To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  Early in 1852, Smith opened a one-person show, “The Ascent of Mont Blanc,” at a 430-seat London theater. Expecting a short run, he booked the hall for only a few weeks. Attracting full houses from the outset, however, the show ran for over six years and two thousand performances—a record for a production of its kind—with attendance approximated at a hundred thousand persons per year. On a stage set like an Alpine chalet and with artwork depicting the passing scene moving behind him, Smith related his expedition in a light, instructional lecture laced with comic patter songs of the type later featured in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. “Nobody but Albert Smith could give a description of such an enterprise so entirely suited to the appreciation of Londoners,” one review commented. “He is quite as intent upon the fun and slang with which he meets as upon the grandeur of nature.”14 Within the first few months, Prince Albert, the queen’s consort, and the eleven-year-old Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, attended. Soon Queen Victoria called for a command performance at court, and, by the end of the run, the young prince was being guided across glaciers at Chamonix by Smith. “He has, in truth, identified himself with Mont Blanc,” a reviewer wrote about Smith, “and no Londoner can think of its snow-capped summit without seeing our adventurous author serenely seated at its loftiest apex.”15 His performances made the mountain seem suitable for climbing by any number of Britons.

  And climb Britons did, by the thousands. Where only about forty parties had reached the top of Mont Blanc before Smith, over twice that number completed the climb over the next five years alone. One of those groups included the first Englishwoman to reach its summit: “a lady,” the Times reported, accompanied by her husband and nine guides “who paid her the utmost attention during the whole route.”16 Many British climbers now wrote in letters back to the Times that everything looked much as Smith had said. He was both their inspiration and their interpreter. In 1857, Smith cofounded the Alpine Club, the first association “for gentlemen who also climb,” as one officer later depicted it, with most members drawn from London’s rising professional class of barristers, bankers, and businessmen.17 Nearly three hundred such gentlemen had joined by 1862, all with at least some alpine experience. More than five hundred signed up over the next three decades. Women were excluded until 1975.

  By the time of the Alpine Club’s founding, the editors of the Times had heard enough about climbing Mont Blanc. Noting that “the feat has now been accomplished so often that it is scarcely worthwhile to register its reoccurrence,” the editors announced that the Times would no longer print letters about it because they all read the same and sounded of Smith. “If any more daring traveler will try his fortune at Chimborazo or Mount Everest, and his efforts are crowned with success, we promise him all the immortality which it lies in our power to bestow,” the editors declared.18 In so saying, England’s newspaper of record was following an emerging trend. With most of its major peaks quickly falling to climbing enthusiasts, mountaineers were already looking beyond the Alps for adventure.

  IN 1865, THE MOST prominent unclimbed peak in the Alps was the dramatically pointed, nearly symmetrical Matterhorn, which was fast gaining the prestige that climbers once reserved for Mont Blanc. Situated on the border between Switzerland and that portion of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia incorporated into Italy in 1860, it had foiled every attempt to scale. Alpinists began calling it unclimbable. With the mountain’s four sheer faces appearing particularly hopeless, attention focused on the four ridges where adjoining faces meet, yet even these were steep and had rotten sections and overhanging ledges. The growing mystique of the mountain’s invincibility served to attract more climbers, and soon it became the focus of a fierce international competition for the first ascent, with Italian mountaineers seeking to conquer it for their newly unified nation and British climbers striving to extend their country’s global reach in exploration and geographic discovery.

  Unified Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel II, came from Piedmont-Sardinia’s House of Savoy, which counted many hikers and climbers among its members. In this sense, the Duke of the Abruzzi, the king’s grandson, followed a family tradition in mountaineering, though he far surpassed any of his relatives in this respect. Further, in the 1860 accord that made Victor Emmanuel king of Italy, Piedmont-Sardinia gave up Chamonix and much of old Savoy to France, lending added symbolic meaning to the Matterhorn over Mont Blanc for Italians. Certainly, the duke would make it a prime target for climbing once he came of age. In the meantime, however, an earlier generation of well-known climbers fought over making the first ascent of the Matterhorn, the so-called mountain of mountains in the Alps.

