When Baker heard of Speke’s discovery he was disappointed. ‘And does not one leaf of the laurel remain for me?’ he inquired. Airily, Speke mentioned Luta Nzige. That was enough for Sam and Florence Baker. While Speke and Grant travelled victoriously north, the Bakers struck south for Luta Nzige with a team of porters, a large Union Jack, a quantity of supplies, their complement of firearms, a tin chest containing full Highland regalia, and a satin jacket that Sam Baker insisted on wearing for dinner in the bush.
Theirs was the usual tale of obstruction, demands for presents – at one point Sam Baker was only allowed to proceed once he had given the local chief his kilt – plus, inevitably, disease and other physical setbacks. On fording a river, Sam Baker wrote that he had waded barely a quarter of the way across when ‘[I] looked back to see if my wife followed close to me when I was horrified to see her standing in one spot, and sinking gradually through the weeds, while her face was distorted and perfectly purple’. Whatever kind of seizure she had suffered was so severe that Sam Baker ordered his men to dig a grave. No sooner had they started, however, than Florence recovered. As she later recounted, the sound of spade on soil was the first thing she heard on emerging from her coma.
On 14 March 1864 the Bakers surmounted a hill and saw, at last, Luta Nzige. ‘There,’ wrote Sam, ‘like a sea of quicksilver, lay far beneath the grand expanse of water – a boundless sea horizon on the south and south west, glittering in the noonday sun: and on the west, at fifty or sixty miles distance, blue mountains rose from the bosom of the lake to a height of about 7,000 feet above its level.’ Nothing could have fitted more perfectly Ptolemy’s description. Sam Baker christened his find Lake Albert Nyanza, then, having attached a mast and a square of plaid to a dugout canoe, he and Florence sailed around its eastern coast until they discovered the point at which it emptied into the Nile.
By 5 May 1865 the Bakers were back in Khartoum, having spent a hideous journey on a dhow filled with plague victims. Among the mail waiting for them was a French translation of Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. Sam Baker read it with what must have been some satisfaction: if Albert Nyanza was connected to lakes further south, then Victoria Nyanza, not Albert, would be the supplementary feeder and he, Baker, could claim to have made an even greater discovery than Speke. But he would never be able to bring Speke the news. At the end of the book there was a depressing footnote: its author was dead.
In the months following his return to London Speke had made a fool of himself. He issued slanderous accusations against Petherick; he questioned the competence of the Royal Geographical Society; and he spread extraordinary rumours concerning Burton, the least offensive of which was that he was an ignoramus who had learned everything he knew at the knee of Speke. The irresponsibility and plain wrongness of these fulminations tarred his statement that ‘the Nile is settled’. Neither did his published account of the expedition help much – as one reader pointed out, Speke’s observations were so faulty that at one point he had the Nile flowing 90 miles uphill. By 1864, the year after his journal appeared in print, Speke was feeling less sure of himself. And then Burton came home.
Fresh from Dahomey, Burton disagreed both with Speke’s assessment of his character and, more importantly, with his assertion that he had discovered the source of the Nile. He advanced the proposition that Lake Victoria was not a single body of water but a collection of smaller lakes, and that it had yet to be disproved that Lake Tanganyika was the ultimate source. Speke responded angrily. Burton counterattacked with vim. Eventually they agreed to debate the matter in public. The date was set for 6 September 1864; the venue was Bath, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science had arranged its annual meeting; and the adjudicator would be the renowned African explorer David Livingstone. Come the day, however, only Burton was on the platform. After a short delay, during which Burton shuffled his papers, a delegation came forward. It was led by Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society. Climbing onstage, Murchison made a short announcement: at approximately 4.30 on the previous afternoon, while shooting partridges on his cousin’s estate, Speke had shot himself. He had climbed a wall, armed with a double-barrelled, breech-loading Lancaster shotgun, set at half-cock, and in doing so had loosed a cartridge upwards into his ribcage.
