In 1856, the Royal Geographical Society asked Richard Francis Burton, a master linguist already known for his Middle Eastern travels, and his sometime companion John Hanning Speke to seek the Nile’s source in east-central Africa. Departing from coastal Zanzibar, their first attempt ended with an attack by Somalis that saw a thrown spear pierce Burton’s face and Speke stabbed over a dozen times. On their second attempt, they reached the large, central Lake Tanganyika in the heart of equatorial Africa before Burton grew too weak to continue. Partly deaf after cutting a burrowing beetle from his own ear and temporarily blinded by disease, Speke pushed on alone to find a lush highlands around an even larger lake that he named Victoria. Speke and Burton were the first Europeans to see either lake. They split over whether Lake Victoria fed the Nile, and failed to find anything like the Mountains of the Moon, but their efforts laid a basis for British colonization of the region.
To mount an 1866 expedition to confirm the Nile’s source, the society tapped fifty-three-year-old David Livingstone, who had gained worldwide fame for his earlier journeys in southern Africa. Also entering by way of Zanzibar, but no longer up to the rigors of such travel, Livingstone was sick, disoriented, and low on supplies somewhere in the eastern Congo River basin by 1870. Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born journalist sent by the New York Herald to find him, reached the explorer in 1871. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley reported asking in an affected British understatement. “Yes, that is my name” came the reply that echoed around the globe.36 Hooked on the fame and money it brought him, Stanley returned to the region once more for the New York Herald and twice for Belgian King Leopold II, who wanted to claim and colonize the Congo. In 1889, on the last of these expeditions, Stanley sighted the snowcapped equatorial peaks that he identified as the fabled Mountains of the Moon but called by their local name, the Ruwenzori Range. Virtually straddling the equator, they rose on the border between Uganda and the Congo 150 miles east of Lake Victoria, their crystal-white summits gleaming with glaciers. Stanley did not climb or visit them, but his reports renewed their fame. Alpinists took note.
“I have been wishing and hoping and praying that some sensible man would go into Africa and explore that region of Ruwenzori thoroughly,” Stanley told the Royal Geographical Society twelve years later. “Some lover of Alpine climbing,” he stressed, who “would take Ruwenzori in hand and make a thorough work of it, explore it from top to bottom through all those enormous defiles and those deep gorges.”37 Here was a challenge fit for a royal climber and naval officer from a country with colonial ambitions in Africa. The duke set sail from Italy on April 16, 1906, to make thorough work of the unconquered range.
Many key members of the duke’s earlier Saint Elias and North Pole expeditions went with him, including Umberto Cagni and Joseph Petigax from the farthest-north party and photographer Vittorio Sella from the Saint Elias expedition. One of the duke’s favorite alpine guides, Cesare Ollier, went too. In all, there were twelve Italians on an expedition that grew exponentially to over four hundred porters, guides, soldiers, and servants by the time it left Lake Victoria and headed toward the mountains. Even some of the servants took servants. The porters carried nearly 10 tons of supplies in wood-covered tin cases. This was a right royal expedition with nothing wanting: it literally traveled with beds, baths, and beyond.
After having journeyed for twenty days by ship, boat, and train as far as Entebbe, the colonial capital of Britain’s Uganda Protectorate on the shore of Lake Victoria, the duke’s caravan headed on foot and horseback 180 miles to Fort Portal, the final British outpost on the western frontier. That took another fifteen days. Already nearly a mile high in altitude, the duke now wrote that the way became steep and the trail “detestable.” A “beating rain,” as he put it, left them “wading in mud” and “sinking to the knees” in swamps. “The Bakonjo, with 40 lbs. or more on their heads, walked like so many squirrels, bending so as to pass their loads under the trees, or leaping from trunk to trunk with such agility that we had difficulty to follow them,” he wrote in admiration about the native porters.38 Still, most of them were sent back or remained behind after reaching the edge of the snow slopes and glacial ice at 12,461 feet in altitude, where the duke established his base camp. Then the climbing began.
