The great Napoleonic venture died at Waterloo in 1815, and the Alpine nations which had hitherto been under French control reverted more or less smoothly to their previous status. Britain, however, was left in something of a limbo. It had been at war for almost a generation and with the arrival of peace, and the surprising realisation that it owned most of the globe, it did not quite know how to dispose of itself. John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, came up with an answer: exploration. Under his aegis naval expeditions streamed out of the Thames for the next thirty years, seeking now the route of the River Niger, now the North Pole, now the South Pole, now the North-West Passage. A spirit of enquiry pervaded the national consciousness. Not everybody, however, was suited to Barrow’s brand of exploration. For these people - who did not have the qualifications, for whom the goal was too frightening or too far, and who had no stomach for pemmican, hardtack, salt beef or, on occasion, human flesh - the next best thing was the Alps.
Britons once again rushed to the mountains, led by a new breed of Romantic poets and writers. In 1816 Byron, Shelley and Shelley’s wife Mary made a trip to Geneva that left lasting impressions. The two men applied all their skills to poems in honour of the mountains and Mary Shelley found an infatuation with ice that would later produce, with a bit of help from Barrow’s Arctic explorers, the story of Frankenstein. The first likeness between the Alps and the Arctic had been suggested by Bourrit who, after a climb, wrote in 1803: ‘Everything was amazing here, no less frightening than were the icy Poles to the bold navigators.’1 Mary Shelley met similar conditions, finding in the Alps the same wintery emptiness that epitomised the Arctic. She did not climb anything of note, but she would have agreed with Bourrit’s view from the Brévent: ‘you look [at the mountains] as if they were a wasteland, seeing nothing to suggest that it is a known world … You would think yourself on an uninhabited planet.’2 Into wastes similar to these strode Frankenstein at the end of her hugely influential novel which came out in 1818.
The views were what had inspired Gesner, Haller, Rousseau, Goethe, Wordsworth, Turner and all earlier Romantics who had come to the Alps. And the views, once again, were what most impressed the next generation. ‘I never knew - I never imagined - what mountains were before,’ Shelley gasped on his first visit to Chamonix. ‘The immensity of the aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon my sight, a sentiment of ecstatic wonder not unallied to madness.’3 As he wrote of his ‘Ode to Mont-Blanc’, ‘it was composed under the immediate impression of the close and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.’4 Byron was similarly moved, as he tried to ‘lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me’.5 The result was some of his most famous works - Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Prisoner of Chillon and Manfred.
What the Romantics never did, however, was to look beyond the view. The wildness was tameable, the solemnity was accessible, as Saussure and, perhaps even more so, Bourrit had done their best to show. But this was not desirable. While the Romantics did not hesitate to engage themselves in other areas that caught their fancy, the Alps for some reason had to remain pure and inviolate. Perhaps this was because climbing them was simply too unglamorous. Swimming across the Hellespont, as club-footed Byron did in 1810, was fine; succumbing to consumption in Rome (Keats, 1821) was highly fashionable; being burned on a funeral pyre on the shore at Viareggio (Shelley, 1822) was even better; dying at Missolonghi while supposedly fighting for Greek independence (Byron again, 1824) was outstanding. Such acts mingled modern drama with evocations of classical myth. But where was the glamour, what was there to stir the soul, in being led up and down a big hill at some cost and returning half-frozen, half-burned and snow-blind to a village full of tourists?
One could not find Rousseau’s noble savages on the top of Mont Blanc. Nor, for that matter, could one find much noble savagery in the valleys. The prevalence of cretinism and goitre produced whole communities of deformity. ‘The people in these exquisite vallies [sic] are without exception the most hideous creatures you can conceive,’ wrote one visitor. ‘The men are bad enough but the women are fearful, nay perfect hags, and the children wretched little distorted creatures, some without any arms and others half a hand. The women, every second one we saw, had a huge goitre which they appear to consider rather ornamental than other for they never cover them but hang necklaces upon them and crosses &c. Their teeth for the most part fallen out and their skins dark brown, wrinkled & dirty, and horned [sic] expressions make them look perfect Harpies.’6* In these circumstances it was not surprising that the Romantics preferred the dream to the reality.
Yet they did encourage a shift in attitude towards the Alps. Their message was part of a trend which Haller and Rousseau had started in the eighteenth century, but the manner in which they delivered it was fresh and vibrant - also, thanks to growing populations and increased prosperity, more people heard it. The Alps entered every literate person’s vocabulary and, if some remained unshaken, there were thousands who were passionately stirred. Thunder-torn banners of freedom flapped against the storm, stars scrawled celestial poetry across the sky, and solitude whispered in quiet, insistent tones amidst the snow. Castle crags, crawling glaciers and moon-freezing crystals tugged at the most moribund of imaginations. Lord Brougham, who travelled through Switzerland in 1816, wrote that: ‘It is a country to be in for two hours, or two and a half, if the weather is fine, and no longer. Ennui comes on the third hour, and suicide attacks you before night.’7 Even he, however, was uplifted when he met the Shelleys. Nobody had encountered imagery or language like this before. The post-Napoleonic poets were the film stars of their time - particularly Byron, who was idolised across the continent - and where they had been so others wished to tread.
