The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  In 2004, previously unreleased private papers revealed another more outlandish explanation for Fawcett’s post-war vanishing act. The explorer, according to letters he sent to friends, had no intention of returning to Torquay. He was, in fact, lured by a beautiful native “she-god”, an erotic siren who draws white men into the jungle. There, he planned to set up a commune based on a cult involving the worship of his son, Jack.

  Had Fawcett been eaten by jaguars, or had he lived alone as a native, or starved or been murdered by fierce natives, or had he settled down in the jungle with a native she-god, retelling tales of unnaturally large serpents to fellow members of a theosophical commune? The question is unlikely ever to be answered.

  Cosmic Martyrs

  When explorers die it is usually down to bad planning, bad luck or unaccounted for physical or biological hazards. Some explorers were never intended to return alive in the first place.

  In October 1956, the Soviet Union blazed a trail into space by launching Sputnik, the first satellite in orbit. It was a cause of huge national rejoicing, but it was still not enough for Premier Nikita Kruschev. Within days, he was commanding his space programme to come up with something even more spectacular for 7 November, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. No pressure then.

  Someone suggested sending a dog into space. Great idea, everyone agreed. The trouble was there was barely enough time to design a spacecraft, let alone a re-entry craft. Sputnik 2 was not designed to come back.

  A stray mongrel bitch – probably part-Siberian husky – called Laika (“Barker”) was plucked from the streets of Moscow and designated for international stardom. She was apparently chosen from ten standby dogs because of her photogenic good looks – “lucky” Laika’s face would soon be printed in newspapers around the world.

  On 31 October 1957, she was placed inside a padded, pressurized cabin within Sputnik 2. There was enough room for her to lie down or stand but she was chained to prevent her turning around. An air regeneration system provided oxygen, and food was dispensed in a jelly form. Laika was fitted with a harness, a bag to collect waste and electrodes to monitor vital signs.

  The early signals before take-off indicated that the dog was agitated but eating her food. During the launch, her pulse rate rose to three times normal, an indication of stress. It was reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six, or as the Soviet Government initially claimed, she was humanely put down prior to oxygen depletion.

  In fact, Laika was dead within hours after launch, roasted alive when Soviet ground engineers failed to notice a problem with the cooling system. Her coffin lapped the Earth another 2,570 times until it burned up in the atmosphere in April 1958. Few people openly questioned the ethics of sending a dog into space. The true cause and time of her death were not admitted publicly until 2002.

  After Laika’s début, at least thirteen Russian canine cosmonauts followed her into orbit between 1957 and 1961, of whom five died in flight. A variety of large and small animals have since been flown to space for scientific experiments in orbit. In 1958, the USA launched their first animal into space, a squirrel monkey named Gordo, aboard a Jupiter AM-13 booster on a suborbital flight. Gordo completed the flight and returned safely, but during his recovery a flotation device in the rocket’s nose cone failed and Gordo drowned.

  Six months later, the USA tried again with a female rhesus named Able aboard a Jupiter AM-18 rocket. The monkey flew to an altitude of 300 miles at speeds over 10,000 mph and was weightless for nine minutes. Able returned safely to Earth, but afterwards sensors that had been used to transmit her vital signs were removed in surgery; Able died from the anesthetic during the operation.

  Worst Attempt to Climb Mount Everest (or the Most Successful Attempt to Climb Mount Everest by a Transvestite)

  On 2 June 1953, the front page of The Times carried the headline: “EVEREST CONQUERED: HILARY AND TENSING REACH THE SUMMIT”. News had reached Britain late the previous evening that a UK expedition led by John Hunt had finally become the first to reach the summit of Chomlungma or “Mother of the World” to the Tibetans, Sagasmatha or “Goddess of the sky” to the Nepalese, or Peak XV to the British, until William Lambton’s Great Trigonometrical Survey of 1806 when they renamed it Mount Everest after the Surveyor-General of India, Sir George Everest.

