‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’ was watched by hundreds of thousands. Many went home with the memory of a good evening’s banter and left it at that. Some, however, decided to follow Smith’s example and climb to the summit. They made their presence felt. Between 1786 and 1853 there had been forty-five ascents of Mont Blanc. In 1854 alone there were sixteen, mostly by Britons. Many more made the less perilous climb to the hut on the Grands Mulets which had now become an attraction in itself. Smith had brought people to the Alps, without a doubt. But the influx of British visitors was not due solely to him.
In the 1850s Britain was on a high. This was the decade of the Great Exhibition, the decade when British supremacy in almost every area was acknowledged across the globe. Britain was the most prosperous, most technologically advanced nation in Europe. It was the stablest one too, having been spared the revolutions which swept Europe in 1848. Its furnaces flamed into the night, its gas-lit mills spewed roll upon roll of cotton and worsted, and the air at Wigan and other mining centres was black with coal dust for miles around. Locomotives charged across viaducts, through 100-foot-deep cuttings and long, lightless tunnels. Energy was everywhere. The popular mood was expressed by Queen Victoria after a visit to the Great Exhibition. ‘We are capable,’ she wrote in her diary on 29 April 1851, ‘of doing anything.’1
Not only was it thought that Britons could do anything, but that they should. It was an age when success was seen as a gift from above. Whatever some radicals said, it was widely believed that the poor were poor and the rich were rich because God had decreed it so. Expanding this philosophy, it was therefore obvious that Britain had done well because it was naturally, divinely better than all other nations. It was the right - nay, it was the duty - for Britain to stamp its mark on the world, and for more than half a century British soldiers, engineers and industrialists did just that, their success serving only to prove the theory.
In the 1850s this brand of chauvinism had yet to become dogma, but Britons - Englishmen especially - felt it in their bones nevertheless. Some people expressed their superiority by conquering distant territories or becoming missionaries in Africa, others by building sewage systems and gasworks in foreign cities, yet others by selling machine tools to developing economies. A select band exercised their divine right - and themselves - by conquering the Alps. ‘I unhesitatingly maintain,’ wrote one climber, ‘that there is a joy in these measurings of strength with Nature in her wildest moods, a quiet sense of work done, and success won in the teeth of opposition.’2 He did not know whether he owed this aggressive impulse ‘to our Anglo-Saxon blood, as some may hold, or whether it be only one of the modes in which the “contrariness” of human nature crops out in certain individuals’.3 Wherever it came from, it was there, and for a decade and a half British climbers swamped the Alps, crossing off peaks like partners on a dance card. They called it the Golden Age of Mountaineering.
The Golden Age was a godsend to the lawyers, doctors, clergymen and others who made up Britain’s middle class. Their jobs prevented them indulging in great adventure. But they had money, and a good six weeks’ summer holiday in which to do some exploring. Thanks to the marvels of modern rail travel, Mont Blanc could be reached in twenty-four hours and the Swiss Alps in little over fifty-six. So they went, conquered and came home. At London Bridge station, on a late August morning when the sky was smogging over, groups of travellers were to be seen brandishing their alpenstocks, hoisting their rucksacks and comparing notes about climbs, the Channel ferry and the excellence of French railways compared to British. Then the cabs came and they dispersed excitedly to their various callings. The thrill was palpable. Hundreds of criminals were prosecuted, hundreds of patients attended and hundreds of sermons given by men who had scarcely washed their socks since Chamonix.
