Edmund Hillary; beekeeper became first to stand on top of the world
When Edmund Hillary descended from the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, having just become the first human being to stand on the world's highest point, his words weren't quite what the public was expecting on the occasion.
"Well, George," he said to fellow New Zealander George Lowe, awaiting him in camp, "we knocked the bastard off."
Sir Edmund spent the rest of his life as a global celebrity without ever losing the blunt appeal of a New Zealand beekeeper who happened to push hard at the right moment. He died yesterday at Auckland Hospital at age 88, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced. No cause of death was immediately given.
"Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities," Clark said in a statement. "In reality, he was a colossus. He was a heroic figure who . . . lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity."
Although he would become a philanthropist noted for his work in remote Nepalese villages, Sir Edmund grew up among people who rarely traveled to nearby Australia, never mind the Himalayas.
Growing up on a small farm near Auckland in the years after World War I, he dreamed of a life of discovery, reading adventure books and imagining himself hiking across Antarctica. At 20, he climbed the modest Mount Olivier, in New Zealand's Southern Alps, and found his passion.
Never a technically perfect or even graceful mountaineer, Sir Edmund matched a brash physical strength with a tacit belief in his own indestructibility. In his 20s, training for World War II with the Royal New Zealand Air Force, he chased and shot an 8-foot crocodile, and later ended his military career by setting himself on fire driving a derelict speedboat through the Solomon Islands.
In the bleak years after the war, the 29,000-foot peak of Everest stood alone as a goal for human ambition. The North and the South Poles had long since been reached, but the remote and forbidding Everest had so far killed or defeated every climber to try for the top. Three decades earlier, the distinguished British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory who famously challenged Everest "because it was there" had disappeared while climbing its north ridge. In 1952, a Swiss team came within 800 feet of the summit before turning back.
The 1953 British Everest Expedition had eight expert climbers and in the mountaineering style of the time used hundreds of porters to haul supplies up to the snowline. Even among such a crowd, the 6-foot 3-inch Sir Edmund cut a distinctive figure. His lantern jaw and wide grin are unmistakable in the old photos.
Sir Edmund was not granted the honor of making the expedition's first attempt on the summit. That went to two English climbers. They returned defeated by exhaustion and a faulty oxygen tank, and pessimistic that the mountain could ever be fully climbed.
Sir Edmund set out soon afterward. His partner was the Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, an ambitious climber in his own right who had nearly reached the top with the Swiss a year before.
At 6:30 a.m. on May 29, they left their wind-lashed tent. Breathing bottled oxygen from 27-pound canisters, moving slowly as their feet sank through crusty snow, they worked their way upward, passing the equipment discarded by the Swiss expedition.
Now, higher than anyone had yet climbed on Earth, they found a 40-foot rock wall blocking their way. The obstacle would have been merely tricky at sea level; in oxygen-starved air, it was forbidding. Sir Edmund found a crack between the rock and the hard snow pack, wedged in, and painstakingly hauled himself up. Tenzing followed on a rope. The rock is still known as the Hillary Step.
"I continued on, cutting steadily and surmounting bump after bump and cornice after cornice looking eagerly for the summit," Sir Edmund wrote. "Finally I cut around the back of an extra large hump and then .. . I climbed up a gentle snow ridge to its top. Immediately it was obvious that we had reached our objective. It was 11:30 a.m. and we were on top of Everest!"
At their feet the world lay open. The New Zealander offered his hand in a congratulatory shake; Tenzing reached up and hugged him.
Their achievement would capture human imagination in a way not seen again until Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The news was relayed to London by cable and reached the city on the morning a young Queen Elizabeth II was to be crowned, bringing a flush of pride to a country still suffering from the war. The next official correspondence he received, while still in the Himalayas, was addressed "Edmund Hillary, KBE," which he thought was a joke until he realized he had been knighted.
Sir Edmund was plunged into a whirlwind of champagne receptions, meetings with royalty, and even political controversy in India, as Tenzing accidentally became the focus of a nationalistic debate over who had stepped on the top first. It was a bit much for a man uncomfortable with the trappings of privilege. For the rest of his life, Sir Edmund's desire to settle down with his beehives would conflict with the restlessness that sent him into the mountains in the first place.
With the most famous name in the adventuring world, he found he could easily build momentum for new expeditions, but a worsening altitude sickness barred him from the heights he had once blithely attacked. Thus came a series of ambitious, if unfocused, adventures around the world.
A motorized expedition to the South Pole, while grueling, did little more than prove, in Sir Edmund's words, "that if you were enthusiastic enough and had good mechanics you could get a farm tractor to the South Pole." He took a pair of jet boats up a Himalayan river canyon. Another expedition to Nepal, to find the mythical giant snowman known as the Yeti, came up predictably empty.
His family life was touched by tragedy when his wife, Louise, and younger daughter were killed in a 1975 helicopter crash in Nepal. He later married June Mulgrew, the widow of a friend and fellow adventurer also killed in a mountain crash. Sir Edmund leaves his wife and children, Peter and Sarah.
On another front, Sir Edmund was a notable success. He pioneered the personal journey from mountaineer to humanitarian, turning a metaphor for Western conquest into an avenue for helping the people of the Himalayas, whose lives were as impoverished as they were picturesque.
His shambling, slightly paunchy figure became a familiar one in Nepal, where he helped construct more than 20 schools, four hospitals, and a dozen medical clinics to benefit the Sherpa people. He channeled his improvisational energy into his projects, once creating an airfield by recruiting dozens of locals, giving them free drinks, and encouraging them to dance until they had flattened the ground into a runway.
In the 1980s, Sir Edmund was appointed New Zealand's ambassador to India and Nepal.
Since his feat, mountaineers have competed to achieve subsequent Everest "firsts" - the first ascent of the West Ridge, the first woman on Everest, the first solo climb without oxygen. Everest has spawned an industry that has sent hundreds of recreational climbers to the top, and Sir Edmund has occasionally let loose with a barb about what climbing has become. "Just sitting around in a big base camp, knocking back cans of beer, I don't particularly regard as mountaineering," he said.
There has also been recurring speculation that George Mallory, in 1924, might have summited the mountain first. In 1999, an expedition found Mallory's body frozen against a high slope; its position, though not conclusive, suggested that he had likely fallen before the summit, leaving Sir Edmund's claim intact.
Sir Edmund stands alone on that summit. He remained the most famous mountaineer in history, and a favorite on lecture circuits. In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of his climb, he made a triumphant return to Nepal, although his altitude sickness kept him restricted to the capital, Katmandu. At the ceremonies, Nepal granted him honorary citizenship.
Sir Edmund invariably portrayed himself as a hardworking person of modest talent who never stopped caring about the place where he earned his fame.
He said for a 1996 documentary: "If you're completely satisfied with what you've done, I think you're kidding yourself, because there's always more you could have done."
Material from the Associated Press was included in this obituary. 