In August 1792 an Anglo-Irish gentleman named Thomas Whaley stood in the Alpine village of Chamonix looking up at the snow-covered slopes of Mont Blanc. Known as the ‘doomed mountain’ it was once believed to be the abode of witches and sorcerers, but its sheer size and height made it even more daunting. At 15,780 feet it is western Europe’s highest peak and in 1792 it had been summited by only a handful of climbers. Whaley was determined to clamber through the snow and ice to join their number. The fact that he had virtually no knowledge of the Alps and was completely devoid of climbing experience mattered not a jot to him. After all, he had faced much greater challenges in the past.
As a sport, mountaineering was still in its infancy in the late eighteenth century but a burgeoning community of climbers in the Chamonix area was steadily conquering the Alps. The most famous was Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a geologist and physicist who had been fascinated by Mont Blanc since he first laid eyes on it in 1760. He decided that he would either conquer the mountain himself or direct the expedition that did so and in the end he succeeded in both objectives. Instructed by him, Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed to the top of Mont Blanc in August 1786, and a year later de Saussure accomplished the feat himself.1 Any attempt to follow in their footsteps was not to be undertaken lightly but Whaley had resolved to give it a try. He knew that de Saussure had left a piece of paper with his name in a bottle at the summit and he wanted to pay ‘homage to this great man, by placing my name next to this bottle’. (W, 293) To accompany him he recruited three Englishmen, one of whom, Lord Charles Townshend, he praised for ‘his merit and distinguished virtues’. (W, 292) Conscious that local knowledge and expertise would be key to the success of the venture, he also assembled a team of around twenty local guides, one of whom was probably the seasoned climber Pierre Cachat. A man of huge stature, Cachat was renowned for his great strength and had been involved in several previous expeditions to Mont Blanc.2 No doubt the expedition was reasonably well equipped by the standards of the day and wore, as de Saussure’s team did, frock coats, hip-length boots and broad-brimmed hats. They would also have had ladders, ice axes and long poles.3 And yet Whaley and his English companions were strangely nonchalant, seemingly unaware of the magnitude of the task that lay ahead. ‘They thought that they were making an excursion as if they had been going to the Col de Balme or the Brévent, or making a pleasure trip,’ the alpinist Marc-Théodore Bourrit observed. ‘Alas! Their lightheartedness and lack of caution almost had deplorable consequences’.4
As they approached the lower slopes of the mountain Whaley and his team could see two glaciers separated by a dark tongue of rock. This was the ridge called the Montage de la Côte and they decided to ascend by it, hoping to reach the Gîte à Balmat, the two great boulders that stood at its crest. This was where Balmat and Paccard had bivouacked following their first day of climbing, but getting to it proved to be no easy matter. Although it was the climbing season, the conditions were not favourable and they had barely reached the snowline, around halfway up the ridge, when they encountered heavy rain and a thick, icy fog. Given the poor visibility, what followed was not surprising. Someone – it is not clear whether it was Whaley, one of the Englishmen, or one of the guides – missed his footing and dislodged a stone. ‘It rolled down, set another much larger one in motion, & all came down into the path.’ Some of the falling debris hit one of the guides, breaking his leg, while a stone struck another in the head and beat him ‘almost to pieces, tho’ without killing him’.5 When they had recovered from the shock, the other guides paused for a moment in the freezing fog to take stock. The two injured men could not continue, the conditions were perilous, and the foreigners who had hired them clearly had no idea what they were doing. If they continued further disaster was inevitable. Their minds made up, the guides picked up their injured companions and began to descend.
Whaley later claimed that he and Townshend considered pressing on by themselves but ‘after some deliberation we determined to join our cowardly attendants; as any attempt to proceed without them would be vain’. Feeling ‘more or less roughly handled’, they tottered back down the mountain. The guide with the broken leg recovered but the other man lingered between life and death for some time afterwards and eventually had to be trepanned. Despite Whaley’s uncharitable description of the guides as ‘cowardly’, he and the others at least tried to make up for what an observer called ‘the sad results of their foolhardiness’ by generously compensating the men’s families.6 Whaley’s hopes of placing his name in a bottle next to de Saussure’s had been dashed. Hoping to have the unfortunate incident put down to the forces of nature rather than his own rashness, when he wrote his memoirs a few years later he claimed that they had been two thirds of the way to the summit when the accident happened, that it had been caused not by a rockfall but by an avalanche, and that the two guides had not been injured but killed outright. (W, 293)
Those who knew Thomas Whaley would not have been surprised to hear of his latest misadventure. It epitomised several of his defining characteristics: a tendency to set off on ill-considered escapades, an obsession with achieving what few or none had accomplished before, and a cavalier attitude towards danger. These traits made for an adventurous life, but they also encouraged an addiction that plagued him all his days. In an age notorious for its gamblers he was one of the worst. Born in Dublin in 1765 into an extremely wealthy Anglo-Irish family, he inherited close to £50,000 (around €19 million in today’s money)7 and estates worth almost £7,000 a year. Yet he squandered every penny of this, and many thousands besides, at the gaming tables. These catastrophic losses drove him into exile on the continent in the 1790s, but this did not cure him of his addiction. By the early summer of 1792 he had managed to redeem his fortunes somewhat by running his own casino in Paris before the turmoil of the Revolution forced him to relocate to Lausanne in Switzerland. It was from there that he set out to climb Mont Blanc (it is entirely possible that he did so on foot of a wager, though this is unknowable). Following his eventual return from the continent Whaley retired to the Isle of Man, where he wrote his memoirs. By this time (1796–7) he had accumulated monumental losses: ‘in the course of a few years I dissipated a fortune of near four hundred thousand pounds, and contracted debts to the amount of thirty thousand more, without ever purchasing or acquiring contentment or one hour’s true happiness’.8 (W, 332) Indeed he was such a restless spirit that contentment eluded him until his dying day. ‘Tis well known that Mr. Whaley was blessed with a good understanding,’ read his obituary, ‘but the whirl and blaze in which he lived, diminished its effect and force in an eccentricity of pursuits’.9
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Why should we care about Whaley? He himself would have admitted that he was a wealthy spendthrift and playboy given over to self-indulgence. So why does he deserve attention, any more than the other rakes and libertines that crop up time and again in the annals of history? Perhaps because he was more than just a rich wastrel. Four years before the Mont Blanc debacle he had undertaken a much longer and more perilous expedition, setting out from Dublin for Jerusalem on the back of wagers amounting to £15,000. The journey had all but ended in disaster on many occasions. Whaley nearly suffocated in a cave in Gibraltar, was caught in a hurricane in the Sea of Crete, fell ill and almost died in Constantinople, had a close shave with pirates in the Dodecanese, was waylaid by bandits near Nablus and had a mesmerising encounter with an infamous Ottoman governor known as ‘the Butcher’. When he returned triumphantly in the summer of 1789, having completed the journey in the allotted time, he became an overnight celebrity. He was feted in Ireland and Britain and mingled with luminaries such as the Prince of Wales and Charles James Fox until his gambling addiction caused his fortunes to spiral downward.
Since his childhood Whaley had wanted to explore far-off lands and exotic climes, and while he liked to give the impression that he undertook the Jerusalem expedition on a whim, in fact he planned it over a number of years. He was not fazed by the human and natural hazards or the complicated logistical challenges that lay in wait. And there were many, for he lived in a time when the world was a wider place than it is today and foreign travel frequently involved discomfort, disturbing realities and extreme danger. It was also an extraordinarily turbulent time. Ireland was about to descend into chaos, Britain was trying to maintain stability at home and abroad,
