Dan Snow's History Hit - Lost on Mount Everest: The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Dan unravels the mystery surrounding George Mallory and Andrew Irvine's daring attempt to conquer Mount Everest in 1924 - a feat that could have made them the first to stand atop the world's highest peak. He tells the tale of Irvine and Mallory's ascent into the 'Death Zone' where they embarked on their final summit push amidst biting winds and punishing altitudes. Dan also hears from world-renowned climber Jake Norton who was part of an expedition in 1999 to find out what happened to the climbers and describes the group's truly astonishing discovery.Written and produced by Dan Snow, and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Our human bodies cannot endure long once we rise to beyond 19,000 feet or so in altitude about 6,000 meters. Our bodies deteriorate faster than they can repair themselves. We are dying at that altitude. And it gets worse as you go higher. Viscous blood, thick blood, fails to reach the extremities. It hastens frostbite. Our skin turns white and then waxy and then purple.

Then it blisters up. And that's what's going on the outside of your body. Inside you, bones and muscles are freezing. The fluid in our cells is freezing. You're slowly drying up. Above 8,000 metres, the body desperately tries to shore up its cardiopulmonary reserves, keeps the heart and lungs alive, and so it shuts down the digestive system. The inability to absorb enough oxygen at that altitude means hypoxia. Your brain, your organs are slowly starving of oxygen.

Your heart desperately tries to supply enough oxygen to those organs and that puts blood vessels under enormous pressure. Scientists think that leads in turn to edemia where fluid gets forced through the blood-brain boundary for example. So your brain, your lungs, they start to drown in fluid. Given the extreme dryness of high-altitude air and the high respiration rate, the high rate of breathing required to try and bring that oxygen in, it means that you're also losing fluid through breathing. So you're dehydrating at the same time as your organs are drowning. You are in what is called the death zone.

The summit of Mount Everest is nearly nine kilometres above sea level, 29,000 feet. That summit is firmly in the death zone and it's over the past hundred years many men and women have walked willingly into that zone the lure of that particular summit has drawn people to it like a siren's song and it can be so irresistible song. And it can be so irresistible that some have knowingly chosen the summit over life itself. Tragically, this year we think five people have died and three are missing, presumed dead. And I wanted to extend our condolences to everyone who's lost someone on Everest, this season or in any season.

A century ago, in the 1920s, the first expedition set out to climb, or as they would have put it, to conquer the peak of Everest. In 1922, the first real summit attempt reached higher than any human being had ever climbed before, and the second expedition, exactly 100 years ago in 1924, saw its team members come remarkably close to the summit, perhaps, perhaps even reaching the summit itself. But we can't be certain, as that expedition ended in tragedy. Two Tibetan porters would die of their injuries they received on the mountain, and two British climbers disappeared in their push for the summit. Their story is now the stuff of legend.

Not just because of the astonishing tenacity that they and their expedition demonstrated to even get close to the summit at the very dawn of mountaineering on Everest, but also because of the drama of their disappearance and the enduring mystery of whether or not they did in fact get to the top. The two British climbers were George Lee Mallory and Sandy Irvin. Exactly 100 years ago, they left their tent and walked into oblivion, from this world into the realm of myth, conspiracy and speculation. In this podcast, I'm going to tell the story of their expedition and of their final climb. And I've got a helping hand from a mountaineering legend, Jake Norton, who spent a lot more time on Everest than most people,

summiting it and many other challenging peaks, and in so doing has developed a profound love, not just of mountaineering, but the history, the culture, and customs of his sport. It's a very big, very challenging mountain. You have massive exposure, especially up on the north face. You're climbing on the whole upper north face of the mountain is like a ceramic tiled roof with loose tiles all over it. But this roof happens to be 10,000 feet in length. And so you're traversing across all these broken slabs of rock that are kind of trying to push you off the

mountain and any slip, and you're probably not going to stop. And you're probably going to end up at the bottom of the mountain. Coming up, I'm going to tell the story of that fateful day 100 years ago when Mallory and Irvin disappeared into the clouds and I'm also going to be asking Jake about what it was like decades later in 1999 when he was on the team that discovered one of their bodies. I remember he had hair still on his forearms and you know as we went into his pockets to try and find any evidence that told us more you know I believe it was his left breast pocket I pulled out a handkerchief that you know was just in perfect condition and still soft to the touch it truly felt like we had walked through a wormhole

and had stepped back in time. This is Dancino's History Hit, and this is the story of Mallory and Irvin. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. In 1802, the British in India began what was one of the most extraordinarily ambitious and greatest mapping projects in history to that point, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. They wanted to create an accurate map of the subcontinent which British arms were so rapidly conquering. It was supposed to take five years. In fact, it took six decades. It cost an absolute fortune. Massive chains were forged and laid out physically on the ground. And then the height of

