Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Just before 7.00 p.m. they began the return journey, Paccard so helpless that Balmat had to carry him over the more difficult stretches. Repeatedly, the doctor said he wanted to do nothing but sleep. At 11.00 both men found their hands were suffering from frostbite, which they cured by rubbing them with snow. ‘Soon sensation returned, but accompanied by pains as if every vein had been pricked by needles. I rolled my baby up in his rug and put him to bed under the shelter of a rock; we ate and drank a little; pressed as close to one another as possible, and fell fast asleep.’ The next day they were back in Chamonix, where Balmat painted a dramatic portrait of his appearance: ‘My eyes were red, my face black and my lips blue. Every time I laughed or yawned the blood spouted out from my lips and cheeks, and in addition I was half blind.’ (He made less play of the fact that Paccard was completely snowblind and that he had left him behind at La Côte to feel his way home with a stick.) Within a week, he was in Geneva to claim Saussure’s prize.

  There was no doubt that the two men had reached the summit and little that Balmat had been first; but the way in which Balmat described the conquest caused controversy. He gave two versions of the climb, one as told to the Precentor of Geneva, Marc-Théodore Bourrit, while he ‘still carried on his face the honourable marks of his intrepidity’, the other 56 years later to the French author Alexandre Dumas (from which the above quotations have been taken). The Dumas version was riddled with fabrications and impossibilities: the two men had never been to the Dôme du Goûter, having crossed the Grand Plateau instead; Paccard was not as unfit as Balmat made him out to be, and he probably wasn’t as faint-hearted either; and if the doctor had collapsed where he was supposed to have done, he would have frozen to death in the time it took Balmat to reach the summit, wave to his ‘subjects’ and return to collect him. The Bourrit version omitted many of these details, but its gist was the same: Paccard had been a useless piece of baggage whom Balmat had lugged heroically up and down the hill.

  Saussure kept his distance from the squabbles: Mont Blanc had been taken and the prize had been claimed. But the manner of its conquest did not satisfy him. Paccard had taken the most paltry of observations, and none of the great scientific questions to which Saussure sought an answer had been addressed. Moreover, the letters of congratulation – including one from England’s Lord Palmerston – read as if he himself had stood on the summit rather than acting as a mere sponsor; while this was flattering, it was an accolade he did not deserve. Therefore, for reasons of personal and professional pride, Saussure felt he had to climb Mont Blanc himself.

  He did so in August 1787, accompanied by a retinue of 18 porters. The ascent was hard, and they suffered horribly from exhaustion, altitude sickness and fear. Camped on the Grand Plateau, Saussure had nothing but admiration for Balmat and Paccard. ‘There were no living beings, no sign of vegetation; it was a realm of frigid silence. When I imagined [them] reaching this desert at the end of the day, without shelter, without the possibility of rescue, without even the knowledge that men could survive where they intended to go, but nevertheless carrying on, I could not help but admire their courage.’ A little further on he was even more admiring. Where Balmat had spoken only of physical exertion, Saussure described the conditions he encountered. ‘The slope is 39 degrees, the precipice below is frightful, and the snow, hard on the surface, was flour beneath. Steps were cut, but the legs insecurely placed in this flour rested on a lower crust which was often very thin, and then slipped.’ But the view from the top was worth the effort. ‘I could not believe my eyes,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed as if it was a dream when I saw beneath my feet these majestic peaks ... of which I had found even the bases so difficult and dangerous of approach.’ The panorama, combined with the five and a half hours that he spent taking readings, told him more about the Alps than he had learned in a lifetime of study. When he returned to Chamonix he was suffused with joy. ‘Congratulate me!’ he said to a friend. ‘I come from the conquest of Mont Blanc!’

  For many, Saussure’s was indeed the true conquest. He was a respectable man of science, whereas Balmat and Paccard – whose argument over who had done what, where, was beginning to heat up – were provincial nobodies. Still, Saussure was not satisfied. The climb had been too hard, had taken too long and had not given him as much time on the summit as he would have liked. ‘The length of the struggle, the recollection and the still vivid impression of the exertion it had cost me, caused me a kind of irritation,’ he wrote. ‘At the moment that I trod the highest point of the snow that crowned the summit I trampled it with a feeling of anger rather than pleasure.’ The experience had left him empty. He felt ‘like an epicure invited to a splendid festival and prevented from enjoying it by violent nausea’.