Ordinary people came to the Alps in the Romantics’ wake, and while admiring the beauty kept a similar distance from the heights. A guidebook of 1818 stated that ‘No one ought to expose himself to the dangers, fatigue, and considerable expense, which an excursion to Mont-Blanc renders indispensable, allured by the deceitful expectation of extraordinary magnificence.’8 Visitors were advised to stay in the valleys and content themselves with hikes from hamlet to hamlet: ‘Every young man in the bloom of health and of life must be capable of travelling over distant climes with his knapsack at his back and a stick in his hands,’9 enthused the book’s editor. Twelve months were advised for a full appreciation of the Alps; a youth willing to sleep rough might scamper through them in four. In the back papers of the same volume there appeared this advertisement:
Travellers wishing to proceed direct to Switzerland may hear of Mr. Emery, the agent, at Mr. Recordon’s, Cockspurstreet, Charing-cross; or the White Bear, Piccadilly. The journey is performed in sixteen days, allowing two at Paris, and sleeping every night at some town. The proprietors furnish lodgings and provisions. The carriage is roomy and convenient - the passengers are limited to six. One cwt. of luggage is allowed to each, and the charge is only twenty guineas English.10
Thousands went to Mr Recordon’s or the White Bear every year, and therein lay another reason for the Romantics’ ambivalence towards the Alps: they had become too touristy. Shelley was aghast in 1816 when he met the proprietor of Chamonix’s nascent Natural History Museum. He was ‘the very vilest specimen of that vile species of quack that, together with the whole army of aubergistes and guides, subsist on the weakness and credulity of travellers as leeches subsist on the sick’.11 Byron was even more dismissive five years later: ‘Switzerland is a curst selfish swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear their inhabitants, and still less their English visitors; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over the cantons of Geneva &c, I immediately gave up the thought.’12
Ghastly as the valleys may have been, and however forbidding their surrounding peaks may have appeared, there were still a few who wanted to meet the Alps at close quarters. In 1816 Count de Lusi of the Prussian army made a brave attempt on Mont Blanc. He fell back at the ‘derniers rochers’ and descended with bad grace, forcing his guides to sign a statement that no Frenchman had got so far. In 1818 the Polish Count Matzewski reached the summit, which was ‘sublime beyond everything he had previously conceived’.13 He asked that he remain anonymous when his account was published in Blackwood’s Magazine; he was driven not by the need for fame, he said, but by ‘curiosity and the pleasure of doing what is not done every day’.14 In 1819 two Americans named Jeremiah van Rensselear and Howard visited Europe on a tour and decided to give Mont Blanc a go. They drank vinegar and water on the way up - this concoction, a common cure for scurvy, was supposed to counteract altitude sickness - and having reached the top descended in such a state of snow-blindness that they had to return to Geneva in a blacked-out carriage, having ‘purchased perhaps too dearly the indulgence of their curiosity’.15 The same year Captain J. Undrell of the Royal Navy followed suit, carrying with him a modest variety of instruments: ‘old Dr. Paccard supplied me with all he had’.16* Undrell made his guides drink a toast to ‘good old England’, and came down ‘suffering greatly from inflamed eyes’. Then, in 1820, Dr Hamel instigated Mont Blanc’s first disaster.
Hitherto, much had been made of the Alps’ dangers but as far as most people were aware they existed only in Bourrit’s heated imagination. In 1791, a young Zürich official named Escher had fallen to his death from an unsteady rock on the Col de Balme. Another young man with a similar name, Eschen, had wandered from his guides on 8 August 1800, carrying the third bulky volume of Saussure’s Voyages, and had dropped 100 feet to his doom on Le Buet. (Bourrit, whose pocket-sized books had been eschewed by Eschen, wrote that it was a ‘deplorable death, and one that possibly awaits other travellers imprudent enough to ignore the advice that I have given’.17) And one or two people had drowned in the River Arveyron while admiring its source at the base of the Mer de Glace. But these were isolated incidents, few in number and, with the exception of Eschen’s fall, occurring below the snowline. Nobody had been entombed in a crevasse, nobody had been crushed by a falling serac, nobody had been swept away by an avalanche, nobody had frozen to death. Generally, therefore, the public remained blasé about Alpine perils. They were wrong to do so.
Those who read of the Alps read mostly the accounts of the scientists who had climbed them. These journals dwelled on the dangers their authors had faced but did not tell the full story. They described neither the scale nor the continuity of Alpine erosion. The extremes of climate which bedevilled travellers were barely hinted at. There was not the slightest suggestion that the Alps were as inhospitable a zone as could be encountered in Europe. Every winter, for example, dozens of people perished on the passes alone. In 1825 the artist William Brockedon discovered a morgue attached to the hospice on the Great St Bernard Pass in which the annual tally of corpses was stored. He was chilled by the sight, especially as it was only a few steps from the room in which he had recently dined.