other objects could be measured because, as I've recently discovered from helping my daughter with her mathematics homework, if you know the length of the base of a triangle and then you know the angle at either end, you can calculate the height of any given object. They measured India by creating an unending series of these triangles and they were remarkably successful. Over 41,000 feet, their error was just four inches. In 1854, that survey had reached the Himalayas. From miles away, the surveyors calculated that the height of Everest, this giant peak they could see in the distance, was 29,002 feet. The current US National Geographic survey puts the height at 29,035 feet, using satellite data. The mid-19th century British survey was just 33 feet out. Extraordinary. It was pretty clear to them at the time that they'd discovered the highest mountain on earth.

Initially they marked it down as Peak B, then they changed its name imaginatively to Peak 15. Contrary to what you might think, the naming convention in this survey did attempt to find a local indigenous name for things. In Mount Everest's case, however, they discovered there were several possible local names. There was a Swedish explorer who insisted that the mountain was called Chu Mu Langma. He said that that had been recorded by Jesuits in China way back in the 18th century. People have translated that as Trungolumna, which I think slightly fancifully has been said to mean goddess mother of the world. But Charles Bell, who was British India's man in Tibet in the early 20th century,

insisted that the local name was Chamalung. Another man, David MacDonald, who accompanied the first expeditions to the area, said that the mountain was called by locals Miti Guti Chapu Lungna, which translates perhaps slightly more convincingly as the mountain whose summit no one can see from close up but can be seen from the far distance and which is so high that birds go blind when they fly over the summit. Given the difficulties in identifying an agreed local name, the chief surveyor of India named the mountain after his predecessor, Sir George Everest, under whose aegis most of the surveying work had taken place. Interestingly, Sir George Everest actually pronounced his name

Everest, but the name of the mountain has stuck, Everest. Whilst the surveyors in India were identifying Everest and calculating its height, in distant Europe, alpinism was really born. The 1850s saw an explosion of climbing. It seems that intellectuals developed this mania for getting to the highest places they could, that ability to breathe rarefied air, to quite literally look down on other people, to stand higher, to demonstrate their muscular intellectual superiority. Standing on top of a mountain was a real way of expressing that ambition, which had remained notional up to that point. And you see that in the decades that followed. The Nazis, I'm afraid, were obsessed with bagging summits, with mountaineering. The British also saw it as an expression of their superiority in South Asia.

So Curzon, the legendary viceroy of India, once said, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen to reach the summit of Everest. This intersection of personal ambition and also national pride was intensified after the Norwegian Amundsen reached the South Pole. It became common currency at the time. People started to refer to Everest as the Third Pole. Having narrowly been beaten in its attempt to first reach the South Pole, the British Empire was determined it would not be beaten again. Britain's would climb Everest. There's such an interesting quote from this period by the president of the Royal Geographical Society, he's called France's young husband, it's in 1920, and he describes really what the thinking at the time was around getting to the top of Everest. The accomplishments of such a feat will

elevate the human spirit and will give man a feeling that we're really getting the upper hand on the earth and that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings. If man stands on earth's highest summit he will have increased pride and confidence in himself in the ascendancy of a matter. This is the incalculable good that the ascent of Everest will confer. What a difference a century makes. In 1920, people still felt that the earth absolutely had the upper hand. And now, as our oceans choke in chemical pollution, plastics, as we change the proportions of gases in our atmosphere, as we level mountains, dig up lithium from the deepest places on earth, it feels like a very different world we're

describing. Now many geographers probably talk of the earth trying to desperately restore its position of supremacy compared to us pesky human beings. But that was the spirit of the time and the Mount Everest committee was established. A reconnoiter was planned for 1921. There'd be climbing attempts in the years that followed. On these expeditions there would be geographers, geologists, surveyors and of course climbers. One of which was a man who probably had the best reputation as a climber of any Britain. who probably had the best reputation as a climber of any Britain. His name was George Lee Mallory. Mallory won undying fame on Everest, probably not in the way that he was intending, but he also issued one of the great one-liners in history. He was in New York on a speaking trip and he was being bothered by journalists and one of them said, why climb Everest? And he snapped, because it's there.

As you'll hear, he issued far more lengthy and articulate statements about what drove him on to climb high mountains. But that was the one that has stuck in people's imaginations ever since. Because it is there. He was born, this epic, high-altitude mountaineer, in one of the flattest parts of England, in the Cheshire Plain. 1886 he was the son of a churchman, a rector, and he used to climb his father's parish church when he was a boy. His sister remembers that impossible was a word that acted as a challenge to him.

