'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...

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...

H.W. Tilman's 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 accompli...

'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...

Throughout 1949 and 1950 H.W. 'Bill' Tilman mounted pioneering expeditions to Nepal and its Himalayan mountains, taking advantage of some of the first access to the country for Western travellers in the 20th century. Tilman and his party—including a certain Tenzing Norgay—trekked into the Kathmandu Valley and on to the Langtang region, where the highs and lows began.They first explored the ...

'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...

'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 ca...

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...

'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 and Mountains Meet is broad, covering his disastrous expedition to the Assam Himalaya, ...

'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...

Harold William 'Bill' Tilman (1898 –1977) was among the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering mountaineer and sailor who held exploration above all else.The son of a Liverpool sugar importer, Tilman joined the army at seventeen and was twice awarded the Military Cross for bravery during WWI. After the war Tilman left for Africa, establishing himself as a coffee grower. He met Eric Shipton and they began their famed mountai...

'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