WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century’s greatest adventurers, died Friday. He was 88.
The New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called Ed and considering himself an “ordinary person with ordinary qualities.”
Hillary died at Auckland Hospital at 9 a.m. Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark’s office said. Though ailing in his later years, Hillary remained active. No cause of death was immediately given.
Hillary’s life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement — yet he was humble to the point that he only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Tenzing Norgay.
He had pride in his feat, yet he referred to it irreverently as he returned to base camp as the man who took the first step onto the top of the world’s highest peak, saying: “We knocked the bastard off.”
The accomplishment as part of a British climbing expedition even added luster to the coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II four days later, and she knighted Hillary as one of her first acts.
But he was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.
He wrote of the pair’s final steps to the top of the world: “Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.
“Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation — these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed,” Hillary noted.
“But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar (high school) and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn’t believe it.”
He said: “I removed my oxygen mask to take some pictures. It wasn’t enough just to get to the top. We had to get back with the evidence. Fifteen minutes later we began the descent.”
His philosophy of life was simple: “Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself,” he said in a 1975 interview after writing his autobiography, “Nothing Venture, Nothing Win.”
Close friends described him as having unbounded enthusiasm for both life and adventure.
“We all have dreams — but Ed has dreams, then he’s got this incredible drive, and goes ahead and does it,” longtime friend Jim Wilson said in 1993.
Hillary summarized it for schoolchildren in 1998, when he said one didn’t have to be a genius to do well in life.
“I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it,” he said before planting some endangered Himalayan oaks on the school grounds.
Hillary’s pace slowed in his final years.
He made his last visit to the Himalayas in April 2007 when he and Elizabeth Hawley — unofficial chronicler of expeditions in the Himalayas for 40 years — met the 2007 SuperSherpas Expedition in Kathmandu.
Earlier, he had joined a flight of New Zealand dignitaries who flew to Antarctica for the 50th anniversary of the Scott Base, which the adventurer helped build in 1957.
Unlike many climbers, Hillary said that when he died, he had no desire to have his remains left on a mountain. He wanted his ashes scattered on Waitemata Harbor in the northern city of Auckland, where he lived his life.
“To be washed gently ashore, maybe on the many pleasant beaches near the place I was born. Then the full circle of my life will be complete,” he said.
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