She said he had a cat-like sure-footedness. challenge to him. She said he had a cat-like sure-footedness. He would come up with completely insane ideas, like lying on the tracks as trains passed overhead, and she had to tell him that, well, that sounded perfectly ordinary. Otherwise, he would certainly go and do it. He went to a very grand private school, a so-called public school in England, called Winchester College. He was gifted in many ways, and I've been to that school, and I've seen the roofs he climbed on, the drainpipes he scaled. He was gifted in many ways, and I've been to that school and I've seen the roofs he climbed on, the drain pipes he scaled. He was a strikingly beautiful boy, everyone agrees, large eyes, heavily lashed. He was compared to Botticelli's Madonna. Perhaps not unrelated to his great beauty, a teacher, Graham Irving, took him to the Alps in 1904 on a mountaineering trip,

and he was instantly obsessed. He'd found his calling. He went up to Cambridge in 1905, where he continued to attract attention for his looks. He had a very tortured homosexual tutor, A.C. Benson. He was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was also the author of Land of Hope and Glory, the wonderful patriotic hymn. He seems to have fallen madly in love with Mallory, unconsumated because Benson forced himself to be celibate his whole life. But he introduced him into a very racy gang, the nascent so-called Bloomsbury group. They were poets and artists, authors. Rupert Brooke, who would die in the Eastern Mediterranean in the First World War, one of the great war poets of that conflict. John Maynard Keynes, who found an entire school of economic thought. And Virginia Woolf, the writer. Mallory grew his hair. He wore black. He posed for friends,

photos, just epic studenty stuff, basically. He may have had some same-sex relationships. Lytton Strachey, the wit and the author, wrote, Mondia, George Mallory, my hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away with the words, oh heavens, heavens. When he wasn't posing for his friends' portraits and photographs and being beautiful and moody, he climbed a lot. He became well-known as one of the best mountaineers in Britain. He used to take trips up to Snowdonia with a gang of friends. If, like me, anyone listening to this enjoys mountaineering, climbing, hill walking, you'll particularly like this short passage he wrote on summiting in this period. We're not exultant, but delighted, joyful, overly astonished. Have we vanquished an enemy?

joyful, overly astonished. Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. After Cambridge, he got a comfortable teaching job at another famous private school called Charterhouse. Now, that was a reserved profession. It meant that when war broke out in 1914, he was not expected to sign up. But he said it was indecent to be happy and prosperous while friends were enduring such horror, and he left his job voluntarily and signed up to fight in the trenches. He became 2nd Lieutenant George Mallory in the artillery. He manned the particularly heavy guns, the ones that were employed to smash the German lines in the lead-up to the Battle of the Somme, or were supposed to anyway. He had multiple shaves with

death. His letters describe trenches full of corpses. He'd got married and his letters back to his wife are full of horror. After the war, he counted the costs. He just looked at his Snowdonia climbing gang and worked out that of the 60 people on one particular trip, 23 had been killed and 14 were wounded in the war. He, like many of his generation, may have felt guilt at surviving. He'd got lucky during the war. It's strange, he'd just got out of harm's way. There was a training course here, a minor injury there. He, by chance, missed some of the greatest battles when he would have stood the most chance of getting killed or injured. But clearly his wartime experience, that trauma,

had to inform the decisions that he made in the years that followed. They also informed his career in another way. It meant that when it came to climbing after the war, many of the older men, the sort of pre-war climbing rock stars, actually hadn't done that much climbing over the previous four years. They were slightly out of practice. In 1921, the great recce moved towards Everest. Mallory spotted the mountain from a hundred miles away. It was, he said, like a prodigious white fang, excrescent from the jaw

of the world. We were satisfied that the highest mountain in the world would not disappoint us. That recce was enormously successful. They mapped hundreds of square meters of terrain. They gathered lots of useful data. They established the best route to the top from the north side, from the Tibetan side of the mountain, a route that's still used today. And they even got to 23,000 feet or around seven kilometers. They got to the North Coal. They were the first mountaineering expedition to get up close to Everest. And it's a good moment for me to bring in the Everest veteran, Jake Norton, to give me a sense of what the mountain is really like from the climber's point of view.