  Among the many British contenders for the crown, Edward Whymper was the most determined. The son of an engraver and an engraver himself, Whymper first went to the Alps in 1860 at the age of twenty to make a series of scenic engravings for an Alpine Club member. He hoped that experience on glacial terrain might win him appointment as an illustrator on a future British Arctic expedition. Whymper had a lust for adventure, a passion for travel, and a fascination with the exotic at a time when all of those magnets pulled toward poles or mountains. Reading about the Arctic searches for Franklin’s lost expedition and attending Smith’s “Ascent of Mont Blanc” had set his compass. One visit to the Alps made him a mountaineer, and the challenge posed by the Matterhorn proved irresistible. Seven times Whymper tried between 1861 and 1865, and seven times he failed, but always by a southern (or Italian) route. Successful ascents of other mountains made his name, yet he kept coming back to the Matterhorn. Arranging for another attempt in 1865, however, he found Italian guides refusing to work with him because by then the international competition had heated to the point where they would only assist Italians. So Whymper went to Zermatt and tried a northern approach from the Swiss side, on the northeast, or Hörnli, ridge.

  On some of his earlier efforts, Whymper had engaged the Italian guide Jean-Antoine Carrel, who in 1857, with two relatives, made the first attempt to climb the Matterhorn. By his repeated attempts, Carrel proved as determined to succeed as any Englishman. Living near the mountain’s base, sometimes as a guide and sometimes as the principal climber, Carrel tried again and again from the southern side, once reaching nearly 14,000 vertical feet on the southwest, or Lion, ridge—about 700 feet short of the summit—before being blocked by an unpassable cleft. Whymper sought to hire Carrel again in 1865, but by then, two deeply nationalistic founders of the Italian Alpine Club, geologist Felice Giordano and Italian finance minister Quintino Sella, had already secured his services, in an effort to assure that an Italian would get to the top first.

  “That fellow whose life seems to depend on the Matterhorn is here,” Giordano wrote to Sella about Whymper from the Italian mountain town of Breuil-Cervinia in July. “I have taken all the best men away from him; and yet he is so enamored of the mountain that he may go with others.”19 When Whymper realized Giordano’s plan, the race was on. “I had been bamboozled and humbugged,” Whymper complained, but by taking the Hörnli ridge by way of Zermatt, he expressed his hope that “the wily ones might be outwitted after all.”20

  Rushing to Zermatt from Italy, Whymper encountered two small British climbing parties with their guides. They made common cause. This brought the total to four British climbers—Whymper and Charles Hudson, who had made the first guideless ascent of Mont Blanc ten years earlier, the eighteen-year-old Scottish lord Francis Douglas, who had also done some notable climbing, and Hudson’s inexperienced nineteen-year-old companion, Douglas Hadow, son of a shipping magnate—plus three guides, including the renowned Michel Croz from Chamonix. While going only a short way up the Hörnli ridge on the first day, July 13, they found it easier than it looked from Zermatt. Starting before dawn on the 14th, they swung around to the east face, which Whymper described as “rising for three thousand feet like a huge natural staircase,” but stayed near the ridge and twice resorted to it.21 Still, the way remained easier than expected and the party made it to withi
n 700 vertical feet of the summit by 10 A.M. Having reached the perpendicular portion that makes the east face appear unclimbable from below, the party shifted to the icy, snow-covered north face and then back to the ridge for the final stretch. Whymper described only this last part of the climb as difficult. “At 11:40 p.m. the world was at our feet and the Matterhorn was conquered,” he exclaimed. “Hurrah!”22

  Now they looked for the Italians, and spotted them over 1,000 feet below struggling up the same southwest ridge that had frustrated so many earlier climbing parties. Whymper and Croz shouted to them at first, but, after getting no response, both men began hurling stones down the mountain toward them. From this assault, Whymper reported, “The Italians turned and fled.” They regrouped two days later and, led by Carrel, fought their way up the Lion ridge to the summit, if only to show that Italians could climb the mountain from the Italian side. “He was the man,” Whymper later said about Carrel, “of all those who attempted the ascent of the Matterhorn, who most deserved to be the first upon its summit.”23

