We had climbed a mountain and crossed a pass; been wet, cold, hungry, frightened, and withal happy. One more Himalayan season was over. It was time to begin thinking of the next. ‘Strenuousness is the immortal path, sloth is the way of death.’ First published in 1946, the scope of H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman’s When Men & Mountains Meet is broad, covering his disastrous expedition to the Assam Himalaya, a small exploratory trip into Sikkim, and then his wartime heroics. In the thirties, Assam was largely unknown and unexplored. It proved a challenging environment for Tilman’s party, the jungle leaving the men mosquito-bitten and suffering with tropical diseases, and thwarting their mountaineering success. Sikkim proved altogether more successful. Tilman, who is once again happy and healthy, enjoys some exploratory ice climbing and discovers Abominable Snowman tracks, particularly remarkable as the creature appeared to be wearing boots—‘there is no reason why he should not have picked up a discarded pair at the German Base Camp and put them to their obvious use.’ And then, in 1939, war breaks out. With good humour and characteristic understatement we hear about Tilman’s remarkable Second World War. After digging gun pits on the Belgian border and in Iraq, he was dropped by parachute behind enemy lines to fight alongside Albanian and Italian partisans. Tilman was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his efforts—and the keys to the city of Belluno, which he helped save from occupation and destruction. Tilman’s comments on the German approach to Himalayan climbing could equally be applied to his guerrilla warfare ethos. ‘They spent a lot of time and money and lost a lot of climbers and porters, through bad luck and more often through bad judgement.’ While elsewhere the war machine rumbled on, Tilman’s war was fast, exciting, lightweight and foolhardy—and makes for gripping reading.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 260

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 01-03-2016

‘Hand (man) wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure’ So read the crew notice placed in the personal column of The Times by H W ‘Bill’ Tilman in the spring of 1959. This approach to selecting volunteers for a year-long voyage of 20,000 miles brought mixed seafaring experience—‘Osborne had crossed the Atlantic fifty-one times in the Queen Mary playing double bass in the ship’s orchestra’. With unclimbed ice-capped peaks and anchorages that could at best be described as challenging, the Southern Ocean island groups of Crozet and Kerguelen provided obvious destinations for Tilman and his fifty-year-old pilot cutter Mischief. His previous attempt to land in the Crozet Islands had been abandoned when their only means of landing was carried away by a severe storm in the Southern Ocean. Back at Lymington, a survey of the ship uncovered serious Teredo worm damage. Tilman, undeterred, sold his car to fund the rebuilding work and began planning his third sailing expedition to the southern hemisphere. Mischief among the Penguins, Tilman's account of landfalls on these tiny, remote volcanic islands, bears testament to the development of his ocean navigation skills and seamanship. The accounts of the island anchorages, their snow-covered heights, geology, and in particular the flora and fauna, pay tribute to the varied interests and ingenuity of Mischief's crew, not least after several months at sea when food supplies needed to be eked out. Tilman's writing style, rich with informative and entertaining quotations, highlights the lessons learned with typical self-deprecating humour, while playing down the immensity of his achievements. From the Foreword by Libby Purves: [Tilman] was not only an adventurer, brave and only rarely reckless, but a tremendous writer. He has that educated, unselfconscious late-Victorian facility and economy with words, sharpened further by his military youth. The sailing chronicles cover 140,000 miles of Arctic and Antarctic travels, and two shipwrecks, the loss of his beloved Mischief being the most wrenching. But he sailed on … This voyage was one of his finest: 20,000 miles of it to the Îles Crozet, where few have been and fewer still have sailed under their own mast. Libby Purves is a well-known British radio presenter, journalist, author and critic. A long-time sailor, she writes a column in Yachting Monthly and in 1982 edited an anthology drawn from Tilman’s sailing books. Tom Cunliffe has contributed an Afterword on the Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter. Tom has been sailing for most of his life and is one of the maritime world’s most popular writers and broadcasters. He is the author of numerous books, including the definitive work on the history of sailing pilot vessels.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 192

