Yeti: An Abominable History

Schäfer had plans for a further expedition to Tibet during the war, ostensibly to harass the British forces in India. These hopes came to nothing. He wrote several books on Tibet, and may have had something to do with the Iron Man statue, a Buddhist figurine which mysteriously appeared in Germany sometime after 1939. This is beautifully carved from a piece of meteorite and featured an anticlockwise Buddhist swastika. This space Buddha was about as close as the Nazis got to their dreams of Glacial Cosmogony.

In this context, then, Schäfer’s letter to Messner is puzzling. He himself was convinced that the native porter’s stories about the yeti were simply sightings of Himalayan bears. And Frank Smythe had by then published articles and a book setting out his own reasons for the same conclusion. Shipton was another kettle of fish. I believe Schäfer had the wrong name: he meant Shipton and Tilman, a British climber and explorer with a more ambiguous attitude towards the yeti.

It could be argued that Schäfer had an axe to grind. He can hardly have been expected to be a British sympathiser. However, his conviction that the yeti was in fact a bear and his careful unravelling of the ‘hoax’ in his books suggests that he took a serious and scientific approach towards the truth. He quite rightly objected to what he regarded as a mischievous fable being used to fund Mount Everest expeditions. In the case of Shipton and Tilman, it is also just possible that he had misinterpreted the British humorous tendency.

Besides, if Schäfer had captured a live yeti and taken him back to Nazi Germany, what would have become of the poor creature?

Somervell and Norton’s near-success on Mount Everest in 1924, coming to within 1,000 feet of the summit without oxygen sets, misled those who followed. Time and time again, the British sent expensive expeditions out to Tibet, and time and time again they were repulsed at around the same altitude. But the combination of the world’s highest mountain and now a mysterious man-beast was to prove irresistible for the British press and public alike. Pressure mounted on the Mount Everest Committee to make another attempt. So, in 1938, the inimitable Bill Tilman, the ‘last explorer’, was invited to lead a lightweight, somewhat cheaper, expedition to Everest, with a £2,360 budget instead of the £10,000 that the 1936 expedition had squandered: about £110,000 versus £500,000 in today’s money.

Tilman was certainly the greatest explorer and adventurer of the twentieth century. He won the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 1952, but his career also encompassed military service in both world wars: he won the Military Cross twice in the first conflict and led a band of underground Albanian Resistance fighters for the British Special Services in the Second World War. In between the wars, he worked as a planter in Africa where he met his long-term climbing companion Eric Shipton. He was the first to climb the Indian mountain Nanda Devi, the highest peak then climbed, and he led the 1938 Everest expedition. He evolved a lightweight, living-off-the-land style of exploration which is now much admired by other adventurers but which was difficult for his companions, who were expected to eat lentils and pemmican at high altitude. After the Second World War, he undertook a little spying in the Karakoram and then embarked on a second career as a deep-sea sailing explorer in a series of ancient Bristol pilot cutters, two of which he sank in unexpected encounters with the land. After a lifetime of inventive expeditions to high mountains and cold seas, he and his crew eventually disappeared on an Antarctic voyage in his 80th year, a mystery to the end.

Tilman was something of an enigma. Clearly traumatised by his experiences as a 17-year-old in the First World War, he appeared to grow a crust over his emotions which made him appear indifferent to his own or others’ sufferings. He was gruff and taciturn, but not irritable. In appearance he was stocky, wore a moustache and smoked a pipe. He never married and appeared to prefer the company of men, but didn’t show any interest in either sex. He seemed to exert an iron grip on his emotions, and one wonders what would have tumbled out had he ever let go. The key to Bill Tilman seems to be what happened to him during the most terrible conflict the world has ever seen. Coming out of it aged just twenty, he asked the question: ‘Why was I spared when so many of the best of my companions were not?’ Like Howard Somervell who asked just the same question, he seemed to suffer from that paradoxical complaint: survivor’s guilt. In the end, Tilman seemed happiest on the open road: ‘I felt uncommonly happy at trekking once more behind a string of mules with their bright headbands, gaudy red wool tassels, and jingling bells, over a road and country new to me with the promise of sixteen such days ahead. I felt I could go on like this for ever, that life had little better to offer than to march day after day in an unknown country to an unattainable goal.’