Here, the bodies of the unfortunate people who have perished in these mountains have been placed, left with their clothes on, to assist the recognition by their friends, if they have any. In these high regions there is scarcely soil enough to bury them: and it is impossible to break it up when the frosts are so intense. Here they have been placed just as they were found; and upon looking through the grated windows the bodies are seen in the postures in which they have perished. Here they have ‘dried up and withered:’ for the evaporation is so rapid at this height that the foulness of mortality is less offensive than in warmer situations; and the bodies are long preserved owing to their having dried without decay. Upon some the clothes had remained after eighteen years, though tattered like a gibbet wardrobe. Some of these bodies presented a hideous aspect; part of the bones of the head were exposed and blanched, whilst black integuments were attached to other parts of the face: we particularly remarked this in a sitting peasant. A mother and her child were among the latest victims; several bodies were standing against the wall, upon the accumulated heaps of their miserable predecessors, presenting an appalling scene.18
When the bodies finally collapsed their bones were stored in an ossuary that Brockedon could just make out on the far side of the room. ‘They might be removed and buried in summer,’ he wrote, ‘but they are left to their long decay by the monks, probably from a religious feeling, to have before them these memorials of mortality.’19
The Great St Bernard Pass killed seven or eight people a year and there were other passes like it. Except in high summer, it was impossible to tell what conditions would be like. You could be walking along in clear sun and then a snowstorm would descend. At these heights the snow was thin and dry, forming not sticky mounds but soft drifts that covered the track in less than an hour. Unwary travellers plunged thigh-deep through the snow, lost their way and stumbled over a cliff. They were mostly smugglers, but sometimes, as Brockedon told, they could be an ordinary family caught unawares. Far more people died every year trying to cross the Alps than ever perished on the high peaks.
And far, far more died in the valleys. In 1618, some 2,430 people were killed when an avalanche hit the town of Pleurs, near Chiavenne. This was the biggest Alpine disaster in history. Since then people had learned not to cut down the protecting forests that overhung their settlements. But casualties mounted nonetheless. In 1806 the Swiss village of Goldau was eradicated when an entire mountainside collapsed onto it. According to records, vast chunks of rock bounced like cannonballs through the valley to land in Lake Löwertz, five miles distant, where they created a tidal wave 70 feet high. When the clamour died down, Goldau was covered by a field of rubble measuring five miles long by three wide, dotted with hillocks of rock several hundred feet high, beneath which lay the remains of 300 houses and 450 people. The death toll in the towns alongside Lake Löwertz was not recorded, but it must have been large: one witness recalled seeing clumps of hay hanging from the church steeples.
In 1818 a slice of glacier fell and blocked a river in Bagnes. As the waters mounted, the inhabitants made a desperate attempt to carve a sluice. They bored from either side of the 600-foot-thick barrier, only to find that when they reached the middle, one team of miners was 20 feet higher than the other. A new tunnel was dug, and the sluice was completed just as the waters lapped into it. But their efforts could not halt the build-up. When the dam broke, 530,000 cubic feet of water plunged into the valley at a speed of 33 feet per second, carrying away bridges that were 90 feet above the river’s normal level, destroying 400 homes and killing 34 people. The clear-up cost was estimated at one million Swiss livres.
In 1819, some 120 houses were smashed by an avalanche that hit the village of Randa, near Zermatt. Nobody was killed because it was Christmas and they were all at Zermatt to help with the celebrations. But the local priest, whose house was at a distance from the village, was shaken out of his bed by the tremor and on emerging was all but suffocated by the wind that rebounded from the opposite slope.
The Alps were therefore very dangerous. In Hamel’s day, however, the dangers were unappreciated and disregarded. None more so than the avalanche. Avalanches occur when fresh snow builds up on a layer of previously frozen snow. In cold weather, when the new snow falls too heavily or, conversely, in warm weather when the accumulation loses its grip on the surface below, the mass slips. Avalanches can be small - clumps of snow tumble constantly from projecting rocks -or they can be large, gathering slabs of snow and ice that plummet downwards until the gradient eases, usually on the upper slopes. Occasionally they can be gigantic, a whole hillside of snow slumping into the valley and washing halfway up the other side. There is nothing that can withstand a serious avalanche and there is little way of telling when or where such an event may occur. ‘A stone, or even a hasty expression, rashly dropped, would probably start an avalanche,’ wrote one Victorian.20 Settlements that have been safe for centuries can be smothered in an instant. The sheer displacement of air that an avalanche causes can empty lungs. Its softly pulverising arrival can turn humans to jelly, bags of skin that contain flesh and small pieces of bone.
In August 1820 Hamel became the first climber to be hit by an avalanche. A Russian scientist, and ‘Counsellor of State to the Czar’, Hamel wanted to climb Mont Blanc to observe the effect of rarefied air upon animal organisms. He took with him M. Selligue, a Swiss engineer from Geneva, and two Englishmen, Mr Joseph Dornford and Mr Gilbert Henderson from Oxford University. Included in his baggage was a cage of homing pigeons that he intended to release at the top to see whether they could fly in such a thin atmosphere and, if they could, to carry home his message of triumph. Twelve guides were hired, three for each member of the party, the leader being Joseph-Marie Couttet. They left Chamonix on the 18 August and by the evening had reached the Grands Mulets where they pitched camp on the habitual shelf of rock. The weather worsened and for two nights and a day they huddled on the cramped site while a thunderstorm crashed around them. When they set off again on the morning of the 20 August Selligue did not accompany them. He had not been feeling well, and it was his opinion ‘that a married man had a sacred and imperious call to prudence and caution where his own life seemed at stake; that he had done enough for glory in passing two nights in succession perched on a crag like an eagle, and that it now became him, like a sensible man, to return to Geneva, while return was still possible’.21 Three guides were left behind to escort him down.
