Gill Edmund Hillary - A Biography

The extraordinary life of the beekeeper who climbed Everest
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-911342-97-7
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 544 Seiten

Edmund Hillary - A Biography is the story of the New Zealand beekeeper who climbed Mount Everest. A man who against expedition orders drove his tractor to the South Pole; a man honoured around the world for his pioneering climbs yet who collapsed on more than one occasion on a mountain, and a man who gave so much to Nepal yet lost his family to its mountains. The author, Michael Gill, was a close friend of Hillary's for nearly 50 years, accompanying him on many expeditions and becoming heavily involved in Hillary's aid work building schools and hospitals in the Himalaya. During the writing of this book, Gill was granted access to a large archive of private papers and photos that were deposited in the Auckland museum after Hillary's death in 2008. Building on this unpublished material, as well as his extensive personal experience, Michael Gill profiles a man whose life was shaped by both triumph and tragedy. Gill describes the uncertainties of the first 33 years of Hillary's life, during which time he served in the New Zealand air force during the Second World War, as well as the background to the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, when Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach the summit - a feat that brought the pair instant worldwide fame. He reveals the loving relationship Hillary had with his wife Louise, in part through their touching letters to each other. Her importance to him during their 22 years of marriage only underlines the horror of her death, along with that of their youngest daughter, Belinda, in a plane crash in 1975. Hillary eventually pulled out of his subsequent depression to continue his life's work in the Himalaya. Affectionate, but scrupulously fair, in Edmund Hillary - A Biography Michael Gill has gone further than anyone before to reveal the humanity of this remarkable man.

Michael Gill was a 22-year-old medical student in 1959 when he followed up on a newspaper statement that Sir Edmund Hillary was looking for additional climbers for his next Himalayan expedition. As a climber, photographer, doctor and writer, Michael was subsequently invited on nearly all the Hillary expeditions through to the last of them in 1977, a jet boat adventure up the Ganges River, and became a close friend of Sir Edmund's. Edmund Hillary: A Biography is Michael's third book, following Mountain Midsummer, a mountaineering autobiography, and Himalayan Hospitals, an account of the experiences of the doctors and other volunteers who worked for Hillary's Himalayan Trust between 1961 and 2002. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gill, Michael

