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Throughout 1949 and 1950 H.W. 'Bill' Tilman mounted pioneering
expeditions to Nepal and its Himalayan mountains, taking advantage
of some of the first access to the country for Western travellers
in the 20th century. Tilman and his party-including a certain
Sherpa Tenzing Norgay-trekked into the Kathmandu Valley and on to
the Langtang region, where the highs and lows began. They first
explored the Ganesh Himal, before moving on to the Jugal Himal and
the following season embarking on an ambitious trip to Annapurna
and Everest. Manaslu was their first objective, but left to 'better
men', and Annapurna IV very nearly climbed instead but for bad
weather which dogged the whole expedition. Needless to say, Tilman
was leading some very lightweight expeditions into some seriously
heavyweight mountains. After the Annapurna adventure Tilman headed
to Everest with-among others-Dr Charles Houston. Approaching from
the delights of Namche Bazaar, the party made progress up the
flanks of Pumori to gaze as best they could into the Western Cwm,
and at the South Col and South-East Ridge approach to the summit of
Everest. His observations were both optimistic and pessimistic:
'One cannot write off the south side as impossible until the
approach from the head of the West Cwm to this remarkably airy col
has been seen.' But then of the West Cwm: 'A trench overhung by
these two tremendous walls might easily become a grave for any
party which pitched its camp there.' Nepal Himalaya presents
Tilman's favourite sketches, encounters with endless yetis, trouble
with the porters, his obsessive relationship with alcohol and
issues with the food. And so Tilman departs Nepal for the last time
proper with these retiring words: 'If a man feels he is failing to
achieve this stern standard he should perhaps withdraw from a field
of such high endeavour as the Himalaya.'
'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the
ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a
ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this
account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and
far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful
voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot
cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic
Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their
sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by
tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives
ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection
of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to
have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part
of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage
south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and
energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet
Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into
a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a
momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two
voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over
twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed
successful, published together they give a fine insight into
Tilman's character.
'Only a man in the devil of a hurry would wish to fly to his
mountains, forgoing the lingering pleasure and mounting excitement
of a slow, arduous approach under his own exertions.' H.W. 'Bill'
Tilman's mountain travel philosophy, rooted in Africa and the
Himalaya and further developed in his early sailing adventures in
the southern hemisphere, was honed to perfection with his discovery
of Greenland as the perfect sailing destination. His Arctic voyages
in the pilot cutter Mischief proved no less challenging than his
earlier southern voyages. The shorter elapsed time made it rather
easier to find a crew but the absence of warm tropical passages
meant that similar levels of hardship were simply compressed into a
shorter timescale. First published fifty years before political
correctness became an accepted rule, Mischief in Greenland is a
treasure trove of Tilman's observational wit. In this account of
his first two West Greenland voyages, he pulls no punches with
regard to the occasional failings, leaving the reader to seek out
and discover the numerous achievements of these voyages. The
highlight of the second voyage was the identification, surveying
and successful first ascent of Mount Raleigh, first observed on the
eastern coast of Baffin Island by the Elizabethan explorer John
Davis in 1585. For the many sailors and climbers who have since
followed his lead and ventured north into those waters, Tilman
provides much practical advice, whether from his own observations
or those of Davis and the inimitable Captain Lecky. Tilman's
typical gift of understatement belies his position as one of the
greatest explorers and adventurers of the twentieth century.
However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the
warps and letting go one's last hold of the shore at the start of a
voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like
marriage, for better or for worse. Mostly Mischief's ordinary title
belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman
covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters.
The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of
Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the
Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast
and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder
of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to
recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to
accept the condemnation of Mischief's surveyor, undertaking costly
repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the
East Greenland ice. Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is
at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East
Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his
account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper
of the schooner Patanela. Tilman had been hand-picked by the
expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of
Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island,
a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe
anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak. In a separate
account of this successful voyage, Colin Putt describes the
expedition as unique - the first ascent of a mountain to start
below sea level.