By common agreement, the Golden Age began with the ascent of the Wetterhorn by Alfred Wills. Wills - later Sir Alfred Wills, the man who tried Oscar Wilde - was a well-to-do barrister with nothing much on his books. In 1854 he made the journey to Grindelwald. He had been to the Alps before, but this trip was something special. He was on his honeymoon and he wanted to climb a major peak to show his wife how it was done - also to see if he could actually do it. As he wrote, ‘I had crossed many a lofty col, and wound my way among many a labyrinth of profound and yawning crevasses. I had slept on the moraine of a glacier, and on the rugged mountainside, but I had never yet scaled any of those snowy peaks which rise in tempting grandeur above the crests of cols and the summits of the loftier passes.’4 Ideally, he wanted to climb the Jungfrau, failing that the Finsteraarhorn or the Schreckhorn. But he found himself on the wrong side of the chain and did not have time to go round to the approachable faces. So he settled instead for the Wetterhorn, a mountain of 12,143 feet that could be reached from Grindelwald and had yet to be climbed (or so he was told).
He set out from Grindelwald at 1.30 p.m. on 17 September 1854 with four guides: Auguste Balmat, to whom he had been introduced by Forbes in London the previous year; a second Chamoniard, named Auguste ‘Samson’ Simond, who could lift a grown man off the ground at arm’s length; a Grindelwald guide called Peter Bohren, who had made three attempts already that season; and the leader, Ulrich Lauener, a ‘tall, straight, active, knowing-looking fellow, with a cock’s feather stuck jauntily in his high-crowned hat’.5 They travelled reasonably light, taking just one porter to carry their food and wine. There was one exceptional piece of luggage, however. Perhaps bearing in mind the squabbles over the Meyers’ ascents of the Jungfrau, Lauener had decided to take a flag that would not easily blow away or perish. It comprised a sheet of iron measuring three feet by two, attached to a twelve-foot-long metal mast.
They spent their first night on the mountain in a cave used by chamois-hunters. Wills found it a dreadful experience. The cold, clammy roof was only six inches from his head, Lauener used his feet as a pillow, the atmosphere was stifling, their blankets had fleas and he was kept awake by the sound of ‘a foaming glacier torrent brawling past my head, not six feet from me’.6 On top of it all he was very hungry, having been unable to eat their evening meal because the mutton was flavoured with garlic, which he detested. ‘I must say,’ he wrote, ‘I was desperately uncomfortable.’7 Balmat, too, could not sleep and the two of them wormed their way out of the cave and into the moonlight. ‘Oh! how grateful was that cool night air! how refreshing that draught at the mountain torrent!’ Wills wrote. ‘The stars were shining as I never saw them shine before, like so many balls of fire in the black concave; the glaciers were sparkling in the soft light of the waning moon … a bracing air blew briskly, yet pleasantly, from the north-west … so beautiful a nocturnal view as this I never had yet beheld.’8 Wills was so refreshed that he decided to take a bath. Thus, at 2.00 a.m., halfway up a very high snow-covered mountain, he stripped naked and immersed himself in the nearby glacial stream. It ‘was icy-cold, but did me more good than a weary night in the hole’.9*
At 4.30 a.m. they resumed their climb, Lauener carrying the ‘flag’ on his back and using its pole as an alpenstock. They held lanterns to help them over the ice and rubble, and by 10.00 a.m. they were on the main plateau from which the Wetterhorn’s three peaks sprang. Here they took a rest. But as they admired the scenery they spied two figures on the mountainside above them. Bizarrely, one of them was carrying a fir tree. After much shouting they discovered that the men were Christian Aimer and Ulrich Kaufmann, two chamois-hunters who had heard of the ascent and had determined to reach the summit first. The fir tree was an impromptu version of Lauener’s iron flag, which they intended to plant at the top for the honour of their valley. Wills was outraged. Balmat had to be restrained from going up to fight them. In the end, however, the two teams joined forces and Balmat was so impressed with the opposition that he declared them ‘bons enfants” and gave them a slab of chocolate apiece.
