THE OPENING UP OF THE ALPS
The climbs, so far chronicled, have been modest achievements and do not
include a genuine snow-peak, for the Roche Melon has permanent snow
on one side only. We have seen that many snow passes were in regular
use from the earliest times; but genuine Alpine climbing may be said
to begin with the ascent of the Titlis. According to Mr. Gribble, this
was climbed by a monk of Engleberg, in 1739. Mr. Coolidge, on the other
hand, states that it was ascended by four peasants, in 1744. In any
case, the ascent was an isolated feat which gave no direct stimulus to
Alpine climbing, and Mr. Gribble is correct in dating the continuous
history of Alpine climbing from the discovery of Chamounix, in 1741.
This famous valley had, of course, a history of its own before that
date; but its existence was only made known, to a wider world, by
the visit of a group of young Englishmen, towards the middle of the
eighteenth century.
In 1741, Geneva was enlivened by a vigorous colony of young Britons.
Of these, William Windham was a famous athlete, known on his return
to London as “Boxing Windham.” While at Geneva, he seems, despite the
presence of his “respectable perceptor,” Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet,
the grandson of the theologian, to have amused himself pretty
thoroughly. The archives record that he was fined for assault and
kindred offences. When these simple joys began to pall he decided to go
to Chamounix in search of adventure.
His party consisted of himself, Lord Haddington, Dr. Pococke, the
Oriental traveller, and others. They visited Chamounix, and climbed
the Montanvert with a large brigade of guides. The ascent to the
Montanvert was not quite so simple as it is to-day, a fact which
accounts for Windham’s highly coloured description. Windham published
his account of the journey and his reflections on glaciers, in the
_Journal Helvetique_ of Neuchâtel, and later in London. It attracted
considerable attention and focussed the eyes of the curious on the
unknown valley of Chamounix. Among others, Peter Martel, an engineer
of Geneva, was inspired to repeat the visit. Like Windham, he climbed
the Montanvert and descended on to the Mer de Glace; and, like Windham,
he published an account of the journey and certain reflections on
glaciers and glacier motion. His story is well worth reading, and the
curious in such matters should turn either to Mr. Gribble’s _Early
Mountaineers_, or to Mr. Matthews’ _The Annals of Mont Blanc_, where
they will find Windham’s and Martel’s letters set forth in full.
Martel’s letter and his map of Chamounix were printed together with
Windham’s narrative, and were largely responsible for popularising
Chamounix. Those who wished to earn a reputation for enterprise could
hardly do so without a visit to the glaciers of Chamounix. Dr. John
Moore, father of Sir John Moore, who accompanied the Duke of Hamilton
on the grand tour, tells us that “one could hardly mention anything
curious or singular without being told by some of those travellers,
with an air of cool contempt: ‘Dear Sir, that is pretty well, but take
my word for it, it is nothing to the glaciers of Savoy.’” The Duc de la
Rochefoucauld considered that the honour of his nation demanded that he
should visit the glaciers, to prove that the English were not alone in
the possession of courage.
More important, in this connection, than Dr. Moore or the duke is the
great name of De Saussure. De Saussure belonged to an old French family
that had been driven out of France during the Huguenot persecutions.
They emigrated to Geneva, where De Saussure was born. His mother had
Spartan views on education; and from his earlier years the child was
taught to suffer the privations due to physical ills and the inclemency
of the season. As a result of this adventurous training, De Saussure
was irresistibly drawn to the mountains. He visited Chamounix in
1760, and was immediately struck by the possibility of ascending Mont
Blanc. He does not seem to have cherished any ambition to make the
first ascent in person. He was content to follow when once the way
had been found; and he offered a reward to the pioneer, and promised
to recompense any peasant who should lose a day’s work in trying to
find the way to the summit of Mont Blanc. The reward was not claimed
for many years, but, meanwhile, De Saussure never missed a chance of
climbing a mountain. He climbed Ætna, and made a series of excursions
in various parts of the Alps. When his wife complained, he indited a
robust letter which every married mountaineer should keep up his sleeve
for ready quotation.