'Hand (man) wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no
prospects, not much pleasure.' So read the crew notice placed in
the personal column of The Times by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in the
spring of 1959. This approach to selecting volunteers for a
year-long voyage of 20,000 miles brought mixed seafaring
experience: 'Osborne had crossed the Atlantic fifty-one times in
the Queen Mary, playing double bass in the ship's orchestra'. With
unclimbed ice-capped peaks and anchorages that could at best be
described as challenging, the Southern Ocean island groups of
Crozet and Kerguelen provided obvious destinations for Tilman and
his fifty-year-old wooden pilot cutter Mischief. His previous
attempt to land in the Crozet Islands had been abandoned when their
only means of landing was carried away by a severe storm in the
Southern Ocean. Back at Lymington, a survey of the ship uncovered
serious Teredo worm damage. Tilman, undeterred, sold his car to
fund the rebuilding work and began planning his third sailing
expedition to the southern hemisphere. Mischief among the Penguins
(1961), Tilman's account of landfalls on these tiny remote volcanic
islands, bears testament to the development of his ocean navigation
skills and seamanship. The accounts of the island anchorages, their
snow-covered heights, geology and in particular the flora and fauna
pay tribute to the varied interests and ingenuity of Mischief's
crew, not least after several months at sea when food supplies
needed to be eked out. Tilman's writing style, rich with
informative and entertaining quotations, highlights the lessons
learned with typical self-deprecating humour, while playing down
the immensity of his achievements.
'Experience is said to be the name men give to their mistakes and
of the experience I gained in Spitsbergen that may well be true.'
The circumnavigation of Spitsbergen is the first of three voyages
described in H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's fifteenth and final book, a
remarkable example of Tilman's ability to triumph when supported by
a crew game for all challenges. The 1974 voyage of the pilot cutter
Baroque takes Tilman to his furthest north--the highest latitude of
any of his travels in the northern or southern hemisphere. The
account of this achievement makes compelling reading, the crew
pulling together to avert potential disaster from a navigational
misjudgement. A younger, less experienced crew join Tilman in 1975,
this time heading north along Greenland's west coast until a break
in the boom necessitates the abandonment of the objective and an
early return. 'That one can never be quite confident of reaching
any of the places I aim at may be part of their charm, and failure
is at least an excuse for making another voyage.' The following
year proves to be Tilman's last voyage in his own boat, his account
beginning with a dry nod to his artillery background: 'As I begin
to describe this voyage, the discrepancy between the target and the
fall of shot provokes a wry smile.' Tilman never expected crews to
pay, covering all the costs of his voyages personally. He therefore
held the quite reasonable view that his crew would pull their
weight, show loyalty to the ship and take the rough with the
smooth. Sadly, the crew in 1976 fell far short of that expectation,
forcing several changes of plan and eventually obliging Tilman to
leave Baroque in Iceland. Not for the first time in Tilman's
remarkable 140,000 miles of voyaging is he moved to quote Conrad:
'Ships are all right, it's the men in them.' Tilman set a high
standard and led by example; where his companions rose to the
challenge, as they did in the majority of his expeditions, the
results were often remarkable. Triumph and Tribulation, his
fifteenth and final book, completes this newly extended edition of
his literary legacy, a fine testament to a remarkable life.
'Whether these mountains are climbed or not, smaller expeditions
are a step in the right direction.' It's 1938, the British have
thrown everything they've got at Everest but they've still not
reached the summit. War in Europe seems inevitable; the Empire is
shrinking. Still reeling from failure in 1936, the British are
granted one more permit by the Tibetans, one more chance to climb
the mountain. Only limited resources are available, so can a small
team be assembled and succeed where larger teams have failed? H.W.
Tilman is the obvious choice to lead a select team made up of some
of the greatest British mountaineers history has ever known,
including Eric Shipton, Frank Smythe and Noel Odell. Indeed, Tilman
favours this lightweight approach. He carries oxygen but doesn't
trust it or think it ethical to use it himself, and refuses to take
luxuries on the expedition, although he does regret leaving a case
of champagne behind for most of his time on the mountain. On the
mountain, the team is cold, the weather very wintery. It is with
amazing fortitude that they establish a camp six at all, thanks in
part to a Sherpa going by the family name of Tensing. Tilman
carries to the high camp, but exhausted he retreats, leaving Smythe
and Shipton to settle in for the night. He records in his diary,
'Frank and Eric going well-think they may do it.' But the monsoon
is fast approaching ...In Mount Everest 1938, first published in
1948, Tilman writes that it is difficult to give the layman much
idea of the actual difficulties of the last 2,000 feet of Everest.