Roped together, the enlarged party struggled on, hacking their way over a glacier that was 45° to begin with, but which soon reached a terrifying 70°. As the guides chopped their way upwards, clumps of ice showered onto those below. Wills dodged valiantly but was nevertheless hit on the head by a lump of debris, ‘which made me keep a better look out for its successors’.10 From where he was Wills could only see a steep slope of ice, above which hung an impenetrable cornice. He was sure that the summit, presumably a dome like so many other summits, lay beyond the cornice. But how were they to overcome the overhang? It ‘curled over towards us, like the crest of a wave, breaking at irregular intervals along the line into pendants and inverted pinnacles of ice, many of which hung down to the full length of a tall man’s height’.11
After a brief parley, Lauener was given an axe and told to do his best. If he could bring the cornice down, the way would be open to the summit. They clung nervously to the ice while Lauener swung the axe. ‘It depended upon this assault,’ Wills wrote, ‘whether that impregnable fortress was to be ours, or whether we were to return, slowly and sadly, foiled by its calm and massive strength.’12 Lauener chopped; a large block of ice bounced down from the cornice and rolled onto the glacier below. Then came one of the most memorable statements in Alpine history: ‘I see blue sky!’13
There was no dome. The cornice was the last obstacle. It was the peak. Lauener thrashed away with his axe and soon he had made an opening wide enough for him to slither through. One moment Wills was facing a blank wall of ice, the next a hand reached down and grabbed him. ‘I stepped across, and had passed the ridge of the Wetterhorn! … The whole world seemed to lie at my feet. The next moment I was almost appalled by the awfulness of our situation. The side we had come up was steep; but it was a gentle slope, compared with that which fell away from where I stood. A few yards of glittering ice at our feet, and then, nothing between us and the green slopes of Grindelwald, nine thousand feet beneath.’14
Wills gasped, not from the altitude - they were nearly the height of Mount Snowdon beneath the summit of Mont Blanc - but from sheer, dumbstruck amazement. He experienced a sense of upliftment: ‘We felt as in the more immediate presence of Him who had reared this tremendous pinnacle, and beneath the “majestical roof of whose deep blue Heaven we stood, poised, as it seemed, half-way between the earth and the sky.’15 Balmat was similarly struck. ‘[He] told me repeatedly, afterwards, that it was the most awful and startling moment he had known in the course of his long mountain experience.’16 Even Lauener trembled ‘like a child’. They soon had more cause to tremble. When Lauener and Samson cut away the dangerous overhang, the party was straddling a ridge only four inches wide. Wills was petrified. Although surrounded by scenery of ‘indescribable sublimity … it was impossible long to turn the eye from the fearful slope at the top of which we stood. For twenty or thirty yards beneath us, the glacier curved away steeper and steeper, until its rounded form limited our view … Nothing else broke the terrific void, and the next objects on which the eye rested were … nearly two miles of absolute depth below us.’17 Eventually he mustered the courage to stand upright and, ‘where there was not room to place my two feet side by side’, waved his hat in the direction of Grindelwald. At the same time the guides ‘began an unearthly series of yells, which … produced a strange and unpleasant effect on the nerves’.18 Reading between the lines it appears that Wills almost lost his balance. Certainly he lost his glove, which slithered down the ice towards Grindelwald and was later rescued by Bohren despite Wills’s commands to the contrary.
They planted their two incongruous flags and were just about to leave when they noticed another flag, underneath and to one end of the cornice, which had been placed there earlier in the year by a team that had failed to reach the top. ‘No better comment could be devised on the reality and greatness of the difficulty we had overcome in passing the cornice,’ Wills wrote. ‘These explorers had actually arrived within ten feet of the summit; but had been arrested by that frowning barrier of overhanging ice.’19 Balmat made him crawl along and give it a contemptuous kick. ‘In doing so,’ Wills recorded, ‘I caught a glimpse of the arête below, ending in the glacier of Schwarzwald, which made me shudder.’20
Down in the valley, Grindelwalders were puzzled by what they saw. There was the flag, there was Wills - recognisable by his white flannel trousers - and there were his four guides. But who were the other two men? And what was that thing next to the flag; was it a tree? The landlord of Wills’s hotel telegraphed Berne, where the great observatory telescope swung round to focus on the Wetterhorn. Yes, the observatory telegraphed back, there were seven men on the summit and they were standing next to a black flag and a fir tree.
