The party arrived at the chapel at Schwarzsee, a village in southwestern Switzerland, at 7.30 a.m. They left at 8.20 a.m. and an hour later stopped to calculate their route. After an hour’s delay and fifty minutes’ climbing, they arrived on the Hörnli Ridge. By half past eleven they had reached 9,900 feet. They made camp higher up on a solid platform just level with the Furggengrat, which curves northwest above the glacier that bears its name. The guides in advance had done some reconnaissance on the upper slopes and returned at three that afternoon with good reports of the snow slopes above them. The weather was calm as they camped there that night. As Whymper recalled:
We passed the remaining hours of daylight – some basking in the sunshine, some sketching or collecting; and when the sun went down, giving, as it departed, a glorious promise for the morrow, we returned to the tent to arrange for the night. Hudson made tea, I coffee, and we then retired each one to his blanket bag; the Taugwalders, Lord Francis Douglas, and myself occupying the tent, the others remaining, by preference, outside. Longer after dusk the cliffs above echoed with our laughter and with the songs of the guides, before we were happy that night in camp, and feared no evil.1
The party moved on at first light.
In fact, first light is rather late in the day to start an Alpine ascent because snow and ice tend to melt and become unstable during the relatively high temperatures in full sun during the day. The likelihood of rock and icefall is greatly increased as the temperature rises above freezing. Alpine climbers must also consider seriously the time of their descent from the summit, a venture best done in daylight. Whymper’s party included some of the finest mountaineers of a generation. Francis Douglas (brother of the Marquess of Queensbury) had only the week before achieved the difficult ascent of the Gabelhorn (13,363 feet). Charles Hudson, the vicar of Skillington in Lincolnshire, was a recognised Alpine climber who had climbed Mont Blanc ten years before – without guides – on a demanding route. His young friend Hadow was a formidable neophyte, having climbed Mont Blanc that year – his first Alpine climb – in under four and a half hours, returning to Chamonix after a five-hour descent. The feat would be impressive now, even with modern equipment.
The party was not roped together and there was little to hold on to. By 6.20 a.m., led by Hudson the vicar, moving over the snow slopes, they had reached 12,800 feet; by 9.55 a.m., when they stopped for fifty minutes, they had reached 14,000 feet, close to the northeast ridge.
At 1.40 p.m. the party reached the Matterhorn’s summit: 14,782 feet. They paused for an hour or so to congratulate each other. They made a flag out of a guide’s shirt and shouted down to a competing team of Italian climbers, 1,250 feet below the summit on the South West Ridge, hurling rocks at the group to get their attention. Whymper paid homage to the view from the top:
Mountains 50 – nay a hundred – miles off, looked sharp and clear . . . details – ridge and crag, snow and glacier, stood out with faultless definition. Pleasant thoughts of happy days in bygone years came up unbidden as we recognised, the old family forms . . . Ten thousand feet beneath us were the green fields of Zermatt, dotted with chalets, from which blue smoke rose lazily . . . There were the most rugged forms, and the most graceful outlines – bold, perpendicular cliffs, and gentle undulating slopes; rocky mountains and snow mountains . . . There was every combination that the world can give, and in every contrast that the heart could desire.2
Twenty-five-year-old Whymper wrote with the Romantic sensibility of the age. In The Prelude in 1850, William Wordsworth wrote of looking up at Mont Blanc:
That very day,
From a bare ridge we also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.3
Even earlier, in 1802, Coleridge wrote a ‘Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni’ (his spelling of Chamonix) and appended a long note beginning:
Chamouni is one of the highest mountain valleys of the Barouny of Facingny in the Savoy Alps; and exhibits a kind of fairy world, in which the wildest of appearances (I had almost said horrors) of Nature alternate with the softest and most beautiful. The chain of Mont Blanc is its boundary; and besides the Arve [river] it is filled with sounds from the Arveiron [another river with its source at Mont Blanc] which rushes from the melted glaciers, like a giant, mad with joy, from a dungeon, and forms other torrents of snow-water, having their rise in the glaciers which slope down into the valley.4
Preparing for the dangerous descent, Whymper and Hudson had agreed that their guide Croz would lead the party down, followed by Hadow, Hudson, Douglas, and Peter Taugwalder senior. Then as a separate pair would follow Whymper and Peter Taugwalder junior (his brother having returned to Zermatt before the summit attempt). Whymper wrote down the names of the party and placed them in a bottle at the summit. The group roped themselves together and set off down the mountain.
Down in Zermatt a boy ran into the Monte Rosa Hotel and reported seeing an avalanche falling from the top of the Matterhorn on to the Matterhorn Glacier 4,000 feet below the summit. What he had seen in fact was a disaster that occurred as Whymper’s team, reaching the most difficult part of the descent, had paused because of the steepness of the slope. In Whymper’s much quoted words:
[Croz] was in the act of turning round, to go down a step or two himself; at this moment Mr. Hadow slipped, fell against him, and knocked him over. I heard one startled exclamation from Croz, then saw him and Mr. Hadow flying downwards; in another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord Francis Douglas immediately after him. All this was the work of a moment. Immediately we heard Croz’s exclamation, old Peter [Taugwalder] and I planted ourselves as firmly as the rocks would permit: the rope was taut between us, and the jerk came on us both as one man. We held; but the rope broke midway between Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on the Matterhorn Glacier below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet in height.5
For the next two hours Whymper and Taugwalder plus son made their way cautiously down, unnerved and shaken. The survivors descended following their original line of ascent.