Leseproben

– CHAPTER 1 – A pioneering heritage
It is not absolutely certain that Sir William Hillary (born 1771) was a forebear of Sir Edmund Hillary (born 1919) but, had he been asked, Ed would almost certainly have approved of the baronet’s life of adventure. William married Frances Disney Fytche, said to be the richest heiress in Essex, against her father’s wishes. He spent the whole of her £20,000 inheritance raising a private army to fight against Napoleon, earning a hereditary baronetcy in 1805. Three years later, to put a few miles and a little water between himself and his creditors (and apparently his wife), and to bury quietly the murkier details surrounding his elopement and marriage, he fled to the Isle of Man. Here he married again and embarked on the work for which he became most famous. The principal port of the isle was poorly protected and its fishing fleet vulnerable to storms from the east. Dismayed by the sight of wrecks and dead sailors washing ashore, Sir William established a fleet of lifeboats manned by volunteers to rescue crew from distressed vessels. The organisation would later become the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The Hillarys of Dargaville
We are on surer ground genealogically when we come in 1884 to Edmund Raymond Hillary of Dargaville, grandfather of the Edmund who climbed Mt Everest. Edmund senior was born in Lancashire in 1836 and trained as a watchmaker. A need for adventure led him to India where he made a good living working for maharajahs on their collections of clockwork birds and animals. In 1881 he was in Wales, then on 3 December 1884, when he re-enters the record at age 48, he was in Dargaville, marrying a 28-year-old Irish woman by the name of Annie Clementina Fleming, always known as Ida. There is no record of where Edmund arrived in New Zealand, but it was probably Auckland, where inquiries in the early 1880s would have shown that the formerly rich southern goldfields were in decline, whereas Dargaville to the north was on the rise, lifted by its kauri timber and gum trade. From Auckland immigrants travelling north went by rail to the southern reaches of the Kaipara Harbour, described as the largest enclosed harbour in the southern hemisphere. Embarked on a steamer, they moved north down a tidal river through mangroves before emerging on to an expanse of storm-swept water, land-locked except where the powerful tidal stream poured through the narrow harbour entrance between bare sandhills. On the beaches were skeletons of ships that had missed the navigable channel winding between breakers pounding the shoals of the bar. Once past the intimidating entrance, the steamer entered the tidal waters of the broad Northern Wairoa River with its main town of Dargaville on the west bank. Kauri timber was in demand in New Zealand and beyond, and was in evidence everywhere as rafts of logs coming down the outgoing tide, and as huge stacks of sawn timber in riverside mills or being loaded on to ships crowding the wharves. Edmund set up shop in a main street that had the makeshift look of a set for a western movie. His two-storey house on the Dargaville waterfront was substantial; he became secretary of the Dargaville Town Board and kept racehorses. His wife Ida, born in 1856, had come to New Zealand at the age of eight and had worked as a governess until her marriage. She had a warm personality and like her husband was a storyteller. Four children were born to the Hillarys: Percival Augustus, future father of Edmund Percival; John, Leila and Clarice. For 20 years the family prospered and the four children grew up strong, healthy, independent, and as well educated as the times allowed. But by 1905 Dargaville was past its peak. The great forests of kauri disappeared as all but the most inaccessible trees were felled and dragged and floated to the mills. Where once there had been stands of the most majestic trees on Earth, their trunks rising like the pillars of a cathedral, now there were only their burnt-over remnants. The timber trade had brought wealth to the north, as the goldfields had to the south, but it came at a price. The gum, too, that poor man’s gold, had almost run out. The Hillary family fortune declined along with that of the rest of the community. Edmund had owned and betted on horses, and lost heavily. His Leorina was an ‘also ran’ in the Auckland Cups of 1889 and 1890, and his Bravo was a non-paying third in the much humbler Matakohe Cup of 1892. The big house had to be sold. Family lore has it that in his late sixties Edmund took to his bed in a fit of depression that lasted through to his death in 1928 at the age of 92. The story is plausible. A streak of depression runs through the Hillary family and, besides, he had a younger wife to take over. To Ida fell the task of earning money and raising the children. She did what work she could – dressmaking, painting pictures for sale – but she must have been hard-pressed. The children completed eight years of their compulsory primary schooling, though not all the way through to the legally required age of 15. Somehow, as people did, they got by. Ida too was long-lived, dying in 1952 at age 95, a year short of seeing her grandson climb Mount Everest. Percival Augustus, the eldest of Edmund and Ida’s four offspring, grew into an energetic and resourceful youth. In 1898, at the age of 13, he began a lifelong connection with journalism when he became a copy boy for the Wairoa Bell, an entry-level job delivering telegraphs and as general factotum. He learned photography, and after proving his writing skills became a reporter. Three years later, inspired by tales and photographs of the heroic British fighting the Boers, he volunteered for war in South Africa but was too young. The glories of battle would have to wait until the Great War in 1915 at Gallipoli. By 1911 Percy was printing and publishing the Wairoa Bell on behalf of its locally based proprietor, and three years later, in April 1914 and at the age of 29, he left the Wairoa Bell to buy its rival, the North Auckland Times. All he needed was a wife, and he knew who she would be: Gertrude Clark, one of a perceptibly superior family of 11 siblings who lived 10 kilometres downstream at Whakahara on the other side of the Wairoa. The Clarks of Whakahara
By North Auckland standards, the Clarks were landed gentry. Gertrude’s grandparents, Charles and Dinah Clark, had arrived in New Zealand from Yorkshire in 1843, 40 years before Edmund Raymond Hillary, and just three years after the beginning of systematic British colonisation and the signing of a treaty with Maori at Waitangi. The Clarks made their landfall in Nelson at the northern tip of the South Island, but found no opportunities for advancement there. Forming a friendship with a family by the name of Paton, they decided to move into the timber trade, first in Auckland, then in the northern Wairoa at a settlement called Paradise, upriver from Dargaville. The Clarks became well known on the Wairoa River, and Dinah was described as a clever businesswoman. Those early days in timber set them up financially, and in 1860 they were able to purchase a small farm downriver on a low hill known to Maori as Whakahara. Charles built a raft – standard technology for timber workers – on to which he loaded all their possessions, including livestock, before setting off on the outgoing tide. On sloping ground overlooking the broad expanse of the river they built their homestead of pitsawn local timber, and filled it with mahogany and Venetian glass imported from England, as well as local kauri furniture. In time they established a fine garden. In front of the house Charles added a one-roomed store selling basic items such as flour, tea, sugar, oatmeal, tinned meats and hardware to passing timber workers and gumdiggers. To these amenities they added a post office and a butchery, and the service of a cutter as transport across and around the Kaipara Harbour. Church services were held in the big dining room, and the home became a centre of hospitality for early settlers and travellers on the river. Despite their isolation, Dinah kept in touch with political developments. Among the 31,872 signatures to the suffragettes’ 1893 petition to Parliament – from a quarter of New Zealand’s women of voting age – were 211 from rural Northland, one of them that of Dinah Clark of Whakahara, then in her seventies. The petition became law that same year, making New Zealand the first country in the world to give women the vote. Charles and Dinah had four children. The youngest, George, married a local seamstress, Harriet Wooderson, and took over the working of the Whakahara farm and store. Between 1882 and 1900, Harriet gave birth to 11 healthy children, spaced on average 18 months apart. She might well have delivered many more had not George been killed in 1901 by a kick from a horse. The family held together despite the tragedy, kept their store in business, and maintained their position as the sort of pioneers others might try to emulate. Gertrude, born in 1892, was the eighth of George and Harriet’s children. She and her siblings were at first educated by a succession of governesses, young women who quickly gave up the isolation of Whakahara in favour of the bright lights of Auckland. By building a schoolhouse on their property, the Clarks were able to persuade the government to pay the...