Lauener had broken through the cornice at 11.20 a.m. and by 11.40 Wills’s team was beginning its descent. Once the ice slope was out of the way they moved at astonishing and at times incautious speed. They slid down scree slopes where each step carried them 12 feet at a time. When the snow permitted they glissaded ‘at railroad pace’. If the ground was firm they ran. At 2.50 p.m. they reached the cave where they had spent the previous night and paused only to drink the last of their wine before careering off again. By the time they reached the lower pastures they were almost flying, hurdling fences and hedges alike with enormous strides. Wills and Lauener were in the lead, racing and laughing like a pair of schoolboys. At one point Wills gained the advantage but Lauener soon caught up and they took a hedge together only to come to an abrupt halt when ‘suddenly, and very much to our mutual astonishment’,21 they discovered themselves within ten paces of Mrs Wills taking a stroll with her brother.
Mrs Wills looked at her husband and his guide with bemusement. Their faces were both suffused with a deep purple and they seemed practically deaf. Wills, meanwhile, looked at his watch. It had taken them twenty-two hours to climb the hill; they had come down it in six. The whole party moved off to Grindelwald where they entered the village in procession, their hats decorated with red berries, to the accompaniment of rifle and cannon discharges. For days afterwards Wills was pointed out in the streets as ‘Der Wetterhörner Herr’, which gave him such pleasure that when he discovered he was not the first to reach the top - two of Desor’s guides had reached the summit in the 1840s - he forgave Lauener entirely for charging the fee that was normally reserved for a first ascent and declared that he had earned every centime. He was a little put out, however, when people began to query whether he had reached the top. The flag was there, Wills said. They could see it and the Berne observatory had seen it. Yes, said the townsfolk, but from where they stood it seemed as if a higher section of the ridge lay to the west. Wills argued it as best he could but eventually gave up. ‘I never saw such a race of unbelievers as the people at Grindelwald,’22 he said despairingly.
Wills was by no means the only British climber loose in the Alps that season. He was, however, one of the first to write about his experiences and, like Smith, he found a ready audience. Where Smith had told people where to go, Wills told them what to do when they got there. He told them of blue ice walls and perilous cornices, of tumbling rocks and the couloirs or chutes down which they fell, of starlit nights and dawn winds that swept streams of ‘smoke’ from the peaks; and then he told them to go out and experience it all for themselves -for the fun of it, for the exhilaration of reaching the top and for the chance, in the grubby industrial world in which they lived, of reaching a true rapport with God and Nature. What he did was to reconcile all the disparate tenets of the Victorian age - national duty, physical exercise, spiritual reward, self-improvement - and channel them into a small piece of Europe known as the Alps. In short, he was the first person to advocate mountaineering as a pursuit worthwhile in itself. This was news.
The exploits of Auldjo, Fellows and all the others who had ‘done’ Mont Blanc paled beside Wills’s philosophy. They had been adventurers. Wills was a teacher. Throughout the 1850s Britons followed his example, climbing peak after undiscovered peak and glorying in every minute of it. Continental climbers - of whom there were several very successful examples - were brushed aside as irritants. Like so many other parts of the world, the Alps now belonged to Albion.
Collectively, the newcomers might have been driven by a subconscious jingoism. Individually, however, each climber had his own motives for visiting the Alps. Some wanted exercise, others excitement, others enlightenment. Doctors considered an Alpine holiday the best medicine there was. Clergymen saw the peaks as natural steeples, leading them ever closer to God. Agnostics saw them as an answer to religion. Lawyers relished the clear-cut simplicity of a mountain. Aesthetes were enraptured by the shapes they encountered. Geologists were in primordial paradise. Explorers had the satisfaction of knowing that the rocks with which they grappled had never before been touched by human hand. And historians could tell them that they were wrong when, in a brief respite from arguing over Hannibal’s route, they learned that a Bronze Age arrowhead had been found at the top of a mountain by American tourists. The Alps were everything to everybody. And they had the further attraction, in an age of progress, that they led forwards and up.
