Yeti: An Abominable History - Graham Hoyland

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to death.

      Schäfer decided to commemorate his wife Hertha by firing a symbolic shot from his rifle, a curious idea considering the circumstances of her death. However, he forgot to remove the cleaning rod from the barrel and the breech exploded, knocking him off his feet and burning his face with the explosion.

      On the positive side, Schäfer refused to take the stories of wild men seriously. He became testy with his porters, who day and night discussed the yeti, and so he started faking large footsteps outside their tents in the snow. In this he was to start a long tradition in yeti fakery. He was quite sure the stories arose from the Himalayan brown bear, and described the adventure that proved his theory:

      On the morning of the second day, a wild-looking Wata [local tribesman] with a rascally face comes to me and tells the fantastic story of a snowman that haunts the tall mountains. This is the same mythical creature about which Himalaya explorers always like to write because it envelops the unconquered peaks of the mountain chains with the nimbus of mystery. It is supposed to be as tall as a yak, hairy like a bear, and walk on two legs like a man, but its soles are said to point backward so that one can never track its trail. At night it is supposed to roam, descend deep into the valleys, devastate the livestock of the native people, and tear apart men whom it then carries up to its mountain home near the glaciers.

      After I listen calmly to this bloody tale, I convey to the Wata that he does not have to make up such a tall tale; however, if he could bring me to the cave of such a ‘snowman’, and if the monster is actually in its lair, then the empty tin can in my tent, which appears to be the object of his great pleasure, would be his reward. But should he have lied to his lord, added Wang [his Tibetan foreman], he could expect a beating with the riding crop. Smiling, with many bows, the lad bids his leave with the promise to return early the next morning and report to me. Wang is also of the opinion that there are snowmen and draws for me the face of the mystery animal in the darkest colours, just like he has heard about it from the elders of his native tribe countless times: devils and evil spirits wreak havoc up there day and night in order to kill men. ‘But Wang,’ I scoffed, ‘how can you as my senior companion believe in such fairy tales?’ Wang explained that these forces were manifest all around them. After all, ‘the same evil demons already tried to menace us many times as we traverse the wild steppes. They also sent us the violent snowstorms that fell on our weak little group like supernatural forces and at night wanted to rip apart our tents with crude fists as if they had rotten canvas before them.’ I insisted ‘that this snowman is nothing other than a bear, perhaps a “Mashinng”, a really large one; but with our “big gun”, I will easily shoot him dead before he even leaves the cave!’

      The Wata returned within the day with a witness who had, while searching for lost sheep, found a cave in which ‘he beheld for the first time with his own eyes the yellow head of a snowman.’

      Following his guides to the den of the yeti, I shot it at point-blank range when it emerged, roaring angrily, from its nap and it was indeed a Himalayan brown bear.5

      On their return home to Germany, Reichsführer-SS Himmler greeted Schäfer and his expedition members on the tarmac at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, where he presented Schäfer with the SS skull ring and dagger of honour. However, it ended badly for them all. Himmler’s puny physique, poor eyesight and digestive problems hardly made him the figurehead for a super-race. He was a pedant, a sadist, probably the most brutal mass murderer in history and the architect of the Holocaust. He was, in short, the middle manager from hell. He committed suicide in custody using a hidden cyanide pill.

      Schäfer returned from Tibet with his 7,000 plant specimens with the intention of developing hardy strains of cereals for the newly conquered regions of Eastern Europe. He also brought back a poorly faked yeti specimen with a lower jaw made of clay with teeth jammed into it. His scientific reputation after the war was damaged by his association with Himmler, which perhaps explains why his rebuttal of the yeti story didn’t gain ground. The expedition cameraman who filmed the Tibet expedition afterwards worked at Dachau, recording prisoners made hypothermic in freezing water or suffocating in decompression chambers. These experiments on living human subjects were used to solve high-altitude and pilot-survival problems for the Luftwaffe.

      Bruno Beger was soon busy selecting Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and recording their skeletons and skulls for an anatomical institute in Strasbourg. Although convicted by a German court long after the war as an accessory to 86 murders, he was given the minimum sentence of three years in prison, which he never served. Author Heather Pringle tells how she tracked him down, aged ninety. Beger was unrepentant: he still thought that the Jews were a ‘mongrel race’, and he still believed in the racial science of the 1930s.6 Towards the end of their collaboration, Beger wrote to Schäfer, describing a ‘tall, healthy child of nature’ he had been experimenting on. ‘He could have been a Tibetan. His manner of speaking, his movements and the way he introduced himself were simply ravishing; in a word, from the Asian heartland.’ And then this child of nature was killed and dissected, another victim of the mindset that enabled Nazi science to regard fellow humans as objects to be experimented upon.

      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.7

      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

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