He returns to the high camp and, in exceptional style, they try for
the ridge, the route to the summit and those immense difficulties
of the few remaining feet.
H.W. Tilman's Two Mountains and a River picks up where Mount
Everest 1938 left off. In this instalment of adventures, Tilman and
two Swiss mountaineers set off for the Gilgit region of the
Himalaya with the formidable objective of an attempt on the giant
Rakaposhi (25,550 feet). However, this project was not to be
fulfilled. Not one to be dispirited, Tilman and his various
accomplices - including pioneering mountaineer and regular partner
Eric Shipton - continue to trek and climb in locations across
China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other areas of Asia, including the
Kukuay Glacier, Muztagh Ata, the source of the Oxus river, and
Ishkashim, where the author was arrested on suspicion of being a
spy ... Two Mountains and a River brims with the definitive Tilman
qualities - detailed observations and ever-present humour - that
convey a strong appreciation of the adventures and mishaps he
experiences along the way. With a new foreword from prominent
trekker, climber and lecturer, Gerda Pauler, this classic
mountaineering text maintains Tilman's name as a unique and
inquisitive explorer and raconteur.
'So I began thinking again of those two white blanks on the map, of
penguins and humming birds, of the pampas and of gauchos, in short,
of Patagonia, a place where, one was told, the natives' heads steam
when they eat marmalade.' So responded H.W. 'Bill' Tilman to his
own realisation that the Himalaya were too high for a mountaineer
now well into his fifties. He would trade extremes of altitude for
the romance of the sea with, at his journey's end, mountains and
glaciers at a smaller scale; and the less explored they were, the
better he would like it. Within a couple of years he had progressed
from sailing a 14-foot dinghy to his own 45-foot pilot cutter
Mischief, readied for her deep-sea voyaging, and recruited a crew
for his most ambitious of private expeditions. Well past her prime,
Mischief carried Tilman, along with an ex-dairy farmer, two army
officers and a retired civil servant, safely the length of the
North and South Atlantic oceans, and through the notoriously
difficult Magellan Strait, against strong prevailing winds, to
their icy landfall in the far south of Chile. The shore party spent
six weeks crossing the Patagonian ice cap, in both directions,
returning to find that their vessel had suffered a broken
propeller. Edging north under sail only, Mischief put into
Valparaiso for repairs, and finally made it home to Lymington via
the Panama Canal, for a total of 20,000 nautical miles sailed, in
addition to a major exploration 'first' all here related with the
Skipper's characteristic modesty and bone-dry humour, and many
photographs.
'I felt like one who had first betrayed and then deserted a
stricken friend; a friend with whom for the past fourteen years I
had spent more time at sea than on land, and who, when not at sea,
had seldom been out of my thoughts.' The first of the three voyages
described in In Mischief's Wake gives H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's account
of the final voyage and loss of Mischief, the Bristol Channel pilot
cutter in which he had sailed over 100,000 miles to high latitudes
in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. Back home, refusing to accept
defeat and going against the advice of his surveyor, he takes
ownership of Sea Breeze, built in 1899; 'a bit long in the tooth,
but no more so, in fact a year less, than her prospective owner'.
After extensive remedial work, his first attempt at departure had
to be cut short when the crew 'enjoyed a view of the Isle of Wight
between two of the waterline planks'. After yet more expense, Sea
Breeze made landfall in Iceland before heading north toward the
East Greenland coast in good shape and well stocked with supplies.
A mere forty miles from the entrance to Scoresby Sound, Tilman's
long-sought-after objective, 'a polite mutiny' forced him to
abandon the voyage and head home. The following year, with a crew
game for all challenges, a series of adventures on the west coast
of Greenland gave Tilman a voyage he considered 'certainly the
happiest', in a boat which was proving to be a worthy successor to
his beloved Mischief.
