Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) — Biography & Facts

Edmund Hillary: The Beekeeper on the Summit

Forty feet of rock stood between two men and the top of the world, at an altitude where the brain runs on roughly a third of its usual oxygen. Hillary found a crack where the snow of the East Face had pulled away from the stone, wedged himself into it, and crawled. The feature is now called the Hillary Step. Descending, he met his friend George Lowe and reported the outcome in the flattest words available: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."

Bees, and a School Trip to Ruapehu

Edmund Percival Hillary was born in Auckland on 20 July 1919 to Percy Hillary, a journalist and beekeeper who had served at Gallipoli. The family moved to Tuakau the following year, where his father started the local paper and expanded the hives. Edmund finished primary school two years ahead of his age group and then, at Auckland Grammar, settled into thoroughly average marks.

The redirection came at sixteen, on a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu. He went to Auckland University College to read mathematics and science and abandoned it in 1938 after two unsuccessful years. Instead he went into commercial beekeeping with his father and his brother Rex — 1,600 hives, thousands of honeycomb boxes, and somewhere between twelve and a hundred stings a day — arranging his life so that he kept bees in one season and climbed in the other. His first real climb, in 1939, was Mount Ollivier near Aoraki / Mount Cook.

War, and the Southern Alps

He withdrew his first application to the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a conscientious objector, then joined in 1943 once conscription arrived, serving as a navigator on Catalina flying boats.

The climbing resumed and sharpened. In January 1948 he took the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He was picked for Eric Shipton's British Everest reconnaissance in 1951 and for the unsuccessful Cho Oyu expedition in 1952.

The 1953 Expedition

When John Hunt replaced Shipton as leader, Hillary objected — and was then, by his own account, immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and drive. Hunt put him in a three-man planning group alongside Charles Evans, and built an operation of extraordinary scale: more than 400 people, including 362 porters and 20 Sherpa guides, moving 10,000 pounds of baggage. Hillary's assignment was to force a route through the Khumbu Icefall, the collapsing glacier that guards the base of the mountain, while Lowe worked the Lhotse Face.

Hunt named two summit pairs. Tom Bourdillon and Evans went first, reached the South Summit on 26 May, and turned back when Evans's oxygen set failed. Two days later Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set out from the South Col at 25,900 feet, supported by Lowe, Alfred Gregory and Ang Nyima, and pitched a tent at 27,900 feet.

29 May 1953

They reached the summit at 11:30 in the morning and stayed about fifteen minutes. Hillary photographed Tenzing holding his ice axe; he declined to be photographed himself. On the question that obsessed everyone afterwards, Tenzing's 1955 autobiography is explicit — Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed — though the two of them generally preferred to present it as a rope of two rather than a race.

The honours were not evenly distributed. Hillary learned in Kathmandu that he had been made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 6 June 1953; the announcement landed on the Queen's coronation day and the press called it a coronation gift. Tenzing, as a Nepalese citizen, was ineligible for a knighthood and received the George Medal, and the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.

Poles, Yetis, and the Silver Hut

He did not stop. Leading the New Zealand party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he established Scott Base and reached the South Pole on 4 January 1958 — the first party to get there overland since Scott, and the first ever to do it with motor vehicles. In 1985 he stood at the North Pole with Neil Armstrong, becoming the first person to have stood at both poles and on the summit of Everest.

Two ventures show a more analytical man than the public image allowed. The Silver Hut expedition of 1960–61, run with the physiologist Griffith Pugh, demonstrated that Everest could be climbed without supplementary oxygen provided a climber acclimatised by living at 20,000 feet for six months — a finding that rewrote high-altitude practice. And when he went looking for the yeti, he came back with a debunking: of the relics he examined from remote temples, two proved to be bear and one a goat antelope. "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined."

The Himalayan Trust

From 1960 he put the rest of his life into Nepal. The Himalayan Trust built schools, airfields, bridges, clinics and hospitals for the Sherpa people, and restored Buddhist monasteries. The cost was personal and terrible: on 31 March 1975 his wife Louise and his young daughter Belinda were killed when their plane crashed shortly after taking off from Kathmandu, flying to join him at Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital.

Why Edmund Is Called a Genius

This claim rests on physical craft, and it is worth being straightforward about that rather than dressing it up. Hillary was an indifferent student who failed out of university after two years and made his living from bees. The sources that praise him call him the best-known New Zealander who ever lived and the country's most trusted person; none of them reaches for "genius," and the honest reading is that the word is a poor fit.

What he did have was a specific and rare competence: route-finding under conditions that degrade judgement. Forcing a line through the Khumbu Icefall — a glacier that shifts and collapses while you work in it — is a problem in reading terrain, and the Hillary Step is the compressed example, a man at nearly 29,000 feet noticing that snow had separated from rock and correctly judging that the gap would hold him. That is perception plus nerve plus an accurate model of what his own body could still do, exercised where most people cannot think clearly at all. Alongside it sits a genuine strain of empiricism: the Silver Hut work produced a real physiological result, and he was willing to investigate a cherished myth and publish the deflating answer.

The counter-case is that Everest was a collective achievement and he always said so. Hunt planned it, 362 porters carried it, Lowe opened the Lhotse Face, and Bourdillon and Evans broke trail to the South Summit and turned back on failed equipment two days before. Hillary and Tenzing were the pair whose oxygen worked. He refused to be photographed on the summit, which reads less as modesty than as an accurate sense of proportion.

Legacy

He served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal from 1985 to 1989. He was made a member of the Order of New Zealand in 1987 and a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter in 1995; Nepal made him its first foreign honorary citizen in 2003, and India awarded him the Padma Vibhushan posthumously. He has been on the New Zealand five-dollar note since 1992 — the only living person other than a head of state ever to appear on one — and he insisted the mountain behind him be Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Everest. He died of heart failure in Auckland on 11 January 2008, aged eighty-eight. Flags dropped to half-mast across New Zealand and at Scott Base, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called it a profound loss. In 2015 a range of mountains on Pluto was named Hillary Montes.