Inevitably the new mountaineers felt the need of a forum in which they could discuss their ideas and experiences. It took the shape of that quintessentially Victorian institution, the club. The notion was first mooted by an Alpine enthusiast named William Mathews, who wrote on 1 February 1857 to a climbing companion, the Revd Fenton John Anthony Hort, Fellow of Trinity College, asking him ‘to consider whether it would not be possible to establish an Alpine Club’.23 Mathews envisaged something basic: an annual dinner, say, at which mountaineers could get together and swap stories about their climbs. Possibly their experiences could be published in an annual or biannual volume. There would be a President, of course, but otherwise it would be pretty informal. Hort replied damply that the idea was fair enough so long as the dinner didn’t cost too much. Undeterred, Mathews went on a climbing expedition to Switzerland that summer and asked his companions - a cousin, Benjamin Mathews, a friend, Edward Shirley Kennedy, and two others, a Mr Ellis and the Revd J. F. Hardy - what they thought of an Alpine Club. They thought it a splendid suggestion and when, on 13 August 1857, they became the first Britons to climb the Finsteraarhorn, they thought it more splendid still. On returning home they gathered at Mathews’s house on the outskirts of Birmingham and drew up a list of who should be invited to join.
Kennedy took the lead in rousting up subscribers, a task which suited him to perfection. He was a man who should have been born fifty years earlier, when blue swallowtail coats were the rage and every man worth his salt carried a rapier to give the nightwatchman a prod. He had come into a fortune when he was 16 and since then had devoted himself to life. For a while he lived with thieves and garrotters and once walked from London to Brighton with a mob of tramps. He was famous for his catchphrase ‘Is it right?’ which he applied to every situation in which he found himself. The Alps were ‘right’ in his eyes and he persuaded many people to take this view. He also plumped up Mathews’s proposal into something much more to his liking. There would be not one but two dinners per annum, famous names would be invited to speak and everybody should pay a guinea for a year’s membership. Hort was disturbed. It was quite right that the club should be select, he told Kennedy, but ‘Is it not rather much to ask a guinea a year, besides two dinners and (for all except Londoners) two double journeys to town?’24 There were also one or two other clauses in Kennedy’s outline that Hort disagreed with: ‘What idea lurks under “geographical explorers” and “other guests of celebrity”?’ he asked. ‘Surely we do not want speeches from Dr. Livingstone or Sir Robert Murchison?’25 In fact, the more he thought about it, the more worried he became - ‘The guinea subscription should be reconsidered as possibly showy,’ he said, adding a desperate postscript: ‘Lightfoot, who left me this morning, begs me to say the same thing.’26
Kennedy ignored Hort’s quibbles, added his name to the list and told Mathews that everything was in order. On 22 December 1857, therefore, the Alpine Club was formally inaugurated at Astley’s Hôtel, Covent Garden, its declared aim being ‘the promotion of good fellowship among mountaineers, of mountain climbing and mountain exploration throughout the world, and of better knowledge of the mountains through literature, science and art’.27 There was a slight flurry when Albert Smith, one of the first invitees, told everybody that he had discussed just such a club several years earlier with Auldjo and was very pleased that his idea had now been taken up. But otherwise the Alpine Club got off to an easy start. John Ball, the Irish politician and scientist, Under-Secretary for the Colonies in 1855, who had spent the last twenty years climbing the Alps, took the chair as President, while the publisher William Longman was elected Vice-President.
