Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The most important India General Service medal awarded to Ensign Henry Haversham Austen (later Lieutenant-Colonel Godwin-Austen, F.R.S., F.Z.S., F.R.G.S.), who was gazetted to the 24th Foot in 1851 and served as A.D.C. to General Godwin in the 2nd Burmese War, and later on special duty with the Bhootan Field Force; as a young British army surveyor he ‘undertook one of the most remarkable expeditions in British mountaineering history; not only did he open the way to the mountain now called K2 but, beyond the village of Skardu, gateway to the Karakoram, he became the first Westerner to explore the world’s most extensive and awesome glacier system; explorations in Ladakh, Tibet, Bhutan and Burma soon followed’

India General Service 1854-95, 2 clasps, Pegu, Bhootan (Ensign H. H. Austen. 24th Foot. A.D.C.) second clasp loose on ribbon as issued, fitted with silver ribbon buckle, toned good very fine £4,000-£5,000

Henry Haversham Austen was born at Teignmouth, Devon, on 6 July 1834, son of Robert A. C. Austen, F.R.S., a distinguished geologist, and Maria, daughter of General Godwin, a marriage that produced no fewer than 17 siblings to Haversham between 1834 and 1856, one of whom, Frederick, was killed at Isandhlwana. Haversham, by which name he was always known, was educated at R.M.C. Sandhurst which establishment he entered at the age of 13. Gentleman Cadet H. H. Austen was appointed as Ensign in the 24th Foot on 26 December 1851, and in June 1852 set out for Burma, as aide-de-camp to his grandfather General Godwin, the commander-in-chief of the British forces in the second Anglo-Burmese war. Following the death of General Godwin in 1854 his name was changed to Godwin-Austen by personal decree of Queen Victoria. He was appointed a Topographical Assistant to the Trigonometrical Survey of India and joined the Kashmir Survey party in 1857, with whom he surveyed a very large extent of country in Kashmir and Baltistan. In the latter country the enormous glaciers at the head of the Shigar river and Hunza Nagar frontier, which included the Baltoro glacier, which he was the first to discover, coming down in part from the second highest mountain in the Himalayas and named after him [since renamed as ‘K2’]. In 1862 he surveyed the lofty country of Rupshu and Zaskar in Ladakh, and in July and August of that year he made 13 different ascents of a mean height of 17,900 feet, the highest peak, Mata, being 20,607 feet. The following year he took up the Changchenmo and carried the topography to the eastern end of the Pang Kong lake, close up to Rudok in Chinese territory, where he was met and stopped by the Lhassan Governor. During the winter of 1863-64 he was on special duty with the last mission to Bhutan, and mapped the country between Darjeeling and Punakha, the capital. In 1864-65, having accompanied the political mission of Sir Ashley Eden to the Rajas of Bhutan, he served on special duty with the left column of the Bhutan field force as Surveyor, and was present at the storm and capture of of the fort of Dalimkot and the stockade of Chamoorchi in December 1864. In 1866, and for the following ten years, he was in charge of Survey Operations in the Garo, Khasi, Jaintia, North Cachar and Naga Hills, and Manipur, including in 1874 the expedition against the Dafia tribe at the base of the Eastern Himalayas, when a large area of new country was mapped and many distant peaks fixed.

He was President of Section E (Geography) of the British Association, 1883; President of the Maalacological Society, 1897-99; President of the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1908-09; awarded the Founders’ medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1910 for his exploration work. He was author of On the Land and Fresh-water Mollusca of India, 1882-1920; (jointly with Dr W. T. Blandford) of The Fauna of British India, vol. Mollusca, 1908; together with some 130 papers in the Journals of various Scientific Societies on Geology and Physical Features, Ethnology and Natural History. Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Godwin-Austen died at his house near Godalming in the Surrey hills on 2 December 1923.

Sold with a copy of Catherine Moorehead’s outstanding 2013 biography of this important but long-forgotten explorer, The K2 Man (and his molluscs) The extraordinary life of Haversham Godwin-Austen, the dust jacket of which carries an excellent précis of the story to be discovered therein:

‘Haversham Godwin-Austen (1834-1923), from an ancient and interesting Surrey aristocratic family with royal connections, not only found the first way to the savage mountain, K2, but went on to be the first serious explorer of the Karakoram, Ladakh, Western Tibet, Bhutan, Northern Burma and Assam. He broke the Asiatic high-altitude summiting record three times, using a ‘garden hatchet’ as an ice-axe, saw his assistant killed by headhunters and socialised with everyone from his ‘coolies' to the Maharajah of Kashmir.
Back in England, he became one of the UK's greatest Natural Historians, a Darwinist collector among collectors of geological and ornithological specimens. His collection of freshwater molluscs forms the basis of all modern science in the subject. And he became one of the UK's greatest surveyors, covering over 22,000 square miles of new territory, including 23 new glaciers and at least two dozen first ascents of peaks over 5000m. Remarkably, he also found time to paint a vast portfolio of watercolours, including the first close sighting of K2, described by the British Library as a 'national treasure’. (Several of these watercolours are illustrated in this book.)
His personal life was equally interesting: three marriages - to an Afghan landowner's daughter, an English socialite, then a civil servant's daughter 23 years younger than himself - were complicated by religious conversions from Anglicanism to Islam then to Buddhism. His strong character as a scholar at great London institutions such as the Natural History Museum is still the stuff of legend, while his bankruptcy in later life required the selling of the 'family pile’, the magnificent, royally-furnished Shalford Park. And thanks to a youthful indiscretion in Kashmir, he harboured a dark secret which came back to haunt him near the end of his long and colourful life.
This is the first and authorised biography of an outstanding man. Godwin-Austen's private papers are being made public for the first time. They prove that he was one of the UK's greatest explorers, on a par with Sir Richard Burton, while surpassing the explorations of David Livingstone, Captain Cook or Captain Scott. For mountaineers, scientists, students of biography and historians of the Raj and the Great Game, this biography offers new and original material - a 'must' for the explorer's bookshelf.’