  Before 1953, ten expeditions at the cost of at least sixteen lives had set out to confront the physical and logistical challenges posed by the world’s highest mountain.15 Apart from the odd Swiss and Canadian, it had been mostly Britons who had died trying to reach the roof of the world. The most famous failed attempt was by the legendary George Mallory, whose response when asked by a journalist, “Why do you want to climb Everest?” produced the reply which has since slipped into common usage when offering a reason for taking on a formidable challenge: “Because it is there.”

  The strangest attempt was by thirty-three-year-old Yorkshireman Maurice Wilson, a mill worker’s son from Bradford, who was an unlikely mountaineer. He had been shot twice during the First World War leaving his left arm immobile and, since the war, had wandered aimlessly and struggled to hold down a job for long. Eventually, he left Yorkshire for New Zealand where he became the manager of a women’s clothes shop. A couple of years before his climb, he was struck down by tuberculosis and suffered a nervous breakdown. It was during this time that he began to dabble in mysticism and faith healing. Wilson later claimed he was able to conquer both illnesses by undergoing a treatment of thirty-five days of intensive prayer and complete fasting, a technique he had apparently learned from a mysterious man he met in London who had cured himself and over 100 other people of various “incurable diseases”. Wilson declined to reveal the man’s name, nor did he ever offer any proof that he really existed, but from then on he become a fanatical believer in the power of prayer and fasting and spreading the word of these powers was his new vocation in life.

  In 1931, while recuperating from his illnesses, he came across a newspaper article about the ill-fated Mallory, who had vanished somewhere near the summit of Everest in 1924. Wilson was intrigued and wanted to know more, so he dug deeper into the life of Mallory. Within six months, he had made his mind up to become the first man to climb the world’s highest peak. What better way to spread the word about his newfound faith than by climbing Mount Everest?

  It goes without saying that the challenges involved in climbing Everest, even for an experienced mountaineer, were enormous. Apart from the hostile climate and the sheer scale of the mountain itself, there were many other obstacles to consider. Some were political – the Chinese forbade anyone to climb the mountain via Tibet. That left only the route via Nepal. The Nepalese authorities didn’t want to encourage random foreign climbers to wind up dead on their territory either, so access to the mountain was carefully restricted. Other challenges were more practical – it took, for example, about thirty porters just to carry the cash required to pay your way because paper money was not acceptable in that part of the world.

  But Maurice Wilson had a bold plan that would circumvent all of these obstacles. He would achieve the first solo ascent of Everest by simply flying halfway round the world, crash landing the plane on the slopes at altitude – then walk to the summit.

  There were a couple of flaws in his plan – he didn’t own a plane and had never flown one before, nor did he have any experience of mountain climbing. Unperturbed by these minor considerations, he bought a used 1925 Gypsy Moth – the type with an open-cabin biplane – and renamed it Ever-Wrest, then booked himself a few flying lessons at the London Aeroplane Club. He was a poor student and it took him twice the average time to get his pilot’s licence. His instructor warned him he would never reach India. Wilson replied that he would get to Everest, or die trying.

  His preparation for the mountaineering challenge that lay ahead was even more rudimentary. He didn’t buy any specialist kit, such an ice axe or crampons, and spent just five weeks walking around Snowdonia before declari
ng himself ready to set off on his great adventure. Fasting and prayer would enable him to succeed where George Mallory and others had failed. He was quite literally on a wing and a prayer.

  Wilson planned his departure for Tibet in April 1933 but was delayed when he crashed Ever-Wrest in a field near Bradford. He escaped unscathed but the plane’s fuselage was buckled and took three weeks to repair. Wilson was now front-page news and The Times alone followed his quest with 150 news stories, but it also attracted the attention of the Air Ministry, who promptly banned him from flying to Nepal because it violated a British Government treaty with the Nepalese authorities.