Initially it was decided that all members should have climbed to a height of at least 13,000 feet. Later, however, this was toned down to to include people who had written about the Alps, performed ‘mountain exploits’ or simply shown an interest in the region. ‘It was at first assumed,’ Longman wrote, ‘that the Club would take the character rather of a social gathering of a few mountaineers rather than of a really important society.’28 This, and the relaxed qualifications for membership, proved very attractive. In the first year 80 people joined; by 1861 there were 158 members; and two years later the club’s list contained 281 names who had paid their annual guinea. The composition of the 1863 list was interesting. It included 57 barristers, 34 clergymen, 23 solicitors, 19 landed gentry and 15 university dons. This was to be expected: these types, 148 of them in all, enjoyed good incomes and long holidays. More intriguing, however, was the fact that 133 members - nearly half the total - were not so blessed yet still devoted what spare time they had to the pursuit of mountaineering. The Alpine Club was open to all, regardless of class or income, and as such was a rara avis in the world of Victorian clubmanship. As the club grew it attracted its share of non-climbers: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, for example, who was primarily a diplomat and breeder of Arab horses; Richard Burton, who scraped in on the count of ‘General travel; mountain ranges in all parts of the world’; Thomas Atkinson, a bricklayer’s assistant who travelled across Russia as a spy for the Tsar and then returned to Britain to become a prominent architect with two wives; and on a very basic level, the poet Matthew Arnold who declared that ‘everyone should see the Alps once, to know what they are’.29 On the whole, however, everybody had a genuine enthusiasm for the Alps as well as a desire to climb them. They had, as one journal put it, been ‘bitten by the tarantula of sport’.30
In 1859 the Alpine Club published its first volume of climbers’ tales to huge public acclaim. Peaks, Passes and Glaciers was edited by John Ball and contained a selection of the most important climbs made in the last few years by club members. Wills contributed a story and so did many other big names. The entries were well written, well illustrated and stirring in the extreme. Wills told readers what it was like to shelter in a grotto on the back slopes of Mont Blanc; another member, John Tyndall, described the horrors of a rockfall amidst the seracs of the Col du Géant, where lumps of stone weighing half a ton bounced from pillar to pillar streaming contrails of ice in their wake; and Kennedy described in nail-biting terms his ascent - the first ever - of the Bristenstock when he and a companion reached the peak without guides and then made the mistake of coming down by a different route.
Of all the chapters in Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, Kennedy’s was the most thrilling. He told how he and his friend had been assured by their innkeeper that the Bristenstock was an easy climb: everybody had done it; several guides had been up and down in less than six hours. So the two Britons went up it. They reached the top without any trouble, then decided to descend by the easiest-looking slope rather than the ridge by which they had ascended. The easy slope gradually became a difficult one and then turned into a rock precipice lined with shelves. They slipped from shelf to shelf in the confidence that they would soon reach the bottom. But, having descended 2,000 feet, they came to a halt. Below them was a 5,000-foot drop of sheer rock. There was no way round it. They could only go back the way they had come. It was late afternoon and they had just a few hours to reach safety before darkness fell. When slithering from shelf to shelf they had given no thought to climbing back up; often they had dropped more than a man’s height. Kennedy described the return journey in which he balanced himself on narrow outcrops a few inches wide, his fingers gripping any available crevice, while his companion climbed on his shoulders to reach the outcrop above. Shelf by shelf they laboured back to the summit. Incredibly, they then chose another short cut down. It was as hopeless as the first, and when night fell they were stuck on a ledge measuring four feet by eight with cliffs above and below. They built a small wall to stop themselves rolling over the edge and then fell asleep in each other’s arms. When either of them turned, lumps of wall tumbled into the valley below. The next day they worked their way back to safe ground and started on a new short cut. This time they were lucky and got below the snowline. They were battling their way through the pine trees when, to their relief, they met a woodcutter from whom they asked directions. Surprised, he told them that most people came down the hill by the track. It was over there, a few yards away.
