I originally wrote Quest for Adventure through 1979 and 1980, setting my start point at the end of the Second World War, a period that was not only within my own conscious memory and the beginning of my own personal quest, but also one which marked so many huge social, economic and political changes. Bringing my investigation up to date covers just over half a century, and reveals some changes in the style and nature of people’s quest for adventure which are not necessarily for the best.
The what and the why of adventure is the reason for this book. I should like to go back to my own beginnings, since I suspect that it is only through one’s own experience that one can analyse motives and feelings. For me it started with a picture book of the Scottish hills, picked up at the age of sixteen. The pictures were in monochrome, showing rolling hills, rocky crags and shimmering waters. I was captivated in a way that I had never been before, longed to be among them, to reach their tops, to see beyond the confines of the page. And then came a trip to stay with my grandfather in Ireland. He lived to the south of Dublin, and from his garden I could see the Wicklow Hills. I caught a bus and set out on my first mountaineering expedition to climb one of the outlying hills but fled, frightened, when a great cloud of cumulus threatened to engulf me. I had no compass and anyway did not know how to read one.
But this was adventure. Tentatively, I was stepping into the unknown, had an awareness of danger – admittedly more imagined than real – and a love of the wild emptiness of the hills around me. The following winter a school friend and I hitch-hiked from London up to Wales. It was the long hard winter of 1951, and the whole country was clad in snow. Viewed from Capel Curig the Snowdon massif had for us all the scale and majesty of a Himalayan peak. Clad in school macs and wearing army boots, we tried our Everest by the Crib Goch Ridge, but were avalanched off a long way from the top. My school friend had had enough and hitched home, but I stayed on and made a solitary attempt on Glyder Fach the next day. It was a brilliant blue, sparkling day with great galleons of cloud sweeping over the tops. Once again I fled, afraid of getting lost, but on the way down stopped to watch some climbers on the Milestone Buttress, just above the road. They were roped together, moving slowly up the sheer rock, one at a time, tiny coloured blobs against the grey of the rock and the white of the snow that covered every ledge. I knew then that was what I wanted to do. I can’t define why or how, had never read a book about rock climbing, didn’t even know that the game existed.
I found a friend of the family who did a little climbing and he took me to Harrison Rocks, a small outcrop of sandstone just south of London. It wasn’t ten metres high. You climbed with the protection of a rope hitched round one of the many trees at the top of the crag. At the end of the day, I knew that I had found something I was good at and loved doing. The basic satisfaction of climbing is both physical and mental – a matter of co-ordination similar to any other athletic attachment. But in climbing there is the extra ingredient of risk. It is a hot, heady spice, a piquancy that adds an addictive flavour to the game. It is accentuated by the fascination of pitting one’s ability against a personal unknown and winning through. Being master of one’s destiny, with one’s life literally in one’s hands, is what gives climbing its fascination.
It also gives a heightened awareness of everything around. The pattern of lichen on rock, a few blades of grass, the dark, still shape of a lake below, the form of the hills and cloud mountains above might be the same view seen by the passenger on a mountain railway, but transported to his viewpoint among a crowd, he cannot see what I, the climber, can. This is not an elitist ethic, but rather the deeper sensuous involvement that the climber has with the mountains around him, a feeling heightened by the stimulus of risk.
These are the elements of adventure that I have discovered in climbing – the physical satisfaction of having complete command over one’s body, a sense of risk in the process, an awareness of beauty and the exploration of the unknown. At its most satisfying this would mean one of the rapidly dwindling unknown parts of the world, but almost equally satisfying is a personal unknown, even if others have trodden that path before. The romantic adventurer has always had strong links with science and intellectual curiosity; the very act of trying the unknown, whether it be a stretch of unclimbed rock, a sheet of polar pack ice or an attempt to be the first to sail alone around the world, holds a challenge of the mind as well as the body.
But there is one more ingredient that appears in almost every adventure, as it does in everyday life – the spirit of competition, gratification of ego, call it what you will. Though today competition climbing has developed its own line of athleticism with set rules, historically and in theory climbing is a non-competitive sport. In practice, however, there is a very high level of competition. At its simplest level, a group of climbers bouldering almost inevitably start to compete, trying to outdo each other, to solve a climbing problem that has beaten the others. On bigger crags or mountains, it is reflected in the sense of urgency to be the first to complete a new route, be it on Scafell, the North Wall of the Eiger or Everest itself. In any activity competition is a spur to progress. Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, I am sure that most of us respond to the stimulus of competition and, having won, enjoy the fruits of success, be it the approval of one’s peers or acclaim from a much wider field.