Roped in groups of three, the diminished party crossed the Grand Plateau without incident. The weather was not particularly good, but it was not particularly bad either - probably a white day, with the sun shining through cloud cover - and Hamel felt so confident of success that he decided to save precious time at the summit by preparing two notes describing his arrival, leaving the exact time to be inserted later. Behind him, Dornford and Henderson dawdled along discussing protocol: who should they drink to first when they reached the top: the King of England, the Tsar of Russia or Saussure? Couttet was less happy: he pointed out that fresh snow had fallen, and that the wind was now in the south thereby adding extra encouragement for unstable layers to slide down the north face, which they were climbing. Hamel dismissed his fears. Was it not sunny? Had not the thunderstorm passed? They should press on while the weather was good.
They crossed a crevasse similar to the one that had filled Saussure with such fear and took off their ropes. In Dornford’s words, the things were ‘utterly useless’ and occasioned them ‘insupportable fatigue’.22 Untrammelled, they climbed through the fresh snow. The sun continued to shine and the wind continued to blow from the south.
The three leading guides, who carried Hamel’s compass, hygrometer and pigeons, chipped away at the steeper slopes to make steps for those behind. Possibly it was this steady serration of the crust, possibly it was the weight of the party treading behind, possibly they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. One or all of these factors may have contributed to the sinking feeling that Dr Hamel suddenly experienced. It was literally that: a sinking feeling. There was a loud crack and then the entire slope upon which the party stood started to slip downhill. As Hamel felt the ground give way he dug his alpenstock deep into the snow but to no effect. Everything was on the move.
The avalanche was small by Alpine standards, dropping some 600 feet according to Couttet. But it was still strong enough to cover Hamel up to his head, nearly asphyxiating him in the process. Hamel was fortunate in that he was on the edge of the avalanche. When he clawed his way out he could see the hillside still falling and his team being carried with it. The three leaders - Pierre Balmat, Pierre Carrier and Auguste Tairraz - were thrown into the crevasse they had crossed less than an hour previously, followed by tons of snow. Of the next four, one managed to keep his footing, another was tossed across the crevasse and Joseph-Marie Couttet, along with his brother David, disappeared from sight. Henderson, meanwhile, came to a halt on the brink. Only Dornford and three guides remained on their feet, far above, terrified that they too might slide into the depths.
Julien Dévouassoud, who was fourth in line, later gave an account of his experience:
Suddenly I heard a sort of rushing sound, not very loud; but I had no time to think about it; for as I heard the sound, at the same instant the avalanche was upon us. I felt my feet slide from beneath me, and saw the first three men fallen upon the snow with their feet foremost. In falling I cried out loudly, ‘Nous sommes tous perdus!’ I tried to support myself by planting the ice-pole below me, but in vain. The weight of snow forced me over the baton, and it slipped out of my hand. I rolled down like a ball, in a mass of loose snow. At the foot of the slope was a yawning chasm, to the edge of which I was rapidly descending. Three times I saw the light as I was rolling down the slope; and, when we were all on the edge of the chasm, I saw the leg of one of my comrades, just as he pitched down into the crevice. I think it must have been poor Auguste; for it looked black and I remember that Auguste had on black gaiters. This was the last I saw of my companions, who fell headlong into the gulf, and were never seen or heard again.23
Dévouassoud only just escaped death, thanks to the barometer he was carrying. Its long wooden casing caught on the lip of the crevasse and vaulted him to the other side, where he plunged 50 feet to the bottom of yet another fissure. When he came to he was bruised but alive, lying head down on a slope of fresh snow.
The survivors regrouped and quickly dug out Couttet, whose arms and chest were pinned under the snow and whose face was turning blue. Then they found his brother David, whose arms could be seen waving from a pile of white. After that, they did not know what to do. ‘We were all more or less injured,’ Couttet recorded.24 Some guides wandered about aimlessly, crying. One just sat and stared out across the valley, muttering. Dornford became briefly deranged and Henderson ‘was in a condition which made one fear for the consequences’.25 Hamel and Henderson climbed into the crevasse but there was nothing that could be done; the bodies were buried under 100 feet of snow. Henderson later told Couttet that he had been on battlefields, had witnesed the butchery of a surgeon’s quarters on a man-of-war, but nothing had horrified him as much as what they had just endured.
The survivors slunk back to Chamonix, in a daze. It was the worst disaster the village had experienced. There was widepread dismay that the bodies would never be recovered; when hunters or crystal-gatherers fell to their deaths there was a prolonged, usually hazardous but ultimately successful effort to retrieve the remains. In this case, however, it was impossible. They blamed Hamel not only for the accident but for the lack of anything to mourn over. The Russian was cold and impassive according to Couttet, and left quickly for Geneva in disgrace. Dornford and Henderson sprinkled money around town before making a similarly swift getaway. ‘The English travellers … promised never to forget the families of our friends,’ Couttet recalled. ‘We haven’t heard anything of them since.’26
For two years a pall fell over Chamonix. The Hamel tragedy fuelled the arguments of those who believed climbing to be a stupid and foolhardy business. Even the guides began to have doubts about going to the top of Mont Blanc - by the traditional route, at any rate -and contented themselves with shepherding étrangers across the lower glaciers. By this time, also, Chamonix was not the only spot on the touristic map. Places like Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, were equally atractive to visitors. In the former one could be carried to a glacier to eat wild strawberries whilst a bearded man blew on an Alpine horn. In the latter one could admire the countless waterfalls that tumbled from the cliffs above, and maybe cross the Kleine Scheidegg as had done the hefty Englishwoman in pre-Napoleonic times. These were the main resorts, but there were hundreds of other places where visitors could commune with God, Nature and that nice couple from Cheltenham Spa.