When Kennedy reached the bottom, after an absence of thirty-six hours, he learned that, in fact, his innkeeper had exaggerated when he had said that it was an easy climb; and when he said everybody had done it he really meant that nobody had: ‘He admitted that neither he, nor any one else, knew anything about the mountain, that the professed guides had never reached the summit, and that, so far as was aware, only one man had ever been there, and he was killed.’31 Later on in their travels, Kennedy and his companion heard that two young men had perished miserably on the Bristenstock: ‘nothing was found of their mangled corpses,’ they were told, ‘save some small particles of blood-stained clothing’. Kennedy replied, in an example of the most ponderous Victorian humour, that he had slid down some rough patches and that ‘I afterwards found myself minus a portion of my nether integuments, and these, no doubt, are the portions of raiment, the discovery of which you relate.’32
Stories like this appealed enormously to the British public. Peaks, Passes and Glaciers went into its second edition after only six weeks and received rapturous notices. Forbes, Smith and Wills had done their bit to acquaint people with the Alps; the Alpine Club now placed them irrevocably on the map. ‘The aim and end of the Alpine Club is a noble one,’ cheered a reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine, who went on to explain, in rather appalling terms, why this was so. ‘The sporting passion exists to a greater or lesser degree, in some shape or other, in the breast of every genuine British man,’ he announced. ‘It is a remnant of barbarism, we are willing to allow, which has clung to us through the whole course of our progressive civilisation and which we hope, indeed, will be the last to leave us.’33 Sport was defined as ‘physical exercise combined with hazard’, and hitherto had been confined in English eyes to fox-hunting or, at a pinch, lion-stalking and buffalo-shooting. It was something that Britons did and which other nationalities were only dimly capable of understanding - they went to war instead, sniffed the reviewer, ignoring Britain’s recent fracas in the Crimea. But not everybody could afford to ‘gratify the national longing’ in the time-honoured fashion. What then were they to do, these ‘hundreds of high-spirited Britons, well educated, well mannered, with high tastes and sympathies, blest with abundant vigour, but moderate means’?34 Why, they were to go to the Alps. Not to the usual watering holes - ‘none but a degenerate Briton would be found among the habitués of a German spa,’35 the reviewer warned - but to the high tops because, ‘the great discovery of the day is a species of sport to which its devotees give the not unapt name of Mountaineering’.36
It was out. Mountaineering had a name, a purpose and a following. Moreover, given that the Alps were for the most part undiscovered, it was considered as valid a means of exploration as any other. The Royal Geographical Society, which was Britain’s prime mover in the field of exploration, had paid scant attention to the Alps. Apart from Barrow’s brief blast in 1844, the only notice it took of the region was when Professor Chaix of Geneva sent the odd communication relating Switzerland’s efforts to map the range. The Alpine Club could therefore claim the opening of a new part of Europe as its own. ‘It is to be esteemed a national honour,’ Blackwood’s concluded, ‘that most of these peaks hitherto considered inaccessible, and many of those passes hitherto considered impassable, have yielded to the courage and perseverance of those islanders, whose still more daring and enduring countrymen have passed the continuous night of the Arctic winter in darkness and suffering, to solve problems not much more important; or endured the torture of thirst in the burning deserts of Central Africa, with an end and purpose avowedly and really higher, but in no dissimilar spirit.’37 Neither comparison was exact but it was a welcome announcement that the Alps were worthy of exploration. Suddenly, people realised that in the middle of Europe there lay a zone with its own flora and fauna, its own climate and its own hundreds of unclimbed peaks. This was not news: scientists had known that the Alps were a unique environment for more than 150 years. What was news, however, was that virtually anybody could go out there and climb them. And who knew what they might find? Dragons were probably too much to hope for - although one could never be sure - but there was the prospect of limitless discovery on a smaller scale. All they had to do was join the Alpine Club.
‘We prophesy,’ said Blackwood’s, ‘that, amongst men of intelligence as well as spirit, this will soon be one of the most popular of all the clubs.’38 It was.