  For the British party, catastrophe struck on the way down. Roped together for the icy, difficult part near the summit, Croz led the way with the inexperienced Hadow next in line. Whymper and the two local guides brought up the rear. Hadow, who had been the only one having trouble climbing up, needed close attention from Croz. Having laid aside his ice ax to assist Hadow in setting his feet, Croz was turning around when Hadow slipped onto his back and slid forward with his feet hitting the unprepared Croz in the small of the back, sending both hurling down the slope. Without an ice ax, Croz could not self-arrest. The jerk on the rope dislodged Hudson and Douglas, sending them downward too. The two local guides and Whymper braced themselves to hold the rope, but it snapped between Douglas and the lower guide. “From the moment the rope broke it was impossible to help them,” Whymper wrote. “For two or three seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downward on their backs, and spreading out their hands endeavouring to save themselves; they then disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorn glacier below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet in height.”24 Only limbless torsos were later found, and no part of Douglas.

  SUCH WAS THE PRESTIGE of mountaineering and the celebrity status of climbers that the first ascent of the Matterhorn and its tragic conclusion made front-page news, and Whymper’s later book about the episode became a worldwide bestseller. Some commentators used the occasion to condemn climbing as a wanton waste of civilization’s finest youth. The death of Douglas, who was described in the Times of London as “the heir presumptive to one of our noblest titles,” the Marquess of Queensberry, and “one of the best young fellows in the world,” drew particular lamentations. “Is it common sense?” the Times asked about mountaineering. “Is it not wrong?”25 Charles Dickens agreed, writing about the selfish spirit of climbers, “We shall be told that ‘mountaineering’ is a manly exercise. It is so, inasmuch as it is not womanly. But it is not noblemanly.”26 Moved by the deaths, Queen Victoria asked her prime minister about ways for the government to discourage the craze or make it safer.

  But risk was an essential part of mountaineering, defenders of the sport shot back in the ensuing public debate, and this was good for Britain. The leading Victorian essayist and art critic John Ruskin, who had once denounced “the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni” and berated “shrieking” climbers for despoiling the quietude of nature,27 now wrote in defense of climbing, “Some experience of distinct peril, and the acquirements of quick and calm action in its presence, are necessary elements, at some period of life, in the formation of manly character.”28 Arguing that mountaineering made men courageous, novelist Anthony Trollope expressed his hope that the “accident on the Matterhorn may not repress the adventurous spirit of a single English mountain-climber.”29 Oxford historian and alpine enthusiast H. B. George added, “The climbing spirit, like the love of all kindred pursuits, is essentially a form of that restless spirit, that love of action for its own sake, of exploring the earth and subduing it, which has made England the great colonizer of the world.”30 In short, hailing “the pure love of adventure” that motivated climbing, the Illustrated London News concluded, “It has given us the empire.”31

  Like polar exploration, mountaineering had become part of the culture in Britain and much of the Western world by the late nineteenth century. Zermatt sharply increased in popularity as a tourist destination after the accident, with ever more people seeking to climb the Matterhorn. For example, noting that the mountain “possesses a certain somber interest from the number of people that have lost their lives on it,” Theodore Roosevelt, scarcely a year after graduating from Harvard College, left his young wife behind to scale the Matterhorn on his honeymoon in 1881. “I was anxious to go up it because it is reputed very difficult,” he wrote home to his sister. “There is enough peril to make it exciting.”32

  Roosevelt’s words spoke for a generation. In 1894, fresh out of boarding school at Harrow, a young Winston Churchill toured Zermatt but chose to climb nearby Monte Rosa because it was higher than the Matterhorn. That same year the legendary British climber Albert Mummery, who in 1879 had made the first ascent of the Matterhorn by the northwest, or Zmutt, ridge, led the twenty-one-year-old Duke of the Abruzzi up that same treacherous route. By this time, the duke had already climbed Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. He was the son of a king; Roosevelt came from a long line of wealthy businessmen; Churchill was born in a palace to an aristocratic family. The children of privilege yet with driving ambitions to make their own names, each of them sought adventure and found it in climbing. From middle-class families, comfortable but not rich, Whymper and Mummery did so as well and gained admission to the gentlemanly Alpine Club.

