The second ascent of Mount Everest was made by a team of Swiss climbers and Sherpas from Darjeeling in 1956. The first attempted Swiss ascent had narrowly failed in 1952. | Photo: Schweizerische Stiftung für Alpine Forschung

On the morning of 28 May 1952, the Swiss climber Raymond Lambert and the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay began their final ascent of Mount Everest. Lambert later wrote that the previous night had been “terrible” and sleep impossible. In the makeshift tent they had erected at 8,400 metres, they had only a small candle that flickered as they used it to melt a little snow for drinking water. They had almost nothing left to eat.

On that day, Lambert and Norgay had wanted what no human being had ever achieved before: an ascent of Everest. But their progress was slow. “As the slope became steeper, we moved forward on all fours, like a dog following a scent”, wrote Lambert. In the next five hours they managed to climb just another 200 metres before they were utterly exhausted. They gave up and turned back – just 300 metres below the summit.

Expeditions like this were often perilous in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Nature was considered a hostile environment. Hundreds died of frostbite, hunger, disease or falls. But people didn’t just accept risk as an inevitable by-product of their undertakings. They actively sought it out. “The extreme environment was part and parcel of the heroic narrative that made expeditions attractive back then”, says Patricia Purtschert, a philosopher and gender researcher at the University of Bern.

In a world that was becoming increasingly modernised and in which technology was giving humans ever more control, venturing into hostile environments had something archaic about it, says Purtschert. Expeditions were staged as a “battle with the elements” – and primarily a battle in which men were the protagonists. This heroic masculinity was both culturally and politically acceptable.

Participating in the colonial scramble

In Switzerland, the public of the 1950s strongly identified with the mountaineers who were active in the Himalayas. According to Purtschert, they embodied “traditional colonial images of white masculinity that were associated with conquest, adventure, courage, leadership and claims of ownership”. And there was a nationalistic dimension too. “The race to the top of Everest was charged with colonial symbolism, and Switzerland wanted to win it”, says Purtschert. “The first nation to reach the summit was going to enjoy immense prestige”.

But the Swiss attempt to achieve the first ascent of Everest in 1952 was also a research expedition. Three researchers from the University of Geneva were there alongside Lambert’s eight-member mountaineering team: a geologist, a botanist, and the ethnologist Marguerite Lobsiger-Dellenbach. She spent her time measuring Nepalese men and women, noting their height, their head circumference, the width of their nose and more besides. She was conducting racial research.

In Purtschert’s opinion, the fact that a Swiss scientist was still engaged in racial research in the field as late as 1952 is allied to Switzerland’s “colonial complicity”. Just like its sister institute in Geneva, the Anthropological Institute of the University of Zurich was for a while a “centre for international race research” whose work helped Swiss scientists to provide legitimacy for acts of domination, exploitation and inequality.

Switzerland didn’t have any colonies, but it was still bound up in colonial projects. Its researchers carried out expeditions with the support of European colonial powers, and the Swiss used their knowledge to facilitate the expansion of colonial dominion, as Bernhard C. Schär has proven in the example of the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia).

During this period, expeditions had multifarious motivating factors, from a desire for knowledge, a personal thirst for adventure and hopes for scientific prestige to political interests and the competing interests of different nation states. By venturing into unknown territories and mapping them, researchers were making them accessible – scientifically, economically and strategically.

Progress and enforced submission

“In military terms, these expeditions were the vanguard”, says Christian Kehrt, a professor in the history of science and technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany. “Researchers opened up paths that were trodden after them by traders and settlers who came to build cities and infrastructure”.

The British in particular preferred this approach. Their expeditions served to wipe ‘blank spots’ off the map. They might be led by a small number of researchers and military personnel, but often also involved hundreds of armed men who ensured their mastery over indigenous helpers by means of firearms and whips. The British then used their tools of empire to modernise these ‘newly discovered’ regions – newly discovered only from a European perspective, of course. This modernisation process brought technologies such as railways and telegraph lines.

The resulting global colonial infrastructure created the conditions for worldwide measuring programmes for geomagnetism, the weather and ocean currents – none of which had been possible before. But as Kehrt insists, we have to realise that “opening up the world as a whole, and Europe’s supremacy in it, were the result of military subjugation that had been prepared by research expeditions and facilitated by them”.