Finally reaching a ridge at some 14,000 feet on June 10, the duke and a small climbing party assessed the situation. “Opposite us,” he wrote, “appeared four distinct mountains, with snowy peaks far loftier than our standpoint.”39 Two more massifs rose behind him, making a total of six in the range, each with multiple peaks connected by saddles. All six rose over 15,000 feet; two topped 16,000 feet. Ridges ran between them easing access from one to another. Ancient glaciers clung to the sides of each but were small and clearly in retreat. New snows fed them only above about 14,600 feet. Over the next five weeks, the duke set out to make a circuit of all six mountains, map the terrain of each, and achieve as many first ascents of their multiple peaks as possible. In the end, his party claimed sixteen first ascents, including the range’s highest massif, the 16,800-foot Mount Stanley, whose twin summits (classified as separate peaks) he named Margherita and Alexandra after the Italian and British queens.
The duke made the three-day trek from his base camp to the glacier below the two highest peaks with two Italian alpine guides, one Italian porter, and nine Bakonjo porters, but only the Italians summited. An overhanging cornice of snow appeared to block the way just short of the top. “We climbed up by a very steep snow-slope to the cornice,” the duke reported. “The slope was so steep that my head almost touched the feet of the guide in front of me.” After searching among the pillars of ice melting from and supporting the cornice, he added, “We found at last a sort of ice chimney 6 feet high. Petigax, to climb up it, had to plant his nailed boots on the head and shoulders of the unfortunate Ollier.” Once up, Petigax lowered a rope for the rest. “The ridge was ours, and at the same time the top,” the duke exclaimed. An Italian flag with the embroidered motto “Dare and hope” was unfurled and planted upon the peak, which “up to that time had known only the breath of the tempest.” In a bit of imperialistic bravado typical of the age, the duke envisioned that the flag raising would serve “as an encouragement and support to all the hearty explorers who, among the still unknown and savage wilds of Africa, labour among hardships and perils for the advance of civilization.”40 The duke gave ideological meaning to mountaineering. He climbed for empire and later, as an admiral and senator, would participate in Italy’s conquest of Libya and colonization of Somalia.
ALREADY A CELEBRITY BEFORE the Ruwenzori expedition, the duke returned to global acclaim. Italians could speak of little else. “The victories that he and his companions have won over the forces of nature in the Arctic circle, as well as in Africa, will be valued in Italy not so much for what they add to the sum of human knowledge as for the noble example they set of enterprise and fortitude,” one correspondent reported from Rome.41 A leading Italian newspaper agreed, describing the expedition’s immense “moral” value to the nation and its people.42
Praise came from all quarters. With nearly a half million Italians living in New York City at the time, and Italians everywhere taking evident pride in the duke’s achievements, the New York Times cobbled together a full-page article celebrating the expedition even before the duke issued his first public statement about it.43 The duke’s initial lecture on the expedition filled Rome’s historic opera house. The entire royal family, ministers of state, and much of the diplomatic corps attended. The Royal Geographical Society hosted his second speech five days later in London’s twenty-five-hundred-seat Queen’s Hall with King Edward VII and the future King George V present, the first time a reigning monarch had attended one of the society’s programs. Both lectures were oversubscribed and punctuated with loud and repeated cheers. “He possesses great courage, great coolness, and great will,” the British king said of the duke.44 These were canonical virtues of the Edwardian era. Leading mountainee
rs joined in hailing the duke, less for the technical difficulty of the climb than for its organization and execution.45 Much as with Mount Saint Elias, the greatest obstacles to climbing in the Ruwenzori range lay in reaching the base and having sufficient dry, clear weather to gain the summits.
