: Eric Shipton
: Land of Tempest Travels in Patagonia: 1958-1962
: Vertebrate Digital
: 9781910240311
: 1
: CHF 3.20
:
: Sonstige Sportarten
: English
: 231
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Land of Tempest reveals Eric Shipton at his best - writing with enthusiasm and humour about his explorations in Patagonia in the 1950s and 1960s. He is an astute observer of nature and the human spirit, and this account of his travels is infused with with his own zest for discovery and the joy of camaraderie. Undaunted by hardship or by injury, Shipton and his team attempt to cross one of the great ice caps in Patagonia. It's impossible not to marvel at his determination, resilience and appetite for travel and adventure, be it climbing snow-clad mountains, or walking in forested foothills. Shipton takes a reader with him on his travels, and the often-inhospitable places he visits are a stark contrast to the warmth of the people he encounters. Land of Tempest is essential reading for anyone who loves nature, mountains, climbing, adventure or simply the joy of discovering unknown places.

Eric Shipton (1907-1977) was one of the great mountain explorers of the 20th century, often known for his infamous climbing partnership with H.W. 'Bill' Tilman. He climbed extensively in the Alps in the 1920s, put up new routes on Mount Kenya in 1921, and in 1931, made the first ascent of Kamet with Frank Smythe - the highest peak climbed at that time. Shipton was involved with most of the Everest expeditions in the 1930s, reaching a high point of 28,000 feet in 1933. He went on to lead the 1951 expedition, which was the first to approach Everest from the north (Nepali) side through the Khumbu ice fall, and on which Edmund Hillary first set foot on the mountain.

– Chapter 1 –


A Strange Land


Having a taste for strange country, I had long nursed a strong desire to visit Southern Patagonia; but the habit of travelling among the mountain ranges of Central Asia, like all agreeable habits, had been hard to break. Those ranges had provided an unlimited field, fresh opportunities kept occurring and each new venture suggested another batch of enticing projects; so Patagonia had receded ever further and more dimly into the future.

I once thought of applying for the job of British Consul in Punta Arenas, on the Straits of Magellan. I was Consul-General in Kunming at the time, and after a year of non-recognition by the Chinese Communist Government, it had become clear that I would have to move elsewhere. Having previously spent four years as a similar official in Kashgar, which had enabled me to travel in the Pamir, Kuen Lun and Tien Shan, it seemed an excellent way to achieve my purpose. However, I discovered that the post of Consul in Punta Arenas was an honorary one held by a local British resident. In any case, when I returned to England in the summer of 1951, I immediately became embroiled in the revival of the attempts to climb Everest, and soon found myself back in the Himalaya.

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in the Karakoram. It was doubtless this melancholy event that impressed me with the urgency of making definite plans for an expedition to Patagonia before I became too senile for such an undertaking. Even so I might have done nothing about it, had it not been for Geoff Bratt.

Geoff was a young Australian student, working (in his spare time between more attractive activities) for his Ph.D at the Imperial College of Science. In 1957 the College had launched an expedition to the Karakoram and had invited me to lead it. Geoff was a member of the party and he had done much of the preliminary organisation. We often shared a tent, and a great deal of varied discussion. Occasionally, of course, we talked of travel and exploration; and I found that he, too, was less interested in mountaineering for its own sake than as a means of getting to strange and little known parts of the world. On the subject of Patagonia it was not difficult to arouse his enthusiasm; his warmth brought mine to the boil and we agreed to go there together the following year.

Patagonia is not a country. The name refers to the whole of the mainland of South America south of the Rio Negro in Latitude 40° S. The bulk of this vast territory, lying in Argentina to the east of the Andes, consists of prairie, some of it flat, much of it hilly, nearly all of it dry, treeless and covered with coarse grass and open scrub. It is a stark, inhospitable land which, until late in the nineteenth century, was inhabited only by a few scattered Indian tribes. It was only then, towards the end of the century, that white men came, mostly direct from Europe or from the Falkland Islands, to settle there as sheep farmers, first along the Atlantic coast, then gradually further inland. Indeed the settlement of Patagonia is so recent that even today many of theestancieros are the sons and daughters of those original pioneers.

The Chilean part of Patagonia, except for a small area in the extreme south, is utterly different. Most of it is wild, rugged and uninhabited, a region of tempest and torrential rain, of fantastic geographical form and strange natural phenomena. The Pacific coast immediately west of the Andes, is split by a complex network of fjords which bite deep into the mainland and form an archipelago, a giant jigsaw of islands, 1,000 miles long. The climate is sub-antarctic, and the glaciation so extensive that, although the mountains are not particularly high, they are as spectacular as any in the entire range. There are two great ice caps, which are the only examples of their kind outside Polar regions. Many of the innumerable glaciers which radiate from these, flow down through dense ‘tropical forest’ (as Darwin described it) and thrust their massive fronts into the intricate system of waterways surrounding them. Parrots and humming-birds inhabit these f