High Mountains and Cold Seas A Biography of H. W. Tilman, by J. R. L. Anderson. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1980. 364 pages, illustrations, sketch maps. Price $20.00.

Bill Tilman was the quintessential British explorer: tough and flexible as good leather, immune to hardship and danger, reticent often to the point of speechlessness. He was stocky, tireless, wiry and weathered with the brush mustache, pipe, and had the bearing of the best type British officer. He not only looked the part of an explorer—he lived it. No climber- explorer-sailor in this century led a more varied and adventurous life in remote parts of the world, and few have been fortunate enough to have such a skilled biographer.

Tilman revealed only parts of himself to the various categories of people who were his friends. He fought valiantly and with distinction in both World Wars and was wounded and decorated in both. Doubtless he had friends among his fellow soldiers but they were not well-known to those who knew Bill as a climber and explorer. We in turn knew little of Tilman the sailor, who took small boats into unlikely and dangerous waters. On the last of these voyages he and five young companions were lost without trace in the South Atlantic.

Roughly a third of Tilman’s eighty years were spent in growing up, surviving two wars and in the formative decade when he farmed in Kenya alone with hundreds of books for company. Another third was devoted to mountaineering in Europe, Asia, Africa, Greenland and the sub-Antarctic; the remainder was spent in deep-water sailing after, as he put it, he was “too old to climb.” Unlike most mountaineers and sailors, Bill Tilman wrote brilliantly, with splendidly dry wit, and a style and reservoir of quotations drawn from reading and re-reading the world’s best literature while running his coffee plantation in Kenya. As a confirmed bachelor and putative misogynist there were no women in his life except for a devoted sister who was, he said, his sheet-anchor and to whom he turned for home and affection, which he returned to her many times. His fifteen books are classics in mountaineering and sailing, written with tongue in cheek, usually putting himself down, and with many famous one liners such as “… on the summit we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands.”

Mr. Anderson knew Tilman during his sea-faring phase and his son was one of Tilman’s climbing disciples. Just what impelled him to write this splendid biography he does not tell us, but thank heavens he did: few mountaineers (who tend more to autobiography) have ever had a biographer of such quality and perception. Anderson has produced a sensitive and engrossing book which is scholarly as well as entertaining, and which gives a clear portrait of a reticent and self-contained individual. By his careful selection of letters, Anderson shows a side of this remarkable man which was hidden from view, even from his many friends. This is a splendid book about a magnificent man, and every climber and deep-water sailor will like and should have it.

Charles S. Houston