It was inevitable, however, that somebody would sooner or later banish Hamel’s ghost. That man was Frederick Clissold, an abominably fit Englishman who had trained on Mount Snowdon and thought Mont Blanc well within his capabilities. He swept into Chamonix on 2 August 1822 and immediately proved his mettle by climbing the Brévent in an unheard-of time of two and a half hours. That done, he procured two crépe veils, one black and one green, ordered a plaster of Burgundy pitch to protect his chest against sudden changes in temperature, and ordered Joseph-Marie Couttet plus five other guides to lead him to the top of Mont Blanc.
This abrupt visitor took Chamonix completely by surprise. Paccard - who was by now often drunk, according to his enemy Balmat who was himself usually incapacitated - came forward with the offer of scientific instruments. Clissold declined it. He didn’t want to take measurements, he didn’t want to have extra baggage, all he wanted to do was reach the summit as quickly as possible. Paccard retreated in astonishment. Couttet was similarly taken aback when Clissold announced that he didn’t intend to sleep at the Grands Mulets: he wanted to start before midnight and march through darkness and then day to camp on the summit. There might be another camp on the Grand Plateau as they came down, Clissold conceded, but he was reluctant to commit himself.
Carried along by Clissold’s imperious dictats, the team left Chamonix at 10.30 p.m. on 18 August 1822. Their start was necessarily slow, lit by brands, but come daylight Clissold bounded ahead. He amazed his companions, forging glaciers, leaping crevasses, occasionally falling into them yet climbing out with undiminished vigour. He lost his alpenstock, but carried on. Couttet and the others were soon left behind. Seeing this, Clissold turned back, grabbed one of the guide’s knapsacks and resumed his assault. Couttet was flabbergasted. ‘Diable vous n’êtes pas fatigué du tout’, he panted.27 After twenty hours’ climbing Couttet suggested they halt. Clissold was having none of such defeatist talk: they had already lost three hours waiting for weary guides to catch up, and he wanted to get to the top before dark. He probably could have achieved his goal had he been on his own. In the end, however, the guides would go no farther then the Rochers Rouges, above the Grand Plateau, and although Clissold dragged Couttet still higher he retreated to spend the night with the others. It was 10.30 p.m. and they had been walking - or Clissold had - for twenty-four hours non-stop.
That night they laid down wooden boards on the snow, wrapped themselves in blankets and went to sleep in temperatures below freezing. Clissold awoke with horrible keenness early next morning. It gave him slight pause when he saw that a bottle of his best Hermitage had turned to ice during the night. But then what was a bit of cold? By 5.30 a.m. on 20 August they stood on the summit; and three hours later they left it, as Clissold resumed his tempestuous journey. They reached the Grands Mulets at 1.30 p.m., pausing only to catch the rumble of an avalanche falling on the slopes they had recently crossed, and at 7.30 p.m. Clissold force-marched them triumphantly back into Chamonix. From start to finish, the climb had taken a record forty-five hours.
Clissold’s eyes were dreadful. He had forgone the use of his two veils, ‘the scene being too extraordinary to be viewed through the preservative of green crape, or any other medium’.28 In every other respect, however, he felt fine. ‘It was not war,’ he wrote casually of the ascent. Truth be told, he thought Mont Blanc rather a let-down -though the views were superb - and wished he had gone up Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador instead. The guides, wracked with exhaustion, probably wished he had too.
It was hoped that Clissold was an aberration, a one-off madman whose example would not be followed by others. But no. That same year Mrs and Miss Campbell climbed the Col du Géant. And in August 1823 a Mr H. H. Jackson arrived from England in a nankeen jacket and trousers, a small knapsack on his back and a walletful of francs in his pocket. He wanted to climb Mont Blanc, ‘from a love of hardy enterprise excusable, as he hoped, in a young man’.29 He attempted to hire Clissold’s guides from the previous year. They immediately said they were booked, so he took a group of five others at a cost of 60 francs apiece. He rushed up the mountain, sleeping under an old sheet at the Grands Mulets and spent ten minutes at the top before rushing down again. The journey was accomplished in a new record of 36 hours.
Whatever the discouragements of the Romantics, the scientists, the guidebooks and even the guides themselves, it was obvious that people were bent on conquering Mont Blanc. Therefore, the Chamonix authorities instituted in 1823 the Compagnie des Guides. It purported to be a guild of professional climbers, but in reality was little more than a list of Chamoniards who were willing to take time off from hunting and crystal-gathering to lead visitors up the hills. Nevertheless, it received royal approval from Savoy, the restored ruler deeming it necessary that some sort of fixed price ‘should be applied to those who lead visitors to the glaciers and other remarkable sites in the valley of Chamonix’.30 The ducal charter was not short, and covered almost every eventuality that the guides might encounter. Article 15, for example, described the difference between ordinary and extraordinary trips. Ordinary was anything below the snowline; extraordinary was anything above. There was also a separate category for climbing Mont Blanc. Ordinary cost seven livres per day for one guide; extraordinary was ten livres per day, two guides per person being obligatory; Mont Blanc was 40 livres per guide, and required four guides per person. Another article decreed that the guides be organised into a quota so that they should have an equal chance, regardless of merit, of picking the Mont Blanc plum.
