There can be no country so rich in mountains as Nepal. This narrow strip of territory, lying between Sikkim and Garhwal, occupies 500 miles of India's northern border; and since this border coincides roughly with the 1,500-mile-long Himalayan chain, it follows that approximately a third of this vast range lies within or upon the confines of Nepal. So starts this breathtaking account of mountaineering and exploring this isolated and awe-inspiring country by one of the most famous men in mou...

'Experience is said to be the name men give to their mistakes and of the experience I gained in Spitsbergen that may well be true.'The circumnavigation of Spitsbergen is the first of three voyages described in H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's fifteenth and final book, a remarkable example of Tilman's ability to triumph when supported by a crew game for all challenges. The 1974 voyage of the pilot cutter Baroque takes Tilman t...

Nanda Devi is the highest mountain in India and was the highest mountain summited for twenty years before Edmund Hilary climbed Mt. Everest. This is a thrilling and often heart stopping account of the attempts and many failures to climb this sacred mountain. Written by 'Bill' Tilman, one of the most famous names in mountaineering and all round adventurer extraordinaire, this book is a must for anyone with a love of adventure and the great outdoors. Many of the earliest books, particularly ...

'To those who went to the War straight from school and survived it, the problem of what to do afterwards was peculiarly difficult.'For H.W. 'Bill' Tilman, the solution lay in Africa: in gold prospecting, mountaineering and a 3,000-mile bicycle ride across the continent. Tilman was one of the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering climber and sailor who held exploration above all else. He made first ascents througho...

'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 w...

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 o...

'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 whi...

'However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one's last hold of 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...

'For most men, as Epicurus has remarked, rest is stagnation and activity madness. Mad or not, the activity that I have been pursuing for the last twenty years takes the form of voyages to remote, mountainous regions.'H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's fourteenth book describes three more of those voyages, 'the first comparatively humdrum, the second totally disastrous, and the third exceedingly troublesome'.The first voyage describes Ti...

'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 sou...

'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 ...

'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