“In this valley, which I had not previously visited,” he writes,
“I have made observations of the greatest importance, surpassing
my highest hopes; but that is not what you care about. You would
sooner--God forgive me for saying so--see me growing fat like a friar,
and snoring every day in the chimney corner, after a big dinner, than
that I should achieve immortal fame by the most sublime discoveries
at the cost of reducing my weight by a few ounces and spending a few
weeks away from you. If, then, I continue to take these journeys, in
spite of the annoyance they cause you, the reason is that I feel myself
pledged in honour to go on with them, and that I think it necessary
to extend my knowledge on this subject and make my works as nearly
perfect as possible. I say to myself: ‘Just as an officer goes out to
assault a fortress when the order is given, and just as a merchant goes
to market on market-day, so must I go to the mountains when there are
observations to be made.’”
De Saussure was partly responsible for the great renaissance of
mountain travel that began at Geneva in 1760. A group of enthusiastic
mountaineers instituted a series of determined assaults on the
unconquered snows. Of these, one of the most remarkable was Jean-Andre
de Luc.
De Luc was born at Geneva, in 1727. His father was a watchmaker, but De
Luc’s life was cast on more ambitious lines. He began as a diplomatist,
but gravitated insensibly to science. He invented the hygrometer, and
was elected a member of the Royal Societies of London, Dublin, and
Göttingen. Charlotte, the wife of George III, appointed him her reader;
and he died at Windsor, having attained the ripe age of ninety. He was
a scientific, rather than a sentimental, mountaineer; his principal
occupation was to discover the temperature at which water would boil at
various altitudes. His chief claim to notice is that he made the first
ascent of the Buet.
The Buet is familiar to all who know Chamounix. It rises to the height
of 10,291 feet. Its summit is a broad plateau, glacier-capped. Those
who have travelled to Italy by the Simplon may, perhaps, recall the
broad-topped mountain that seems to block up the western end of the
Rhone valley, for the Buet is a conspicuous feature on the line,
between Sion and Brigue. It is not a difficult mountain, in the modern
sense of the term; but, to climbers who knew little of the nature of
snow and glacier, it must have presented quite a formidable appearance.
De Luc made several attempts before he was finally successful on
September 22, 1770. His description of the view from the summit is a
fine piece of writing. Familiarity had not staled the glory of such
moments; and men might still write, as they felt, without fear that
their readers would be bored by emotions that had lost their novelty.
Before leaving, De Luc observed that the party were standing on
a cornice. A cornice is a crest of windblown snow overhanging a
precipice. As the crest often appears perfectly continuous with the
snow on solid foundation, cornices have been responsible for many
fatal accidents. De Luc’s party naturally beat a hurried retreat; but
“having gathered, by reflection, that the addition of our own weight
to this prodigious mass which had supported itself for ages counted
for absolutely nothing, and could not possibly break it loose, we
laid aside our fears and went back to the terrible terrace.” A little
science is a dangerous thing; and it was a mere chance that the first
ascent of the Buet is not notorious for a terrible accident. It makes
one’s blood run cold to read of the calm contempt with which De Luc
treated the cornice. Each member of the party took it in turn to
advance to the edge and look over on to the cliff below supported as to
his coattails by the rest of the party.
De Luc made a second ascent of the Buet, two years later; but it was
not until 1779 that a snow peak was again conquered. In that year
Murith, the Prior of the St. Bernard Hospice, climbed the Velan,
the broad-topped peak which is so conspicuous a feature from the St.
Bernard. It is a very respectable mountain rising to a height of
12,353 feet. Murith, besides being an ecclesiastic, was something of
a scientist, and his botanical handbook to the Valais is not without
merit. It is to Bourrit, of whom we shall speak later, that we owe the
written account of the climb, based on information which Bourrit had at
first hand from M. Murith.
Murith started on August 30, 1779, with “two hardy hunters,” two
thermometers, a barometer, and a spirit-level. They slept a night on
the way, and proceeded to attack the mountain from the Glacier du
Proz. The hardy hunters lost their nerve, and tried to dissuade M.
Murith from the attempt; but the gallant Prior replied: “Fear nothing;
wherever there is danger I will go in front.” They encountered numerous
difficulties, amongst others a wall of ice which Murith climbed by
hacking steps and hand-holds with a pointed hammer. One of the hardy
huntsmen then followed; his companion had long since disappeared.
