‘Goblins and devils have long vanished from the Alps,’ Henry Gotch told the Alpine Club in May 1877, ‘and so many years have passed without any well-authenticated account of the discovery of a dragon that dragons too may be considered to have migrated.’1 A new creature, however, had arrived to take the dragons’ place. The Hunting of the Snark, published in 1876 by the Revd Charles Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, described the surreal adventures of a band of misfits seeking an elusive beast known as the Snark. They dreamed of the Snark, it occupied their waking moments, they threw all their ingenuity into its discovery. They hunted it, clad in seven coats, through deep valleys surrounded by dangerous peaks and chasms. And then, when one of their number found it, both he and the Snark vanished. The Hunting of the Snark was possibly an allegory for the pursuit of happiness. It was possibly, too, an allegory for the wild objectives Victorian explorers set themselves. Whatever interpretation Dodgson favoured, the Meije was a very obvious Snark. And it was captured in much the same way as the poem described.
Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau was a latecomer to the hunt. Born in 1857, the same year in which the Alpine Club had been inaugurated, he was the youngest scion of a noble French family fallen on hard times. Like so many other climbers he had been a sickly child and had encouraged himself with dreams of the unknown: ‘The one thing which interested me was reading accounts of distant exploration. I knew everything about recent discoveries in Africa and Asia and about Polar expeditions.’2 Like others with similar dreams, he went to the Alps instead. Between 1872 and 1874 he went up Mont Blanc four times, climbed the Matterhorn, the Jungfrau, the Finsteraarhorn, the Dent Blanche, the Écrins, the Col du Géant and a host of other mountains. He was one of the founding members of the French Alpine Club. Little else is known about him but, from surviving diaries, he was obviously tough. He trained for months before embarking on a campaign and was harder even than Whymper. On one ascent he and his guide climbed barefoot in order to get a finer grip of the rock - though he did not, as chamois hunters were reputed to do, cut his feet so that the congealing blood gave that extra bit of purchase. He tried the Meije first in 1874, again three years later, and then, on 16 August 1877 he stood on its summit.
He described the climb in nonchalant terms. Starting from La Bérarde, in conditions that were ‘splendid, cold and piercing’,3 he and his guides simply went up, skirted to one side and after a bit of hard ice work and a nasty moment with an overhang that forced them to traverse onto the north face, they reached the top at 3.30 p.m. They were cold, there was no view, they felt hungry and they came down, whereupon Boileau de Castelnau slept for sixteen hours. He subsequently joined the army and rarely climbed in the Alps again. Like the man who found the Snark, he vanished, along with the last great unclimbed peak in the Alps. No greater anti-climax could be imagined.
‘One bright summer morning in August 1877,’ wrote Coolidge, ‘soon after my return from an unusually short holiday among the mountains, a foreign postcard was placed in my hand which proved to contain the startling news of the conquest of the Meije.’4 It informed him that Boileau de Castelnau had climbed up the south face of what was now called the ‘Grand Pic’. Coolidge was appalled. He had met Boileau de Castelnau three weeks earlier at the foot of the Meije and had left him to his own devices, confident that the Meije could only be surmounted via the arête leading from the central peak, or the Tic Central’. Who was this man? Enquiring of the Alpine Club he learned that Boileau de Castelnau was an excellent mountaineer who was on the list for next year’s admissions. Still, why was he not more famous? How had he beaten all the older, more experienced continental climbers who had shown an interest in the Meije, such as Cordier, Duhamel and Guillemin? He did not believe it. It was a false report, just like the one Cordier had put about in 1876. But as more letters came in from unimpeachable sources, Coolidge was forced to acknowledge the truth.
The truth made him no happier. He could not see how the Meije could have been conquered. Had it really been conquered by the south face? In Coolidge’s mind no conquest was complete until every footstep had been set down on paper. The meagre details which appeared in French journals did not satisfy him, nor did Boileau de Castelnau’s brief narrative, the proofs of which Coolidge acquired from the printers in Paris. In fact, the more he looked at it, the more unlikely it seemed that Boileau de Castelnau had climbed the Meije. There was only one way to make sure. In July 1878, Coolidge hired Christian Aimer and his son ‘young Christian’ to take him up Boileau de Castelnau’s route.