History has offered plenty of opportunities for the adventurously inclined to sail the seas in search of merchandise or plunder, to trek overland to distant Cathay, but adventure as we know it today is a very recent phenomenon. The concept of climbing mountains or sailing small boats just for the fun of it could only come to those with sufficient wealth and time to indulge their whims. It came on the back of the Industrial Revolution, which brought a certain amount of leisure and money, at least to a privileged minority. At the same time, the growing safety and blandness of urban life sparked the desire to escape and seek the stimulus of the unknown, the thrill of defying danger and enjoying the physical beauty of nature entirely for its own sake. During the first half of the twentieth century, adventure games remained the prerogative of a small, middle-class minority. If you were working a six-day week, with only a week’s holiday each year, even if you were able to afford to buy a small boat, you would not have had time to sail it. It was cheaper to go climbing, but, without a full weekend, there was not enough time to get started. In addition, two destructive world wars consumed the energies and, in many cases, the lives of two generations.
It has only been since the Second World War that the field has been laid open to almost anyone in the developed world who craves such a release. This is the reason why people in their thousands tramp the hills, sail their boats, fly their gliders. The ordinary person has been given both the time and the money to do it. It is also why comparatively few people from the Third World play the adventure game – they have not yet reached this level of affluence or leisure. The Sherpa in Nepal is happy to be a high-altitude porter, frequently enters into the spirit of an expedition, is keen to reach the summit, but he is still doing this entirely professionally. For the Nepalese to organise their own expeditions to their high mountains is still a rare occurrence. The more successful ones could undoubtedly afford it, for they are well off, even by Western standards, but I suspect they are too busy consolidating their newfound positions. They are members of a society in a state of fast transition and it is their children or grandchildren who will, perhaps, feel the restless urge towards adventure for its own sake.
In this book I want to look at a wide spectrum of adventurous activities, to see what they have in common, not so much in motive – the why of it – but rather the ‘how’. In studying what took place in an adventure, be it an attempt to sail round the world, cross one of the poles, or climb a mountain, the reasons for doing it emerge on their own. But the field of adventure is so wide I have given myself a few ground rules in deciding which ventures to study.
To me, adventure involves a journey, or a sustained endeavour, in which there are the elements of risk and of the unknown, which have to be overcome by the physical skills of the individual. Furthermore, an adventure is something that an individual chooses to do and where the risk involved is self-imposed and threatens no one but himself. It could be argued that the man who volunteers to join the army, or becomes a mercenary or perhaps a member of the security services, is also an adventurer answering the tempting call to play the danger game. I am aware that this is what attracted me to the army when I became a professional soldier for a few years. It is something the recruiting posters play upon, but in the end one cannot escape from the fact that the soldier’s adventures and thrills are at the expense of others, and that part of the thrill of adventure can become the thrill of the hunt. This goes outside my own ground rules.
There are different levels of adventure which one can separate in the same way as the athlete distinguishes between a hundred-metre sprint or a marathon. The hundred-metre dashes of adventure are activities that are very intense but of short duration. Take the solo rock climber making a new route in North Wales or the English Lake District. His is undoubtedly the ultimate in adventure, for his life is literally in his hands and, if he makes a mistake and is a couple of hundred metres above the ground he will almost certainly die. He is faced with the challenge of the unknown and the extreme limits of muscular control. It needs an intense level of commitment, but the period involved is comparatively short. At the top of the crag the tension is over and the climber can return to a pint at the pub, home, family, friends. The same can be said of other extreme-risk sports – steep gully skiing, white-water canoeing, hang-gliding or dinghy sailing on a stormy day; in all there is an immense concentrated commitment.
The marathons of adventure are to Himalayan peaks, to the poles and across the oceans. The biggest difference is the obvious one of scale, where the element of time is perhaps as important as size. The immediate risk and skill level might not be so concentrated, but the expedition requires both physical and mental stamina, the capacity to live with others for a long period of time or, perhaps even harder, to be alone and self-sufficient.
From my own point of view I have worked my way through the various levels of the game; first as a necky young rock climber, tackling the most difficult rock climbs in Britain, next to the middle-distance of the Alps, with climbs like the Central Pillar of Frêney and North Wall of the Eiger, and then, in more recent years, to the great peaks of the Himalaya, with all the complexities of logistics, human relations and the sheer scale of everything involved.
In this book I want to look at my fellow marathon-runners, to see what we have in common, where we are different. I am not unduly concerned by the level of mechanical aid used in the adventures I have selected, since in almost every case some kind of tool or mechanical assistance is needed. My own personal ethic in planning an expedition has always been to use the minimum force that I have felt would give the enterprise concerned a chance of success. Thus, on the South-West Face of Everest, we had a team of very nearly a hundred, using oxygen, specially designed tents that were like miniature fortresses, and the best equipment available at the time. Since five expeditions that had been similarly equipped had failed, this seemed a reasonable scale of effort at that particular time. Having achieved success, I would never want to launch a similar expedition, since the challenge is forever to reduce the size and force of each enterprise to its most fundamental simplicity. Reinhold Messner succeeded in climbing Everest from the north side on his own, without the help of oxygen. In 1988 four Czech climbers succeeded in climbing the South-West Face alpine-style, without using oxygen, but perished on the way down, exhausted after spending too long above 8,000 metres. Is there perhaps a finite barrier to what human beings can achieve either in high-altitude performance or in athletics? Who can tell? Perhaps someone some day will climb the South-West Face solo and survive to tell the tale.