They reached the summit without further difficulty, and their
impressions of the view are recorded by Bourrit in an eloquent passage
which recalls De Luc on the Buet, and once more proves that the early
mountaineers were fully alive to the glory of mountain tops--
“A spectacle, no less amazing than magnificent, offered itself to
their gaze. The sky seemed to be a black cloth enveloping the earth
at a distance from it. The sun shining in it made its darkness all
the more conspicuous. Down below their outlook extended over an
enormous area, bristling with rocky peaks and cut by dark valleys.
Mont Blanc rose like a sloping pyramid and its lofty head appeared
to dominate all the Alps as one saw it towering above them. An
imposing stillness, a majestic silence, produced an indescribable
impression upon the mind. The noise of the avalanches, reiterated
by the echoes, seemed to be the only thing that marked the march
of time. Raised, so to say, above the head of Nature, they saw the
mountains split asunder, and send the fragments rolling to their
feet, and the rivers rising below them in places where inactive
Nature seemed upon the point of death--though in truth it is there
that she gathers strength to carry life and fertility throughout
the world.”
It is curious in this connection to notice the part played by the
Church in the early history of mountaineering. This is not surprising.
The local curé lived in the shadow of the great peaks that dominated
his valley. He was more cultured than the peasants of his parish; he
was more alive to the spiritual appeal of the high places, and he
naturally took a leading part in the assaults on his native mountains.
The Titlis and Monte Leone were first climbed by local monks. The
prior of the St. Bernard made, as we have seen, a remarkable conquest
of a great local peak; and five years later M. Clément, the curé of
Champery, reached the summit of the Dent du Midi, that great battlement
of rock which forms a background to the eastern end of Lake Geneva.
Bourrit, as we shall see, was an ecclesiastic with a great love for the
snows. Father Placidus à Spescha was the pioneer of the Tödi; and local
priests played their part in the early attempts on the Matterhorn from
Italy. “One man, one mountain” was the rule of many an early pioneer;
but Murith’s love of the snows was not exhausted by this ascent of the
Velan. He had already explored the Valsorey glacier with Saussure, and
the Otemma glacier with Bourrit. A few years after his conquest of the
Velan he turned his attention to the fine wall of cliffs that binds in
the Orny glacier on the south.
Bourrit, who wrote up Murith’s notes on the Velan, was one of the
most remarkable of this group of pioneers. He was a whole-hearted
enthusiast, and the first man who devoted the most active years of
his life to mountaineering. He wins our affection by the readiness
with which he gave others due credit for their achievements, a
generous characteristic which did not, however, survive the supreme
test--Paccard’s triumph on Mont Blanc. Mountaineers at the end of the
eighteenth century formed a close freemasonry less concerned with
individual achievement than with the furthering of common knowledge.
We have seen, for instance, that De Saussure cared little who made the
first ascent of Mont Blanc provided that the way was opened up for
future explorers. Bourrit’s actual record of achievement was small. His
exploration was attended with little success. His best performance was
the discovery, or rediscovery of the Col de Géant. His great ambition,
the ascent of Mont Blanc, failed. Fatigue, or mountain sickness, or
bad weather, spoiled his more ambitious climbs. But this matters
little. He found his niche in Alpine history rather as a writer than
as a mountaineer. He popularised the Alps. He was the first systematic
writer of Alpine books, a fact which earned him the title, “Historian
of the Alps,” a title of which he was inordinately proud. Best of all,
in an age when mountain appreciation was somewhat rare, he marked
himself out by an unbounded enthusiasm for the hills.
He was born in 1735, and in one of his memoirs he describes the moment
when he first heard the call of the Alps: “It was from the summit of
the Voirons that the view of the Alps kindled my desire to become
acquainted with them. No one could give me any information about
them except that they were the accursed mountains, frightful to look
upon and uninhabited.” Bourrit began life as a miniature painter.
A good many of his Alpine water colours have survived. Though they
cannot challenge serious comparison with the mountain masterpieces
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they are not without a
certain merit. But Bourrit would not have become famous had he not
deserted the brush for the pen. When the Alps claimed him, he gave
up miniatures, and accepted an appointment as Precentor of Geneva
Cathedral, a position which allowed him great leisure for climbing.