'We had climbed a mountain and crossed a pass; been wet, cold,
hungry, frightened, and withal happy. One more Himalayan season was
over. It was time to begin thinking of the next. "Strenuousness is
the immortal path, sloth is the way of death".' First published in
1946, the scope of H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's When Men & Mountains
Meet is broad, covering his disastrous expedition to the Assam
Himalaya, a small exploratory trip into Sikkim, and then his
wartime heroics. In the thirties, Assam was largely unknown and
unexplored. It proved a challenging environment for Tilman's party,
the jungle leaving the men mosquito-bitten and suffering with
tropical diseases, and thwarting their mountaineering success.
Sikkim proved altogether more successful. Tilman, who is once again
happy and healthy, enjoys some exploratory ice climbing and
discovers Abominable Snowman tracks, particularly remarkable as the
creature appeared to be wearing boots - 'there is no reason why he
should not have picked up a discarded pair at the German Base Camp
and put them to their obvious use'. And then, in 1939, war breaks
out. With good humour and characteristic understatement we hear
about Tilman's remarkable Second World War. After digging gun pits
on the Belgian border and in Iraq, he was dropped by parachute
behind enemy lines to fight alongside Albanian and Italian
partisans. Tilman was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for
his efforts - and the keys to the city of Belluno, which he helped
save from occupation and destruction. Tilman's comments on the
German approach to Himalayan climbing could equally be applied to
his guerrilla warfare ethos. 'They spent a lot of time and money
and lost a lot of climbers and porters, through bad luck and more
often through bad judgement.' While elsewhere the war machine
rumbled on, Tilman's war was fast, exciting, lightweight and
foolhardy - and makes for gripping reading.
'I believe we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it.' -
H. W. Tilman, on reaching the summit of Nanda Devi.In 1934, after
fifty years of trying, mountaineers finally gained access to the
Nanda Devi Sanctuary in the Garhwal Himalaya. Two years later an
expedition led by H.W. Tilman reached the summit of Nanda Devi. At
over 25,000 feet, it was the highest mountain to be climbed until
1950.The Ascent of Nanda Devi, Tilman's account of the climb, has
been widely hailed as a classic. Keenly observed, well informed and
at times hilariously funny, it is as close to a 'conventional'
mountaineering account as Tilman could manage.Beginning with the
history of the mountain ('there was none') and the expedition's
arrival in India, Tilman recounts the build-up and approach to the
climb. Writing in his characteristic dry style, he tells how
Sherpas are hired, provisions are gathered (including 'a
mouth-blistering sauce containing 100 per cent chillies') and the
climbers head into the hills, towards Nanda Devi.Superbly parodied
in The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman, The Ascent of Nanda
Devi was among the earliest accounts of a climbing expedition to be
published.Much imitated but rarely matched, it remains one of the
best.
'For most men, as Epicurus has remarked, rest is stagnation and
activity madness. Mad or not, the activity that I have been
pursuing for the last twenty years takes the form of voyages to
remote, mountainous regions.' H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's fourteenth book
Ice with Everything describes three more of those voyages, 'the
first comparatively humdrum, the second totally disastrous, and the
third exceedingly troublesome'. The first voyage describes Tilman's
1971 attempt to reach East Greenland's remote and ice-bound
Scoresby Sound. The largest fjord system in the world was named
after the father of Whitby whaling captain, William Scoresby, who
first charted the coastline in 1822. Scoresby's two-volume Account
of the Arctic Regions provided much of the historical inspiration
for Tilman's northern voyages and fuelled his fascination with
Scoresby Sound and the unclimbed mountains at its head. Tilman's
first attempt to reach the fjord had already cost him his first
boat, Mischief, in 1968. The following year, a 'polite mutiny'
aboard Sea Breeze had forced him to turn back within sight of the
entrance, so with a good crew aboard in 1971, it was particularly
frustrating for Tilman to find the fjord blocked once more, this
time by impenetrable sea ice at the entrance. Refusing to give up,
Tilman's obsession with Scoresby Sound continued in 1972 when a
series of unfortunate events led to the loss of Sea Breeze, crushed
between a rock and an ice floe. Safely back home in Wales, the
inevitable search for a new boat began. 'One cannot buy a biggish
boat as if buying a piece of soap. The act is almost as irrevocable
as marriage and should be given as much thought'. The 1902 pilot
cutter Baroque was acquired and after not inconsiderable expense,
proved equal to the challenge. Tilman's first troublesome voyage
aboard her to West Greenland in 1973 completes this collection.