You're just like, man, this is a lot of real estate rising up above me. And the Tibetan side where they came in, of course, in 24, and I've been a lot, it's just in your face. You get to base camp at 17,600 feet and you're looking up at a 12,000 foot wall of mountain rising above you. And it's just so utterly humbling, you know, to imagine how am I going to get up there? And so that's how I always feel, you know, just, I don't understand how people have ego in the mountains on the slopes of Everest. To me, it absolutely obliterates any sense of ego whatsoever. And you realize that you're a gnat on the arm of the world at that point. So after a reasonable successful

reconnoiter in 1921, a proper climbing expedition was planned for the following year, an attempt to get to the summit. They faced a big decision around the use of oxygen. Aviation, particularly during the war, had proved the usefulness of taking oxygen at high altitudes, and Mallory had initially called it a damnable heresy but he pretty quickly totally reversed that opinion and he began to see it for this second expedition as absolutely necessary for getting to the top of Everest. The problem is oxygen gear was heavy and bulky. It added enormously to the load that summiters would be expected to carry on the day of their final attempt. The following year, 1922, the first real attempt begins. I think it's true to say that

Mallory was developing a bit of a mania for the summit. His gang, the Bloomsbury set, his pre-war friends had done very well in life. Four of his mates earned the Nobel Prize. Five were cabinet ministers. Fifteen of his old climbing gang had been knighted. John Maynard Keynes was now a world-famous economist. And interestingly, Mallory's little brother, Trafford Lee Mallory, was on his way up the ranks of the RAF, on his way to a stellar career during the Second World War. So Mallory was surrounded by impressive people on the march and I think he started to believe that his only path back to Britain now lay via the summit of Everest. On this first expedition you can see how

Everest was, just as it remains to this day for so many people, a ticket somehow to a better future, a box to check, a stepping stone. But seeing Everest as a stepping stone is to profoundly underestimate it and the dangers of climbing it. In May 1922 Mallory was back on the slopes of Everest. On the 20th, he and a small group of climbers set off from Camp 5, around 25,000 feet. The following day, they reached 27,000 feet, that's 8,230 metres, higher than anyone had ever been before. And they turned round. There was a very illustrative event on the way down,

and it's the descent on which most accidents happen. One climber slipped, three men were pulled off by the ropes that connected them all, and were just sliding down the side of Everest. Mallory had the presence of mind to smash his climbing axe into the snow, wrap the rope around it, and it held fast. Their lives were saved. Mallory had saved them all from death. Their potentially deadly fall didn't stop them. Another group went up and made it about 300 feet higher, again setting a new record, and Mallory

launched one final attempt with three Brits and 14 porters. As they set out they noticed there was a lot of fresh snow which should have rung warning bells but it seems not to have done. As they pushed higher, they triggered a huge avalanche. Some of their porters were swept off a cliff, others were buried in the rapidly freezing snow. Seven of them died. One of the doctors on the expedition blamed Mallory and another of the more aggressive climbers for this tragedy. He wrote, Mallory is a very good, stout-hearted baby, but quite unfit to be put in charge of anything, including himself. Somerville is quite the most urbanely conceited youth I have ever struck, and quite the toughest. He was very politely scornful of our

refusing to countenance the German alpine, forlorn hope, success at any cost, death doesn't matter stunt. He was honestly prepared to chuck his life away on the most remote chance of success. So Mallory and Somerville, the two men seemingly really driving hardest for the summit, were already causing tensions within the climbing community. One old Everest hand has written more recently, the 1922 avalanche, I mean it was Mallory's fault and he was right to feel so guilty. It reinforces that caution about sweeping along weaker brethren, carried away by their belief in you, to take risks or exertions that they were not fit for. These would be apocryphal words. This would not be the last time in Mallory's career that this could be said to apply to him.

You listen to Dan Snow's history, there's more coming up. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Undeterred by the loss of life, the Everest Committee planned another expedition. This time it would go in 1924. Mallory and Somerville were back alongside some fresh blood. There was one young man who'd been

brought along with limited mountaineering experience. Mallory called him The Experiment. His name was Sandy Irvine. When the 1924 Everest expedition left Liverpool docks, Irvine's young brother, a 10-year-old called Thurston, waved on the quayside. And apparently as the ship pulled off down the Mersey, Thurston said, well, that's the last we'll ever see of him. Irvin was a big, strong student from Oxford University. He'd won the Oxford-Cambridge boat race in 1923. He had impressed on a tough Oxford University sledging trip to Spitsbergen. He was young and ambitious and strong. One member of the expedition wrote, Irvin, our blue-eyed boy from Oxford, is much younger than any of us,

and he's really a very good sort, neither bumptious by virtue of his blue, nor squashed by the age of the rest of us. Mild, but strong, full of common sense, good at gadgets. None of the oxygen apparatus would have worked if it had not been for him. If ever a primer stove goes wrong, it goes straight to Irvin, whose tent is like a tinker's shop. He's thoroughly a man or boy of the world, yet with high ideals and very decent with the porters. Mallory, at age 37, 15 years old, and Irvin was the lead climber on the expedition.

