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George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s — until the mountain claimed his life.
Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest, leading up to the last days before he disappeared while heading for its peak.
On June 8, 1924, Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine departed from their expedition team in a push for the summit; they were never seen alive again.
Mallory’s words, however, are now available to read online in their entirety for the first time. Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Mallory studied as an undergraduate from 1905 to 1908, recently digitized hundreds of pages of correspondence and other documents written and received by him.
Over the past 18 months, archivists scanned the documents in preparation for the centennial of Mallory’s disappearance. The college will display a selection of Mallory’s letters and possessions in the exhibit “George Mallory: Magdalene to the Mountain,” opening June 20.
The Everest letters outline Mallory’s meticulous preparations and equipment tests, and his optimism about their prospects. But the letters also show the darker side of mountaineering: bad weather, health issues, setbacks and doubts.
Days before his disappearance, Mallory wrote that the odds were “50 to 1 against us” in the last letter to his wife, Ruth, dated May 27, 1924.
“This has been a bad time altogether,” Mallory wrote. “I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustion & dismal looking out of a tent door and onto a world of snow & vanishing hopes.”
He went on to describe a harrowing brush with death during a recent climb, when the ground beneath his feet collapsed, leaving him suspended “half-blind & breathless,” his weight supported only by his ice axe wedged across a crevasse as he dangled over “a very unpleasant black hole.”
Other letters Mallory exchanged with Ruth were written at the time of their courtship, while he was serving in Britain’s artillery regiment during World War I. Throughout his travels, correspondence from Ruth provided him with much-needed stability during the most challenging times, said project lead Katy Green, a college archivist at Magdalene College.
“She was the ‘rock’ at home, he says himself in his letters,” Green said. The archivist recounted one note in which Mallory told Ruth: “I’m so glad that you never wobble, because I would wobble without you.”
Yet while Mallory was clearly devoted to his wife, he nonetheless repeatedly returned to the Himalayas despite her mounting fears for his safety.
“There’s something in him that drove him,” Green said. “It might have been his wartime experience, or it might have just been the sort of person that he was.”
‘Documents of his character’
In total, the collection includes around 840 letters spanning from 1914 to 1924; Ruth wrote about 440 of those to Mallory, offering an unprecedented and highly detailed view of daily life for women in the early 20th century, Green told CNN.
Together, the letters offer readers a rare glimpse of the man behind the legend, said Jochen Hemmleb, an author and alpinist who was part of the Everest expedition that found Mallory’s body in 1999.
“They are really personal. They are documents of his character. They provide unique insights into his life, and especially into the 1924 expedition — his state of mind, his accurate…
Read More: Last letters of pioneering climber who died on Everest reveal dark side of mountaineering