  In July 1788 he sated his appetite with an ascent of the Col du Géant. Situated on Mont Blanc, roughly midway between Chamonix and the Italian village of Courmayeur, the col, or shoulder, was not particularly high – approximately 11,000 feet – nor, apart from a tricky glacier on the Chamonix side, was it very hard to reach. It had already been climbed, and there was no glory in repeating the process. Saussure, however, wanted to do more than climb it: to gain a full appreciation of the geology and meteorology of the Alps he intended to camp there for at least a fortnight.

  People were just adjusting to the fact that it was possible to breathe at the top of Mont Blanc. They conceded, reluctantly, that one might also be able to survive a few nights at high altitude. But to spend two weeks at 11,000 feet was unheard of. The cold, the storms, the avalanches, the altitude sickness, the stress: it was more than the human frame could bear. The weather and the gods had permitted a few mortals to climb Europe’s highest mountain. To tempt providence further was rash. Saussure didn’t care. Accompanied by his teenage son, his manservant, and four guides led by Jacques Balmat, he went up the glacier and onto the col. He erected tents for the guides and, on a small ledge, with a cliff above and a cliff below, he built a stone hut for himself and his son.

  Their day began at 4.00 a.m. and did not stop until Saussure doused the lamps at 10.00 p.m. During that period they observed the progress of the clouds beneath them, measured the atmosphere’s electricity, watched their thermometers, recorded every swing of the barometer, and marvelled at the butterflies, carried on thermals from Chamonix, that landed, bemused, on their blankets. Sleeping on the edge of a precipice did not bother Saussure – if anything he enjoyed it: ‘on my little mattress which had been laid on the ground next to that of my son, I slept better than I did in my own bed at home’.

  When the weather was good, as it generally was, their happiness was infinite. ‘We have had the most magnificent evenings,’ Saussure wrote, ‘all these high peaks that surround us and the snows that separate them were coloured with the most beautiful shades of rose and carmine. The Italian horizon was girdled with a broad belt from which the full moon, of a rich vermillion tint, rose with the majesty of a queen ... These snows and rocks, of which the brilliancy is unsupportable by sunlight, present a wonderful and delightful spectacle by the soft radiance of the moon ... The soul is uplifted, the powers of the intelligence seem to widen and in the midst of this majestic silence, one seems to hear the voice of Nature and to become the confidant of her most secret workings.’ One of these secrets, which Saussure and his son enjoyed, was seeing what happened when they tipped boulders down the hill: ‘they produce really magnificent torrents of stones and snow’.

  When the weather was not so good, however, life was bothersome. Between 5.00 and 10.00 p.m. they were often plagued by a cold wind that brought snow and hail. ‘The warmest clothes – even furs – could not protect us,’ Saussure wrote. ‘We could scarcely light a fire in our tents; and the hut... was hardly warmed at all by our little stoves; the coal only smouldered without the use of bellows and if, finally, we managed to warm our feet and calves our bodies remained constantly frozen thanks to the wind which blew through the hut.’ Sometimes, too, they became more intimately acquainted with nature’s wo
rkings than they would have liked. One night the camp was hit by a thunderstorm. It has been calculated that, with its lightning and its repetitive up-down cycles of wind, a single thunder-cloud contains as much energy as ten Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. Saussure was facing not one cloud but scores of them. And at 11,000 feet he was not just under the storm but in it.