climber on the expedition. They set off with 10 mules carrying 75,000 copper coins for any expenses they faced along the way. Each man had a servant, they had plenty of bottles of champagne with them, sadly most of them burst at altitude, and they ate well, certainly at the lower altitudes. The weather that May was abominable and Mallory had a very tough time establishing the higher camps the idea is you shuttle supplies up from base camp preparing for the final assault on the summit so you have a series of tents up the hill well stocked with food and fuel and oxygen but it was very difficult to establish those higher camps two porters died one died from frostbite injuries the other from a cerebral hemorrhage. They had to perform a big rescue at one stage, bringing down some porters from very high up during a resupply

mission. And it's thought that rescue, they went to such extremities in that rescue, they may have weakened themselves and made themselves less likely to summit in the days that followed. On the 26th of May, there was a council of war. They decided it was too dangerous to keep asking the porters to head up and down. And so they decided to make an attempt on the summit without oxygen. Mallory was dismayed. Three non-oxygen attempts would be made. The first was to be made by Somerville and a man called Norton.

And they left on the 4th of June and climbed higher than anyone had ever climbed before to around 28,000 feet, 8,500 meters or so. They climbed into the jet stream. Somerville was wearing four pairs of socks under his boots, a woolen vest against his skin, a flannel shirt, and three cardigans, we're told. They were great conditions. It really was the perfect day. Not too much wind, clear skies. They managed to get within half a mile of the summit when Somerville announced he could go no further. His throat was obstructed. He just could not breathe. Norton pushed a little bit further. He went across the Great Couloir that now bears his name, around 100 feet higher. He got to about 28,120 feet or 8,500 meters. But at that stage, he went snow blind. His eyes just stopped working.

They turned around, Somerville just getting enough breath into his lungs, helping Norton down. Just before they reached their camp, Somerville sat down in the snow to die. He was unable to breathe. With one last great effort, he sort of smashed his chest. He gave himself almost chest compression. And the throat lining, which had become frostbitten, just came loose. It shook loose. He coughed it up and found he could breathe again. In terrible condition, they made it back to their high camp and huddled in the tent for warmth. Norton's record, we should say, stood for 55 years. It was an astonishing effort, all without oxygen.

Mallory was in the tent that night, and he told the two broken mountaineers that he'd sent for oxygen. He was going to attempt the summit, and he had insisted that the porters bring up oxygen. He was going to take Irvine with him. Norton later said he did not agree with this decision, but he couldn't do anything to stop him. He was blind, Somerville was completely incapacitated, and Mallory was burning with a fierce ambition they could not restrain. At this point, Mallory borrowed Somerville's camera. That will become important as the story goes on. On the 6th of June, Mallory and Irvin headed up. They had some porters with them and he wrote a note back to his crew to be brought down by the porters saying there's no wind up here and things look hopeful. On the 7th they pushed up to what was rather grandiosely called

Camp 6, which was just a tent that Norton and Somerville had established. It was from there they would leave on their final push for the summit. He was still accompanied by porters at that point, and as he sent them back down, leaving just him and Irvin up in Camp 6, he sent notes with them. He said that he'd lost his stove, which was vital for making water. You have to melt snow to make water to that altitude, so it's essential. He'd also lost his compass, which was vital if you want to try and find your way back in whiteout conditions in a blizzard. So these were huge problems. Now, luckily for him, Norton had left a stove in Camp 6, so they would be able to make some water. He sent one last note the night of the 7th with

the porters that were retreating down the mountain. He said, Dear Noel, we'll probably start tomorrow morning on the 8th in order to have clear weather. It won't be too early to start looking out for us, either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up the skyline at 8pm. Yours, G. Mallory. Now, he obviously meant 8am, which implies that the effects of altitude were slowly working on his brain at this point. It also massively underestimates the time you'd need to hit these marks today, even with the fixed ladders and the drugs that we have. Some people even take Viagra on Everest because apparently it has a useful effect. So in Mallory's day, it's highly unlikely that by 8am they're going to reach the places that he had told them to look out for them. The skyline he's referring to, we think, is the notorious so-called second

step. It's a 15-foot vertical cliff, which now has a ladder on it. Two men carrying 30 pounds of oxygen each in rubbish leather boots were not going to be able to scramble up that. The first team to do so was a Chinese team in the 1970s, I think it was, that took five hours to do so and sustained multiple injuries in the process. So Mallory has forgotten the essential kit, he could be showing signs of confusion, and he's hugely, hugely underestimated the time it was going to take to complete the distance to the summit. The signs were not good. That final note was carried down by the departing porters. They hurried down to get back before dark. As the porters hurried down from Camp 6 and they looked back and saw Mallory and Irvine,