With the aid of a local oarsman, the Swiss geologist Arnold Heim glides along Lake Mutanda in Uganda in 1954. He became an advocate of decolonisation. | Photo: Jon Feuerstein / ETH Zurich Library

Nor was science merely a fig leaf for imperial ambitions. Often, researchers used imperial interests to finance their expeditions. Many research projects and practices were imbued with colonial logic, says Moritz von Brescius, a professor at the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel who has been researching into different facets of imperialism for years now.

“Besides the prospect of territorial expansion”, he continues, “Western rulers, scientific societies and the East India companies were also always interested in raw materials and commodities that could be discovered and secured. This is why researchers often used the prospect of economic exploitation to convince financiers to help them with their expeditions, which were both costly and logistically complex”. In the 19th and 20th centuries in particular, according to von Brescius, the search for raw materials in the colonies reached a new intensity, as did their predatory exploitation.

Collecting with no purpose

This colonial mindset is also evident in the fact that expedition leaders were keen to collect as much data and as many objects as possible and bring them all back to Europe. They were sure that a system would later emerge out of the sheer volume of what they brought back with them. Von Brescius deems this a “collecting mania”. It manifested itself in collections of plants, rocks, artefacts, drawings, stuffed animals and even human skeletons. Everything was bartered, purchased or stolen, sent back to Europe and catalogued.

The collections of many museums in the Global West were gathered primarily in the wake of colonial enterprises and comprise enormous quantities of objects – including valuable cultural artefacts from very different societies.

In 2024, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich hosted a special exhibition entitled ‘Colonial. Switzerland’s Global Entanglements’. A book published in tandem with the exhibition states that ETH Zurich today still possesses “tens of thousands of animal specimens, plant specimens and rocks from European overseas colonies”. Nor is this an exception: most of these so-called ‘type specimens’ from former colonies are now located in Western Europe and the USA. They are unique specimens of plants and animals, and also include fossils.

These specimens were used to describe species for the first-ever time – descriptions often drawn up by researchers from the Global West. Today, newly collected type specimens have to remain in their countries of origin, as was stipulated in the Nagoya Protocol of 2014, which regulates access to genetic resources and ensures equitable compensation.

Colonial thinking was also reflected in the reports that explorers wrote after their expeditions, which they were often able to market with a profit. They frequently described themselves as heroic lone travellers braving dangers on their own in their quest to survey the world. “And yet these expeditions were immense logistical undertakings that involved hundreds of porters, translators and local guides”, says von Brescius.

Silencing indigenous assistance

Omitting indigenous peoples from their travel narratives was in line with the literary conventions of the time. Anyone who diverged from this well-travelled path risked criticism – which is precisely what happened to the brothers Hermann, Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit. In their reports of their three-year journey to India and the Himalayas, they praised what their local helpers had done for them and were accordingly ridiculed in the British press for having treated the indigenous as individuals, thereby assigning authorship to them.

But the falsifications of their exploring peers went even further. Today, we know that many of these travel reports contained fictional elements. Some explorers simply invented entire routes they’d supposedly taken. In his book ‘Out of Our Minds’, the ethnologist Johannes Fabian has described how some European travellers fell seriously ill during their expeditions, were unable to walk at all and descended into feverish hallucinations while being carried along by their indigenous attendants. But there’s almost no mention of anything like this in the reports they subsequently published.

It was only when the Swiss meteorologist Alfred de Quervain resorted to dog sleds – of the kind the Inuit had been using for centuries – that he was able to cross Greenland in 1912. | Photo: ETH Zurich Library

At the same time, many of these historical expeditions demonstrated what consequences could arise from ignoring indigenous knowledge. Lea Pfäffli is a cultural scientist, and in her book ‘Arktisches Wissen’ (Arctic Knowledge), she cites the Swiss meteorologist Alfred de Quervain as a prime example. In 1909, he failed in his attempt to cross the Greenland ice sheet because he wanted to pull his own sledges with equipment and provisions instead of harnessing them to dogs, as had been the custom in Greenland for centuries. Pfäffli quotes de Quervain: “This devil of a sledge! Whenever it can overturn, it will; where it can’t, it does it anyway”.