'To those who went to the War straight from school and survived it,
the problem of what to do afterwards was peculiarly difficult.' For
H.W. 'Bill' Tilman, the solution lay in Africa: in gold
prospecting, mountaineering and a 3,000-mile bicycle ride across
the continent. Tilman was one of the greatest adventurers of his
time, a pioneering climber and sailor who held exploration above
all else. He made first ascents throughout the Himalaya, attempted
Mount Everest, and sailed into the Arctic Circle. For Tilman, the
goal was always to explore, to see new places, to discover rather
than conquer. First published in 1937, Snow on the Equator
chronicles Tilman's early adventures; his transition from East
African coffee planter to famed mountaineer. After World War I,
Tilman left for Africa, where he grew coffee, prospected for gold
and met Eric Shipton, the two beginning their famed mountaineering
partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro and
Ruwenzori. Tilman eventually left Africa in typically adventurous
style via a 3,000-mile solo bicycle ride across the continent - all
recounted here in splendidly funny style. Tilman is one of the
greatest of all travel writers. His books are well-informed and
keenly observed, concerned with places and people as much as
summits and achievements. They are full of humour and anecdotes and
are frequently hilarious. He is part of the great British tradition
of comic writing and there is nobody else quite like him.
'Upon this trackless waste of snow, cut by a shrewd wind they sat
down and wept.' In China to Chitral H.W. 'Bill' Tilman completes
one of his great post-war journeys. He travels from Central China,
crossing Sinkiang, the Gobi and Takla Makan Deserts, before
escaping to a crumbling British Empire with a crossing of the
Karakoram to the new nation of Pakistan. In 1951 there still
persisted a legend that a vast mountain, higher than Everest, was
to be found in the region, a good enough reason it seems for Tilman
to traverse the land, 'a land shut in on three sides by vast snow
ranges whose glacial streams nourish the oases and upon whose
slopes the yaks and camels graze side by side; where in their felt
yorts the Kirghiz and Kazak live much as they did in the days of
Genghis Khan, except now they no longer take a hand in the
devastation of Europe'. Widely regarded as some of Tilman's finest
travel writing, China to Chitral is full of understatement and
laconic humour, with descriptions of disastrous attempts on
unclimbed mountains with Shipton, including Bogdo Ola-an extension
of the mighty Tien Shan mountains- and the Chakar Aghil group near
Kashgar on the old silk road. His command of the Chinese
language-five words, all referring to food-proves less than helpful
in his quest to find a decent meal: 'fortunately, in China there
are no ridiculous hygienic regulations on the sale of food'. Tilman
also has several unnerving encounters with less-than-friendly
tribesmen ... Tilman starts proper in Lanchow where he describes
with some regret that he is less a traveller and more a passenger
on this great traverse of the central basin and rim of mountain
ranges at Asia's heart. But Tilman is one of our greatest ever
travel writers, and we become a passenger to his adventurers.
There can be no country so rich in mountains as Nepal. This narrow
strip of territory, lying between Sikkim and Garhwal, occupies 500
miles of India's northern border; and since this border coincides
roughly with the 1,500-mile-long Himalayan chain, it follows that
approximately a third of this vast range lies within or upon the
confines of Nepal. So starts this breathtaking account of
mountaineering and exploring this isolated and awe-inspiring
country by one of the most famous men in mountaineering. Many of
the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and
before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are
republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality,
modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Nanda Devi is the highest mountain in India and was the highest
mountain summited for twenty years before Edmund Hilary climbed Mt.
Everest. This is a thrilling and often heart stopping account of
the attempts and many failures to climb this sacred mountain.
Written by 'Bill' Tilman, one of the most famous names in
mountaineering and all round adventurer extraordinaire, this book
is a must for anyone with a love of adventure and the great
outdoors. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating
back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and
increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in
affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text
and artwork.
Following the abortive attempts on Mount Everest that had taken
place in 1921, 1922, 1924 and 1933, 1935 and 1936, Tilman and his
small party set out in 1938 for a fifth attempt on this peak.
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