As the porters hurried down from Camp 6 and they looked back and saw Mayer and Irvine, it would be the last confirmed sighting of the pair by another human being. On the 8th of June 1924, the sun rose at 4.45am on Everest. Their tent has subsequently been discovered and excavated. A torch and candlelight were found in the tent, so we can be reasonably sure they did not leave in the dark. Nowadays, expeditions leave from higher than their Camp 6, and they leave at midnight or even before, so Mallory and Irvine were already dangerously late for a summit attempt. We know what he was wearing that day. He had a silk wool vest next to his skin, a beige silk shirt,

a wool pullover, another shirt, then a flannel shirt, and then the outer layer was a windproof Burberry jacket. On his lower body, he had a cotton pair of long johns, then woolen long johns, then another pair of woolen long johns, and then Burberry breeches. He was wearing three pairs of socks and puttees, which are like bandages that were very familiar to anyone who served in the First World War. You wrap them around your lower leg. They're made of fine wool. On his head, he had a flying helmet lined with fur. Now, the weather was bad. The weather readings taken below showed the barometric pressure was tumbling. A storm was on the way, And low pressure effectively makes the mountain

even higher. There is even less atmosphere for humans to live in and breathe in. And on top of that, his clothes, which scientists think might have kept people alive at sort of minus 10, minus 15 degrees centigrade, were simply not going to cut it if the wind chill that came with that storm would push the temperature down to sort of minus 30 or 40. He had mentioned to one of his comrades that he wanted to take two bottles of oxygen. Now that is just not enough for getting up and back. He would have known that. But he could not risk the weight of carrying three bottles of oxygen each. By the time they'd got up, they defrost their boots, they'd checked their equipment. They probably would have set off at something like 5.30 in the morning, by which time modern climbers are reaching the summit of Everest.

An oxygen bottle thought to be one of Mallory and Irvin's has been found around 600 feet short of the so-called first step, this band of more vertical rock that you have to cover. Now that implies they took about four hours to get there, so they were going slowly. At midday, we get one of the most controversial and raked over piece of evidence in the Mallory and Irvine story. At 12.50 on the 8th of June, their fellow climber Odell claims that the clouds lifted and he saw two dots moving on Everest. Now, if this is true, moving on Everest. Now, if this is true, that is the last sighting of Mallory and Irvine alive. Unfortunately, his story has changed over years with retelling. Most experts now agree it's very unreliable given the distances involved and the mountain, the conditions, the altitude. If he was right, he says that they were nearing the base of the final pyramid. He seems to think they're at the so-called third step at the base of the summit, and that means they were not going to stop until

they'd made it. They were very, very close indeed. However, it's just impossible to know what Odell saw and whether he remembered it correctly. We certainly, and it's certainly impossible to know exactly what happened next, other than its ultimate outcome, which is that Mallory and Irvin never returned from their summit attempt. They were lost to the mountain. Their comrades tried to search for their bodies, but nothing was found. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. Irvin's mother left a candle burning in the porch for years afterwards in case her boy had survived somehow and found his way home. The first evidence of Mayer and Irvin was probably what was found in 1933, a dark stained wooden ice axe with a very finely forged head buried in the snow. It was found about an hour's climbing from their Camp 6. From marks on it, it's assumed to be Irvine's, but it's not for certain. It's below the first step. In 1979, there's a tantalising moment. A Japanese climber was talking to a

Chinese climber, very, very high on Everest. The Chinese man was called Wang Hongbo. He said in 1975, he'd seen the body of an Englishman. He claimed it was around 8,100 meters. Extraordinarily, the following day, Wang was killed in an avalanche. In 1991, a oxygen bottle was found, we think, under a boulder around 27,800 feet or 8,475 meters. If this is one of their bottles, that would be evidence for the highest point that they reached. But again, nothing on Everest, nothing in the death zone is certain. nothing in the death zone is certain. In 1999, however, there was a breakthrough. Not far from Mallory's Camp 6, a body was found at about 8,156 metres or 26,760 feet. Let's hear from Jake Norton, who was part of that expedition on Everest that year, to try and find the bodies of Mallory and Irvin. It must be very interesting being on Everest, not just trying to bag the summit,

but working around the edges of it, spending time at that altitude without focused uniquely on just getting up to the top. Yeah, yeah. And for me, that's what turned me on to the expedition in the first place. I've never been super motivated by summits. I've always been more interested in the history and kind of the cultural landscape of a mountain and a mountain area. So for me to be up there without the intent of summiting per se, but really trying to kind of go back in time was immediately enthralling to me. And it made the expedition so much richer, I guess, to go up, to get up to these high camps and know that we were intentionally going to be going off the route, off the beaten track, trying to figure out where someone might have chosen to walk 75

years beforehand was just a dream to me and so neat to see the mountain through a different lens where I think a lot of people today, for better or worse, are just one foot in front of the other following a fixed line and an established route, which is fine to each their own, but I much prefer getting off into less tracked terrain. And that was really magical in 99. Is there an issue with spending so much time at altitude if you're taking that approach? Yeah, certainly spending all that time up there is hard. It wears you down. And, you know, our expedition leader in 99 really chose the climbing team, the research team, specifically with people who had proven themselves at altitude previously.