They arrived on 3 July to find La Bérarde in turmoil. Several amateurs had already settled in the surrounding villages and the more serious mountaineers - ‘whom I looked on as dangerous rivals,’5 -were plodding over the passes that led to the Meije. Coolidge and the Aimers moved fast. By 9 July they were in a position to start the climb. ‘Never have I been in a greater state of nervous excitement on starting for any ascent than on this occasion,’6 Coolidge wrote. ‘The Meije had exercised, and indeed still exercises, the same strange influence over me which the Matterhorn had on its early explorers; and though I knew I could trust my two faithful guides, yet I scarcely dared hope that it would be given to me to attain the much-desired summit.’7
He spoke as if he was the first man to climb the Grand Pic. In his mind, he probably was. He and the Aimers followed Boileau de Castelnau’s track, and at each stage Coolidge wondered whether the Frenchman’s report was accurate, whether they might be crossing new ground. But they weren’t. Every move was exactly as Boileau de Castelnau had described it. Only when they reached the arête linking the Pic Central and the Grand Pic did Coolidge have a moment of satisfaction. Boileau de Castelnau had described climbing a ten-metre-high rock face to reach the arête and then leaving a rope behind for other climbers. Coolidge saw the face but he saw no rope, nor did he see any way in which Boileau de Castelnau could have climbed the face other than ‘a narrow gully of most uninviting appearance, filled with just enough snow to make it dangerously slippery’.8 Discomfited at the prospect of failure but heartened at the thought of proving Boileau de Castelnau a fraud, he paced along the face searching for the rope. It was not there. Then he looked down and saw it lying in the snow beneath the gully; flayed by ice and wind over the course of a year, it had fallen to the ground. The way having been pointed out to them, Coolidge and the Aimers crawled up the gully and reached the arête from where they walked to the summit, a disappointing sight, being sheer on one side but gently rounded on the other, and far from the precipitous peak Aimer had described in 1870.
Coolidge was solemn: ‘I am ashamed to say that I paid but little attention to the view. The Meije had been in my eyes a mountain to be climbed for its own sake, and not for the sake of the view - a fault or merit which I cannot attribute to many other mountains.’9 On his return he snipped off a bit of the rope to prove he had been there, and then retreated to La Bérarde. What Boileau de Castelnau had neglected to record was supplied by Coolidge to the Alpine Club in 1879: ‘the whole climb ranks with, and even surpasses in point of length and of continuous difficulty, the most difficult mountains with which I am acquainted’.10 Of an exceptionally awkward face he said: ‘The descent of this wall will always remain in my mind as the most arduous and terrible piece of climbing it has ever fallen to my lot to perform. When I say this, I am speaking deliberately, and in the conviction that I am not exaggerating the impression it made upon me.’11
Coolidge could not but admire Boileau de Castelnau’s achievement. Yet it was a forestalment he never forgave. He had climbed the Pic Central with his aunt and had hoped to accompany her up the Grand Pic, which stood such a minuscule distance higher. When he did reach the top, he dedicated it to her. When he returned, he dedicated his failure to Boileau de Castelnau. All the best peaks in the Dauphiné had been climbed by Britons, he said, and it was an unfortunate mistake that the Meije wasn’t among them. With petulant hauteur he announced (inaccurately) that it had fallen ‘by a kind of accident to a young Frenchman who was a chamois hunter’.12
The Grand Pic of the Meije was Coolidge’s last big climb. He did not renounce the Alps - during his lifetime he made more than 1,200 ascents, adding a silver medallion to Tschingel’s collar for every first -but he treated them thereafter as specimens, objects to be categorised and slotted into order. Having helped bring the age of Alpine exploration to a close he set himself up as its chronicler, creating an oeuvre of historical studies that was as painstakingly accurate as it was massive and dull. Over the years he contributed more than 230 pieces to the Alpine Journal and wrote for some thirty other Alpine periodicals. He was the author, co-author or consultant of sixty-one separate titles. His encyclopedia articles were as flies in a stable. After several decades his outpourings became so voluminous that he made them a subject of a book itself. A List of Writings (not being Reviews of Books) dating from 1868 to 1912 and Relating to the Alps or Switzerland of W. A. B. Coolidge was published in 1913. Such a list may have been needed but its public appeal was limited. For apart from one or two major works Coolidge’s writing comprised a maze of footnotes, references and pettifogging detail impenetrable to most. He was no Whymper; he was not even a Tyndall, Wills or Forbes. Pedantry took precedence over passion, prose and linear progression. ‘I personally cannot forgive him,’ wrote a later President of the Alpine Club, ‘for the fact that he never tried seriously to communicate to the world the knowledge which he possessed, but was content to fling it out in a disorderly mess.’13
