Maurice Wilson on Everest — Faith, a fast, and a lonely death on the ice

Summary

In late May 1934, on the East Rongbuk Glacier beneath the North Col of Mount Everest, the British adventurer Maurice Wilson died alone in a small tent at roughly 6,400 metres, having tried to climb the highest mountain on Earth with almost no mountaineering training. He had reached India by light aircraft, slipped illegally into Tibet disguised as a monk, and walked to the foot of the peak convinced that prayer and fasting would carry him to the summit. They did not. His body, tent and diary were found the following year, in July 1935, by Eric Shipton's reconnaissance expedition.

Wilson was not a member of any organised effort; he was a thirty-six-year-old solo enthusiast acting against the advice of the Royal Geographical Society, the Air Ministry and the British authorities in India. A decorated veteran of the First World War, he had become persuaded after a period of illness and recovery that a thirty-five-day regime of fasting and faith could cure any ailment and overcome any obstacle, and he chose Everest as the public proof of his idea. His plan combined two feats he was unqualified for: a long-distance flight in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth he had only just learned to fly, and the ascent of an 8,849-metre peak that the best-equipped expeditions of the age had failed to climb.

His three Sherpa companions — Tewang, Rinzing and Tsering, all veterans of the official 1933 Everest expedition — guided him from Darjeeling across Tibet to the Rongbuk Monastery and waited at Camp III as he made his final attempts. They are central to the story and were treated kindly by Wilson in his diary, even as his judgement failed; they urged him to turn back, and when he would not, it was their later testimony and Shipton's expedition that established how and where he died. Wilson's last diary entry, dated 31 May 1934, read simply: "Off again, gorgeous day."

Timeline

A pilot who could not climb and a climb he could not fly

Maurice Wilson came to Everest from outside every institution that had tried to climb it. Born in Bradford in 1898, he had served on the Western Front, won the Military Cross in 1918 for holding a position near Wytschaete as the only unwounded survivor of his unit, and carried the unsettled aftermath of the war through years of restless travel and poor health. The turning point, by his own account, was a period of intense fasting and prayer in 1932 that he believed had cured him; from it he drew a sweeping conviction that the same discipline of faith and self-denial could solve human problems and, specifically, lift him to the summit of the world's highest mountain.

The scheme he built on that belief was extraordinary in its disregard for the practical. He decided he would fly a small aeroplane from England to the slopes of Everest, crash-land or abandon it high on the mountain, and walk to the top — a plan that required neither flying nor climbing skill, both of which he lacked entirely. He bought a de Havilland Gipsy Moth, christened it Ever Wrest, took flying lessons, and crashed more than once in training. The Air Ministry forbade the flight; he went anyway. In May 1933 he flew east across Europe, the Middle East and India in stages, reaching India despite official efforts to stop him, only to be denied permission to fly on into Nepal or Tibet. The aircraft never reached the mountain. Forced onto the ground, Wilson fell back on the second, harder half of his plan: to walk in overland and climb Everest on foot, alone.

Disguised as a monk, then alone on the glacier

Tibet was closed to unauthorised travellers, so in March 1934 Wilson left Darjeeling in secret, dressed as a Buddhist monk and feigning deafness and illness to avoid questions at checkpoints. He travelled with three Sherpas — Tewang, Rinzing and Tsering — experienced men who had served on the official British Everest expedition of 1933 and who now did the real work of route-finding, load-carrying and survival across some 480 kilometres of high Tibetan plateau. They reached the Rongbuk Monastery on 14 April. There Wilson rested, then on 16 April set off alone up the glacier for the first time, with little food and no proper technique, and was driven back by the terrain and the cold.

He recovered at the monastery and tried again on 12 May, this time keeping the Sherpas with him as far as the abandoned stores of the previous expeditions. They reached the old Camp III at the foot of the North Col, around 6,400 metres. Above lay a steep wall of ice and snow that fully equipped teams had climbed only with fixed ropes, step-cutting and roped parties — work far beyond a lone man with no training. Wilson threw himself at it repeatedly between roughly 21 and 28 May, gaining perhaps a few hundred metres to around 6,920 metres before being turned back each time by the ice walls and by his own exhaustion and hunger, his strength further eroded by his refusal to eat normally. The Sherpas, watching his condition deteriorate, begged him to descend with them. He refused, telling them to wait, and went up alone for the last time. His diary's final entry, on 31 May, recorded only optimism: "Off again, gorgeous day."

The Five Factors

Aftermath

One man died, alone and unnecessarily, and the manner of it briefly made him famous. The British press treated Wilson as an eccentric curiosity, and for decades his attempt was filed under folly rather than tragedy. Yet the recovery of his diary in 1935 preserved a fuller and more human picture, and later writers — notably his biographers — restored him as a figure of genuine, if misdirected, courage shaped by the wounds of the First World War. His body, reburied in the glacier in 1935, has reportedly been seen and disturbed by the ice's movement in the years since, surfacing and shifting as the East Rongbuk grinds downhill.

Everest itself would not be climbed for another nineteen years, until Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit on 29 May 1953 from the Nepalese side, with proper teams, oxygen and decades of accumulated technique. Wilson's story is remembered now as the clearest early case of the mountain's central lesson: that Everest is indifferent to motive, and that belief, however deep, is no substitute for the skill and support the terrain requires. The three Sherpas who guided him deserve the larger share of credit the original accounts withheld — it was their competence, not his faith, that got him as far as the foot of the climb that killed him.

Lessons

References

• Maurice Wilson WIKIPEDIA
• 1935 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition WIKIPEDIA
• Maurice Wilson and Everest, 1934 ALPINE JOURNAL