  The mountaineering establishment was similarly unimpressed by Wilson’s endeavour. Every previous British expedition to conquer the mountain had been under close supervision by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographic Society and neither looked kindly on the efforts of dilettante madmen to upstage them. But despite the best efforts of the authorities to thwart Wilson’s apparently suicidal attempt, on 21 May 1933 he slipped out of the country and set off for India, just after tearing up a telegram from the British Government threatening action if he went ahead with the flight.

  A solo flight halfway across the world would have tested the best aviators of the day, but Wilson was planning to do it with basic maps. His destination was 5,000 miles away but his plane had only a 620-mile fuel range. His route meandered from London to Freiburg, Freiburg to Passau, followed by a failed attempt to cross the Alps, then back to Passau and Freiburg, then over the Alps again to Rome. At one point, he was flying blind through total cloud cover – a challenge for a professional pilot, let alone a novice – but somehow he managed to pull it off. A few days later, he set off again for Cairo, then Baghdad. The Persian authorities refused him a permit to fly over their territory and he was forced to turn south and fly along the Arabian Peninsula, an area for which he had no maps at all. He bought himself a children’s atlas and then set off on the 620-mile stretch from Baghdad to the next airfield in Bahrain. Flying in the brain-boiling summer heat, he managed to land just before running out of fuel.

  In Bahrain, the implications of flying without British Government backing finally caught up with him. The local police informed him the air space ahead was “closed to civilian air traffic” and he was to turn back immediately or face arrest. Wilson promptly took off, pretending to fly back to Iraq, but then turned his plane and headed straight for India. Just a few hundred miles short of the Indian border with Nepal, his primitive plane stalled and Wilson was forced to perform an emergency landing at Gwadar. The police promptly impounded his plane and placed him under surveillance.

  Having been forced to abandon his plane, Wilson decided to complete the rest of his ascent on foot. He sold the Gypsy Moth and went to Darjeeling where he hoped to get a climbing permit from the Tibetan side. The local authorities were still determined to stop him; there would be no permit granted for Wilson to ascend Everest by any means. One morning in March 1934, he slipped away disguised as a Tibetan priest and, accompanied by three Sherpas, hiked overland through Tibet and ten days later arrived at the foot of Mount Everest.

  After four days of slow progress and camping on exposed ledges, they were confronted by an impassable forty-foot ice wall. Wilson was still convinced that he could surmount any obstacle via a combination of fasting16 and prayer. His Sherpas begged to differ and returned to base camp, after imploring him to go with them. Wilson climbed on alone.

  Whether he genuinely believed at this point that he could still conquer Everest alone, without extra oxygen or proper climbing gear, or whether he continued because he preferred death to the humiliation of returning to England in defeat, is open to debate. He was last seen alive setting out alone up a glacier equipped with a tent, three loaves, two tins of oatmeal, a camera, a Union Jack and a shaving mirror. The latter was to be used to signal monks at the Rongbuk Monastery fifteen miles away by flashing sunlight down to them that he had reached the summit. The signal never came.

  A year later, a British party found his frozen, emaciated corpse wrapped in his tent. There was women’s clothing in his rucksack and he was wearing women’s underwear. Beside his body was his diary. Wilson’s final entry for 31 May, read: “Off again, gorgeous day.”

  ___________________

  1 Keats gave Ritchie a copy of his newly published poem “Endymion”, with instructions to place it in his travel pack, read it on his journey and then “throw it into the heart of the Sahara Desert . . . as a gesture of high romance”. Keats received a letter from Ritchie in December 1818: “‘Endymion’ has arrived thus far on his way to the Desert and when you are sitting over your Christmas fire will be jogging (in all probability) on a camel’s back o’er those African Sands immeasurable.” After that, there was no word.

  2 Especially Africans. In his memoir, Laing describes them as “depraved, indolent, avaricious, and so deeply sunk in the debasement of the slave traffic”.

  3 The mud hut still stands today. On the wall above the door is a plaque to his memory and, outside, a sign announces that this is “Mission Culturelle, Site No. 2. Gordon Laing”.