For no obvious reason, this system seemed to quieten the Gadarene rush. When Dr Edmund Clarke and Captain Markham Sherwill paid their premium to climb Mont Blanc in 1825, they made the ascent at a moderate pace, sleeping where it was proper to sleep, feeling nauseous at the correct height, becoming tired when tiredness was appropriate and displaying suitable appreciation at the top. Sherwill felt so light-headed that he declared a single slice of the knife beneath his boots would send him floating into the air. They did nothing startling except bury a time capsule on the summit: a wide, glass tube in which they stuffed an olive twig from the Mediterranean ‘together with the name of George the Fourth and his deservedly popular Minister, subjoining the names of some of the most remarkable persons of the age’. The tube was buried deep in the snow in the hope ‘that it might remain unaltered for many centuries like insects preserved in amber’.31 (It was found two years later, half filled with water and containing a pulpy mass of twigs and paper.)
Meanwhile, down below, tourists poured into Chamonix by the hundred. They left from Geneva, climbing into high coaches whose springs were adjusted to cope with the poor roads and then trembled uncertainly, umbrellas at the ready, towards Mont Blanc. (Earlier in the century, Bourrit had gone to great lengths to have the Geneva-Chamonix route cleared of stones and resurfaced; but it had disintegrated over the years.) A large proportion of the tourists were women, which delighted the Genevans. Crowds gathered at each departure to marvel at the sight of so many bustles being hoisted aloft. They nicknamed it ‘l’ ascension des ballons.’32
For a short while everything seemed back to normal. The ordinary tourists paid their seven livres to be escorted across the glaciers. The extraordinary ones paid three livres extra to be led above the snowline. But nobody paid the summit premium. It was not that they were scared of the summit. It was worse than that: they simply had no interest in it. From being anathema, height had become a matter of complete indifference.
The new Alpine étrangers were a far cry from the devil-may-cares of pre-war years. The English, who vastly outnumbered all other nationalities, seemed to have deteriorated particularly badly during the war. Gone were the titled swells, to be replaced by men and women from all classes who were, as the aubergistes noted, ‘not at all the best of all classes’.33 They haggled over the prices, drank until midnight, dirtied the linen unduly, overworked their guides and generally behaved far too much as if they were on holiday - which of course they were. In the best tradition of English holidaymakers they wore ghastly costumes that aped the local style. One bemused visitor to Chamonix reported in 1825 that ‘we beheld a description of animal rather frequent in these mountainous regions - not a chamois nor a lammergeyer but an Alpine dandy. He was fearfully rigged out for daring and desparate exploit, with belt, pole and nicely embroidered jerkin - a costume admirably adapted for exciting female terror, and a reasonable apprehension that some formidable hillocks and rivulets would be encountered during the day, before the thing returned to preside over bread and butter at the vesper tea-table.’34 In the same year and place another Englishman met a similar apparition, a Londoner ‘who somehow had got far out of his road, and wandered, not knowing whither he went… He bewailed his miserable lot - he seemed to have lost the log-book of his reckoning, and to be in a perfect maze. He thought he had lost ten years of his (valuable) life by such an adventure, and doubtless, could he have procured Fortunatus’s wishing cap, he would immediately have transported himself to Bond Street. He saw nothing in “Mount Blank”, and wondered what others could see there to make such a fuss about.’35 The English gentility, who considered themselves the only ones capable of appreciating the Alps, were dismayed by the newcomers, a lot of whom for some reason came from London’s impoverished East End. When William Brockedon overheard a family speaking in Cockney accents at a table next to him, he was struck with ‘disbelief that such vulgarity could have reached the Great St Bernard. I only record it as a subject of astonishment, how such people ever thought of such a journey. I had no idea that the gentilities of Wapping had ever extended so far from the Thames.’36
The class-ridden British sneered at each other. The Europeans took a more egalitarian view: all Britons were equally awful. It wasn’t so much their clothes or their accents as their manners. Yes, Britain had won the war, yes Europe was politically unstable, and yes the Alps lacked the amenities of London. But was that a reason to be rude and haughty? The British were known as ‘Yes and No Tourists’ from their refusal to engage in conversation. The Milords, even more so than the jerkins, were abrupt, dismissive and uncaring of peoples’ feelings. ‘What an armour of dignity or something else must these singular mortals possess,’ wrote an amazed schoolmaster, ‘to be able to walk for ten hours in these valleys without … giving some sign of greeting, or of politeness, or even of non-ferocity!’37 George Sand thought she had the answer:
Albion’s Islanders bring with them a peculiar fluid which I shall call the British fluid, enveloped in which they travel, as inaccessible to the atmosphere of the regions which they traverse as is a mouse in the centre of a pneumatic machine. Their eternal unresponsiveness is not solely due to the thousands of precautions which they take. It is not because they wear three pairs of breeches, one over the other, that they reach their destination perfectly dry and clean in spite of rain and mud; nor is it because of their woolen caps that their stiff and metallic coiffure withstands the damp; it is not because they are loaded with sufficient pomades, brushes and soap to convert an entire regiment of Breton conscripts into Adonises that they always have a tidy beard and irreproachable fingernails. It is because the outer air has no hold on them, because they walk, drink, sleep and eat encapsuled in their fluid as in a bell-jar twenty feet thick, from out of which they look down with pity on riders whose hair is ruffled by the wind, and on foot-travellers whose shoes are damaged by snow.38
There were, however, one or two Britons willing to engage more closely with the outside world. Among them was Charles Fellows.