  He described the experience with a mixture of objectivity and awe. ‘The gale had this peculiarity, that it was periodically interrupted by intervals of the most perfect calm. In these intervals we heard the wind howling below us... while the utmost tranquillity reigned around our cabin. But these calm moments were succeeded by blasts of an indescribable violence; double blows like discharges of artillery. We felt even the mountain shake under our mattresses.’ At dawn, fearing that his hut would fall over the edge, he took refuge with the guides in one of their tents. But there it was no better: it took the weight of every man, hanging on the posts, to stop the tent being lifted into the sky; and when a guide crawled out to fetch food and water, he had to cling to the rocks lest he be blown over the edge. Even though the distance between their tent and their supplies was only 16 feet, it took more than ten minutes to make the return journey. At 7.00 a.m. the storm reached a peak. Hailstones battered the tent, and one flash of lightning struck so close that they distinctly heard a spark hiss down the wet canvas. ‘The air was so full of electricity,’ Saussure recorded, ‘that directly I put only the point of my electrometer outside the tent the bubbles separated as far as the threads would allow them, and at almost every explosion of thunder the electricity changed from positive to negative or vice versa.’

  The tempest died at midday, leaving him badly shaken. He had been one of the first people to survive the heart of a thunderstorm, and he had not liked it. As he said, it was ‘the most terrible [thing] I have ever witnessed’. The guides felt the same. After 16 days, with Saussure rhapsodizing over a particularly beautiful sunset and looking as if he would stay there for ever, they took unilateral action. In a single night they ate the remaining supplies, leaving Saussure no option but to retreat. He chose the descent to Courmayeur rather than Chamonix, arriving weak with hunger but fizzing with excitement.

  Saussure continued to explore the Alps until his death in 1798, but nothing matched the Mont Blanc years. It had been a unique, if not scientifically earth-shattering, time. And it had made him, in a way, one of the fathers of mountaineering. By the 1820s a visit to Chamonix was an accepted part of a wealthy young gentleman’s education, while those of a sporting disposition actually climbed the hill itself. From the mid-19th century alpinism became a sport, a skill and, eventually, a mania. Every person who subsequently stood on the summit of an Alp appreciated, and was inspired by, Saussure’s envoi to Mont Blanc. As he said, on descending the Col du Géant, he had been ‘a neighbour to heaven’.

  INTO THE HEART OF SOUTH AMERICA

  Alexander von Humboldt (1799–1804)

  In 1796, at the age of 27, Alexander von Humboldt was a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief. His mother had just died of breast cancer, and the love of his life, Reinhard von Häften, an infantry subaltern in the Grevenitz Regiment stationed at Bayreuth, had decided to get married. His career as an inspector of Prussian mines was unexciting and although he had been offered promotion the prospect did not appeal. He was a forward-looking man, however, and the future still held promise: he came from an aristocratic family, was highly intelligent and very well connected, counting amongst his friends such luminaries of the European literary scene as Goethe and Schiller. He was a capable surveyor, an admirable organizer and an expert in practically every branch of science. As for love, he had decided he could do without it. ‘A man should get used to standing alone early on in his life,’ he wrote. ‘Isolation has a lot in its favour.’ Moreover, following his mother’s death he commanded estates producing more than 3,000 thalers per annum, a sum that made him the equivalent of a modern millionaire. He therefore resigned his job in the mines and embarked on what he had always wanted to do: to make a thorough scientific examination of the world beyond Europe.

  In 1797 he accepted an offer from Britain’s eccentric Lord Bristol to join an expedition to Egypt, but the project collapsed the next year amidst rumours that Napoleon was about to invade the country. Undeterred, he took a post with the French explorer Bougainville, who was planning a five-year circumnavigation that would touch every major landmass on the globe, including the Great Southern Continent that the British had said was unreachable. ‘I was busy with magnetic research at the time,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘so it seemed to me that an expedition to the South Pole might be a lot more use than a trip to Egypt.’ Once again he was thwarted by Napoleon’s ambitions, this time a war with Austria. Accordingly, he mounted his own expedition to North Africa, accompanied by a French botanist and draughtsman, Aimé Bonpland, who, like him, had been a disappointed member of Bougainville’s party. As he explained, ‘A man can’t just sit down and cry, he’s got to do something’. The trip would provide ample opportunity to test the dictum. At Marseilles, the Swedish ship on which he had booked passage to Algiers failed to materialize. When he bought tickets to Tunis he learned that it was closed to French passengers. He therefore dragged Bonpland on foot over the Pyrenees to Madrid, in the hope of catching a ship to Smyrna. He was well received at the Spanish court and, on the spur of the moment, told the king that he was particularly interested in his American colonies. This was not exactly a lie: the Indies, East or West, had always tempted him. But he was unprepared for the response. Eager to have a Prussian professional increase the output of his gold and silver mines – and perhaps even find new ones – the king ordered him to go there at once.