He used to climb in the summer, and write up his journeys in the
winter. He soon compiled a formidable list of books, and was hailed
throughout Europe as the Historian of the Alps. There was no absurd
modesty about Bourrit. He accepted the position with serene dignity.
His house, he tells us, is “embellished with beautiful acacias, planned
for the comfort and convenience of strangers who do not wish to leave
Geneva without visiting the Historian of the Alps.” He tells us that
Prince Henry of Prussia, acting on the advice of Frederick the Great,
honoured him with a visit. Bourrit, in fact, received recognition in
many distinguished quarters. The Princess Louise of Prussia sent him
an engraving to recall “a woman whom you have to some extent taught
to share your lofty sentiments.” Bourrit was always popular with the
ladies, and no climber has shown a more generous appreciation for the
sex. “The sex is very beautiful here,” became, as Mr. Gribble tells us,
“a formula with him as soon as he began writing and continued a formula
after he had passed his threescore years and ten.”
We have said that Bourrit’s actual record as a climber is rather
disappointing. We may forget this, and remember only his whole-hearted
devotion to the mountains. Even Gesner, Petrarch, and Marti seem
balanced and cold when they set their tributes besides Bourrit’s large
enthusiasm. Bourrit did not carry a barometer with him on his travels.
He did not feel the need to justify his wanderings by collecting a
mass of scientific data. Nor did he assume that a mountain tour should
be written up as a mere guide-book record of times and route. He is
supremely concerned with the ennobling effect of mountain scenery on
the human mind.
“At Chamounix,” he writes, “I have seen persons of every party in the
state, who imagined that they loathed each other, nevertheless treating
one another with courtesy, and even walking together. Returning to
Geneva, and encountering the reproaches of their various friends,
they merely answered in their defence, ‘Go, as we have gone, to the
Montanvert, and take our share of the pure air that is to be breathed
there; look thence at the unfamiliar beauties of Nature; contemplate
from that terrace the greatness of natural objects and the littleness
of man; and you will no longer be astonished that Nature has enabled us
to subdue our passions.’ It is, in fact, the mountains that many men
have to thank for their reconciliation with their fellows, and with
the human race; and it is there that the rulers of the world and the
heads of the nations ought to hold their meetings. Raised thus above
the arena of passions and petty interests, and placed more immediately
under the influence of Divine inspiration, one would see them descend
from these mountains, each like a new Moses bringing with them codes
of law based upon equity and justice.”
This is fine writing with a vengeance, just as Ruskin’s greatest
passages are fine writing. Before we take our leave of Bourrit, let
us see the precentor of the cathedral exhorting a company of guides
with sacerdotal dignity. One is irresistibly reminded of Japan, where
mountaineering and sacrificial rites go hand in hand--
“The Historian of the Alps, in rendering them this justice in the
presence of a great throng of people, seized the opportunity of
exhorting the new guides to observe the virtues proper to their
state in life. ‘Put yourselves,’ he said to them, ‘in the place
of the strangers, who come from the most distant lands to admire
the marvels of Nature under these wild and savage aspects; and
justify the confidence which they repose in you. You have learnt
the great part which these magnificent objects of our contemplation
play in the organisation of the world; and, in pointing out their
various phenomena to their astonished eyes, you will rejoice to see
people raise their thoughts to the omnipotence of the Great Being
who created them.’ The speaker was profoundly moved by the ideas
with which the subject inspired him, and it was impossible for his
listeners not to share in his emotion.”
Let us remember that Bourrit put his doctrine into practice. He has
told us that he found men of diverse creeds reconciled beneath the
shadow of Mont Blanc. Bourrit himself was a mountaineer first, and an
ecclesiastic second. Perhaps he was no worse as a Protestant precentor
because the mountains had taught him their eternal lessons of tolerance
and serene indifference to the petty issues which loom so large beneath
the shadow of the cathedral. Catholic or Protestant it was all the same
to our good precentor, provided the man loved the hills. Prior Murith
was his friend; and every Catholic mountaineer should be grateful to
his memory, for he persuaded one of their archbishops to dispense
climbers from the obligation of fasting in Lent.