George Mallory is famous for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s, until the mountain claimed his life.
Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest, right up to the final days before she disappeared while en route to its summit.
On June 8, 1924, Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine set out from their expedition team in an effort to reach the summit; They were never seen alive again.
However, Mallory’s words are now available to read online in their entirety for the first time. Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Mallory studied between 1905 and 1908, recently digitized hundreds of pages of correspondence and other documents written and received by him.
For the past 18 months, archivists have scanned the documents in preparation for the 100th anniversary of Mallory’s disappearance. The university will display a selection of Mallory’s letters and possessions in the exhibition “George Mallory: Magdalene to the Mountain,” opening June 20.
The Everest letters describe Mallory’s meticulous preparations and equipment testing, and his optimism about his prospects. But the letters also show the darker side of mountaineering: bad weather, health problems, setbacks and doubts.
Days before his disappearance, Mallory wrote that the odds were “50 to 1 against us” in his last letter to his wife, Ruth, dated May 27, 1924.
“This has been a bad time,” Mallory wrote. “I remember the tremendous efforts, the exhaustion and the depressing feeling of looking out the door of a tent at a world of snow and fading hopes.”
He went on to describe a harrowing brush with death during a recent climb, when the ground beneath his feet collapsed, leaving him suspended “half-blind and breathless,” his weight supported only by his ice ax wedged in a crack as he dangled. “A very nasty black hole.”
Other letters that Mallory exchanged with Ruth were written at the time of their courtship, while he was serving in the British artillery regiment during the First World War. Throughout her travels, Ruth’s correspondence provided much-needed stability during the most difficult times, said project leader Katy Green, university archivist at Magdalene College.
“She was the ‘stone’ at home, he says himself in his letters,” Green said. The archivist recounted a note in which Mallory told Ruth, “I’m so glad you never stagger, because I would stagger without you.”
However, although Mallory was clearly devoted to his wife, he repeatedly returned to the Himalayas despite her growing fears for his safety.
“There’s something about him that drove him,” Green said. “It could have been his wartime experience, or he could have just been the kind of person he was.”
Andrew Irvine and George Mallory set out with their expedition team in an effort to reach the summit on June 8, 1924. (Royal Geographical Society/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
‘Documents of his character’
In total, the collection includes around 840 letters spanning from 1914 to 1924; Ruth wrote about 440 of them to Mallory, offering an unprecedented and highly detailed look at the daily lives of women in the early 20th century, Green told CNN.
Together, the letters offer readers a rare glimpse of the man behind the legend, said Jochen Hemmleb, an author and mountaineer who was part of the Everest expedition that found Mallory’s body in 1999.
“They are really personal. They are documents of his character. They provide unique information about his life, and especially about the 1924 expedition: his mental state, his precise planning, his ambitions,” said Hemmleb, who was not involved in the scanning project. “It is a great treasure that they are now digitized and available for everyone to read.”
Frozen in place
Three of the digitized letters, written to Mallory by her brother, sister and a family friend, were recovered from Mallory’s body by the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, which ascended Everest in search of Mallory’s remains and Irvine.
On May 1, 1999, expedition member and mountaineer Conrad Anker found a frozen corpse at an altitude of around 26,700 feet (8,138 meters) and identified it as Mallory’s from a name tag sewn into his clothing.
Mallory’s body was buried where she lay at the family’s request, said Anker, who was not involved in the letter digitization project.
“Having done body recoveries elsewhere, it’s very laborious and very dangerous at that altitude,” he told CNN. “We collected some of his personal effects dating back to the Royal Geographical Society,” including the three letters that were later scanned at Magdalene College.
Mount Everest, the highest peak in the Himalayas, is also the highest mountain on Earth, standing 29,035 feet (8,850 meters) above sea level on the border between Nepal and Tibet, an autonomous region of China. . Her Tibetan name is Chomolungma, meaning “Goddess Mother of the World”, and her Nepali name is Sagarmatha, meaning “Goddess of Heaven”.
However, these names were unknown to the 19th-century British surveyors who mapped the region, and in 1865 the Royal Geographical Society named the peak Mount Everest after the British surveyor Sir George Everest, former Surveyor General of India.
Mallory took part in Britain’s first three forays onto the slopes of Everest: in 1921, 1922 and 1924. When he disappeared in 1924, he was less than two weeks shy of his 38th birthday.
Many have speculated whether Mallory and Irvine managed to reach the summit of Everest. The climbers were last seen in the early afternoon of June 8 by expedition member and geologist Noel Odell, who was following them and caught a glimpse of them from a distance. Later, Odell found some of his equipment at a campsite, but there was no sign of Mallory and Irvine.
“(Mallory) risked a lot even though she had a family at home and three young children,” Hemmleb said. “We don’t know if it was really irresponsible to make that last attempt, because we don’t really know what happened. It could be that in the end she simply had bad luck.”
British mountaineer George Mallory expressed in digitized letters his hopes and fears about climbing Everest. (Magdalene College/AP via CNN Newsource)
so close yet so far
Decades after Mallory’s death, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and British mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary became the first to reach the summit of Everest, reaching the summit on May 29, 1953. In the years that followed, thousands of people attempted climb Everest, and almost 4,000 people reached the summit. More than 330 climbers have died attempting since modern records have been kept, according to the Himalayan Database, which compiles records of all Himalayan expeditions; Some of those bodies remain on the mountain, frozen where they fell and visible to climbers passing by them.
“If you’re in this environment, you make peace with your own mortality and the death of others,” Anker said. “You are above 8,000 meters, and when there are changes in the weather or your own systems stop working due to lack of oxygen, things get serious very quickly.”
When mountaineers find themselves near the top of a mountain, they sometimes advance even in dangerous conditions due to so-called summit fever, a compulsion to reach the summit even at the cost of their own safety. It is unknown if Mallory was suffering from summit fever when she died, but she might have thought that her reputation depended on the summit.
“That was going to be the defining moment in his life,” Anker said.
By comparison, Edward Norton, a member of Mallory’s team, had attempted to reach the summit four days earlier, but returned to approximately the same altitude where Mallory and Irvine were last seen.
“I had a conversation with one of Edward Norton’s sons a couple of years ago,” Hemmleb said. “When I asked him, do you think it was pure luck that your father survived and Mallory died? He said, ‘No, I think there was a difference: my father, Edward Norton, didn’t need the mountain.'”
As a climber, Hemmleb took that message to heart.
“That’s something I learned personally from Mallory,” he said. “You have to be very careful not to depend on the success of the summit.”
A century has passed since Mallory’s death, but the digitization of these letters ensures that her story will continue to be told, Hemmleb said.
“This will continue beyond my own lifetime, that’s for sure,” he added. “In a sense, it is the expedition that never ends.”
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American, and How It Works magazines.
British mountaineer George Mallory expressed in digitized letters his hopes and fears about climbing Everest. (Magdalene College/AP via CNN Newsource)
British mountaineer George Mallory expressed in digitized letters his hopes and fears about climbing Everest. (Magdalene College/AP via CNN Newsource)