Being Tilman, though, he immediately undermined the conceit by self-deprecation: ‘The morning was well advanced and it was uncommonly hot, so that my thoughts underwent a gradual change. Far from wishing the march to go on for ever, I did not care how soon it would be over. I did not care if it was my last.’

His enduring achievement is his series of fourteen travel books, some of them classics of the genre. He is the master of a good travel tale, with a self-deprecating black humour which is sometimes misunderstood.

Turning to the subject of the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, firstly we have to concede that Tilman had an ambivalent attitude to science. As one of his biographers, J. R. L. Anderson, pointed out,

he held that travel and mountain climbing should be ends in themselves and science should not be allowed to compromise the adventure. He himself wrote: ‘The idea of sending a scientific expedition to Everest is really deplorable; there could be no worse mixture of objectives.’

In this he was controversial, as some might say that the only reason Everest was eventually climbed (on the ninth attempt, in 1953) was by Griffith Pugh’s application of science in the form of oxygen equipment, diet and clothing. Adventurers of the hardy variety would retort that Everest was only climbed properly in an ethical way in 1978 by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habler when they succeeded without using supplementary oxygen.

Despite this, Tilman was a careful observer, taking great trouble to check geographical locations and work out heights on his spying mission in Chitral: ‘We used an aneroid barometer and at specially important points took boiling point thermometer readings. As there were no basic stations sufficiently near for the reduction of the barometer to sea level, the barometrical readings taken during three days before leaving Urumchi were used as a check. For this period a correct mean height of the barometer was ascertained by using the observations made by Strowkowski over a period of three years in Urumchi.’

A sailor would know just how proficient Tilman was at celestial navigation, finding himself around the oceans of the world armed only with paper charts, compass, sextant and a copy of Lecky’s Wrinkles In Practical Navigation: ‘The amateur sailor, or haphazard navigator, should ponder a remark of the editor of the new edition of Lecky’s Wrinkles: “There is nothing more distressing than running ashore, unless it be a doubt as to which continent that shore belongs.”’

However, it cannot be denied that Tilman sometimes derided science and scientists in his books, and I suspect that, like his friend Eric Shipton, he had a sense of humour and may have played fast and loose with the truth when it came to the Abominable Snowman.

On Mount Everest in 1938, Tilman’s team included Eric Shipton and Frank Smythe: the very two men accused by Ernst Schäfer of using yeti footprints to raise expedition funding. All three of these men had seen strange footprints in the Himalayas. One can imagine the campfire stories about the Abominable Snowman. Rongbuk is an eerie valley at the best of times; I have walked alone there at night with the ghosts of Mallory and Irvine at my back and can imagine that the shifting shadows beyond the firelight might have caused the odd shiver of fear.

These same three climbers had just had a minor spat in the newspapers before the expedition. Smythe had reported his find of what he insisted were bear tracks in The Times of 10 November 1937, perhaps with a view to some helpful pre-publicity for his next book; and Tilman, under the pseudonym of Balu (the bear), had put up a defence of the Abominable Snowman in the letters page on 13 November where he wrote: ‘Mr Smythe’s article, if it was an attempt to abolish that venerable institution, the “Yeti”, was hardly worth the paper on which it was written.’

This was nicely calculated to wind up the irascible Smythe (note that this was one of the first public uses of the term ‘yeti’ instead of Abominable Snowman). Shipton, also writing pseudonymously (as The Foreign Sportsman, one of the Sherpa’s nicknames), had given his own first-hand experience of footprints in the snow, and supported Balu. He wrote: ‘Balu’s contribution to the discussion was welcome. His spirited defence of the Abominable Snowman wilting under the combined attack of Mr Smythe and the Zoological Society reminded me of Kipling’s lines: “Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer, making his supplication rose Adam-Zad the bear.”’

In short, Tilman and Shipton were having a bit of fun taking the mickey out of the presumptuous Frank Smythe and a bunch of self-important scientists. This was altogether more amusing than the annual ‘first cuckoo of spring’ type of letters to The Times, and this controversy between Himalayan rivals, I suggest, may have provided the spark for what I think was the biggest yeti hoax of the century. (But that was to come much later, in 1951, after Smythe was dead.)