The official verdict was that Speke had met an accidental death. Many, however, thought he had committed suicide rather than defend a theory he already knew to be flawed against a man whose intellectual and physical abilities were superior to his own. The manner of Speke’s death would never be resolved. But his theory was settled in 1871, when David Livingstone and journalist-turned-explorer Henry Morton Stanley discovered that Lake Albert led nowhere and that Victoria Nyanza was the primary source of the Nile. Before his death in 1890 Burton admitted that he knew Speke had been right all along.
Speke’s monument was a Cleopatra-like needle in London’s Kensington Gardens. Burton’s was the burning by his wife of both his diaries and the manuscript of his final book, The Scented Garden, whose contents she judged too risqué for publication.
THE CONQUEST OF THE MATTERHORN
Edward Whymper (1865)
In the mid-19th century the Alps were Europe’s last undiscovered wilderness. It was incredible, in a way, that this should be so: Europe contained so many people, had such a long history and was so expansionist that it had already begun colonizing most of the world. Yet in its midst there was a chain of mountains – indeed, a completely different climate zone – about which little was known. True, the passes had been frequented since ancient times; Mont Blanc had been conquered as far back as 1786; and one or two intrepid climbers had attacked some of the more accessible peaks. On the whole, however, the Alps remained an uncharted blank on the map. From the 1850S Britain began to address this deplorable state of affairs.
Supported by a strong, stable economy, possessed of wealth and long summer holidays, Britain’s professional middle class took to the hills with a vengeance. Thanks to the advent of steam locomotion, a London lawyer (say) could walk out of his courtroom, on to a train, and alight at Geneva a couple of days later. From there it was only a few connections and a hike or two before he was facing mountains that had never before been climbed by humankind, and valleys that might contain – well, anything. Alpine dwellers told of demons and witches who cackled from the glaciers and peaks; even for the less superstitious the Alps were so inaccessible that it was still possible for diligent explorers to discover isolated communities descended from Huns, Vandals and even Saracens. After a few weeks’ exhilarating scramble the same lawyer could be back in his courtroom, shuffling his papers with hands that had recently grappled the Eiger.
The excitement of being able to go where no one had yet gone – and in one’s holidays too – was irresistible. It was cheaper and more convenient than travelling to the Arctic, and almost as hazardous. Many papers likened the Alps to the North Pole and railed against those who risked their lives to conquer them. Many others, however, lauded their bravery: Englishmen, said one journal, were famed for their love of sport (defined as exercise combined with danger) and if they could not afford to hunt foxes or shoot tigers then mountaineering was a perfect outlet for their natural instincts. And so, throughout the 1850S, a growing number of part-time, budget explorers caught the ferry train from London Bridge to Geneva. Among the band were John Tyndall and Edward Whymper.
Tyndall was an Irish scientist, based in London, who specialized in the study of gases. He was renowned for the strength of his opinions and the remarkable physique with which he was prepared to defend them. Should someone deride his favourite writers he would at once offer to fight them – an offer that met with incredulity and then frustration, for Tyndall was so slight that it was hard to find a place to punch. Slope-shouldered and skinny, weighing no more than ten stone at the best of times, with a disproportionately large head whose chin was noosed by a ‘Newgate fringe’ beard, he was outwardly the
feeblest of specimens. Wracked by constant intestinal complaints, he rarely ate or slept and was so nervous in company that he hesitated even to approach a woman for fear of rebuff. To assuage his indigestion he ran every morning in Kensington Gardens, which calmed him sufficiently to have a small bowl of soup for lunch. Then he went for another run to alleviate its disagreeable effects. Of an evening he might lecture at the Royal Society before retiring dinnerless, with his notes, for another dyspeptic bout of insomnia. In the Alps, however, Tyndall became a superman. His appetite returned, he was able to sleep and, thanks to his exercise programme, he could haul himself up the rockiest summit faster than any guide. His fitness and application were so prodigious that he soon dispensed with guides altogether. In 1858 he made the first solo ascent of Monte Rosa, carrying nothing more than a flask of tea and a ham sandwich. Wherever he went – Mont Blanc, the Bernese Oberland, the Valais – he climbed with a desperate ferocity.