In my selection of adventures I have only been able to deal with a limited number of subjects in the detail that is essential to convey the story of what happened. So I have chosen the ventures which have been important, innovative ‘firsts’ – the first ascent of Everest, the first crossings of both poles, the first circumnavigation of the world by balloon, the first non-stop solo voyage in a sailing boat round the world. I am uncomfortably aware that I will inevitably have left out many ventures that readers will feel are either more representative or more outstanding than those I have included; my answer can only be that the ones I have chosen are ones that especially inspired me and are examples which, I hope, will illustrate a broad spectrum of post-war adventure.
In checking out adventures over the last twenty years for this new edition I became aware of the huge increase in the numbers of people undertaking all forms of adventure, linked to a decreasing number of obvious firsts to achieve. In the climbing field the 8,000-metre peaks had all been climbed by 1962, Everest was soloed by Messner in 1980 and, although there are still a huge number of smaller unclimbed peaks and even more unclimbed faces and ridges on some of the highest peaks in the world, the easily identifiable superlatives have been achieved. The same can be said of sailing, while in polar travel there has been a refinement in style rather similar to that of climbing, with a reduction of numbers and level of support, the ultimate goal being to traverse the poles alone and unsupported. It could be argued that the last unique first, the equivalent of the first ascent of the highest point on earth, was in the air with the first complete non-stop circumnavigation of the world by balloon in the spring of 1999. The year before, Brian Milton, became the first man to fly round the world in a microlight.
While there has been an explosion in the number of people going adventuring, the way adventure is pursued has changed. We seem to have entered an era of adventure-on-a-plate, neatly packaged and sold at an appropriate price. You can join a commercial expedition to attempt Everest for prices ranging from $25,000 to $65,000, race around the world in an eighteen-metre yacht for around £25,000 or be conducted to one of the poles. The terrain remains the same – Everest, the Southern Ocean or the wastes of the Polar Ice Cap are no different from when the original adventurers climbed or crossed them. The fact that they are more attainable does not render them less dangerous. However, that special quality of the unknown has vanished from this level of adventuring. The guided client need hardly think, indeed is encouraged not to take the initiative.
On Everest the tents are erected, the food is cooked, the fixed rope set up, the acclimatisation programme carefully planned until the client sets out for the summit from the South Col. It can, of course, all go terribly wrong, as it did in the spring of 1996 when nine died in an appalling storm. Guides, starved of oxygen, made faulty decisions; clients, without the experience to cope for themselves in a crisis, just sat and waited to be told what to do or, in trying to get down, lost their way. The very shallowness of the tailor-made adventure-on-a-plate proved their undoing. There has also been a change of emphasis amongst the elite. This is particularly noticeable in the field of mountaineering.
With the obvious firsts already climbed, the next step is to try to make ascents that are faster, in better style, without supplementary oxygen or the aid of Sherpas. There is the challenge of skiing or paragliding from the summits and the growing popularity of collecting summits – the seven highest peaks of each continent or, much more challenging, the fourteen peaks of more than 8,000 metres, all of which are either in the Karakoram or the Himalaya. The first person to do so was Reinhold Messner, arguably the greatest innovative climber of all time, and yet in setting this trend he has changed the emphasis in climbing from exploration to peak-bagging, which ends up all too often in following the easiest possible known route to the summit.
It is very noticeable that fewer new routes are being tackled today. The ascent of new routes, which I believe is at the core of climbing adventure, has always been a minority activity. The vast majority of climbers are happy to follow in the footsteps of others, guide books clutched in their hands. But there is and always has been a small elite who have gone for new routes and unclimbed summits. There are still literally hundreds of unclimbed peaks of between 5,000 and 6,000 metres in Central Asia. There are unclimbed faces and ridges on many of the 7,000-metre peaks. In describing the first ascent of the North Face of Changabang, climbed in 1997, I have tried to capture the magic and challenge of this style of climbing.
I am still attracted by what seems at first glance to be impossible. To me, the ultimate in adventure is to convert this impossible into the feasible, and this is what all the adventures I have chosen have in common. Together they represent a complex mosaic, the component pieces of which differ enormously in so many ways, but which contribute to a fascinating overall pattern.
Chris Bonington