of reminiscences and personal associations only adds to the allure of the mountains for the ageing aesthete.
The aesthetic tradition may appear to us now to have been stronger for much of the early part of British climbing history, but this probably reflects the literary record more than reality at the time. In general, aesthetically inclined climbers wrote more books than their heroic contemporaries, who were often content just to climb. The strength of the aesthetic influence in the literary record should not obscure the fact that the heroic tradition, of an anarchic, competitive, sometimes criminal and frequently jingoistic pursuit of individual liberty has been a vital part of British climbing throughout its history, particularly at the leading edge of the sport. After reading Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754), which advocated the abandonment of civilisation and a return to the life of the ‘natural man’, Voltaire wrote ‘one longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.’22 His thoughts were echoed by a guest staying at the Wasdale Head Inn in the Lake District in the late nineteenth century who described his fellow guests, all of whom were climbers, as ‘men struggling to degenerate into apes’.23 To this day, many climbers are, perhaps unwittingly, pursuing Rousseau’s ideal of the ‘noble savage’ for a few weeks each year.
Pococke and Windham, two Englishmen who visited the Alps in 1741, were in many ways the prototype for subsequent generations of British climbers in the heroic rather than aesthetic mould. They arrived in the Chamonix valley with a party of 11 others and camped in fields near the town. Richard Pococke, who had recently travelled in the East, wore an exotic Arab robe. His companion, ‘Boxing’ Windham, had a reputation for rowdy athleticism and had been accused of drunkenness, assault and wanton shooting while studying in Geneva. The entire party was heavily armed. As Windham noted: ‘One is never the worse for it and oftentimes it helps a Man out of a Scrape.’24 They climbed up to Montenvers and descended to the glacier which, as a result of Windham’s memorable description, is still called the Mer de Glace. Standing on the ice, they uncorked a bottle of wine and drank to the success of British arms. Their expedition contained at least three elements that would reappear throughout the history of British climbing: adventure, alcohol and a belligerent contempt for foreigners.
The motives of Colonel Mark Beaufoy, an Englishman who was the first foreigner to climb Mont Blanc (4,807m/15,770ft) in 1787 (the fourth ascent), remain obscure, but the beauty of the mountain landscape does not appear to have made a lasting impression. He had been moved by ‘the desire everyone has to reach the highest places on earth’25 and recorded that ‘he suffered much, thought he had gone blind, got a swelled face and regretted he had undertaken such a thing’.26 Nevertheless, he was the first Englishman to climb a major alpine peak.
In parallel with the Romantic movement, the growing popularisation of science during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century provided a further impetus to mountain exploration. The development of printing technology and publishing spread scientific knowledge as subscription libraries sprang up in major towns and cities and natural history became a popular pastime for the educated classes. Geologists and botanists were pioneering explorers of the British hills. The first recorded ascent of Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis (1,344m/4,406ft), in 1771, and the first recorded rock climb, on Clogwyn Du’r Arddu in Snowdonia in 1798, were both undertaken in order to collect plant specimens. The idea of mountain climbing purely for sport and pleasure had still not been accepted and, in keeping with the spirit of the age, many early pioneers insisted that their motives were primarily scientific. De Saussure, the Geneva-born founder of ‘scientific alpinism’ who sponsored the first ascent of Mont Blanc and made the third himself in 1787, wrote: ‘I was bound to make the scientific observations and experiments which alone gave value to my venture.’27 However, as his Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96) makes clear, he was interested in far more than natural history, and his book influenced future generations of British climbers to follow in his footsteps for reasons that were often far from scientific.
James Forbes, one of the founding fathers of British mountaineering, also claimed to be primarily motivated by science. He visited the Pyrenees in 1835 and the Alps in 1839, as well as making extensive journeys on foot across the Scottish Highlands, including the first ascent of Sgurr nan Gillean on Skye in 1836. The son of a wealthy banker, Sir William Forbes, and Williamina Belsches, the first love of Sir Walter Scott, Forbes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 23 and became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh one year later. He was particularly fascinated by glaciology, a subject that attracted widespread interest in Britain following the publication of a book by the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz in 1840 which suggested that glaciers had once been much more extensive. As evidence accumulated of an ‘Ice Age’ during which glaciers had scooped out the mountains and scoured the valleys of northern Britain, people travelled to the Alps just for the experience of walking on these rivers of ice. Forbes’ book Travels through the Alps of Savoy, published in 1843, contained both scientific observations and the first account in the English language of a series of alpine climbs, including the fourth ascent of the Jungfrau (4,158m/13,642ft) in 1841. The book, which was widely read, communicated Forbes’ enthusiasm for science and the pure joy of climbing: ‘Happy the traveller who...starts on the first day’s walk amongst the Alps in the tranquil morning of a long July day, brushing the early morning dew before him and, armed with his staff, makes for the hill-top – begirt with rock or ice as the case may be – 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.’28
Glaciers also had an indirect impact on mountaineering because of the extraordinary popular interest in polar exploration in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the ‘Great Peace’ following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Royal Navy embarked upon a series of exploratory missions that were the most expensive in history before the United States and Soviet space programmes in the second half of the twentieth century. They set out to fill in the blanks on the map of the Congo, the Sahara and the Sahel, but in the period from 1820 to 1850, expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic captured the public imagination more than any other. The great polar explorers became household names, including William Parry, who found the entrance to the North-West Passage in 1819; John Franklin, ‘the man who ate his boots’ during a disastrous overland expedition to Canada’s northern coast in 1822; James Ross, who discovered the northern magnetic pole in 1831 and explored the Antarctic in 1839; and the leaders of numerous overland and naval expeditions that set out to search for Franklin when he and his crew disappeared once again in 1847. Accounts of these journeys in the press and in bestselling books formed part of the childhood experience of the generation of Englishmen that set out to conquer the Alps in the 1850s.
These great exploratory expeditions were, from a practical point of view, quite useless. The North-West Passage proved not to be a passage (although global warming has since made it one), the Arctic and Antarctic had no economic or strategic significance, and the leaders of the expeditions were often extraordinarily incompetent. But the public celebrated their failures almost more than their successes. To Victorians, explorers represented the romantic ideal of a quest: a reminder of England’s chivalrous and buccaneering past. With its combination of hardship and heroism, polar exploration, in particular, had the effect of making a virtue out of suffering. Franklin appeared alongside Frobisher, Drake, Cook and Nelson in children’s books, and a whole generation of young men grew up in the mid-nineteenth century with the ambition to become explorers and to suffer. Most of them never went near the poles, but some found that there was a region of glaciers and snow, accessible by railway in the heart of Europe, where it was possible to become an explorer for a few weeks each summer. Many of the first generation of alpine climbers openly acknowledged the inspiration that polar exploration provided. Edward Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn, wanted to be a polar explorer. Even Leslie Stephen, the great mid-Victorian intellectual, confessed that in the Alps he imagined himself walking across the Arctic wastes to encourage himself to keep going.
The importance of exploration