No less ferocious was Whymper. A Southwark wood engraver and printer’s apprentice, he first visited the Alps in 1860, at the age of twenty, on a commission from Longman’s publishing house. Initially contemptuous of what he considered the mountains’ over-touted attractions, he soon became as fervent a convert as anyone. As with Tyndall, there were two sides to his existence. In London he was a mere wood engraver, a solitary, humourless man who dropped his aitches and in the evenings went for long, lonely walks. In the Alps he was lord of all creation. Here it did not matter how he spoke or what he did for a living, only how well he acquitted himself on the peaks. And he acquitted himself superbly. He flung himself, quite literally, at the mountains, determined not so much to climb them as to conquer them. He had no time for summits that had already been done; his one desire was to break new ground, to go where nobody else had gone, to stand where no other had stood. If he saw a crag he did not pause to admire its beauty but planned how to defeat it. In many ways he was pursuing a form of personal imperialism, stamping his name on as much ground as he could in as short a time as possible. He was tougher than his guides – for most of whom he had profound contempt – and tougher than any of the other Britons who went to the Alps. In one remarkable burst of energy he climbed a total of 100,000 feet in a period of just 18 days. People regarded him with awe, disbelief and a certain amount of fear. One reluctant admirer would later write: ‘To Mr. Whymper belongs the credit of having had no weak spot at all.’
Whymper and Tyndall were in the vanguard of a wave of British climbers who swept through the Alps during the early 1860s. Equipped with nothing more sophisticated than ropes (Tyndall was one of their earliest advocates), ice-axes and crampons (in both cases Whymper was an innovator), and clad in flannel suits and tackety boots, they raised a metaphorical Union Jack on peak after peak. By 1865, in what would later be dubbed the Golden Age of Mountaineering, British climbers had opened virtually the whole of the Swiss Alpine range. But there was one important mountain that still eluded them. It was not the highest in the Alps, nor the last to be climbed, but it was certainly the most dramatic and to all appearances the most inaccessible. It was called the Matterhorn.
A sheer-sided fang of rock rising 14,688 feet on the Swiss-Italian border, the Matterhorn was seen as the ultimate challenge. Rocks dribbled down its flanks 24 hours a day in all seasons. Even in summer its slopes were clad in treacherous black ice. Its weather system was unpredictable, localized storms descending with terrible swiftness on the sunniest day. Rarely was it cloud-free, and on a summer evening the summit smoked as if the very mountain was ablaze. Above all, there was no obvious way up it. On the Swiss side, above the village of Zermatt, the cliffs were so precipitous that local guides just laughed if anyone suggested climbing them. The pointlessness of such an exercise was reinforced when one Briton tried to do just that, only to be driven back by a storm that blew blocks of ice a foot wide up at him from the glaciers hundreds of feet below. On the Italian side, above the hamlet of Breuil, however, the Matterhorn’s forbidding outline was broken by a few shoulders and plateaux. It was from this direction, therefore, that most attempts were made. But even here, at its most forgiving, the Matterhorn was still a terrible foe. Only Tyndall and Whymper could make any impression on it, but despite repeated attempts they were always defeated. Whymper wrote: ‘There seemed to be a cordon drawn around it, up to which one might go but no further. Within that invisible line gins and effreets were supposed to exist – the Wandering Jew and the spirits of the damned. The superstitious natives spoke of a ruined city on its summit wherein the spirits dwelt; and if you laughed, they gravely shook their heads; told you to look yourself to see the castles and the walls, and warned one against rash approach, lest the infuriated demons from their impregnable heights might hurl down vengeance for one’s derision.’