  In climbing, or at least while climbing, the era’s rigid class barriers broke down between upper- and middle-class mountaineers, and even among them and their working-class guides such as Carrel and Croz. With a few notable exceptions, however, the gender divide persisted in mountaineering, much as it did on polar explorations, at least in part because manly danger was part of their appeal and male comradery was perceived as one of their virtues. These pursuits, their proponents maintained, built a man’s character in a supposedly decadent age and thus, by convention, were reserved for men. While hiking in a high alpine region of Switzerland during the 1880s, German writer Friedrich Nietzsche was inspired to pen Thus Spake Zarathustra, which contained the line that called to his age: “Two things are wanted by the true man: danger and play.”33

  THE FIRST AND SECOND ascents of the Matterhorn, the last remaining prominent unclimbed alpine peak, marked the end of one era in mountaineering and the start of another. Climbing enthusiasts had already started to look beyond the Alps for new challenges, and now the trickle became a tide. With all the Alps’ major peaks climbed, English writer and Alpine Club president Leslie Stephen wrote in 1868, “One great inducement of climbing [them] has all but disappeared.” And “when there is a railroad to Timbuctoo, and another through the central regions of Asia,” he added, a later generation “will feel on a large scale the same regret for the old days, when the earth contained an apparently inexhaustible expanse of unknown regions, as the Alpine traveler now feels on a very diminutive scale.”34 If he had added the Andes to this list of little-known regions, Stephen would have neatly summarized where Alpinists began looking for adventure: Africa, Asia, and South America.

  Well into the nineteenth century, Europeans believed that the Andes were the world’s loftiest mountain range, and, although it had lost its preeminence to the Himalayas by midcentury, it was there that many climbers looked for the next challenge. After his first ascent of the Matterhorn and two expeditions to Greenland, for example, in 1880, Whymper, with former rivals Jean-Antoine and Louis Carrel, made the first ascent of Ecuador’s 20,000-foot-high Chimborazo, which Europeans once deemed the world’s tallest mountain. When some doubted the feat, Whymper did it again by another route later in the same year. Betwe
en these two climbs, along with several other first ascents in the Andes, he summited Cotopaxi and spent a night on top to study the effects of altitude sickness.

  Whymper then turned to the Canadian Rockies for first ascents. The Duke of the Abruzzi looked this way too in 1897 for his first ascent of Mount Saint Elias, which straddles the border between Canada and the United States and is the second tallest mountain in both. Other leading Alpinists resorted to the Caucasus and Norway during the period. Both Whymper and the duke considered tackling the Himalayas prior to 1900 but on-and-off political restrictions on access pushed them elsewhere. For the duke, equatorial Africa came next.

  PRIOR TO 1850, FEW Europeans had ventured beyond the coasts of equatorial Africa to explore its vast interior. Those who tried usually succumbed to disease. As long as there were other places to explore and exploit, Westerners stayed away. On Western maps, it was terra incognita or filled in with features drawn from myth and legend. One of the oldest such legends held that snow-covered mountains—the ancient Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy called them “the Mountains of the Moon”—fed the Nile River from a lake district in central Africa. In the 1850s, imperialist-minded Europeans began looking beyond their nations’ coastal trading posts toward the African interior for further exploration and expansion. The ancient accounts of mountains and lakes offered hope that something other than malarial jungles and barren deserts lay there.

  No one nurtured those hopes more than the wealthy former British army officer who then headed the Royal Geographical Society, Roderick Murchison. “The adventurous travelers who shall first lay down the true position of these equatorial snowy mountains,” Murchison declared in his 1852 presidential address to the society, “and who shall satisfy us that they not only throw off the waters of the White Nile to the north, but some to the east, and will further answer the query, whether they may not also shed off some streams to a great lacustrine and sandy interior of this continent, will be justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age to geographical science!”35 The race was on to find the source of the Nile and, hopefully, a fertile, temperate interior highlands in East Africa suitable for European settlement, which drew them toward Uganda.