from the effects of the altitude, the cold, and the very trying winds. They all went to the utmost limit of endurance and sometimes overstepped it. Colonel Strutt, who had spent twelve days running at over 21,000 ft., including a visit to Chang-la, over 23,000 ft., was too done up to continue any longer near the mountain, and under medical advice had to return with Dr. Longstaff, Major Morshead, and Captain Finch, the latter of whom, though he pluckily started on the final effort, was compelled to give up, being completely exhausted as a result of his great climb to an altitude of 27,300 ft. Major Morshead will unfortunately have to lose the last joints of three fingers. The conclusion of all this party is that young men are required for climbing to any really high altitudes. At the same time much experience of snow conditions—and especially winter snow conditions—is necessary.… In the view of the party, Mount Everest can undoubtedly be climbed. But the conditions must be perfect. There must be quite four days of fine weather, and the majority of the actual climbers should be under thirty years of age.

  This Times report was not unusual. Wilson read widely about Everest in this period and must therefore have known the profoundly unwelcoming situation into which he hoped to thrust himself.

  But the newspaper articles of the time also ring out with a spirit of optimism. In another Times report from 1932, written by Sir Francis Younghusband, the chairman of the Mount Everest Committee, a sense of possibility emerges. Younghusband was a fascinating and conflicted character. In 1903 and 1904, he led the ultraviolent British invasion into Tibet. He had been at the forefront of the British Everest obsession ever since. Like Wilson, the former officer had experienced a revelation. On Younghusband’s way out of Lhasa, in 1904, he became suffused in a type of spiritual bliss and became convinced that “all men are divine.” As the years went by, Younghusband’s spiritual life became more and more unorthodox: he began to explore ideas about free love, founded a world interfaith conference, and became an early adherent to a kind of holistic worldview that would later be enshrined as the Gaia hypothesis. His highest ambition would become a world “in which war was unthinkable.” But on September 3, 1932, Younghusband wrote more in the mold of the old soldier than the new-age man he had become in private:

  The stature of the mountain cannot increase, but the stature of man can. The mountain can grow no higher. It can employ no weapons save those we already know—deadly cold, terrific winds, avalanches, snow, ice, rocky precipice, above all, rarefied atmosphere. These are fearful enough. But we know them, and know the worst they can do. And they cannot be augmented. Everest cannot use poison-gas or hurl bombs from the air. Man, on the other hand, can profit by experience. He can bide his time. He can watch for unguarded moments. He can equip himself against cold and wind. He can train himself against snow and ice and precipice. He can acclimatize himself against the want of oxygen in the air.… No one would be foolhardy enough to say that even this expedition will succeed; what is certain is that some day man will stand on the summit of the mountain. And what then? Who will be one ounce the better for it?… Everest has become a symbol. Everest stands for all that is highest and purest and most difficult of attainment.

  * * *

  Wilson was spurred on by this kind of language. Through his research, he learned that previous expeditions to Everest had been enormous and costly undertakings, featuring teams of British climbers, many experienced local mountaineers—Sherpas and Bhutias from the Himalayas—as well as trains of luggage, food, and equipment, which themselves needed a caravan of porters to ferry them from Darjeeling. In 1922, the expedition stores had filled nine hundred plywood boxes, shipped from London. Among these stores was three thousand pounds of food, including sixty tins of quail in foie gras, and four cases of Montebello 1915 champagne from Fortnum & Mason. The 1924 expedition had packed
soup plates and carving knives.

  Wilson correctly saw an oversupply both of people and goods. What if one man, trained in body and spirit, and unburdened by yaks and porters and foie gras, attempted to climb the mountain alone? Would he not stand a greater chance that these slow-moving armies? The theory was sound enough and would, decades later, find full expression in the “alpinist style”—in which gifted climbers abandoned siege tactics in favor of self-sufficiency and speed. The trouble for Wilson, however, was that such tactics required the person in question to be a mountaineer of great skill and experience. Wilson had hardly climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs.

