Lodestar Books (42)

The Ascent of Nanda Devi

ISBN: 9781909461185

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

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, mountai...


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


$36.00
Mischief among the Penguins

ISBN: 9781909461208

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

‘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 Time...


‘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


$36.00
When Men & Mountains Meet

ISBN: 9781909461222

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

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 thi...


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


$36.00
Mischief in Greenland

ISBN: 9781909461246

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

Only a man in the devil of a hurry would wish to fly to his mountains, forgoing the lingering pleasure and mounting excitement of a slow, arduous approach under...


Only a man in the devil of a hurry would wish to fly to his mountains, forgoing the lingering pleasure and mounting excitement of a slow, arduous approach under his own exertions. H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman’s mountain travel philosophy, rooted in Africa and the Himalaya and further developed in his early sailing adventures in the southern hemisphere, was honed to perfection with his discovery of Greenland as the perfect sailing destination. His Arctic voyages in the pilot cutter Mischief proved no less challenging than his earlier southern voyages. The shorter elapsed time made it rather easier to find a crew but the absence of warm tropical passages meant that similar levels of hardship were simply compressed into a shorter timescale. First published fifty years before political correctness became an accepted rule, Mischief in Greenland is a treasure trove of Tilman’s observational wit. In this account of his first two West Greenland voyages, he pulls no punches with regard to the occasional failings, leaving the reader to seek out and discover the numerous achievements of these voyages. The highlight of the second voyage was the identification, surveying and successful first ascent of Mount Raleigh, first observed on the eastern coast of Baffin Island by the Elizabethan explorer John Davis in 1585. For the many sailors and climbers who have since followed his lead and ventured north into those waters, Tilman provides much practical advice, whether from his own observations or those of Davis and the inimitable Captain Lecky. Tilman’s typical gift of understatement belies his position as one of the greatest explorers and adventurers of the twentieth century.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 216


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 01-03-2021


$36.00
Mount Everest 1938

ISBN: 9781909461260

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

Whether these mountains are climbed or not, smaller expeditions are a step in the right direction. It’s 1938, the British have thrown everything they’ve got...


Whether these mountains are climbed or not, smaller expeditions are a step in the right direction. It’s 1938, the British have thrown everything they’ve got at Everest but they’ve still not reached the summit. War in Europe seems inevitable; the Empire is shrinking. Still reeling from failure in 1936, the British are granted one more permit by the Tibetans, one more chance to climb the mountain. Only limited resources are available, so can a small team be assembled and succeed where larger teams have failed? H.W. Tilman is the obvious choice to lead a select team made up of some of the greatest British mountaineers history has ever known, including Eric Shipton, Frank Smythe and Noel Odell. Indeed, Tilman favours this lightweight approach. He carries oxygen but doesn’t trust it or think it ethical to use it himself, and refuses to take luxuries on the expedition, although he does regret leaving a case of champagne behind for most of his time on the mountain. On the mountain, the team is cold, the weather very wintery. It is with amazing fortitude that they establish a camp six at all, thanks in part to a Sherpa going by the family name of Tensing. Tilman carries to the high camp, but exhausted he retreats, leaving Smythe and Shipton to settle in for the night. He records in his diary, ‘Frank and Eric going well—think they may do it.’ But the monsoon is fast approaching... In Mount Everest 1938, first published in 1948, Tilman writes that it is difficult to give the layman much idea of the actual difficulties of the last 2,000 feet of Everest. He returns to the high camp and, in exceptional style, they try for the ridge, the route to the summit and those immense difficulties of the few remaining feet.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 216


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 01-05-2016


$36.00
Mostly Mischief

ISBN: 9781909461284

Authors: H. W. Tilman, Roger D. Taylor    Publisher: Lodestar Books

However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one’s last hold f the shore at the start of a voyage has about it somethi...


However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one’s last hold f the shore at the start of a voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like marriage, for better or for worse. Mostly Mischief ’s ordinary title belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to accept the condemnation of Mischief ’s surveyor, undertaking costly repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the East Greenland ice. Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper of the schooner Patanela. Tilman had been hand-picked by the expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island, a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak. In a separate account of this successful voyage, Colin Putt describes the expedition as unique—the first ascent of a mountain to start below sea level.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 216


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 16-06-2016


$36.00
Two Mountains and a River

ISBN: 9781909461307

Authors: H. W. Tilman, Gerda Pauler    Publisher: Lodestar Books

An expedition that cannot organise itself… on the back of an old envelope, is bound to suffer from the effects of too much organisation. Two Mountains and a R...