Coolidge was stunted by his aunt’s death. From 1876 he wanted nothing more than to recreate his early life. He professed pleasure in mountains but he never went to the English hills of Cumbria, nor did he climb Wales’s Mount Snowdon; he never crossed the border to Scotland, whose Highlands were as magical and whose rock-climbing as taxing as anything to be found in Europe. He did not go to the Pyrenees, nor to the Andes or the Rockies or the Himalayas. He just went to the Alps, again and again, employing no guide other than Aimer. Whenever possible he took Tschingel on his trips, but Tschingel was growing old. She gradually turned white - not just the muzzle but the whole coat - her teeth dropped out, she went blind and on 16 June 1879, the day before she was due to be put down, she died in front of the kitchen fire. ‘I am at present in great affliction at the death of my dear old dog,’14 Coolidge wrote a few days later. Yet another link to the past had been lost. In 1880 he investigated the possibility of Holy Orders and two years later he was ordained; this, combined with archaic regulations stipulating that Oxford dons be bachelors, created a monastic cocoon in which he wrapped himself ever closer as the years passed, emerging only to investigate the finer points of Alpine history.
From 1880 to 1889 Coolidge was editor of the Alpine Journal, a post which gave him ample opportunity to indulge his mania. He plagued himself - and others - with picayune queries regarding precedence and accuracy. Seasoned climbers, who had gone to the Alps just for the fun of it, received bewildering enquiries on details they had forgotten years ago. ‘Such questions seemed to him of the highest importance,’ recalled an acquaintance, ‘and he insisted on his own view as though it was a matter of principle. In the upshot he maintained with vigour, and, I believe, with real enjoyment, a number of quarrels which lasted for years. When his opponent became tired, and ready to let the question drop, he was fresh as paint, and as eager to reply and counter-reply.’15 Nothing was too unimportant for Coolidge: he could turn a misplaced comma into a lifelong feud.
Frequently his quibbles concerned mistaken reports of his own ascents. Having conquered in 1878 the double-peaked Aiguille de Péclet, for example, he was concerned when a French journal suggested seven years later that its lower peak - which had first been climbed in 1877 by two Frenchmen - might be the higher of the two. Coolidge protested vehemently, and when the allegation was repeated in 1905 he threatened to resign from the French Alpine Club (of which he was an Honorary Member). An amendment was duly published. But Coolidge did not forget the incident. Nor did the French, apparently, for thirteen years later Coolidge was able to write: ‘One of my English friends, Colonel Strutt, climbed the Péclet and assures me that the Southern summit (mine) is a metre higher than the north summit, but that the latter is now crowned by a huge cairn so that it is, in fact, the higher.’16
His conservatism was reflected in his mountaineering. He was willing to make new ascents for historical purposes - always led by Aimer - but when offered an Alp he generally insisted on going up well-known routes so that he could trace the steps of those who had preceded him. One companion, who wanted to go up an old hill a new way, was slightly infuriated when Coolidge insisted they pass such-and-such a rock by the right rather than the left, merely to satisfy himself that the man who had first described the ascent had done so correctly. On one occasion, when climbing with a friend and fellow Alpine Club member, Frederick Gardiner, he refused to continue unless Gardiner placed his hands and feet in exactly the same spots as did Aimer. The same lack of adventure typified his university career. He was ‘one of a block … of stubborn dons who resisted every reform’, wrote a colleague, ‘and could always be relied upon to turn up when it came to voting. They systematically non-placetted every reform.’17 When beards were becoming unfashionable Coolidge wore one all the same, posing for photographic portraits as if he were a scientist of old - or as if he were a guide. Coolidge’s biographer called him ‘The Magdalen Hedgehog’. It was a perfect description. He was spiky, defensive and unapproachable. He made few friends, preferring to curl up in the dry leaves of correspondence with which he documented a dying age.