Fellows - later Sir Charles Fellows - was a young man in a hurry. Not for him a four-month ramble through the Alps as recommended by the guidebooks. He was doing Europe, for form’s sake, and had no time to waste. He disembarked at Ostend on 20 June 1827 and hurtled across Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France before landing back at Hastings on 11 August, carrying in his slipstream a companion named William Hawes. One of Fellows’s stops was Chamonix, where he was disappointed by the ‘rank and coarse’ vegetation growing in the fields and sneered at the ‘sickly green foliage’ on the lower slopes. He would have left the valley as rapidly as he left all his other destinations had he not seen Mont Blanc and learned of its reputation. He was told it was impossible to climb the mountain and that so many people had died in the attempt that he may as well abandon all thought of it. The story of Hamel’s disaster was not only fresh but flourishing - in the latest version, the avalanche had carried the guides not 600 feet but a full two miles down the hill. Fellows was immediately interested and announced his intention to give it a try. A procession of injured guides came forward to dissuade him; one man whose skull had been fractured in 1792 made him feel the spot where he had been trepanned; but the sight of their shattered limbs acted only as a spur.
Fellows was a man of his age. ‘Mad as the attempt was generally deemed, especially as, in proportion to the very few who had succeeded, so many had fallen a sacrifice to their curiosity, we were not to be dismayed.’39 He had obviously read, and been influenced by, the Quarterly Review in which Barrow vented his opinions on the Arctic and on exploration in general. That Barrow’s expeditions had largely been failures did not dissuade him. ‘If arguments and apprehensions in matters of enterprise were always to carry their discouragements with them,’ he reasoned Barrowesquely, ‘the boldness of adventure would be checked, and all that field of interest which is opened by the discoveries of the daring, would be closed against the world.’40
Normally an ascent of Mont Blanc involved much studying of the weather, collecting of provisions, hiring of guides, saying of farewells to loved ones and other time-consuming details. None of this for Fellows. As he said, ‘Our maxim throughout our tour had been to avoid delay.’ And so, within a day of their arrival he and Hawes were climbing Mont Blanc accompanied by ten guides and ten porters who carried blankets, sheets, clothes, linen, a change of shoes, candles, wood, straw, a saucepan for melting snow, ‘besides an adequate supply of provisions, consisting of eight joints of meat, a dozen fowls, sausages, eight loaves of bread and a cheese, lemons, raisin, prunes and sugar, with forty-two bottles of wine, brandy, capillaire, and syrup of raspberries etc.’41 Down in Chamonix, the chief magistrate was left holding their wills and the addresses of their next of kin.
Hawes, who was not as keen as Fellows, found the climb arduous and surreal. Struggling over the Glacier des Bossons, he heard the distant conversation of butterfly-catchers on the Aiguille du Midi, who spent their days in a swathe of silk nets, hoping to catch specimens for tourists. Fellows, on the other hand, was impressed by nothing. He described the crossing of snow bridges, when he and Hawes stretched themselves flat as a plank and, attached to a rope on the opposite side, were hauled over by the guides. Before the Napoleonic Wars, such an act would have produced reams of frenzied terror. Fellows dismissed it in a sentence. The snow bridges did not always hold and sometimes he dropped through. Again, where Saussure would have described the situation in several pages, and Bourrit might have squeezed a chapter or even a book out of it, Fellows was unworried: while dangling from his rope he ‘had the opportunity of contemplating and admiring the wonders about me. From this novel but awful situation the colours of the snows above me were truly beautiful, varying from a dead whiteness to dark shades of blue and green, while the hanging icicles, some of which were of immense size, glittered with all the prismatic colours.’42 And that was all he had to say on the subject.
