James Forbes was a strange, mercurial man. Born in Edinburgh on 20 April 1809 into a patrician Scottish family, he was, like Agassiz, largely self-taught. Unlike Agassiz, however, he was dour, humourless and fixated. His father had died when he was in his teens, leaving him with a desperate urge to get on in life. Forbes did so thanks to his connections and his intelligence. He published his first scientific paper -on Vesuvius - anonymously, when he was only 19, and followed it with 148 others whose topics ranged from the study of a single boulder in the Pentland Hills to the entire mountain chain of the Alps. He investigated solar rays, magnetic variations, the temperature of hot springs, the colours of the sky, the colours of steam and the colours of dewdrops. He looked into heat, mirages and atmospheric refraction. In 1832 he wrote ‘Notice respecting a Vitrified Fort at Carradale in Argyllshire’. In 1833 he lectured on Alpine views. ‘In 1834 he wrote On the Horary Oscillations of the Barometer near Edinburgh, deduced from 4,410 Observations’, and in the same year spoke about sparks from magnets and delivered an early analysis of ultraviolet rays, following these the next year with a paper on hydraulics which was only a stopgap before he published, in 1836, the results of his experiments on ‘The Electricity of Tourmaline and other Minerals when exposed to Heat’. When nothing new came to light, he told people how he hadn’t discovered it. ‘On the muscular Effort required to ascend Planes of different Inclinations’ appeared in the April 1837 edition of the Philosophical Magazine.
Forbes was a man of many parts, but he bore them heavily and impatiently. He was unwell for most of his life and in 1839 wrote that ‘I yearly feel a greater readiness to die.’1 What he wanted was to get the job done, and to do it as accurately and as conclusively as was possible in the time he had left. According to one of his relatives, ‘he seemed a man too much on the stretch’.2 This was true. His writings portray him as a Calvinistic figure with little time for anything that was not immediately connected with the task in hand. Science was his life, and he pursued it with a grim and single-minded determination. He did, however, have one solace: the Alps. He had first visited them aged 18 and since then had traversed them widely, finding in their granite solitude the material to satisfy both his intellectual and emotional needs.
‘I have crossed the principal chain of Alps twenty seven times, generally on foot, by twenty three different passes,’ he wrote in 1843. ‘I employed neither draughtsman, surveyor or naturalist; everything that it was possible to do I executed with my own hands, noted the result on the spot, and extended it as speedily as possible afterwards.’3 Saussure was his hero. Like him he made it a habit to record his impressions immediately in a notebook - use an ineradicable pencil, he warned his readers sternly - before writing them out in full at a later date. Like Saussure, too, he never went anywhere without his geologist’s hammer, though in Forbes’s case the point was sharpened so that he could use it as an ice axe in case he fell down a crevasse. The only point in which he differed from Saussure was as an employer. He derided the ‘uselessness and inconvenience’ of large bodies of guides and took only one, or sometimes two, on his journeys. Even this number he sometimes found excessive, particularly at inns, where their ‘love of indulgence’ coupled to the ‘systematic extortion’ of the innkeepers caused him unnecessary expense. Let the guides pay for their own board, he grumbled ungenerously.
Forbes detested ordinary Alpine travellers and wrote ascerbically of ‘those beaten tracts, along which tourists follow one another, like a flock of sheep, in interminable succession’.4 In his opinion their outings were ‘miracles of rapidity and boldness, from which, if anything were gained, it must have been from a sort of intuition’.5 What he advocated was a solitary commune with nature in which the individual could revel in his surroundings and then - tellingly - conquer them. ‘Happy the traveller,’ he wrote, ‘who, content to leave to others the glory of counting the thousands of leagues of earth and ocean they have left behind them, established in some mountain shelter with his books, starts his first day’s walk amongst the Alps in the tranquil morning of a long July day, brushing the early dew before him, and, armed with his staff makes for the hilltop … whence he sees the field of his summer’s campaign spread out before him, its wonders, its beauties and its difficulties, to be explained, to be admired, and to be overcome.’6
Apart from Saussure - and Professor Playfair, under whom he had studied - Forbes had little time for scientists of the past. He took particular exception to Bourrit - who had pretended many things, but never that he was a scientist - and wrote uncharitably that ‘he conveys the simplest fact through a medium of such unmixed bombast as to disgust the reader’.7 As for everybody else, he dismissed them with a monstrously sweeping judgement: ‘It seems very singular that ingenious men, with every facility for establishing themselves, should have relied on conclusions vaguely gathered from uncertain data, or on the hazarded assertions of the peasantry about matters in which they take not the slightest interest.’8 He had little time for scientists of the present either. In fact he had little time for anybody who did not think and act as he did, and by 1843 he had very little time for Agassiz and his team. It was all very well to play about with rock bivouacs, he wrote, but, ‘however amusing such privations are for a time, and however pleasant it may be to laugh over them in good company, such expeditions tend rather to amusement than edification’.9
What had happened since 1841 to turn him against Agassiz? It was the ice. When Forbes had pointed out to Agassiz the blue and white striations in the glacier, Agassiz had been taken aback and had said that he had not noticed them before. Shortly afterwards he said that he had noticed them the previous year but was convinced they were mere surface phenomena. Forbes thought differently that they were the very structure of the glacier and was writing up his conclusions in 1841 when Agassiz published a letter to Humboldt in which he described his, Agassiz’s, amazing discovery of the alternating ice layers.