The Italian government capitalized on the duke’s stature by promoting him to the command of a naval squadron and sending it on worldwide goodwill voyages beginning in 1907. In that window between the spread of far-flung global empires in the mid-1800s and the advent of effective military aircraft in the early 1900s, surface warships became a marker of national power, and publicly displaying them served a significant role in peacetime diplomacy. In the same year, for example, President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched America’s first blue-water navy, the so-called Great White Fleet, composed of sixteen white battleships with support vessels, on a fifteen-month-long circumnavigation of the globe designed to strengthen alliances, encourage trade, and reinforce overseas holdings. Now an admiral in the Italian navy, the duke had much the same mission, and indeed one of his first stops was to call upon Roosevelt, a fellow outdoorsman who had closely followed his exploits.
This 1907 American visit coincided with tricentennial celebrations for the founding of Jamestown, with the Italian squadron joining the festivities in and around the Chesapeake Bay. Roosevelt met with the duke at Jamestown and invited him to a state dinner at the White House, where he reportedly first met the smart and spirited American who became his love interest, Katherine Elkins. The duke also sailed on the presidential yacht to Mount Vernon, where he laid a wreath at George Washington’s tomb. By some accounts, the U.S. president and the Italian duke talked more about mountaineering than foreign policy. From the Chesapeake, the duke’s flagship, the Varese, proceeded to New York City for a courtesy call that equally excited the local Italian American community and the elite American Alpine and Arctic clubs.
“The arrival of the Varese had been anticipated for days by New York’s large Italian population,” the press reported one day after the ship sailed into port, “and a great crowd of them stood alongshore and watched the ship as she rode at anchor.”46 Lines formed for tours of the Varese, with people waiting hours for launches that would take them to the ship. “In the crowd of enthusiastic Italians were hundreds of women,” another article noted, “every one of whom fought for the chance to get on board.”47 All hoped for a glimpse of the duke, and perhaps that he would catch a glimpse of them. He was the celebrity who drew them to an otherwise ordinary navy cruiser. Newspaper reports inevitably described the duke as olive skinned and appearing much younger than his thirty-four years. Some mentioned his elegant dress, good looks, and stylish Italian cigarettes.
The response was much the same on shore. Besieged with social invitations, among those that he accepted was one to a banquet in his honor hosted by the American Alpine Club in the grand ballroom of the newly opened Hotel Astor. The long guest list included members of the Peary Arctic Club; Robert Peary himself, recently back from his 1905–06 polar expedition, during which he claimed to have beaten the Italians’ farthest-north mark by some 30 miles; and David Brainard, the surviving member of the Greely expedition’s farthest-north party. The only woman present was the wealthy mountaineer Annie Peck, who could then claim the western hemisphere altitude record for her 1904 assault on Bolivia’s Mount Illampu and would confirm it at age fifty-eight with her 1908 first ascent of Nevado Huascarán’s 22,000-foot northern peak. At the time, the duke still held the altitude record for the United States and Canada unless one credited polar explorer Frederick Cook’s disputed claim to have summited Denali in 1906. “His Royal Highness was not content with the rank and wealth which came to him by birth,” Peary said of the duke in the evening’s closing remarks. “He went out to meet the forces of nature, and, strong in his self-reliance and courage, matched himself against them and triumphed. His noted achievements have won him a high place among the explorers of the world.”48
Upon its commissioning later in 1907, the duke was given command of the Italian navy’s sleek new Regina Elena, then the world’s fastest battleship, and directed to continue his goodwill touring. In December, it took him to Glasgow and his gala reception at the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, as word began spreading that he would aim next for a world altitude record in the Himalayas or Karakoram.
BY 1900, THE TWO words Himalayas and Karakoram had merged together in the Western mind, or the second was subsumed by the first, to denote a single place of untold wonder and natural splendor. It was only as Britain gained effective control over India during the mid-1800s and extended its Great Trigonometrical Survey of the subcontinent north that Europeans recognized the Himalayas and Karakoram as the rooftop of the world and measured many of their tallest peaks from a series of lower-level observation stations. And it was not until near the century’s end that first ascents in the Alps and elsewhere became sufficiently passé for top European mountaineers to begin looking toward these spectacularly tall and exotically remote mountain ranges for new challenges.