They spent the night on the Grands Mulets. The porters had left by this time and the two Britons and their ten guides slept on two shelves of rock, one of which was four feet square and the other eight feet by four, edged by a 300-foot drop. The temperature was 5°F below freezing. When they awoke the following morning Fellows was slightly taken aback by the provisions the guides allotted for their climb to the summit, ‘the forage for the whole party for the day being estimated at little more than I myself had eaten on the preceding’.43 At first he did not understand it. But after he had experienced the depressing effect altitude had on the appetite, he considered that perhaps they had taken too much. ‘A crust of bread,’ he later wrote, ‘some lemonade and a very few raisins constituted all the sustenance I took in the course of thirty hours.’44
They crossed the Grand Plateau safely but found Balmat’s old route blocked by avalanche falls. Thereupon Fellows looked for another route and discovered one, after much scouting and peering from hummocks. It led to the east, as opposed to the avalanche-prone western funnel that had been used hitherto. They took it. As they climbed, Fellows began to appreciate some of Mont Blanc’s beauties. He could see the stars at midday, and marvelled at the way in which they did not look ‘as if studded on the surface of the heavens [but] as if suspended in the air at various distances’.45 They were smaller than he was used to and gave the impression that he could reach out and touch them. Less beautifully, he experienced Mont Blanc’s thin atmosphere: ‘I conceive we suffered precisely as we might expect to suffer, had we been placed under the gradually exhausting receiver of an air-pump.’46 He, Hawes and their guides began to haemorrhage. First came nosebleeds; then they spat blood. After that they vomited blood and finally they urinated blood. (Hawes said he had nothing but a headache.) Bleeding from almost every orifice they reached the summit at 2.20 p.m. on 25 July. Physically, it was unexceptional, being an inclined plane in the shape of an egg, measuring 150 feet long and 30 wide. Hawes felt ‘an indescribable feeling of melancholy’47 but Fellows was moved to brief excitement: ‘From the extraordinary brilliancy of the day, and the closeness of the air, it seemed as if we were suspended from heaven itself.’48
He stuck his cap on his stick and waved it elatedly in the air. He did not particularly want to make scientific observations - and anyway, he had left his thermometer and barometer at the Grands Mulets - but he made one useful discovery when he invited everybody to join him in ‘God Save the King’. (The guides didn’t know the words so they settled on a Swiss chant instead.) He found that it was impossible to sing. The sounds came out of their mouths but vanished as soon as they appeared. ‘Such was the want of the vibratory power of the atmosphere that we could by no possibility blend or carry one note into another.’49 It was the musical equivalent of throwing pebbles into the air.
They did not stay long on the top, to the disappointment of those below for whom an ascent of Mont Blanc was still rare enough to be worthy of attention. (The artist David Wilkie recorded that twenty-five English tourists were clustered in one hotel room, passing a single telescope between them.) Nor did they linger on the descent. The guides seemed to have been infected by Fellows’s sense of urgency for instead of climbing carefully down the hill they glissaded on their alpenstocks. This remarkable trick involved leaning back on the alpenstock and sliding feet first down the snow, braking and steering with the heels. Glissading was nothing new: roadmen who maintained the passes traditionally used it as a quick way of getting home in winter, using shovels in place of alpenstocks; Saussure had recorded the practice and so had Bourrit, who declared it was very easy once one got the knack and almost convinced his readers that he had mastered the skill himself. Fellows found it very impressive, nonetheless. He did not attempt it personally, but slid down behind one of the guides in a sitting position, ‘keeping the eye immoveably fixed upon his hat.’ In this manner he descended ‘with inconceivable velocity over a space of seven hundred feet at a time’.50 On one occasion the guide braked too hard and they flew into the air, tumbling chaotically to the bottom of the slope. Fellows spat snow and announced that the incident was rather amusing (in retrospect).
After that, there was very little that could disturb him. They slept at the Grands Mulets and were hit by a thunderstorm. ‘No one but those who have experienced it can conceive the extreme irksomeness of passing a night in such a situation,’ he complained.51 He was in the same situation as Saussure had been on the Col du Géant. But whereas Saussure had cowered in his tent, brandishing his electrometer like a cross to a vampire, Fellows observed only that he constantly had to wring out his night cap and that its silk tassle froze when he went to sleep.
Their descent was marked by all kinds of obstacles that Fellows swept aside as mere nothings. The glacier had been transformed by avalanches, and on one occasion they had to cut steps in a fresh crevasse, while a 200-foot block of ice loomed perilously above them. The process took fifteen minutes, during which time the block cracked three times, ‘sounding like the report of a pistol echoed through the body of the mountain’.52 Shortly after they crossed the crevasse, the block collapsed onto the spot where they had been standing. Fellows recorded it with mild interest. The party reached Chamonix at 9.00 a.m. on 26 July, having been on the hill for 48 hours. The Englishmen subsequently went for a two-hour walk through the valley, because they felt the need to stretch their legs, then caroused until midnight and got up at 6.00 the following morning to catch the coach to Geneva.
‘The burden,’ Fellows wrote, ‘of every inquiry was - has the difficulty, labour and danger, been repaid by what you have witnessed? To which I, for myself [Hawes perhaps was of different opinion] replied, and still reply, that I was amply recompensed; having witnessed what otherwise I never could have conceived, and in so doing, enlarged my ideas of creation which, with all its magnitude, scarce forms a speck in the universe.’53 Given the complete absence of any such sentiment hitherto, and the fact that Fellows was the last man on earth to consider himself a speck, this rings with appealing insincerity. Nonetheless, for all his nonchalance he was secretly very proud of his achievement and reproduced in his journal a facsimile of the certificate which Chamonix had awarded him to mark the ascent.
Fellows later went on to become a respected Middle East archaeologist. Hawes sank from sight. In 1828 he published his own account of the climb, in which Fellows appeared as a weakling and he himself as a superman. But his true feelings are best expressed in a closing paragraph in Fellows’s journal that one feels can only have been written on Hawes’s urging. It reads: ‘any one who sets the least value upon his own life, or upon those who must accompany him on such an expedition, hazards a risk which, upon calm consideration, he ought not to venture: and, if it were ever to fall to my lot, to dissuade a friend from attempting what we have gone through, I shall consider that I have saved his life’.54