Thus began an unimportant but, to Forbes, hugely imperative argument. Who had seen the ice layers first? In the ensuing correspondence, which was published in the Edinburgh Philosophical Review and elsewhere, Forbes teetered on slander as he denigrated first Agassiz and then Desor. Agassiz stated that he had previously seen the striations on the Mer de Glace back in 1838. Forbes gathered affidavits to prove this a lie. Agassiz said he had seen them the year before on the Unteraar Glacier, but hadn’t understood their importance until 1841. Forbes said this was piffle. Finally, Agassiz gave in and said that his colleague, Arnold Guyot, had first observed them in 1838; but had not he, Agassiz, gone further towards investigating them than anybody else? Forbes said this was entirely by the by. Guyot may have seen the striations - he had - but he had not published the fact and so he, Forbes, was the first person to have publicly announced their presence.
‘The dilemma in which M. Agassiz has placed himself,’ Forbes wrote to Guyot, ‘appears to be this: Either he was acquainted with this structure of the ice on the 9th of August or he was not. If he was not acquainted with it, he learned it from me; for he has never attempted to maintain he showed it to me. If he was acquainted with it he learned it from you. And if he learned it from either of us, how does he claim it as his own in the letter to Humboldt, and in one other private letter at least, not yet published?’10 The cheerful, optimistic Agassiz was at a loss. He was an intuitive scientist, whose world was smaller, gentler and more gentlemanly than that of Forbes. He probably had no idea that he would cause offence by incorporating Forbes’s remarks on the ice into his own annual report. The Unteraar Glacier was Agassiz’s private experiment, so surely he had some sovereignty over chance remarks made by guests who came to increase their knowledge at his expense. Had the observation been made by someone he knew - a Swiss, a German or a Frenchman - the business might have been smoothed over quickly and without fuss. Unfortunately, it had been Forbes, and Agassiz was no match for his relentless, granite-like character.
Through the winter and spring of 1842, letters sputtered to and fro, each one leaving Forbes increasingly incensed. That summer he decided to settle it once and for all. Packing a bundle of red and white flags, cans of red and white paint, stakes, brushes and every piece of surveying equipment known to humankind, he departed for Chamonix’s Mer de Glace. By this time, Bourrit’s Temple had been augmented by a nicely appointed two-storey refuge. It had a large main room, a small kitchen and three bedrooms, below which were quarters for the three servants who lived there for four months of the year. There was only mutton to eat, but otherwise it was all very comfortable and Forbes installed himself in it with much sneering at Agassiz’s rough and ready accommodation. (The mutton was excellent, he said, twisting the knife.) Then, with the aid of just one guide, Auguste Balmat, he proceeded to chart the glacier with unprecedented thoroughness. For ten to thirteen hours per day he stalked the ice, planting flags, painting rocks and triangulating their positions. Before long Mont Blanc’s hinterland looked like a blasting zone.