An expedition that cannot organise itself… on the back of an old envelope, is bound to suffer from the effects of too much organisation. Two Mountains and a River picks up where Mount Everest 1938 left off. In this instalment of adventures, Tilman and two Swiss mountaineers set off for the Gilgit region of the Himalaya with the formidable objective of an attempt on the giant Rakaposhi (25,550 feet). However, this project was not to be fulfilled. Not one to be dispirited, Tilman and his various accomplices—including pioneering mountaineer and regular partner Eric Shipton—continue to trek and climb in locations across China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other areas of Asia, including the Kukuay Glacier, Muztagh Ata—the source of the Oxus river—and Ishkashim, where the author was arrested on suspicion of being a spy… Two Mountains and a River brims with the definitive Tilman qualities—detailed observations and ever-present humour—that convey a strong appreciation of the adventures and mishaps he experiences along the way. This classic mountaineering text maintains Tilman’s name as a unique and inquisitive explorer and raconteur.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 256


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 01-09-2016


$36.00
Mischief Goes South

ISBN: 9781909461321

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water. So observes H.W....


No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water. So observes H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, ‘to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many’. The second part of this volume contains the author’s account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman’s character.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 196


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 01-09-2016


$36.00
China to Chitral

ISBN: 9781909461345

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

Upon this trackless waste of snow, cut by a shrewd wind, they sat down and wept. In China to Chitral H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman completes one of his great post-war ...


Upon this trackless waste of snow, cut by a shrewd wind, they sat down and wept. In China to Chitral H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman completes one of his great post-war journeys. He travels from Central China, crossing Sinkiang, the Gobi and Takla Makan deserts, before escaping to a crumbling British Empire with a crossing of the Karakoram to the new nation of Pakistan. In 1951 there still persisted a legend that a vast mountain, higher than Everest, was to be found in the region, a good enough reason it seems for Tilman to traverse the land, ‘a land shut in on three sides by vast snow ranges whose glacial streams nourish the oases and upon whose slopes the yaks and camels graze side by side; where in their felt yurts the Kirghiz and Kazak live much as they did in the days of Genghis Khan, except now they no longer take a hand in the devastation of Europe’. Widely regarded as some of Tilman’s finest travel writing, China to Chitral is full of understatement and laconic humour, with descriptions of disastrous attempts on unclimbed mountains with Shipton, including Bogdo Ola—an extension of the mighty Tien Shan mountains—and the Chakar Aghil group near Kashgar on the old silk road. His command of the Chinese language—five words, all referring to food—proves less than helpful in his quest to find a decent meal: ‘fortunately, in China there are no ridiculous hygienic regulations on the sale of food’. Tilman also has several unnerving encounters with less-than-friendly tribesmen. Tilman starts proper in Lanchow where he describes with some regret that he is less a traveller and more a passenger on this great traverse of the central basin and rim of mountain ranges at Asia’s heart. But Tilman is one of our greatest ever travel writers, and we become a passenger to his adventurers.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 184


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 26-01-2017


$36.00
In Mischiefs Wake

ISBN: 9781909461369

Author: H. W. Tilman    Publisher: Lodestar Books

I felt like one who had first betrayed and then deserted a stricken friend; a friend with whom for the past fourteen years I had spent more time at sea than on ...


I felt like one who had first betrayed and then deserted a stricken friend; a friend with whom for the past fourteen years I had spent more time at sea than on land, and who, when not at sea, had seldom been out of my thoughts. The first of the three voyages described in In Mischief’s Wake gives H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman’s account of the final voyage and loss of Mischief, the Bristol Channel pilot cutter in which he had sailed over 100,000 miles to high latitudes in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. Back home, refusing to accept defeat and going against the advice of his surveyor, he takes ownership of Sea Breeze, built in 1899; ‘a bit long in the tooth, but no more so, in fact a year less, than her prospective owner’. After extensive remedial work, his first attempt at departure had to be cut short when the crew ‘enjoyed a view of the Isle of Wight between two of the waterline planks’. After yet more expense, Sea Breeze made landfall in Iceland before heading north toward the East Greenland coast in good shape and well stocked with supplies. A mere forty miles from the entrance to Scoresby Sound, Tilman’s long-sought-after objective, ‘a polite mutiny’ forced him to abandon the voyage and head home. The following year, with a crew game for all challenges, a series of adventures on the west coast of Greenland gave Tilman a voyage he considered ‘certainly the happiest’, in a boat which was proving to be a worthy successor to his beloved Mischief.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 172


Dimensions: 156 x 216 mm


Publication Date: 26-01-2017


$36.00
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