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 10-12-2015

I believe we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it. H. W. Tilman , on reaching the summit of Nanda Devi. In 1934, after fifty years of trying, mountaineers finally gained access to the Nanda Devi Sanctuary in the Garhwal Himalaya. Two years later an expedition led by H.W. Tilman reached the summit of Nanda Devi. At over 25,000 feet, it was the highest mountain to be climbed until 1950. The Ascent of Nanda Devi , Tilman s account of the climb, has been widely hailed as a classic. Keenly observed, well informed and at times hilariously funny, it is as close to a conventional mountaineering account as Tilman could manage. Beginning with the history of the mountain ( there was none ) and the expedition s arrival in India, Tilman recounts the build-up and approach to the climb. Writing in his characteristic dry style, he tells how Sherpas are hired, provisions are gathered (including a mouth-blistering sauce containing 100 per cent chillies ) and the climbers head into the hills, towards Nanda Devi. Superbly parodied in The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman, The Ascent of Nanda Devi was among the earliest accounts of a climbing expedition to be published. Much imitated but rarely matched, it remains one of the best.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 212

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 16-12-2015

'So I began thinking again of those two white blanks on the map, of penguins and humming birds, of the pampas and of gauchos, in short, of Patagonia, a place where, one was told, the natives' heads steam when they eat marmalade.' So responded H.W. 'Bill' Tilman to his own realisation that the Himalaya were too high for a mountaineer now well into his fifties. He would trade extremes of altitude for the romance of the sea with, at his journey's end, mountains and glaciers at a smaller scale; and the less explored they were, the better he would like it. Within a couple of years he had progressed from sailing a 14-foot dinghy to his own 45-foot pilot cutter Mischief, readied for her deep-sea voyaging, and recruited a crew for his most ambitious of private expeditions. Well past her prime, Mischief carried Tilman, along with an ex-dairy farmer, two army officers and a retired civil servant, safely the length of the North and South Atlantic oceans, and through the notoriously difficult Magellan Strait, against strong prevailing winds, to their icy landfall in the far south of Chile. The shore party spent six weeks crossing the Patagonian ice cap, in both directions, returning to find that their vessel had suffered a broken propeller. Edging north under sail only, Mischief put into Valparaiso for repairs, and finally made it home to Lymington via the Panama Canal, for a total of 20,000 nautical miles sailed, in addition to a major exploration 'first' all here related with the Skipper's characteristic modesty and bone-dry humour, and many photographs.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 202

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 01-09-2015

No ship should be without Tabasco sauce. Experience is said to be the name men give to their mistakes and of the experience I gained in Spitzbergen that may well be true. The circumnavigation of Spitzbergen is the first of three voyages described in HW ‘Bill’ Tilman’s fifteenth and final book, a remarkable example of his ability to triumph when supported by a crew game for all challenges. The 1974 voyage of the pilot cutter Baroque takes Tilman to his furthest north; the highest latitude of any of his travels in the northern or southern hemisphere. The account of this achievement makes compelling reading, the crew pulling together to avert potential disaster from a navigational misjudgement. A younger, less experienced crew join Tilman in 1975, this time heading north along Greenland’s west coast until a break in the boom necessitates the abandonment of the objective and an early return. “That one can never be quite confident of reaching any of the places I aim at may be part of their charm, and failure is at least an excuse for making another voyage.” The following year proves to be Tilman’s last voyage in his own boat, his account beginning with a dry nod to his artillery background: “As I begin to describe this voyage, the discrepancy between the target and the fall of shot provokes a wry smile.” Tilman never expected crews to pay, covering all the costs of his voyages personally. He therefore held the quite reasonable view that his crew would pull their weight, show loyalty to the ship and take the rough with the smooth. Sadly, the crew in 1976 fell far short of that expectation, forcing several changes of plan and eventually obliging Tilman to leave Baroque in Iceland. Not for the first time in Tilman’s remarkable 140,000 miles of voyaging is he moved to quote Conrad: “Ships are all right, it’s the men in them.” Tilman set a high standard and led by example; where his companions rose to the challenge, as they did in the majority of his expeditions, the results were often remarkable. Triumph and Tribulation closes this newly extended edition of his literary legacy; a fine testament to a remarkable life.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 202

Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm

Publication Date: 01-06-2017