Graham Hoyland - Yeti

The earliest Western account of a wild man in the Himalayas dates from 1832 and is given by Brian Houghton Hodgson, the Court of Nepal’s first British Resident, and the first Englishman permitted to visit this forbidden land. Hodgson had to contend with the hotbed that was (and still is) Nepalese politics. He was particularly interested in the natural history and ethnography of the region, and so his report carries some weight. He recorded that his native hunters had been frightened by a ‘wild man’: 1

Religion has introduced the Bandar [rhesus macaque] monkey into the central region, where it seems to flourish, half domesticated, in the neighbourhood of temples, in the populous valley of Nepal proper [this is still the case]. My shooters were once alarmed in the Kachár by the apparition of a ‘wild man’, possibly an ourang, but I doubt their accuracy. They mistook the creature for a càcodemon or rakshas (demons), and fled from it instead of shooting it. It moved, they said, erectly, was covered with long dark hair, and had no tail.

It has to be noted that Hodgson didn’t see the wild man of Nepal himself, and he doubted the story. We can go back further in history for stories about wild men. Alexander the Great set out to conquer Persia and India in 326 BC, penetrating nearly as far as Kashmir. He heard about strange wild men of the snows, who were described as something like the satyrs, the lustful Greek gods with the body of a man but the horns, legs and feet of an animal. Alexander demanded to have one of them brought to him, but the local villagers said the creature could not survive at low altitude (rather a good excuse). Later, Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia : ‘In the land of the satyrs, in the mountains that lie to the east of India, live creatures that are extremely swift, as they can run on both four feet and on two. They have bodies like men, and because of their speed can only be caught when they are ill or old.’ He went on to describe monstrous races of peoples such as the cynocephali or dog-heads, the sciapodae, whose single foot was so huge it could act as a sunshade, and the mouthless astomi, who lived on scents alone. By comparison, his yeti sounds quite plausible. ‘When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement about her incredible.’

Septimius Severus was the only Roman emperor to be born in Libya, Africa, and he lived in York between 208 and 211 BC. His head priest, Claudius Aelianus, wrote De Natura Animalium ( On the Nature of Animals ), a book of facts and fables about the animal kingdom designed to illustrate human morals. I like to imagine the Roman emperor reading it to take his mind off his final illness during the Yorkshire drizzle. In his book, Aelianus describes an animal similar to the yeti:

If one enters the mountains of neighbouring India, one comes upon lush, overgrown valleys … animals that look like Satyrs roam these valleys. They are covered with shaggy hair and have a long horse’s tail. When left to themselves, they stay in the forest and eat tree sprouts. But when they hear the dim of approaching hunters and the barking of dogs, they run with incredible speed to hide in mountain caves. For they are masters at mountain climbing. They also repel approaching humans by hurling stones down at them.

The first sighting of yeti footprints by a Westerner was made by the English soldier and explorer Major Laurence Waddell. He was a Professor of Tibetan Culture and a Professor of Chemistry, a surgeon and an archaeologist, and he had roamed Tibet in disguise. He is thought by some to be the real-life precursor of the film character Indiana Jones. 2One of his theories included a belief that the beginning of all civilisation dated from the Aryan Sumerians who were blond Nordics with blue eyes. These theories were later picked up by the German Nazis and led to their expedition to Tibet in 1938–39. While exploring in northeast Sikkim in 1889, Waddell’s party came across a set of large footprints which his servants said were made by the yeti, a beast that was highly dangerous and fed on humans:

Some large footprints in the snow led across our track and away up to the higher peaks. These were alleged to be the trail of the hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows, along with the mythical white lions, whose roar is reputed to be heard during storms [perhaps these were avalanches]. The belief in these creatures is universal amongst Tibetans. None, however, of the many Tibetans who I have interrogated on this subject could ever give me an authentic case. On the most superficial investigation, it always resolved into something heard tell of. These so-called hairy wild men are evidently the great yellow snow-bear ( Ursus isabellinus ) which is highly carnivorous and often kills yaks. Yet, although most of the Tibetans know this bear sufficiently to give it a wide berth, they live in such an atmosphere of superstition that they are always ready to find extraordinary and supernatural explanations of uncommon events. 3

Note that Major Waddell did not believe in the story of wild men, and identified the creature as a bear. It should also be noted that Ursus isabellinus comes in many colours: sometimes yellow, sometimes sandy, brown or blackish. Crucially for our story, Waddell was the first modern European to report the existence of the yeti legend. In so doing, he was the first in a long line of British explorers whose words on the yeti were misrepresented and whose conclusions were deleted.

The next explorer to march across our stage is Lt-Col. Charles Howard-Bury, leader of the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition, who saw something strange when he was crossing the Lhakpa’ La at 21,000 feet.

Howard-Bury was another of the extraordinary Everesters. He was wealthy and moved easily in high society. He had a most colourful life, growing up in a haunted gothic castle at Charleville, County Offaly, Ireland. Then, in 1905, he stained his skin with walnut juice and travelled into Tibet without permission, being ticked off by the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, on his return (Tibet must have been crowded with heavily stained Englishmen at that time). He bought a bear cub, named it Agu and took it home to Ireland where it grew into a seven-foot adult. So he was familiar with bear prints. He was taken prisoner during the First World War by the Germans and staged an escape with other officers. He never married and lived with the Shakespearean actor Rex Beaumont, whom he had met, aged 57, when Beaumont was 26. Together they restored Belvedere House, Westmeath, Ireland, and also built a villa in Tunis. Here they entertained colourful notables such as Sacheverell Sitwell, Dame Freya Stark and the professional pederast André Gide.

Was Howard-Bury prone to the telling of tall stories? Fellow Everester George Mallory didn’t much like him but thought not. The story he brought back seemed entirely plausible to fellow members of the Alpine Club. He was a careful observer of nature and a plant hunter ( Primula buryana is named after him). After the Mallory research, I found it hard to disentangle truth from wishful thinking, but I felt that it was important to note what Howard-Bury himself observed and then see how the newspapers reported the story. Howard-Bury’s diary notes for 22 September 1921 read: ‘We distinguished hare and fox tracks; but one mark, like that of a human foot, was most puzzling. The coolies assured me that it was the track of a wild, hairy man, and that these men were occasionally to be found in the wildest and most inaccessible mountains.’