Tilman loved the Abominable Snowman story and had had first-hand experience of it. This is what he reported in his Times letter. He told the 1938 Everest party how in the previous year, during his great journey of exploration across the Karakoram with Eric Shipton, he and two Sherpas came across the footprints of a strange animal:

While contouring round the foot of the ridge between these two feeder glaciers, we saw in the snow the tracks of an Abominable Snowman. They were eight inches in diameter, eighteen inches apart, almost circular, without signs of toe or heel. They were three of four days old, so melting must have altered the outline. The most remarkable thing was that they were in a straight line one behind the other, with no ‘stagger’ right or left, like a bird’s spoor. A four-footed animal walking slowly puts its hindfoot in the track of its forefoot, but there are always some marks of overlapping, nor are the tracks immediately in front of each other. However many-legged it was, the bird or beast was heavy, the tracks being nearly a foot deep. We followed them for a mile, when they disappeared on some rock. The tracks came from a glacier pool where the animal had evidently drunk, and the next day we picked up the same spoor on the north side of Snow Lake.

The Sherpas judged them to belong to the smaller type of Snowman, or yeti, as they call them, of which there are apparently two varieties: the smaller, whose spoor we were following, which feeds on men, while his larger brother confines himself to a diet of yaks. My remark that no-one had been here for thirty years and that he must be devilish hungry did not amuse the Sherpas as much as expected! The jest was considered ill-timed, as it perhaps was, the three of us standing forlorn and alone in a great expanse of snow, looking at the strange tracks like so many Robinson Crusoes.

Tilman attempted to take a photograph but claimed that he managed to make two exposures on the same negative and so nothing came out. This seems odd, as he seemed perfectly competent with his camera on other expeditions. One might begin to smell a horrible, hairy rat. Later, his team saw bear tracks and agreed that they were completely unlike what they had seen earlier. The first set of prints he reported as circular, with no toes. Tilman speculates on the nature of the creature: ‘A one-legged, carnivorous bird, weighing perhaps a ton, might make similar tracks, but it seems unnecessary to search for a new species when we have a perfectly satisfactory one at hand in the form of the Abominable Snowman – new perhaps to science but old in legend.’

They followed the footprints for a mile. His diary notes tersely: ‘Sixteen inches apart and about 6–8 inches in diameter. Blokes say it is hairy like a monkey.’

On The Times letters page, Shipton chipped in with his own sighting. ‘With two Sherpas I was crossing the Bireh Ganga glacier when we came upon tracks made in crisp snow which resembled nothing so much as those of an elephant. I have followed elephant spoor often and could have sworn we were following one then but for the comparative scarcity of these beasts in the Central Himalaya.’

If you are attuned to the Shipton–Tilman dynamic, you might begin to hear the gentle sound of the piss being taken. Then – and here’s a point relevant to Ernst Schäfer’s accusation – Tilman chimed into suggest a search expedition: ‘I notice regretfully that the correspondence appears to be failing and that a zoologist (Huxley) has been afforded space to drive yet another nail into the coffin of our abominable friend having first poisoned him with another dose of Latin. Difficult though it is, the confounding of scientific sceptics is always desirable, and I commend the suggestion that a scientific expedition should be sent out. To further this an Abominable Snowman Committee, on the lines of the Mount Everest Committee, might be formed, drawn from the Alpine Club and the Natural History Museum.’

Were Tilman and Shipton hinting that more public money might be raised to pay for their expeditions, this time to pursue the Abominable Snowman?

Despite including seven strong climbers, Tilman’s 1938 Everest expedition got no higher than the Norton and Somervell high point of 28,000 feet. Food became a point of contention among the team members; in the name of austerity Tilman had refused the gift of a crate of champagne from a well-wisher, and listed porridge and soup as luxuries. Noel Odell, in particular, objected to the ration of two pounds per day of flour and lentils after enjoying quails in aspic and chocolates on the 1924 Everest expedition. He blamed the parsimonious diet for the recurrent illness and weakness of the party. Bill Tilman gave a typically sarcastic response to this in Appendix A of his expedition book: ‘I must confess I was surprised to hear any criticism of the food, except from Odell, who has not yet finished criticising the food we ate on Nanda Devi in 1936 and who, in spite of his half-starved condition, succeeded in getting to the top.’

