Sir Edmund Hillary, First
Man to Conquer Mount Everest, Dies at 88
Published
January 10, 2008
Associated
Press
WELLINGTON,
New Zealand – Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered
Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century's greatest adventurers,
has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday. He was 88.
The
gangling New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people
of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called "Ed"
and considering himself just an ordinary beekeeper.
"Sir
Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In
reality, he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only 'knocked off'
Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity,"
Clark said in a statement.
"The
legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New
Zealander ever to have lived," she said.
Hillary's
life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement —
and by his personal humility. Humble to the point that he only admitted being
the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Tenzing
Norgay.
He had
pride in his feats. Returning to base camp as the man who took the first step
onto the top of the world's highest peak, he declared: "We knocked the
bastard off."
The
accomplishment as part of a British climbing expedition even added luster to
the coronation of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II four days later, and she
knighted Hillary as one of her first act.
But he
was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health
clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom
he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.
He wrote
of the pair's final steps to the top of the world: "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."
Hillary's
life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement —
and by his personal humility. Humble to the point that he only admitted being
the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Norgay.
His
philosophy of life was simple: "Adventuring can be for the ordinary person
with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself," he said in a 1975
interview after writing his autobiography, "Nothing Venture, Nothing
Win."
Close
friends described him as having unbounded enthusiasm for both life and
adventure.
"We
all have dreams — but Ed has dreams, then he's got this incredible drive, and
goes ahead and does it," long-time friend Jim Wilson said in 1993.
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.
Hillary
remains the only non-political person outside Britain honored as a member of
the Britain's Order of the Garter, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II on just 24
knights and ladies living worldwide at any time.
He
reached the summit of Everest four days before Elizabeth was crowned Queen of
Britain and the Empire on June 2, 1953. She immediately knighted the angular,
self-deprecating Hillary, who was just 33.
Throughout
his 88 years, he was always the atypical "typical New Zealander" who
spoke his mind.
In his
1999 book "View from the Summit," Hillary finally broke his long
public silence about whether it was he or Norgay who was the first man to step
atop Everest.
"We
drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued
cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish
exposed area of snow with nothing by space in every direction," Hillary
wrote.
"Tenzing
quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we
realized with had reached the top of the world."
Before
Norgay's death in 1986, Hillary consistently refused to confirm he was first,
saying he and the Sherpa had climbed as a team to the top. It was a measure of
his personal modesty, and of his commitment to his colleagues.
He later
recalled his surprise at the huge international interest in their feat. "I
was a bit taken aback to tell you the truth. I was absolutely astonished that
everyone should be so interested in us just climbing a mountain."
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.
It was on
a visit to Nepal that his first wife, Louise, 43, and 16-year-old daughter
Belinda died in a light plane crash March 31, 1975.
Hillary
remarried in 1990, to June Mulgrew, former wife of adventurer colleague and
close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died in a passenger plane crash in the
Antarctic. He is survived by his wife and children Peter and Sarah.
His
passport described Hillary as an "author-lecturer," and by age 40 his
schedule of lecturing and writing meant he had to give up beekeeping
"because I was too busy."
By that
time he was touring, lecturing and fund-raising for the Himalayan Trust in the
United States and Europe for three months at a time, speaking at more than 100
venues during a tour.
He was
known as ready to take risks to achieve his goals, but always had control so
that nobody ever died on a Hillary-led expedition.
He was at
times controversial. He decried what he considered a lack of
"honest-to-God morality" in New Zealand politics in the 1960s, and he
refused to backtrack when the prime minister demanded he withdraw the comments.
Ordinary New Zealanders applauded his integrity.
He got
into hot water over what became known as his "dash to the Pole" in
the 1957-58 Antarctic summer season aboard modified farm tractors while part of
a joint British-New Zealand expedition.
Hillary
disregarded instructions from the Briton leading the expedition and guided his
tractor team up the then-untraversed Shelton Glacier, pioneering a new route to
the polar plateau and the South Pole.
In 2006
he climbed into a row over the death of Everest climber David Sharp, stating it
was "horrifying" that climbers could leave a dying man after an
expedition left the Briton to die high on the upper slopes.
Hillary
said he would have abandoned his own pioneering 1953 climb to save another
life.
"It
was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and was huddled under
a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by," he
said. "Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a
mountain."
Named New
Zealand's ambassador to India in the mid-1980s, Hillary was the celebrity of
the New Delhi cocktail circuit. He later said he found the job confining.
He
introduced jetboats to many Ganges River dwellers a decade earlier, in 1977,
when his "Ocean to the Sky" expedition traveled the Ganges by jetboat
to within 130 miles of its source.
The last
segment was by foot, and two mountain peaks near Badranath, where the Ganges
rises, were also climbed. He sought adventure in places as distant from each
other as the Arctic and Antarctic.
Hillary
didn't place himself among top mountaineers. "I don't regard myself as a
cracking good climber. I'm just strong in the back. I have a lot of enthusiasm
and I'm good on ice," he said.
Despite
his fame, he spoke of being "really embarrassed" even when introduced
at a lecture.
"I
really am an ordinary person with a few abilities which I've tried to use in
the best way I can," he said.
The first
living New Zealander to be featured on a banknote, he helped raise nearly
$530,000 for the Himalayan Trust by signing 1,000 of the sparkling new
five-dollar bills sold at a charity auction in 1982. They were snapped up by
collectors round the world.
Honored
by the United Nations as one of its Global 500 conservationists in 1987, he was
also awarded numerous honorary doctorates from universities in several parts of
the world.
One of
his accolades was the Smithsonian Institution's James Smithson Bicentennial
Medal for his "monumental explorations and humanitarian
achievements," awarded in 1998.
Throughout
his life Hillary remembered his first mountain he climbed, the 9,645-foot Mount
Tapuaenuku — "Tappy" as he called it — in Marlborough on New
Zealand's South Island. He scaled it solo over three days in 1944, while in
training camp with the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II.
"Tapuaenuku" in Maori means "footsteps of the Rainbow God".
"I'd
climbed a decent mountain at last," he said later.
Like all
good mountaineers before him, Hillary had no special insight into that
quintessential question: Why climb?
"I
can't give you any fresh answers to why a man climbs mountains. The majority
still go just to climb them."
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