Clad in a thin layer of flannels, topped by a suit of chamois leather and wearing a straw hat underneath which lay a velvet cap - or a fur cap if he had to stand still for too long - Forbes became a veritable ice elf. He eschewed artificial climbing aids - ‘Of late years I have never habitually used spikes or crampons of any kind for crossing the ice,’11 he wrote - and relied solely on a good pair of double-soled London shoes with studs. When tourists caught him unawares he sprang to safety over the glacier, picking his way through the crevasses as if he was born to them. The sight must have been arresting, especially in cold weather, when he wrapped himself in a thick Scottish plaid. When the intruders went, he scurried home and wrote up his work in the calm of his cabin. Only once did he have close contact with the public, and that was by accident. On 29 August, while Forbes was squinting through his theodolite, Auguste Balmat arrived in a state of excitement. Accompanying him were two men from Chamonix who supported a dishevelled American tourist between them. The American had apparently been wandering above the Mer de Glace and had slipped, tumbling down a cliff to land on a narrow ledge where he lay for several hours until the two Chamoniards heard his cries. They had been unable to help him until Balmat appeared. Balmat had lowered himself down, grabbed the American’s hand and hauled him to safety. The man was a wreck: ‘his nervous system was greatly affected,’ wrote Forbes, ‘and for a time I doubted whether he was not deranged’.12 He sent the American down to Chamonix where, on recovering from his ordeal, the man promptly fled the town. ‘I regretted to learn afterwards that he had not shown himself generously sensible of the great effort used in his preservation,’13 Forbes recorded.
The next day Forbes visited the shelf from which the American had been rescued and was shocked. The man had fallen from the top of a 210-foot-high precipice. It was sheer and polished save for a tiny ledge, 20 feet down, that was 1 foot wide and a few feet more in length. At one end the ledge narrowed into the cliff and at the other it widened to meet a ten-foot buttress. It was studded with stones and there were one or two juniper bushes whose branches bore scraps of the American’s clothes. Below, the glacier was waiting to mangle him; above was a slope ‘to which a cat could not have clung’. He would have died on that lonely shelf, salvation tantalisingly beyond his reach, had it not been for the chance passing of the two Chamonix men and Balmat. ‘A more astonishing escape, in all its parts, it is impossible to conceive,’14 wrote Forbes.
He continued his experiments until the end of September when, with the thermometer registering only 6°F above freezing - and that was in his bedroom - he concluded that he done his job. Over the winter he wrote up his findings, made a quick visit to Chamonix to confirm them and then in 1843 published Travels through the Alps of Savoy, in which he gave the most comprehensive and accurate account of glacial movement and formation to date. He reported that glaciers moved faster at the centre than at the sides, that they moved by night as well as day and in winter as well as summer. He reported that the striations were caused at the head of the glacier, where cracks in the permanently frozen snow - firn or névé - were filled by melt-water that turned to ice in winter. Above all, he reported that Agassiz was wrong. Glaciers did not move by dilatation. If they did, then objects on their surface would move apart. According to his measurements this did not happen. Moreover, he had found it repeatedly the case that even if the surface water froze in bad weather, the summer melt continued below. Therefore, if the water did not freeze in the fissures, it could not expand.
Having crushed Agassiz completely, he then explained why glaciers did move. They moved because they were plastic: despite their apparent solidity they flowed in the same manner as water, only much more slowly. To prove his point he showed readers how to create their own personal glacier at home by mixing plaster of Paris with glue (to stop it setting) and then pouring the mixture into an inclined trough. Those who followed his instructions - Forbes helpfully supplied diagrams - found that they worked perfectly. And if they sprinkled lines of coloured powder across their ‘glacier’ they could see the different speeds at which sides and centre progressed.
The home-made glaciers were a masterly conclusion to an irrefutable theory which still holds true today. When Forbes’s book came out the scientific community was agog.* Little wonder, then, that Agassiz cut short his 1843 season and did not visit Unteraar at all in 1844. His biographer claims that during this period he shut himself in his study, staying up well past midnight in order to transcribe his discoveries. But one gets a dreadful image of a man covered in plaster dust and glue, watching in misery as, by candlelight, his ‘glacier’ inched flawlessly to its conclusion. His own countrymen began to mock him. ‘It is now much the fashion to visit the … glacier of the Aar, and a great noise is made about it,’ wrote one Professor Chaix. ‘Mr. Forbes is a very bold and indefatigable explorer, and not many will dare to follow him everywhere he has been.’15 Worst of all, Agassiz’s own men at Unteraar sent back reports that year that Forbes’s theory was undoubtedly correct. So it was not surprising that he climbed into his coach in the early hours of a March morning in 1846, bade farewell to his students - they had come out with torches to see him off - and clattered off for the uncontroversial promise of America. Forbes had destroyed him in Europe.