However, Odell did have a point: once again, the British had failed on Everest. Little did they know that their youngest Sherpa, 24-year-old Tenzing Norgay, would finally manage to climb the mountain in 1953 with Edmund Hillary. He was described by the leader as young, keen, strong and very likeable. Shipton had employed him on the 1935 Everest reconnaissance expedition, catching his flashing smile in the employment lines. Nor could they suspect that a British woman, Rebecca Stephens, would climb Everest in 1993; a 13-year-old boy, Jordan Romero, would climb it in 2010; or an 80-year-old Japanese man, Yuichiro Miura, in 2013. Surely, they wouldn’t believe that 234 people would reach the top in a single day in 2012. One of the greatest mysteries about mountains is how they appear to lose their difficulty. As British mountaineer and author Albert Mummery said: ‘It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak – The most difficult ascent in the Alps – An easy day for a lady.’

This is not a topic for this book, but it has been addressed at length in at least one other.

Once again, the weather was bad that year so they retreated to the Rongbuk monastery, where they had already noticed that someone had demolished the monument to those who died in 1924 (the carved stone panels on this had been executed by Howard Somervell, the polymath, in an Arts and Crafts style). Tilman and the other climbers questioned the lamas:

Odell, who as a member of the 1924 expedition was particularly interested, then asked who had destroyed the big cairn erected at the Base Camp … The abbot disclaimed all responsibility on the part of the monastery and suggested that the culprits were the ‘Abominable Snowmen’. This reply staggered me, for though I had an open mind on the matter I was not prepared to hear it treated so lightly in that of all places. I was shocked to think that this apparently jesting reply, accompanied as it was by a chuckle from the abbot and a loud laugh from the assembled monks, indicated a disbelief in the ‘Abominable Snowman’ … Further questioning showed clearly that no jest was intended, and we were told that at least five of these strange creatures lived up near the snout of the glacier and were often heard at night.

Another explanation could be that the monument, which might have been considered to sacrilegiously resemble a Tibetan religious chorten, had indeed been demolished by the lamas.

There was more to see in the Rongbuk monastery. In the innermost shrine, they were shown a piece of rock with ‘the very clear impress of a large human foot’. Odell, a geologist of some standing, could not provide an explanation. Another mysterious footprint!

Tilman’s book of the expedition, Mount Everest 1938, was not published until ten years later, after the war. In it he discusses the Abominable Snowman at length: ‘Since no book on Mount Everest is complete without appendices, I have collected all the available evidence, old and new, and relegated it to the decent obscurity of Appendix B.’ As well as being obscure, Appendix B

is now extremely hard to find (having been unaccountably left out of the otherwise excellent Diadem edition of his collected Mountain-Travel books). It is written in a suspiciously jocular manner – ‘Nothing like a little judicious levity’ – but Tilman manages to make the case for the Abominable Snowman whilst undermining him and at the same time hinting that he doesn’t take the whole phenomenon entirely seriously. In fact, this is a masterpiece of sustained comic irony, a difficult rhetorical trick to pull off but one that Tilman manages, time and time again.

He firstly deals with the genesis of the Western yeti, thanks to Howard-Bury’s missing exclamation marks, then suggests that the journalist Henry Newman may have had one explan-ation of the phenomenon:

… in Tibet there is no capital punishment, and men found guilty of grave crimes are simply turned out of their villages and monastery. They live in caves like wild animals, and in order to obtain food become expert thieves and robbers. Also in parts of Tibet and the Himalaya many caves are inhabited by ascetics and others striving to obtain magical powers by cutting themselves off from mankind and refusing to wash.

In other words, was the yeti phenomenon merely wild Tibetans trying to make ends meet? Henry Newman had translated the porters’ name for the wild men as ‘metch kangmi’, kangmi meaning snowman and metch meaning disgusting, or abominable, but it appears that the word ‘metch’ actually means someone wearing tattered or disgusting clothes. This fitted better with the idea of exiled wild men wearing the remnants of their original clothing, attacking travellers; or indeed, hermits wearing rotting rags. This seems a possible origin for the story.

Tilman points out that snow is an unsatisfactory medium for footprints. A foot changes shape as the body’s weight comes onto it and the resulting print can look nothing like the foot that made it. And the effect of intense high-altitude sun is first to collapse the sides of the print by melting, then to enlarge the whole thing, ending with a vague circular shape. An explanation for bare footprints in snow was provided by one of Tilman’s correspondents:

In 1930 on the summit of a 17,000 ft pass in Ladakh, Capt. Henniker met a man completely naked except for a loincloth. It was bitterly cold and snowing gently. When he expressed some natural astonishment, he was met with the reply in perfect English: ‘Good morning, Sir, and a Happy Christmas to you’ (it was actually July). The hardy traveller was an MA of an English university (Cambridge, one suspects) and was on a pilgrimage for the good of his soul. He explained that one soon got used to the cold and that many Hindus did the same thing.