He didn’t succeed in his aim until three years later – when he crossed the ice sheet with dog sleds. All the same, de Quervain refused to recognise the local knowledge of the Inuit as equal to his own. Pfäffli reveals how de Quervain devalues their indigenous expertise as mere implicit knowledge. Nor are they mentioned in his scientific publications as either producers of knowledge or in any wise worthy of reference.

A new responsibility for the environment

The colonial patterns that shaped expeditions from the 19th century onwards left behind an infrastructure from which research in the Global West continues to benefit to this day. “This means modern expeditionary research also bears certain responsibilities”, says Danièle Rod, the director of the Swiss Polar Institute (SPI) that was founded in 2016. They finance and organise expeditions to the ice and advise Swiss researchers on ethical issues and legal frameworks.

These frameworks have only emerged in the last twenty years and are still evolving. Today, decolonial principles are at the forefront. Research, it is believed, ought to involve local communities actively, share knowledge, and work transparently. International and national guidelines set high standards for this, as do the indigenous organisations. “This can make many researchers feel overwhelmed”, says Rod.

But at the same time, the Western academic system rewards speed, publications and international cooperation – not building up long-term relationships. “It takes time and trust to establish genuine collaborative research with indigenous groups that significantly enhances the quality of our science and scholarship”, says Rod. In practice, however, people usually begin by organising their finances and their research plans, and only then start to talk about possible local participation. Decision-making authority thus remains in the Global West, and the associated structures change but slowly.

Rod has also observed signs of fatigue in certain indigenous communities. If dozens of teams keep showing up, year after year, asking questions, initiating collaborations and seeking consent, then it’s easy to tip the balance between costs and benefits in the wrong direction.

But there’s another aspect that has long been a focus of modern expeditions, above and beyond issues of participation: their environmental footprint. “We require researchers to calculate their carbon footprint and to transport the materials for their expeditions more efficiently. Those who plan ahead and ship their cargo by sea rather than by air can significantly reduce their footprint. But they have to allow several more months to manage this”, says Rod. At the same time, the SPI is promoting models to reduce travel altogether. Local partners can be drawn in to service measuring equipment or collect samples. This reduces emissions and strengthens the local research component.

And yet field research can’t be replaced completely, Rod insists. The polar regions are changing rapidly, and tipping points there will have global implications. “That’s why scientists have to go into the field”, says Rod. “We know enough to act. But we don’t know when the systems there will tip”.

Then come the tourists

The sheer fact that we’re talking about tipping points today is proof that our perspective on the environment has shifted. According to Dania Achermann, a historian of science and technology, “In the mid-20th century, our relationship to Nature altered. We moved away from notions of conquest and domination towards a realisation that we have to protect it and preserve it”. Ecological awareness rose in the 1960s and ’70s as it became obvious that the environment is in fact a delicate system.

In parallel with this, expedition research also changed, becoming more international and more reliant on technology. Today’s large-scale projects – such as the Antarctic ice-core drilling project ‘Beyond EPICA’ and the Arctic expedition MOSAiC – have significantly expanded our knowledge. But they also require complex logistics and consume immense resources.

This particular development has consequences beyond science, says Achermann. Research expeditions of the present and past have both generated knowledge and opened up routes to remote regions that tourists can also use today. And the scientific data, images and climate diagnoses made have enabled us to see the rapid changes that these places have undergone and have raised public awareness of them. In this context, Achermann speaks of “last-chance tourism” – simply knowing that polar regions are increasingly under threat stimulates people’s desire to see them “just one last time” before they disappear.

This dynamic is especially evident in the polar regions, where cruise ships and polar flights often use the same routes and landing sites as research expeditions. “Science expeditions haven’t triggered this tourism”, says Achermann. “But it’s helping to show that these remote regions are actually accessible and that you can visit them”.

And at the same time, global warming is revealing new routes. As the ice recedes, areas are opening up that were once impenetrable. And as their natural resources become accessible, this in turn is making those areas politically relevant. Research there is thus becoming more urgent, but geopolitical appetites have also been awakened. Research expeditions have to be planned responsibly, particularly in the Arctic, where territorial claims are disputed – otherwise, research risks once again being misused as a pretext for other interests.