High Mountains and Cold Seas: The life of H.W. `Bill' Tilman: soldier, mountaineer, navigator (H.W. Tilman - The Collected Edition)

Harold William 'Bill' Tilman (1898-1977) was among the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering mountaineer and navigator 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 mountaineering partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro . Turning to the Himalaya , Tilman went on two Mount Everest expeditions, reaching 27,000 feet without oxygen in 1938. In 1936 he made the first ascent of Nanda Devi , the highest mountain climbed until 1950. He was the first European to climb in the remote Assam Himalaya , delved into Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor and explored extensively in Nepal, all the while developing a mountaineering style characterised by its simplicity and emphasis on exploration. It was perhaps logical that Tilman would eventually buy the pilot cutter Mischief , not with the intention of retiring from travelling, but to access remote mountains. For twenty-two years he sailed Mischief and her successors in search of them-to Patagonia , where he made the first easterly crossing of the ice cap, to Baffin Island to make the first ascent of Mount Raleigh , to Greenland , Spitsbergen , and islands in the far Southern Ocean, before disappearing in the South Atlantic in 1977. J.R.L. Anderson 's High Mountains and Cold Seas draws on a wealth of personal correspondence between Tilman-a compulsive letter writer and his immediate family and close friends, crafting the first detailed account of the extraordinary life of this remarkable but very private individual.