Because he knew from experience that a strong climber doesn't necessarily do well at altitude previously because he knew from experience that a strong climber doesn't necessarily do well at altitude. And so he really chose all of us based on the fact that we had been to high altitude before and shown that our bodies adapted well. I wish I could say that it's some superhuman strength. It's really just genetics. And I, I happened to choose my parents well for a life at high altitude. That day, I mean, you know, it sounds cheesy or contrived, but I think about it a lot. And I that day, May 1st, was the idea was just doing a first cursory search of the area, hoping to maybe turn something up, but really getting a feel for the terrain. We didn't have our high camp in yet, but we thought we might as well go up and check things out. And so we descended. We were all spread out, trying not to cover the same ground twice. Then all of a sudden, Conrad Anker was on the radio calling a team meeting. I could see him maybe 100 meters away from me. I pretty nonchalantly walked over to where he was. Hey, Jake, I'm going to interrupt you there. Nonchalantly walking over above 8,000 meters, what does that mean? How long does that take you and how nonchalant is that?

above 8,000 meters. What does that mean? How long does that take you and how nonchalant is that? Yeah, nonchalant, I guess, is a relative term up there. I wasn't rushing, but you had to cover 100 meters. It was horizontal, so it wasn't too difficult, but probably 10 minutes to get over there or something. And looking down off to my right the whole time at the North Face, going down about 8,000 feet below me knowing that I didn't want to make a mistake so it was less than non or more than nonchalant less than one of the two so you get over there yeah I got over there and just I lost my breath immediately because there was Conrad next to the remains of we didn't know who at that point but knew this was someone from the pre-modern era we had found a half dozen other bodies in the basin that day and it was obvious that they were

modern climbers they were in nylon and more modern equipment this one was in natural fibers and immediately apparent that this person was very old and had to have been either Mallory or Irvin. The body was partially covered in loose rock and gravel. Unlike many of the bodies on Everest, which lie on their sides or in fetal positions, this seemed to be clinging to the mountain. It was tensed, flecked, it was so vital. It was was face down arms outstretched muscles contracted fingers dug into the rock the face was perfectly preserved there was two pieces of bone protruding from a impact injury over the left eye in the shirt collar there was a label. In red print, it said, G. Mallory. You look at him and he was face down, head uphill, legs downhill, still after 75 years, apparently gripping the slope of the mountain.

And what that told us immediately was, here is this guy in woolen knickers and a tweed coat and hobnail boots who had taken a hell of a fall down the north face of the mountain 75 years before, but managed to stop himself. He survived his fall, albeit tragically for a short period of time, but he survived it and was a climber, a gritty, determined climber to the very end. And that just, that just blew me away. I don't know what I imagined in my head beforehand, but it wasn't that picture. And so that, that blew me away. And that was a huge learning thing for me. And then what we also could see pretty quickly was his right leg was horribly shattered in a boot top fracture of the tib fib, which is pretty common

climbing injury or trying to self-arrest. You imagine he's falling down the north face of the mountain. He's clawing at the mountain and kicking with his feet, trying to get anything to grab. And his right boot finally grabs and grabs hard enough that it appears that the hobnails were torn right out of the sole of the boot, breaks his ankle in the process. But then you can see he has his left leg that isn't broken crossed defensively over the broken right leg. This guy was a fighter and he survived. He survived and was cognizant until the last moment, enough so that he protected his broken leg. till the last moment, enough so that he protected his broken leg.

And so, yeah, it was just the grit and strength and determination. And tragically to me, the will to live that ultimately didn't end in his favour was chilling. There is no freeze thaw that high on Everest. The body doesn't decompose. It becomes desiccated, totally dried out. Not unlike the ice mummy that I held in my arms in the Andes, if you want to go back and listen to those episodes on the Inca. And that means the bodies are in an astonishing state of preservation. I remember he had hair still on his forearms.

And, you know, as we went into his pockets to try and find any evidence that told us more, you know, I believe it was his left breast pocket. I pulled out a handkerchief that, you know, was just in perfect condition and still soft to the touch. It truly felt like we had walked through a wormhole and had stepped back in time. hole and had stepped back in time. What else can the body tell us? Well, there was, as Jake said, the boot top fracture of the tibia and fibula, the right leg. There was a fractured right elbow, the big head injury above the left eye. There was a tiny rope, such a thin rope that modern mountaineers can't believe that Mallory and Irville would have trusted their lives to this rope. It was tied in a bowline around his waist. It was snapped. There were bruises around his ribs. and a bowline around his waist was snapped. There were bruises around his ribs. In his pockets, there was some junk, really.

