Younghusband wrote of his adventures in The Heart of a Continent, a book that in a way set rolling the ball of exploration and map-making in this high country.
By the early years of the 20th century, Raj authorities had become painfully aware that they knew next to nothing of the region lying east of the Hunza River to the Karakoram Pass on the ancient Leh-Yarkand route. The peculiarity of this region is that north and east of the village of Askole (Skardu) there sits a roughly square-shaped area of some 13,000 square kilometres of the greatest average height above sea level in the world. It is one vast tangle of high icy peaks and glaciated valleys utterly devoid of human habitation. No wonder then that Victorian explorers called Askole “World’s End”.
The few maps of this area that existed in the early 20th century had large blank swathes marked with a most tantalisingly challenging word for anyone imbued with geographical curiosity and a spirit of exploration: ‘Unsurveyed’, or, alternatively, ‘Unexplored’.
In 1936, Eric Shipton, by then a famous British mountaineer, was on his way back from a reconnaissance of Mount Everest when it was suggested to him that he consider filling in the blanks in this region. Together with his long time friend and climbing partner William Tilman, Shipton gave shape to a proposal for a three-month expedition in this area which was duly sanctioned by the Survey of India. And so it was that Shipton, Tilman, Michael Spender and the geologist John Auden (Spender and Auden were brothers of famous poets) undertook an expedition to rival no other in the world of Karakoram exploration. Since most of their time was spent in the Shaksgam River Valley north of the Great Asiatic Divide, the expedition was titled The Shaksgam Expedition 1937.
The adventure is described in Shipton’s Blank on the Map. First published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, in 1938, this utterly, utterly readable book has since remained the classic of mountain exploration in the Karakoram region. Perhaps no author and no other work on this area has been quoted or referred to as much as Shipton and his book. A close second being Younghusband’s The Heart of a Continent.
As compared to the latter which is serious, even dour, Shipton’s work is marked by light-hearted and sharp humour. For instance:
“Our first camp was on the railway platform at Rawalpindi. Tilman, Spender and I arrived there at 5 a.m. on the morning of April 26th. I was not very popular with my companions, as I had travelled from Karachi in complete luxury in a gleaming white-and-chromium special coach, while they had slept — or rather failed to sleep — on the dirty floor of a crowded second-class carriage. My exalted circumstances were due to ‘friends at court’ … I emerged immaculate — having honoured the occasion with my best suit — and strolled along the platform of a wayside halt. I encountered two soot-blackened ruffians, their unshaven faces streaming with grimy sweat, their tired eyes regarding me with incredulous loathing. I could just recognise them as Tilman and Spender.”
The early part of the last century was when white sahibs still considered natives somewhere below themselves in status. Not so Shipton and his crew. As we journey up from Rawalpindi to Srinagar and by the old trade route through Kargil to Skardu and onward to Askole, we discover not only Shipton and the three others. We also delight to meet the seven Nepali Sherpas who portered for and assisted the explorers.
Now, in order to reach the Shaksgam Valley, there had long existed a route over the 5,300 metre-high glaciated Muztagh Pass. Since Younghusband’s crossing of it in September 1887, this pass had not been crossed because of difficult snow and ice conditions. And Shipton and his merry band had to actually discover a new route over the Divide, a pass that he named the Sarpo Laggo after the glacier on its north side. From this point, plane-tabling work began in earnest.
We must remember that those were the days of theodolites and plane-tables and it was rather intricate work to translate actual features on the ground to those on a sheet of paper.
In order to take their theodolite readings, the explorers had to climb peaks, sometimes two in a single day.
This was very strenuous work but what shines throughout the book is the thrill of excitement, of intense pleasure and of a sense of achievement.
Having hired about a hundred Balti porters in Skardu and Askole to ferry the expedition’s heavy equipment and rations over the Divide, Shipton makes light of their aversion to being on a glacier. Despite my admiration for him, I feel Shipton was somewhat uncharitable towards these people — and he was not the only one. All Victorian and later explorers mocked the Baltis for being terrified on glaciers. Shipton writes:
“By the time [the Askole porters] joined us it was midday, and it was quite evident that, with the exception of the Skardu men and two of the others, they were determined not to go a step farther. Many of them complained of mountain sickness; and some of these lay in the snow, holding their heads and groaning. Of the whole number, only 17 were fit and willing to go on. The rest had to be paid off at once and sent back. So, on top of a hanging glacier terrace, in the torrid heat of the afternoon, we solemnly sat down and counted out great piles of rupees. The usual uproar, despite the mountain sickness, was as vehement as ever.”
I find it peculiar that none of those writers recognised that places in that great unexplored geographical tangle all had Balti names. They could only have been assigned by Balti hunters and shepherds who had been in those remote regions at some earlier point in time. It was only in the Shaksgam Valley two months later that the Baltis won Shipton’s admiration by their expertise in unassisted river crossing.
The narrative, never dull, takes on greater thrill when the expedition begins its survey work in the Shaksgam Valley. Here is a region that was then, and for Pakistanis even now, entirely unknown. With Younghusband’s description of his crossing of the Aghil Pass in 1887 their only guide, the party found the pass, climbed a high peak above it and connected the survey of the Shaksgam basin with that of the Surukwat River on the north side. That was a time when the border between India and the Chinese province of Sinkiang (now written Xinjiang) went over the Aghil.
The result of these three months was that the word ‘Unexplored’ was finally erased from the maps of the Central Karakorams, the basin of the Shaksgam River and the region of the Aghil Mountains abutting the Kun Lun. The maps that we have today of this region are a direct result of the Shaksgam Expedition-1937.
Eric Shipton (died March, 1977) and his mate Tilman (lost at sea September, 1977) did not only make up the greatest mountaineering duo of the 20th century, but both were outstanding writers as well. Quite justifiably, Blank on the Map has remained a bible for, first, explorers, and now ordinary trekkers in the region it describes.
The serious business of map-making is not without the ability to draw a chuckle from the reader every now and again. Blank on the Map is the kind of read that gives the reader the itch to get up and go. It surely has to rank among the most unforgettable adventure travel book of the English language.
The writer is a traveller and travel writer
Blank on the Map(TRAVELOGUE)By Eric ShiptonHodder & Stoughton, London (1938)280pp. Price not listed