  In June 1799, three months after arriving in Madrid with the vague hope of catching a ride to Turkey, Bonpland and Humboldt were aboard the Pizarro, bound for the New World and carrying passports that gave them unfettered access to every corner of the king’s domains. It was an extraordinary and unheard-of opportunity. Spain’s American possessions stretched from California to Cape Horn; they covered most of South and Central America, a large chunk of North America and practically all the Caribbean islands. Within this area trade was forbidden with any country other than Spain, and foreigners were rarely allowed entry. After 300 years of Spanish occupation only 12 or so expeditions had been dispatched and most of those had been to the coast. Charles-Marie de la Condamine, several decades earlier, had triangulated a small portion of the Andes and travelled down the Amazon, but otherwise the interior was a mystery, offering immense possibilities to a man with a touch of vim and the requisite instruments. Humboldt, who had no less than 40 of the latter, ranging from rain gauges and hygrometers to microscopes and a two-inch ‘snuff-box’ sextant, considered himself equal to the challenge. Aboard the Pizarro, he wrote a letter that amounted to a manifesto of Enlightenment thinking: ‘I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographical environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.’

  He and Bonpland were kept busy on the Atlantic crossing. They measured the sea’s temperature, analysed its chemistry, and observed strange phenomena, such as a host of jellyfish drifting south at four times the speed of the current. Bonpland examined the specimens they retrieved from the waves, while Humboldt filled his journal with words and pictures. At Tenerife they explored a 12,300-foot, semi-dormant volcano. ‘What a fantastic place! What a time we had!’ Humboldt wrote. ‘We climbed some way down into the crater, perhaps further than any previous scientific traveller. There isn’t much danger in the ascent, you just get rather done up by the heat and cold; the sulphurous vapour in the crater burnt holes in our clothes while our hands were frozen numb.’ Lower down they found a tree whose 45-foot girth had not, reportedly, altered in the last 400 years. Humboldt was entranced: ‘I could almost weep at the prospect of leaving this place.’ The Pizarro weighed anchor on 25 June, bound for Havana. By the time it was
off the coast of South America, however, it was gripped by an epidemic of typhoid fever. On 14 July, with one man dead, another mad and several more in delirium, Humboldt decided to leave while he was still alive to do so. Two days later he and Bonpland disembarked at the Venezuelan port of Cumaná.

  The two scientists were enraptured. ‘What a fabulous and extravagant country we’re in!’ Humboldt wrote to his brother. ‘Fantastic plants, electric eels, armadillos, monkeys, parrots: and many, many, real, half-savage Indians ... We’ve been running around like a couple of mad things; for the first three days we couldn’t settle to anything: we’d find one thing, only to abandon it for the next. Bonpland keeps telling me he’ll go out of his mind if the wonders don’t cease.’ For four months they indulged in an orgy of cataloguing and exploration. They measured the magnetic variations caused by an earthquake; studied an eclipse of the sun; forayed into the rainforest; examined the astonishing guacharo bird, whose breast was equipped with a pad of fat that produced a fine cooking oil; and interviewed a father who had suckled his children with his own breast milk. They learned to dance the samba, listed the varieties of lice to be found in the local women’s hair, noted with disapproval the iniquities of the slave system, and goggled at the brilliance of the stars: ‘Venus plays the role of the moon here,’ Humboldt enthused. ‘She shows big, luminous haloes and the most beautiful rainbow colour, even when the air is quite clear and the sky is perfectly blue.’ Now and then they suffered a setback – on 27 October Bonpland was concussed by a club-wielding madman, from which he did not fully recover for three months; on 28 October, a very hot day, Humboldt burned his face so badly while observing the heavens that he had to spend two days in bed (with typical thoroughness, he recorded that one of his instruments measured 124° F) – but generally it was a profitable and unforgettable time. When they left on 16 November for the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, they did so with regret.