The vivid description of how four men – Croz, Hadow, Douglas and Hudson – were lost appeared in Whymper’s letter to The Times, 8 August 1865, giving the world an account of the most famous mountaineering accident of the nineteenth century. The letter concluded with a description of an unearthly vision that challenged the scientific world of the 1860s:
When, lo! a mighty arch appeared, rising about the Lyskamm, high into the sky. Pale, colourless, and noiseless, but perfectly sharp and defined, except where it was lost in the clouds, this and an earthly apparition seemed like a vision from another world; and, almost appalled, we watched with amazement the gradual development of two vast crosses, one on either side . . . It was a fearful and wonderful sight; unique in my experience, and impressive beyond description, coming at such a moment.6
‘Here then,’ according to the science historian Andrew St George, ‘was everything one could ask for from the individualistic strain of nineteenth-century thought and action. A group of talented amateur individuals pit themselves against sublime and raw nature; they gain the summit spectacularly, and some of their party fall to earth thousands of feet below; and to round off the most famous mountaineering accident of the century there was a celestial vision to tease the new scientific worlds of the 1860s. Rocks were always throwing up new challenges.’7
In August of the following year, 1866, Whymper returned to the Alps imbued with the new geological sensibility of the times. He determined to measure, record, analyse and explain the snow layers and snow temperatures at the summit of the Col de Valpelline, just north of Aosta. In one
year he had ceased to think of the mountain landscape as something to be feared and it became something to be analysed and quantified.
As the Romantic view lost out to the scientific view, the arts lost out to the sciences. No one cared about an individual perception but rather sought knowledge that could be exchanged as data and, as in scientific practice, duplicated and replicated. However, in a review for the Royal Institution in 1892, the lecturer John Tyndall recalled the sense of sadness that overwhelmed him when he first saw the Matterhorn, in the summer of 1868. He turned his thoughts to the time when the mountain was ‘more mountainous, more savage’ and ‘stronger’ than it now seemed. Holding on to this feeling, he continued: ‘Nor did thought halt there, but wandered on through molten worlds to that nebulous haze which philosophers have regarded, and with good reason, as the proximate source of all things. I tried to look at this universal cloud, containing within itself the prediction of all that has since occurred. Did that formless fog contain potentially the sadness with which I regarded the Matterhorn? Did the thought which now ran back to it simply return to its native home?’8
Whymper’s experience on the Matterhorn expressed an imaginative engagement with the world which was nonetheless impersonal. The novelty was neither an invention nor a discovery but rather a growth of a new way of thinking, a mode of thought that swiftly spread through the academic world. The work of palaeontologists, glaciologists and archaeologists in the nineteenth century was central to the arrival of scientific change in the form of four giant intellectual leaps forward.
The first was the idea of a field of physical activity occurring everywhere, even in vacuums. The second was the realisation that all matter is atomic. Indeed, by 1840, cell theory in biology and atomic theory in chemistry were established. Between the two, the nineteenth century established that electromagnetic effects – such as light waves – occurred within a continuous field and recognised ordinary matter as atomic.
The third big scientific idea of the nineteenth century was the conservation of energy. The fourth was the theory of evolution. These last two have had much to do with how we account for change or transition on a micro and macro scale, either during the short space of a chemical reaction or during the long time of evolutionary development. It was almost by chance that the theory of evolution developed in biology, for, at the start of the nineteenth century, the idea had been touched on by Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace applied Newton’s law of gravitation to the solar system (in his five-volume Celestial Mechanics, in which he applied Newton’s law of gravitation to the solar system; he was also responsible for early probability theory).
John Tyndall, with his retrospective wisdom, commented in 1892 that Kant and Laplace had concluded the various bodies of the solar system had once formed part of a single mass and that, as the ages rolled away, the planets were detached and the chief portion of the hot cloud compressed and formed our sun. He found in the earth evidence of fiery origin as it had the same substances as the sun.9
The search for physical origins gave rise to the search for biological origins. The first people to question the perceived timescale of man’s origins were Lyell, with his three books of Principles on matter, the Scottish publisher and natural philosopher, Robert Chambers, and the archaeologist Boucher de Perthes, who first discovered stone tools and flint weapons in the gravels of the Somme River in 1832.