There were letters and bills. There was a penknife, nail scissors, sun goggles, importantly, in a pocket. There was a pencil. There were some monogrammed handkerchiefs with GLM on them. And there was a watch. The watch was in his pocket, but sadly, the hands had fallen off. We, after spending probably about four hours trying to essentially chip Mallory out of the

ice and rock he was encrusted in, and examining the body and the artifacts, we spent about probably the last hour or so gathering up rock and gravel, which you wouldn't think would take an hour, but at those altitudes, we were pretty tuckered out by them too. It was a lot of effort. So gathering enough rock and gravel to bury him as best we could, and then read Psalm 109 over his remains and laid him to rest as best we could. Mallory remains where he lay for decades. Just as his story is entwined with the history of Everest, so his body is now part of the mountain itself. Of Irvin's body, there is no firm evidence.

There's conspiracy theorists out there that have us believe the Chinese found it and removed it. But more likely is that he's huddled there in a nook to which he'd crawled to try and survive an overnight storm in the death zone. Perhaps one day we'll find Irvin's body, and perhaps he was carrying the famous camera which Mallory had borrowed before they set off. If that camera is found one day, and maybe, just maybe, the film on it may be developed, and we may have evidence about whether they stood on top of Everest. So what does the body tell us about how high they might have got or how they might have died?

There's no oxygen apparatus, no breathing apparatus around the body, which does imply that they had jettisoned it. That means they were probably coming down. It was bad enough carrying that oxygen up the mountain. On the way back down, as it grew slightly easier to breathe, you'd have got rid of that oxygen as quickly as possible. The interesting thing is that the body was around 1,000 feet or 300 meters below where they found that axe in the 1930s. Yet Mallory's wounds are not consistent with a fall of that magnitude. Huge amount of vertical fall, and even more when you consider some of the horizontal as well. We also have to bear in mind the sun goggles were in the pocket. So the implication is that they were coming down and it was dark. He did not need

his sun goggles anymore. They'd had a very, very long day on Everest. Now the bruises are interesting. Bruises take time to form. If those injuries had been sustained at the point of his death, they wouldn't have formed. So it seems possible that there may have been two falls, perhaps an hour apart. They were coming down. The weather was abominable. They were cold. They were deprived of oxygen. They were dying. And one of them fell. They were tethered to each other, we can assume. And so one would have pulled the other off the mountain. At some stage, their rope snapped. Mallory may well have picked himself up

and started hiking back towards Camp 6. There were bloodstains on his left cuff, so that implies that perhaps he wiped blood away from his injury. There was time for bruises to form. And then there was another fall, this time fatal. I asked Jake the ultimate question. The question has divided mountaineers and historians ever since they disappeared.

Does he think they made it to the summit? To me, the most important thing that we learned that day was something we didn't find on Mallory. And it took a few months for us to kind of realize this, but Mallory's daughter, Claire, who was the eldest daughter, she was eight when he left for Everest, she told us that her mom, Ruth, George's wife, had always told the kids that he promised to take a photo of her and a letter from her and bury it in the summit snows. And I'm pretty darn confident that we didn't miss the photo or the letter. And I at least want to believe that Mallory was a romantic, not a pragmatist, and he would have

put it on the summit or as he promised or brought it back down with him. So at the end of the day, from a factual standpoint, it's still a beautiful mystery. We have no proof they did summit, but we have equally no shred of proof that they did not. And I, as a romantic as well, like to believe that they probably did. So Jake wants to believe they made it. It's so exciting to think that one day we may discover more evidence that will get us

to a more definitive conclusion. Before I let Jake go, I want to ask him one last question. Why does Mallory and so many other climbers, why do they take such terrible risks to go and stand on top of a big hill? That's the perennial question, right? I mean, I think, you know, Mallory is so well known for his frustrated quip while in the US, you know, answering that question saying, because it's there, but he gave a much more beautiful and eloquent statement later on, I believe it was to the New York Times,

where he described it pretty well saying, you know, in pieces, he said, there's something in man that responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it. The struggle is the struggle of life itself, upward and forever upward. And what we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. You know, I think, for me, that really sums it up very tidily and very beautifully that it's not a simple answer. It's not because it's there. I think it's about this quest to prove something to oneself and not necessarily to the outside world. And I do think and worry at times that Mallory started with that philosophy and showed it

in 21 and 22 and parts of 24. But I think he got himself into a bit of a pickle as 24 went on, where in a weird way, he had built it out that his only route home was via the summit. And I think it became more of an objective, external objective than an internal point of challenge and ended tragically. Thank you for listening to this special centenary episode of Dan Snow's History. See you next time. time you