me in the writing of this book and I’d like to say a special word of thanks to Marie Ryan, Karla Doran, Jimmy Doran, Joan Ryan and Aideen Keane for reading and commenting on drafts of different chapters. I would also like to acknowledge the staff of the different institutions in which I conducted research, in particular the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin City Library, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the London Library.
I am very grateful to Ömer M. Koç for giving me permission to consult the manuscript journal of Hugh Moore in his collection in Istanbul, Turkey and to Özlem Çakar and Ayhan Kıbıç for arranging for me to visit the library where it is held. Thanks also to Ruth Ferguson for showing me around Thomas Whaley’s family home, Newman House in Dublin, and to Ted Cahill and Sue Chadwick for courteously welcoming me to two other buildings with which he is associated, Fonthill House and Fort Faulkner.
Thanks to Michael Berreby, Frances Coakley, Glenn Dunne and Ruth Ferguson for kindly giving me permission to reproduce a number of the images in the plate sections, and to Jim Butler, Vincent Hoban and Berni Metcalfe for supplying high-res versions of images. Very special thanks are due to Mervyn Whaley for giving me permission to reproduce the oval portrait of Thomas Whaley, which he recently had photographed, and the wax portrait of Richard Chapel Whaley and his family.
I am grateful to Conor Graham for his encouraging response when I first approached him with the idea for this book and for agreeing to publish it, and to Fiona Dunne for preparing it for publication. Sincere thanks also to the following persons for their help and advice: the late Nicola Gordon Bowe, Turtle Bunbury, William Butcher, Zoë Comyns, Patrick Conner, Leigh Crawford, Dorinda Evans, Nichola Goodbody, Karina Holton, James Kelly, Anthony Malcomson, Sami Malki, Jo-Anne Martin, Fonsie Mealy, Averil Milligan, Katie Milligan, Michael Monahan, Michael Ryan, Amanda Stebbings and Christina Tse-Fong-Tai. I am also grateful to my employer Stephen Rooke for allowing me to take a short period of leave to focus on finishing this book.
When you’re immersed in researching and writing history it’s easy to lose track of what life is really about and I’d like to thank our little boy Diarmuid for reminding me of the bigger picture and for being such a source of happiness in our lives. My wife Karla is my biggest supporter and I want to thank her for all her advice and encouragement and for indulging my fixation with Whaley over the past five years. This book is dedicated to her.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The text contains many quotations from manuscript and printed primary sources. In these quotations capitalisation has been standardised. For the most part spelling and punctuation have been left unchanged from the original, but in the case of quotations from manuscripts some minor alterations have been made: ‘&’ is converted to ‘and’, and in the case of some words (e.g. ‘distinguish’d’) the modern spelling (‘distinguished’) is given for ease of reading.
A NOTE ON SOURCES, CITATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS
Two of the main sources consulted are Thomas Whaley’s own memoirs, written down c.1796–1797 and published in 1906 as Sir Edward Sullivan (ed.), Buck Whaley’s Memoirs (London: Moring, 1906); and Captain Hugh Moore’s Narrative Journal of his Expedition to Constantinople and Jerusalem in the Company of Thomas Whaley, an unpublished manuscript held in a private collection. Whenever a quotation from either of these sources is used in this book, the citation is given afterwards in parentheses: either W (to denote Buck Whaley’s Memoirs) or M (to denote Moore’s journal), followed by the relevant page number, e.g. (W, 43).
Occasionally reference is made to Sir Edward Sullivan’s introduction and footnotes to Buck Whaley’s Memoirs and in these instances the source is cited as Sullivan (ed.), Memoirs, [page number].
Many other sources are also used and these are referenced in the notes. In the case of printed sources, when a source is cited only once the full reference is provided in the notes. When a source is cited more than once an abbreviated form is given in the notes and the full reference is provided in the ‘Works Cited’ section at the end of the book. In the case of citations for letters and other documents, the names of the most common individuals are abbreviated as follows:
RC Robert Cornwall
HF Hugh Faulkner
SF Samuel Faulkner
WN William Norwood
AR Anne Richardson
JR John Richardson
RCW Richard Chapel Whaley
TW Thomas Whaley
WW William Whaley
The following abbreviations are also used:
BNL Belfast News-Letter
DEP Dublin Evening Post
DIB James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002 (9 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009)
Faulkner Papers Correspondence and papers of Samuel Faulkner, c.1721–1795 (in private ownership)
FLJ Finn’s Leinster Journal
FJ Freeman’s Journal
HJ Hibernian Journal
NAI National Archives of Ireland
NLI National Library of Ireland
ODNB H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004)
PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
RCBL Representative Church Body Library, Dublin
TW Manuscript Memoirs Manuscript Memoirs of Thomas Whaley (2 vols), London Library, NRA 20043
SNL Saunders’ News Letter
Whaley Papers Minor collection of correspondence and other material relating to Thomas Whaley (in private ownership)
WHM Walker’s Hibernian Magazine
PROLOGUE
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