  Still, he thought, there was time to learn. On Wilson’s return from Germany, he and the Evanses spent one of their riotous evenings in the West End of London in their best clothes: a restaurant in Mayfair, then a dance at a nightclub, then home in the small hours to 101 Biddulph Mansions and a cup of tea in front of the fire. Here, at 101, at 4:00 a.m., Wilson first unburdened his plans to his friends. He told them about his new philosophy of the body—that by fasting and prayer, you could make yourself pure and strong. He told them that total submission to God’s plan and belief in His protection was like wearing a suit of armor. With enough faith, said Wilson, you could achieve anything. And he told them that he was going to prove his theory by making a great and seemingly impossible conquest.

  Enid asked him what that impossible thing was.

  Wilson pulled out the newspaper article about the Everest 1924 expedition and showed it to Enid and Len. Wilson was going to climb Everest alone, he said. The Evanses were, at first, at a loss as to what to say. Wilson told them he was serious. Enid, at least, had no doubt that he was sincere.

  In the morning, Wilson’s hangover faded, but his adamantine will to reach the summit of Everest did not. This was his new knightly purpose. Evidently, he enjoyed the drama of telling his plan to other people. Equally true, however, he yearned for the adventure in ways even he found hard to explain.

  Wilson spent little time considering his complicated motivations. There were problems to solve. He needed a way to get to the mountain. The expeditions of the 1920s, which were funded by the Mount Everest Committee, had bought passage for their members on steamships to India. From Calcutta, those massive climbing parties had made their way to Darjeeling, then trekked, via Sikkim and Tibet, to the mountain. Wilson could have traveled the same way. He was a veteran of ocean liners. Trains could easily take him from Calcutta, where the ship docked, to Darjeeling, the gateway to the Himalayas. But then something in a newspaper caught his eye. Another idea—more flamboyant, more Wilson—emerged.

  * * *

  The Houston–Mount Everest Expedition, which was financed by a rich and somewhat eccentric widow named Lady Houston, planned to fly over the top of the highest mountain in the world in 1933. In the autumn of 1932, when Wilson’s ambition to climb Everest was crystallizing, several reports about the flying project appeared in the British press. Its chief pilot was a member of Parliament, Lord Clydesdale, who took a leave of absence from his political duties to undertake the mission.

  In an article in the Times, from October 1932, Lord Clydesdale told his constituents about his plans. Some, he said, had expressed concerns about his safety. Clydesdale reassured them, with classic British sangfroid, that he had no intention of dying on the expedition, and to “subject this constituency again to the expense and trouble of a by-election” to choose another MP. He also pitched the Houston flight squarely as a matter of national pride:

  The objects of the expedition are first and foremost to foster and promote British prestige in the world, and especially in India. Americans have flown over the North Pole and the South Pole, the Pacific Ocean has been crossed by air, and the Atlantic has been frequently flown. There is only one original flight really worthwhile: that is the flight over Mount Everest, which alone stands out as the only significant part of the world which has not been flown over. The success of this flight will have a great psychological effect in India. It will do much to dispel the fallacy that this country is undergoing a phase of degeneration, but rather instil the truth that Britain is ready to pass through a process of regeneration. It will show India that we are still a virile and active race and can overcome difficulties with energy and vigour, both for ourselves and for India.

  Wilson’s first thought, when he heard about the Houston–Mount Everest Expedition, was not about national pride or about proving the virility of his island race. He wondered, instead, whether he could hitch a ride to Everest in an airplane. Wilson seemingly thought it might be possible to travel with the Westland PV-3 bomber that planned to circle the summit, then be dropped by parachute onto the lower slopes of the mountain, before climbing to the top. He soon realized this was a ridiculous notion that was likely to lead to his instant death, and unlikely to be permitted. He shelved the Houston plan before he had told too many people. But the idea of a flight to the mountain stayed with him.

  Britain was in the middle of a civil aviation boom. During the First World War, aircraft design had been accelerated by military necessity. In 1914, there were few planes, and pilots were used chiefly as observers of enemy positions. By the end of the war, fighter aces in Sopwith Camels and Fokkers fought aerial duels with machine guns above the battlefields.

  Wilson had seen many airplanes before, both in Bradford and on the front line. Since the end of the war, civil aviation had blossomed, and new flying records were set every year. In 1927, for instance, Charles Lindbergh became the first aviator to fly nonstop and alone between New York and Paris, when he flew thirty-three and a half hours in the Spirit of St. Louis—a feat that brought him enormous fame.