The duke first considered making a Himalayan climb after seeing the world’s third-highest mountain, Kangchenjunga, from a viewpoint near Darjeeling during an 1895 goodwill visit to India, but an outbreak of the plague and famine in the area compelled him to set aside this plan. By then, with British dominance pushing north across the subcontinent and Imperial Russia expanding south into central Asia in what became known as the Great Game between those two powers for geopolitical influence over the region, Tibet and Nepal had long since sealed their borders to outsiders, cutting off access to Mount Everest and leaving K2 in the Karakoram Range northwest of the central Himalayas as the highest accessible peak for European mountaineers. At 28,281 feet, it is the world’s second-highest mountain. Climbing K2 became the duke’s goal for 1909.
Chapter 5
The Peary Way
JULY 4, 1908, INDEPENDENCE Day in New York City, and everything stood ready for Robert Peary’s final assault on the North Pole. Peary’s custom-built ship, the Roosevelt—named for the nation’s young, vigorous president, then in his final year of office—was heavily loaded, decked out in holiday bunting, and receiving a steady stream of visitors at the 24th Street Recreation Pier on the East River.
“There is no doubt about it,” Peary’s longtime aide and sledging companion Matthew Henson told reporters about the expedition’s prospects for reaching the pole. “I am not a weather prophet, and I don’t know much about science, but something in me—I don’t know what it is—tells me that the Commander will get there this time.”1
Cheering crowds lined the shore and a flotilla of yachts with whistles tooting filled the river as the Roosevelt cast off, heading to nearby Oyster Bay Harbor where the president himself waited to inspect the ship at his Long Island estate, Sagamore Hill.
“It’s going to be just a bully trip,” Roosevelt told the crew following his inspection, “and I’d like to be with you when you find the pole.”2
OVER THE PRIOR DECADE, Theodore Roosevelt had become Peary’s most visible booster. Before Roosevelt’s ascension to the presidency following William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Peary had enough backers in political circles to secure a succession of paid leaves from the navy for his Arctic expeditions despite objections from his superiors. Indeed, he had spent half his navy career on leave. After the disappointing results of the 1898–1902 venture and his physical disability, Peary feared that the navy would harness him to a desk. Instead, with Roosevelt’s support, he was promoted to the rank of commander in 1902 and assigned the following year to head a commission studying naval facilities in Europe, where he met with fellow explorers, learned about the latest Antarctic expeditions, and received honors from various geographic societies.
“All that I can do as President to give Peary a free hand and hearty backing for his next effort to go to the Pole, will be done,” Roosevelt assured a friend in 1903.3 The American Geographical Society chose Peary as its pre
sident that year, and he presided over the International Geographical Congress when it met in Washington a year later. A further operation on his feet, removing parts of his two remaining toes and shifting his soles forward, allowed him to walk with a less visible shuffle. He appeared capable of another polar trek.
Roosevelt’s role was crucial at this juncture. Even as some longtime backers resisted Peary’s pleas to fund yet another expedition, Roosevelt directed the navy to grant Peary further paid leave. “It was a great pleasure to issue the order. I feel you have rendered service not only to America, but to all the world, by what you have done, and any way I can help you I am desirous of doing so,” he told Peary.4 “The attainment of the Pole should be your main object. Nothing short will suffice,” the order read. “Our national pride is involved in the undertaking.”5
The leave was for three years beginning in September 1903. Much of it would be spent raising funds and supervising construction of a ship, because Peary’s new plan called for his most elaborate effort yet. Gone were any hopes of reaching the pole with a small party living off the land. Peary now knew where the land ended in the north, and that the route to the pole lay over shifting sea ice from roughly 83° north longitude on. One party could not carry enough supplies to get from the land to the pole and back. Support parties were needed, and sledging must begin as far north as possible.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 11