For both men the Matterhorn became an obsession. In 1860 Tyndall went up it, scrambling to a height of 13,000 feet along ledges one foot wide, through waterfalls, up rock chimneys, and over ‘a wilderness of blocks, roofed and festooned with huge plates and stalactites of ice’. On his return he vowed to try again the following year. But in 1861 his guide informed him the weather was too bad. Tyndall ground his hobnailed boots into the soil with frustration. Not being able to climb the Matterhorn was ‘like the removal of a pleasant drug, or the breaking down of a religious faith. I hardly knew what to do with myself.’ He vented his fury on the surrounding peaks. Next year, though, the Matterhorn would be his.
Whymper thought exactly the same. Having already made two attempts from Breuil in previous years, he arrived for a third in 1862. Starting on 9 July, he pitched camp at 12,550 feet and was poised to go further, in perfect, cloudless weather, when one of his guides complained of illness. Reluctantly, Whymper agreed to retreat, but in such foul temper that he did not even bother to take his tent with him. After a restorative ascent of nearby Monte Rosa he returned to Breuil on 17 July for another try. But all the guides were booked, so Whymper stomped angrily up the Matterhorn on his own to collect the tent he had left behind the previous week. He had never made a solo climb before, and the experience agreed with him. When he reached the tent he decided it would be a shame not to climb a little bit further. And then a little bit further still. At every turn the mountain seemed more interesting than before. Soon he had surpassed his highest point and was in virgin territory, a surreal field of towers and turrets that valley-dwellers called The Coxcomb. ‘The pinnacles ... were wagging in the wind. Without exaggeration, one could take hold of huge Egyptian-like blocks, ten or more feet high, and rock them backwards and forwards,’ he wrote. ‘Strangely fascinated, on I went.’
He came to within 1,400 feet of the summit before being blocked by precipices that were insurmountable without the assistance of other climbers. Exultantly he dashed down to Breuil, once again neglecting to take his tent with him. But, as he wrote, his ‘exultation was a little premature’. At the head of a 200-foot gully he lost his footing. Tipped onto his back by the weight of his knapsack, he slid down the chute. Within seconds he was ricocheting from side to side, each bound longer than the last and each impact more violent. After a final leap of 60 feet he was hurled against a clump of rocks which halted his fall for a few seconds. Although knocked almost senseless, he scrabbled instinctively for survival. When he finally brought himself to a stop, he was only ten feet from the lip of the gully, beyond which fell an 800-foot cliff. His situation was terrifying. ‘The rocks could not be left go for a moment,’ he wrote, ‘and the blood was spirting [sic] out of more than twenty cuts. The most serious ones were in the head, and I vainly tried to staunch them with one hand, while holding on with the other. It was useless; the blood jerking out in blinding jets at each pulsation. At last, in a moment of inspiration, I kicked out a big lump of snow and stuck it as a plaster on my head.’ He crawled halfway up the 60-degree slope to the safety of another group of boulders, and there he fainted.
He came to as night was falling, and in the light of the setting sun he took stock of his injuries. He had lost t
he tips of both ears, every limb was grazed and bleeding, his head was gashed in a number of places, and a rock had taken a neat circular slice out of his boot, sock and ankle. Fortunately, however, no bones had been broken, and so he continued his crawl up the gully. Then, in darkness, he descended the remaining 4,800 feet to Breuil, where his hotelier rubbed salt and vinegar into the wounds.
Covered in scabs, he hired a guide and resumed the battle on 23 July. This time he reached 12,992 feet, but was forced to retreat because the weather was too foul. He submitted with bad grace. Privately, he suspected that his guide – the best in Breuil, Jean-Antoine Carrel – was keeping the Matterhorn for himself and for Italy, a suspicion reinforced when, Whymper having booked him for another ascent on the 25th, Carrel sent word that he was unavailable because he was hunting marmots. Not to be thwarted, Whymper hired a small, hunchbacked porter instead. Once again, though, he was blocked by the same precipices he had encountered on his solo climb. He would need not one helper but at least two if he was to overcome the obstacle. Returning to base, he sought out Carrel for another attempt on the 26th. But Tyndall had got to him first.
Off the Map Page 45