Agassiz could, however, take some comfort from a little-advertised fact: Forbes’s theory had already been formulated by someone else. In 1838 one Bishop Rendu of Annecy had noticed the ice striations and had come to the conclusion that glaciers moved fastest in the centre and were probably plastic. He had then published his conclusions in 1841, two years before Forbes’s own book went to press. Forbes said he hadn’t known of Rendu’s book, had arrived at the theory independently, had provided better proof and so on. ‘M. Rendu had the candour not to treat his ingenious speculations as leading to any certain result,’ he wrote, ‘not being founded on experiments worthy of confidence.’16 But Rendu had made the theory and Forbes was therefore in the same position as Agassiz: he had claimed precedence where he did not deserve it. This humiliating charge hung over him for more than a decade and became the subject of controversy in 1856. Forbes scribbled away, covering twenty pages of small print with reasons why the theory was his alone. The verdict was decided in his favour - but only just, and only because the adjudicators were British.
By that time Forbes was a sick man. Stricken by gastric fever and an ailment of the lungs, he spat blood. As Principal of St Andrews University in Scotland, he coughed his way through a disciplinarian tenure. On the other side of the Atlantic, Agassiz was in good health, had established himself on the East Coast, had taken a new wife and was planning a trip to Brazil. His father had once described him as having ‘a mania for rushing full gallop into the future’,17 and in this case the future was a happy one. He became one of America’s most eminent scientists and although he preserved a penchant for taking the wrong side - such as a tortuous attempt to refute Darwin’s theories - he was generally hailed as a brilliant addition to the New World intelligentsia.
Forbes was a scientist, and his expeditions were made for scientific purposes. During his travels he did, however, open a whole new area of the Alps to the world. The Dauphiné, or Massif des Ecrins, was a virtually unexplored sector that lay to the south-west of the Mont Blanc chain. Forbes walked all over it and, in between geological observations, gave his readers the best yet description of life off the beaten track. Not only that, but in his odd, critical way he provided an image of noble savagery better even than Rousseau’s. He was fascinated, for example, by the chalets, the rough stone shacks in which cattle-herders lived during the summer months and which were often used as stopovers by climbers such as himself. Each herdsman had two huts, one hut for day and one for night. The day hut was where they made cheese. It had an earth floor, no windows, no chimney and a fireplace in a hole near the door. The only furniture was a one-legged milking stool, the only cooking equipment a wide copper dish in which the milk was heated and the only utensil a six-inch wooden spoon for skimming the milk. ‘Morning, noon and night, the inhabitants think but of milk,’ Forbes wrote. ‘It is their first, last and only care; they eat exclusively preparations of it; their only companions are the cattle which yield it; money can procure for them here no luxuries; they count their wealth by cheeses.’18 Next door was a night hut, that again had neither chimney or window; nor did it have a fire. What it did have was a door, three feet high, through which travellers crawled to make their bed on a pile of grass, covering themselves with a blanket of hay.
Forbes was overcome. The chalets were picturesque beyond his imagination - noticeably, there was no sneering about lack of comforts - and when he emerged in the mornings he was greeted by the sight of several hundred cows tethered on a terrace, being milked by their owners. Here was the isolated existence he hankered after. ‘There is an indescribable unity and monotony of idea which fills the minds of these men,’ he wrote of his hosts, ‘who live during all of the finest and stirring part of the year in the fastnesses of their sublimest mountains, seeing scarcely any strange faces, and but few familiar ones, and these always the same; living on friendly terms with their dumb herds, so accustomed to privation as to dream of no luxury, and utterly careless of the fate of empires, or the change of dynasties.’19 He found them shy, gentle and impeccably mannered.
The purity of these people was reinforced for him by his encounters with civilisation. In the valley of Evolène he met villagers so rude and inhospitable that he could only agree with historians that they were a sept of Hun, who had been stranded there in the fifth century. On a high pass he encountered a couple of Piedmontese customs officers, huddling in a shelter.
The absolute discomfort in which this class of men live is greater than in almost any other profession. Hard diet, constant exposure, sleepless nights, combined with personal risk, and still more galling unpopularity, great fatigue, and perpetual surveillance, are the ordinary accidents of their life … posted for hours together on a glacier 9,000 feet above the sea, and, like animals of prey, taking repose in some deserted hovel in their wet clothes - one cannot but conclude the smuggler’s lot to be luxury compared to the protracted sufferings of their detectors.20
Man was vile and nature sublime. Forbes saw more spirituality in a glacier than he did in his fellow humans, a view he explained to his readers in a laboured comparison between the movement of ice and the passage of a soul to heaven. He did his best to dispel the idea, so popular in that age of Arctic exploration, that ice was still and deadly. Glaciers had a life of their own: ‘All is on the eve of motion. Let him sit awhile, as I did, on the moraine of Miage, and watch the silent energy of the ice and the sun. No animal ever passes but yet the stillness of death is not there; the ice is cracking and straining onwards.’21 Nature, however, was not consistently sublime, as he was honest enough to admit. He was terrified by rockfalls, which he described as ‘dry avalanches … the most terrible of the ammunition with which the genius of these mountain solitudes repels the approach of curious man’.22 He also witnessed, with some awe, the price an Alpine snowstorm could exact on the unwary.
