No . 132 The Trusty Servant
In 1922 one Everest summit attempt resulted in Henry Morshead ( E , 1896- 1901 ) suffering frost bite so severely that three of his fingers later had to be amputated . A second summit attempt ( led by the Australian George Finch using bottled oxygen ) set an altitude record of 27,330 feet . However , the third attempt , which was to have been undertaken by Mallory and Howard Somervell , suffered a calamity when an avalanche hit the party en route to the North Col . Seven porters were killed , leaving the ‘ sahib ’ foreign climbers untouched and ridden with guilt . No further climbing was attempted .
The expedition of 1921 was purely a reconnaissance mission , led by Lt Col Charles Howard-Bury , with an ageing Scot , Harold Raeburn , as climbing leader . Setting out from Darjeeling
The 1921 Everest Expedition . Mallory back right , Bullock back left , next to Morshead
on 18 th May , the expedition lost its principal climbers within three weeks . Alexander Kellas died on 6 th June and Raeburn had to be carried from Kampa Dzong in Tibet back along the route they had followed , to convalesce from dysentery . Thus Mallory became the de facto climbing leader of the expedition , working alongside his fellow OW , Guy Bullock ( Coll , 1901-06 ), neither of whom had previous Himalayan experience .
Those early expeditions cannot easily be imagined through the lens of the first successful ascents of Everest . The climbs of the 1950s and the majority of subsequent ones , followed the Hillary and Tenzing South Col and East Ridge route and involve travel through Nepal , a country closed to visitors until the late 1940s . Instead , and thanks to the patient diplomacy of yet another Old Wykehamist , the early expeditions would commence in Darjeeling , pass through Sikkim into Tibet and approach Mt Everest from the north . Sir Charles Bell ( Coll , 1884-89 ) had been Political Officer in Sikkim from 1908 – 18 and in 1910 had met and befriended the 13 th Dalai Lama , who had been forced into temporary exile . Without Bell it is unlikely that there would have been British expeditions in the 1920s . He was sent as a special ambassador in 1920 to Lhasa to seek permission for a first exploration of the Himalaya .
After the initial travel into Tibet , the expedition did not travel as a cohesive unit . Mallory ( whose task was to identify and assess a climbing route up Everest ) and Bullock explored the Rongbuk valley ( approaching Everest from the
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