  4 They returned with a menagerie of animals given to them as presents for King George IV, including a horse, a sheep, a mongoose, four ostriches, three parrots, a monkey, a shark and three slugs. A home was found for the parrots and the monkey but the fate of the others, including the slugs, is not known. According to the records, there was some concern over the fate of the sheep that had become “so much attached to the horse that their separation might be fatal”.

  5 Convinced that he would encounter mighty river systems or even an inland sea, the Scot Thomas Mitchell explored vast tracts of central Australia, dragging two wooden boats over 3,000 miles of arid scrub. Although they never once got wet, he refused to give up on them. He wrote after his third trip with slight understatement: “The boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us,” but added, “I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.”

  6 Recent research suggests that another potential source for the lead may have been the ships’ fresh water systems.

  7 Fonck claimed he shot down 140 German planes and received credit for 75, falling just short of the Red Baron’s 80. His confirmed victories exceed the tallies of any Allied WWII pilot, making him the all-time Allied ace of aces. In his own words, “I put my bullets into the target as if I placed them there by hand.”

  8 The explorer Robert Peary failed to reach the North Pole, but down to his last two toes from previous attempts, found time to endorse Shredded Wheat and his favourite brand of underpants before naming a remote cape on Ellesmere Island after another of his sponsors, Colgate.

  9 It turned out that Evans wasn’t even the first European to pass this way that year. A few weeks earlier, a Canadian fur trader called René Jusseaume had arrived via a different route, established a small trading post, raised a Union Jack, and then left. Little wonder the Mandans were so relaxed about Evans’ arrival.

  10 Kislingbury, although discharged from the expedition for insubordination, missed his boat home and had no choice but to hang around. He died of starvation on 1 June 1884.

  11 Amundsen’s ship.

  12 Although Scott never made it back himself, a lot of his samples did, plus the Edwardian version of Frozen Planet – the first movie film of Antarctic creatures ever recorded. Film of Weddell seals and killer whales was truly groundbreaking. There were also the Emperor Penguin eggs he found. Not a total disaster then.

  13 These were Laurence Oates’ last words according to Scott’s account. Some historians have suggested that Scott made them up.

  14 Because he was pugnacious, not because he resembled a Pug.

  15 The first Everest casualty was Scottish mountaineer Dr A. M. Kellas, who didn’t actually make it to within 100 miles of the mountain, having died on his approach. The rest of his party gave up at 23,000 ft – a vertical mile below the summit – and went home pronouncing thei
r mission “a total success”. Expedition leader W. H. Murray explained, “It was thought that the mountain could indubitably be climbed were it 5,000 feet smaller.”

  16 He seems to have lapsed with his fasting, though – in Wilson’s diary, he admits to eating large amounts of anything he could get his hands on.

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  Standing on the Shoulders of Midgets: Scientific Losers

  In which Mr Scheele tastes the periodic table; the world’s greatest astronomer dies of good table manners; Mr Newton loses his marbles; Mr Wallace lets someone else get the credit for discovering evolutionary theory; and Mr Midgley lowers the world’s IQ.

  Least Accurate Scientific Textbook

  The first-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote a forty-seven-volume book Historia Naturalis, which was to become the foremost authority on scientific matters right up to the Middle Ages.

  Pliny didn’t take the trouble to verify most of what he wrote about. His book contained detailed descriptions of monstrous races in far-off lands, including evil-eyed Illyrians, one-legged Monocoli and animal-human hybrids, and assured readers that the hippopotamus walks backwards to confuse anyone trying to track it.

  Pliny’s fact-checking on medical matters was similarly lax. He recommended treating a scorpion bite by drinking the insect’s ashes in a glass of wine, advised that toothache was caused by malevolent worms living inside teeth and was preventable by eating mice twice a month, and prescribed green frogs, toads and worms as a cure for halitosis. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Pliny’s book as “a work of uneven accuracy”.