To intellectuals of the early nineteenth century, the superiority of the sciences was clear: here was the way forward. In the analysis of John Stuart Mill: ‘no one dares to stand up against the scientific world, until he too has qualified himself to be named as a man of science; and no one does this without being forced, by irresistible evidence, to adopt the received opinion. The physical sciences, therefore (speaking of them generally), are continually growing, but never changing: in every age they receive indeed mighty improvements, but for them the age of transition is past.’10
Perhaps the most influential convert to the scientific approach through geology was Herbert Spencer. His search for a general theory was said by T. H. Huxley to be ‘the first attempt to deal, on scientific principles, with modern scientific facts and speculations’.11 What Spencer did was far more important than escorting George Eliot to the theatre.
Born in 1820, not dying until 1903, this gifted man led his century in persuading his contemporaries that the scientific approach was the rational way to look at physical phenomena. As agnostic, philosopher, geologist, economist, psychologist, phrenologist and iconoclast (and, it is claimed, inventor of the forerunner of the paperclip, as well as of the phrase the ‘survival of the fittest’), Spencer unified thinking on the physical world and, under the influence of Eliot and her partner George Henry Lewes, wrote the nine-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy. He led others in coming to his strong belief in the unity of scientific knowledge – his century’s great contribution to human philosophy.
12
DARWIN THE GEOLOGIST
While Charles Darwin is inescapably identified with biology, his enduring scientific love was always geology. Arriving at a new place and trying to puzzle out its past from its rocks and fossils was, he wrote to his sister in May 1832, more fun than ‘the first day’s partridge shooting’. Nothing could compare ‘to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue’.1 Having begun his journey round the world on the Beagle in December 1831, he found that he could hardly sleep at night for thinking about the geological phenomena he was seeing.
As a sixteen-year-old enrolled to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Darwin thought he had dismissed geology for ever. He abandoned his medical studies because he could not stand the blood and suffering he witnessed. On visiting an operating theatre he saw what he described as ‘two very bad operations, one on a child . . . I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform.’ He also gave up geology. Its lectures were so dull, he recalled in his autobiography, that he vowed ‘never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology or in any way to study the science’.2
He changed his mind, however, in January 1828 when he moved to Cambridge and fell under the spell of the brilliant Adam Sedgwick. Three years of study culminated in 1831 in their joint field trip to Wales to trace the junction of limestone cliffs and the Old Red Sandstone. Like Sedgwick, Darwin did not travel light. A young acquaintance, Robert Lowe, who accompanied him part of the way, remembered that Darwin ‘carried with him, in addition to his other burdens, a hammer that weighed 14 pounds’. So much did Lowe admire Darwin that ‘I walked twenty-two miles with him . . . a thing which I never did for anyone else before or since.’3
On returning from Wales, Darwin learned that his Cambridge mentor and friend, the botanist John Henslow, had recommended him to go as intellectual companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy on a journey to circumnavigate the globe. Darwin had the additional advantage of being a naturalist, although in fact there was an official naturalist on board the Beagle.
On the voyage Darwin brought an alert curiosity to his reading of Lyell’s Principles, the book Captain FitzRoy had shrewdly given to him before they left England. FitzRoy was acquainted with Lyell, who had asked him to look out for several features when he got to South America.
After an infuriating succession of delays, the Beagle eventually sailed from Plymouth on 27 December 1831. Its first stop came in January at the island of St Jago (São Tiago) in the Cape Verde islands, west of the bulge of North Africa. The tropical lushness of the island dazzled Darwin. He had never seen anything like its jungle, birds, insects, flowers and volcanic rocks. His powerful impressions of the island were used by his great-great-granddaughter, the poet Ruth Padel, in her 2009 poem ‘Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes’ – written for the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth:
Lava must once have streamed on the sea-floo
r here,
baking shells to white hard rock. Then a subterranean force
pushed everything up to make a new island.
Vegetation he’s never seen, and every step a new surprise.
‘New insects, fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been
for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’4
For Darwin, St Jago provided, apart from his brief time in Snowdonia, his first field research. Guided by Lyell’s Principles, he looked at nature as an example of processes still continuing. On St Jago he became ‘convinced of the infinite superiority of Lyell’s views over those advocated in any other work known to me’. He noticed a horizontal band of white rocks filled with seashells and coral standing thirty feet above the ground. There was only one possible explanation: a gradual uplifting of the land, a process that Lyell – and before him his eighteenth-century predecessor, James Hutton – had described. To Darwin the larger meaning was unmistakeable: the earth was ancient.
All his life Darwin would credit Lyell for his awakening on that island. As he wrote in his Autobiography:
The geology of St Jago is very striking yet simple: a stream of lava formerly flowed over the bed of the sea, formed of triturated recent shells and corals, which it baked into a hard white rock. Since then the whole island has been upheaved. But the line of white rock revealed to me a new and important fact, namely that there had been afterwards a subsidence round the craters, which had since been in action, and had poured forth lava. It then first dawned on me that I might write a book on the geology of the countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. That was a memorable hour to me . . .5
He was so much under Lyell’s influence that he likened the elevated white rock to Lyell’s Temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli. He also wrote home and asked to be proposed for membership of the Geological Society.
Reading the Rocks Page 13