  In January 1928, two New Zealand pilots, John Moncrieff and George Hood, attempted their own mammoth crossing of the Tasman—the nearly fourteen-hundred-mile-wide sea that divides New Zealand from Australia. Ten thousand spectators awaited their arrival at a racecourse just north of Wilson’s home in Wellington. But the airmen never arrived. They were lost at sea.

  In September of the same year, the Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith, who had already flown planes across the Pacific and across the interior of Australia, made the first successful trans-Tasman flight in his Fokker monoplane, the Southern Cross. With a crew of three, he flew nonstop from Sydney to Christchurch, the biggest city in the South Island of New Zealand, dropping a wreath into the water 150 miles from the coast of New Zealand in memory of Moncrieff and Hood.

  The arrival of Kingsford Smith’s airplane was a national event in New Zealand. There was a live radio broadcast, tens of thousands of people flocked to the airfield, and children were given the day off school. You imagine Maurice Wilson, thirty years old and living in sleepy Wellington, domesticated to the point of stifling, yearning for adventure, and starting to become restless once more, experiencing the rapture as Kingsford Smith’s airplane touched down. It seems impossible Wilson did not experience a little Southern Cross fever himself.

  * * *

  By the early 1930s, the development of single and double-seater aircraft had accelerated. More and more private citizens were able to buy and to fly relatively affordable airplanes. By 1932, hundreds of civilians flew airplanes in Britain alone.

  The de Havilland Aircraft Company drove the craze. The firm’s founder, Geoffrey de Havilland, was a pioneering airplane designer and pilot who had served in the First World War, including a stint flying patrols in a Blériot from Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland. After the conflict, having founded his company with help from a private investor, he began to design a magnificent series of airplanes from new headquarters at Stag Lane, in Edgware. In 1925, de Havilland had an idea for a new plane that would be attractive, above all, to the “amateur”:

  I had visualised the finished aeroplane long before the design was started, and the working drawings quickly began to appear. It was an all-wood biplane with four inter-wing struts in all, instead of the more usual eight. The wings
were arranged to fold back along the sides of the fuselage, safely and easily, the time for the whole operation being two minutes. The aeroplane could then be housed in a shed of normal garage size, or the tail could be attached to the rear of a car for towing. It had a plywood fuselage with very adequate cockpits for two people, the passenger being in front; dual control; and very important, a locker behind the pilot for light baggage and a tool kit. The landing gear was simple and could take a pretty bad landing. The petrol tank above the centre section held fifteen gallons and an extra tank could be fitted in the front cockpit.

  De Havilland, a keen lepidopterist, called this airplane the Moth. (Like an actual moth, the plane could fold back its wings, making it easy to store.) The model was instantly popular. By June 1928, the de Havilland Aircraft Company claimed to be selling a Moth every day. In time, new engines for the machine were developed—from the Cirrus to the Genet to the Gipsy to the Tiger—and de Havilland made modifications to the overall design. But the basic principal of the Moth remained the same: a relatively inexpensive amateur’s biplane, easily stowed, reliable, and capable of flying long distances. Soon, Moths had been shipped everywhere, from Canada to New Zealand, which took delivery of its first consignment in 1929, while Wilson was still living there.

  The Moth became the airplane of choice for record breakers. In 1925, Alan Cobham flew his Cirrus Moth from London to Zurich and back in a day, a total distance of nearly a thousand miles, with only one stop, in Switzerland, to refuel and turn the plane around. In 1926, two former Royal Air Force men, Neville Stack and Bernard Leete, flew two Moths by easy stages from Stag Lane to Karachi in India. The trip took them fifty-four days, due to bad weather and a “heavy social programme,” but when they reached Karachi, huge crowds greeted them. Both aviators were awarded the Air Force Cross for their achievement. In 1929, Lady Mary Bailey became the first woman to fly solo from London to Cape Town and back. She achieved this coup despite condescending interventions from British officers in Cairo, who attempted to dissuade her from continuing, citing fears for her safety—and despite that her plane was so badly damaged by a landing in Tabora, Tanzania, that she needed a new Moth shipped to her. In 1930, Amy Johnson, a Yorkshirewoman, became the first female aviator to fly from London to Australia. She arrived in Darwin, in a Gipsy Moth, in nineteen days. She had a sheath knife at her side in the cockpit, to fend off sharks should she crash at sea.