Tilman then records the series of letters to The Times which had produced more eyewitnesses. One of them was from Ronald Kaulback, who on a journey to the Upper Salween in 1936 reported seeing at 16,000 feet five sets of tracks which looked exactly as though made by a bare-footed man. Two of his porters thought they had been made by snow leopards, but two claimed they were made by mountain men, which they described as like a man, white-skinned, with long hair on head, arms and shoulders. There were no bears recorded in that area. This letter produced another witness, Wing-Commander Beaumont, who had seen similar tracks near the source of the Ganges (however, bare-footed pilgrims are known to visit this sacred site). These letters in turn produced a volley from the zoologists, who suggested langurs might produce such footprints. Or giant pandas. Kaulback responded drily that he had seen and heard of no monkeys despite exploring the area for five months, and as for giant pandas there were no bamboo shoots, ‘a sine qua non for pandas without which they languish and die’.

At this point, Tilman summarises the evidence: ‘So far then we have as candidates for the authorship of queer tracks seen on three several occasions, snow leopards, outlaws, bears, pandas, ascetics, langurs, or X the unknown quantity (which we may as well call the ‘Abominable Snowman’) roughly in that order of probability.’

But Tilman is equivocal about the actual existence of the Abominable Snowman: ‘… everything turns upon the interpretation of footprints. And if fingerprints can hang a man, as they frequently do, surely footprints may be allowed to establish the existence of one.’ However, despite his taciturnity, Tilman did have a tongue and at times it was in his cheek. His dark humour was sometimes misunderstood. Earlier in the same book, Mount Everest, 1938, he discusses the idea of dropping expedition stores onto the slopes of Everest: ‘There is a good case for dropping bombs on civilians because so few of them can be described as inoffensive, but mountains can claim the rights of “open towns” and our self-respect should restrain us from dropping on them tents, tins, or possibly men.’ One American reviewer complained of Tilman’s complete lack of humour.

Tilman the satirist (and admirer of Jonathan Swift) reserves his ammunition for the irascible and scientific Frank Smythe, who had clearly irritated him on and off the slopes. He details his careful measuring of the prints ‘with the calm scientific diligence of a Sherlock Holmes’ and the way his photographs were carefully submitted to the ‘Zoological pundits’, who pronounced them to be made by a bear. ‘Whereupon, Mr Smythe, triumphantly flourishing his Sherpa’s affidavit, announced to his expectant audience that “a superstition of the Himalaya is now explained, at all events to Europeans”. In short, delenda est homo niveus disgustans;

moreover, any tracks seen in the snow in the past, the present, or the future, may safely be ascribed to bears. As a non sequitur this bears comparison with the classic example: “No wonder they call this Stony Stratford, I was never so bitten by fleas in my life.”’

He makes a good point: Smythe’s tracks were almost certainly those of the bear, but mystery footprints come in all shapes and sizes. Because his Sherpas had identified undisputed bear tracks as those of a wild man, Smythe had leaped to the conclusion that all mysterious tracks were made by bears. It was not his facts that were suspect but his inferences.

Tilman then produces his one-legged, carnivorous, hopping bird, weighing perhaps a ton, which he thought might explain the circular footprints he had seen. Perhaps pulling another leg, he suggests that a more likely explanation was that Abominable Snowmen had developed a primitive kind of snowshoe, despite these being unknown to the natives of the Himalayas.

Why was Tilman so anti-science? This is something that comes up again and again, and you can see the same tendency in the Bigfoot believers. Perhaps he wanted a space left for mystery in the Himalayas. In all of his writings about the yeti, Tilman adopted an anti-science ‘unbecoming levity’; as one interviewer found, ‘… it was obvious that he also belongs to the school which considers that the mystery of the yeti should be left uninvestigated; that once the unknown becomes known and the glamour dispelled, the interest evaporated.’

This is an odd position. Tilman spent his exploring lifetime attempting to know the unknown among high mountains and cold seas. Was the glamour dispelled once the blanks on the maps and charts were filled in? In line with his generation, Tilman attended church and was a believer. However, he doesn’t seem to have ever been a lover. Unknowns that become knowns in these circumstances might be too disillusioning. Maybe he just preferred the yeti to be left as a mystery.