Crossing just one pass Forbes found the corpses of three men in varying stages of decomposition. The freshest was on a slope of scree and lay face down, its hands still in its pockets. It was so well preserved that Forbes thought it must be a recent casualty until he turned it over and saw how its face had been rubbed off as the thaw carried it downhill. The second comprised a little pile of bones surrounding a backpack. The third was the strangest of them all. It lay on a glacier and its flesh had long since vanished. Its skeleton, however, was still intact and was strung out in an extraordinary, yet anatomically correct, fashion: from head to foot it measured five yards. Had Forbes found this earlier he might have been tempted to agree with Agassiz’s theory of dilatation. As it was, he was at a loss. He could only put it down to a glacial property that he had yet to fathom.
The experience upset him deeply, and in a rare moment of non-scientific reflection he wrote that ‘We surveyed with a stronger sense of sublimity than before the desolation by which we were surrounded and became still more sensible to our isolation from human dwellings, human help, and human sympathy - our loneliness with nature and, as it were, the more immediate presence of God.’23 Scurrying to the other side of the pass, he learned that a group of twelve had tried to cross it the previous winter and had been driven back by snow, leaving three of their number behind. Two bodies had already been recovered and the survivors were grateful to him for having found the third. They had no clue as to the identity of the other skeletons. Forbes understood completely. ‘We are men,’ he wrote, ‘and we stand in the chamber of death.’24
When Forbes’s Travels through the Alps of Savoy came out in 1843 it caused a stir. First there was his glacier theory, then there was his exploration of the Dauphiné. From Switzerland, Professor Chaix wrote to London’s Royal Geographical Society that Forbes’s Travels was ‘by far the best thing that has been written on our Alps either by natives or foreigners. Mr. Forbes has proved himself a worthy successor of Saussure by his modesty, his keenness of observation, his absence of charlatanry, and his laborious researches.’25 It was true. In his travels and his scientific work, Forbes was the spiritual heir of Saussure. Both men were devoted to science and both had incidentally broadened the scope of Alpine exploration. Both, too, were pivotal characters who stood on the brink of a new age. Saussure had set in motion the rush of climbers to Mont Blanc. During the 1850s Forbes prompted a similar wave of explorers. Saussure’s disciples had followed his example, taking hordes of guides on their ascents. Forbes’s followers approached the hills in a leaner fashion, employing one or two guides and sometimes not even that. A new attitude was afoot.
When Sir John Barrow, father of Arctic exploration and founder of the Royal Geographical Society, read Forbes’s book he was excited and angry. The excitement came from the fact that he had another icy world to contend with. The anger came from the fact that this world, so close to home, was still unmapped and was likely to remain so during his lifetime. (He was then 79, and died five years later.) Forbes had acknowledged in his book the merit of a few three-dimensional models made by Exchaquet and others, but he had denigrated in no uncertain terms the Alpine maps that were available. ‘Now, it is not creditable to European geographers,’ Barrow wrote, ‘that at a time when every day adds to our intimate knowledge of the Ural and Caucasus, of the Bolor-tag, the Altai, and the Himmalaya, and of the mountain masses of America, such ignorance and confusion should prevail regarding the mountain mass which may be regarded as the central knot of the upheaving of the European continent.’26 He was all for further investigation. ‘It is in the Alpine regions of Europe that the European geographer … can rightly understand and turn to account… the important facts gleaned by travellers in more remote regions. The account given by Professor Forbes of the wretchedly deficient knowledge of a portion of the European Alps … show[s] that this maxim has been entirely disregarded.’27 Barrow ended on a strident note: ‘It is to be hoped, the ground having been fairly broken for an improved geography of the Alps, that the region will not much longer be allowed to remain a reproach to modern geographical knowledge.’28
The Alps would not remain a reproach for long. In the 1850s the Swiss government instigated a thorough topographical survey of the region, its progress being reported to the Royal Geographical Society at regular intervals by Professor Chaix - seemingly a rather obsequious Anglophile. But it was a time-consuming affair and before it was completed several individuals from Britain had already done the job to their own satisfaction. Anyway, even before the survey started, the very notion of such a prosaic venture was being questioned by the century’s most prominent aesthete, John Ruskin. Ruskin did not want the Alps to be mapped. He wanted them to be understood.