regarded with curiosity like a revived mammoth out of an iceberg.’27 Safety-conscious, despite his apparently flippant attitude, he was an opponent of guideless climbing but recognised that risk and danger are a vital part of the sport, noting that ‘no advertisement of Alpine adventure is so attractive as a clear demonstration that it is totally unjustifiable’. Writing of his first ascent of the Zinal Rothorn, he made two observations that have stood the test of time: ‘One, that on the first ascent a mountain, in obedience to some mysterious law, is always more difficult than at any succeeding ascent; secondly, that nothing can be less like a mountain at one time than the same mountain at another.’28
If Stephen was the scholarly aesthete of the Golden Age, Edward Whymper was its flawed hero. Stephen called him the Robespierre of mountaineering.29 The son of a commercial artist, he trained as a wood engraver and always felt a sense of social inferiority, trying hard not to drop his ‘aitches’. Throughout his life he was incapable of close relationships or lasting friendships, and from boyhood he exercised a steely self-discipline and pursued the goal ‘that I should one day turn out some great person’.30 His original ambition was to become an Arctic explorer, which would have suited his temperament well, but in 1860 he was commissioned to produce a series of alpine sketches and transferred his ambitions to the mountains. In 1861 he climbed Mont Pelvoux (PD, 3,946m/12,946ft) and was elected to the Alpine Club. He then set his sights on the Weisshorn, ‘the noblest [mountain] in Switzerland’,31 but immediately lost interest when he heard that it had been climbed by Tyndall. Thereafter he focused his attention on the Matterhorn which, because of its magnificent shape, commanding position above Zermatt and apparent impregnability, had become the greatest prize in the Alps.
After making unsuccessful attempts on the Matterhorn in 1862 and 1863, Whymper joined forces with Adolphus Moore and Horace Walker in 1864 for a successful 10 day campaign in the Dauphiné Alps, including the first ascent of the Barre des Écrins (PD, 4,101m/13,454ft). He then made three first ascents in the Mont Blanc area before being summoned back to London before the end of the season. Following a winter of detailed planning, over a period of 24 days from 13 June to 7 July 1865, he made four first ascents, including the Grandes Jorasses Pointe Whymper (AD, 4,208m/13,805ft) and the Aiguille Verte by the Whymper Couloir (AD, 4,122m/13,524ft), and crossed 11 passes.
He also climbed the Dent Blanche (AD, 4,356m/14,291ft) in poor weather, apparently believing that Thomas Kennedy had failed to reach the summit in 1862 and unaware that it had also been climbed by another party in 1864. When he saw through a break in the clouds ‘about twenty yards off’ the outline of a cairn on the summit ‘it was needless to proceed further; I jerked the rope...and motioned [to my guide] that we should go back’.32
On his ninth attempt, at the age of 25, Whymper finally succeeded in climbing the Matterhorn by the Hörnli Ridge (AD) on 14 July 1865. On the descent disaster struck. Four members of the party fell to their death: Charles Hudson; the young and inexperienced Douglas Hadow; Lord Francis Douglas, the younger brother of the Marquis of Queensberry; and their guide Michel Croz. The death of Hudson was particularly shocking because he was regarded as the best amateur climber of the day. The triumph of reaching the summit of the Matterhorn was the crowning achievement of the Golden Age. The tragedy on the descent marked the end of the era. Whymper effectively abandoned alpine climbing after the accident, although he did return to the Matterhorn in 1874, making the 76th ascent. ‘Soon the biggest duffers in Christendom will be able to go up’,33 he wrote in his diary. Today the Zermatt guides claim that they could take a cow to the summit.
The ascent of the Matterhorn was the first climb to receive widespread media coverage, as a result of the accident, and the first to become the focus of competition inspired by nationalism. Both were to become major features of the sport in later years. In the patriotic fervour created by the unification of Italy, the Italian guide Jean Antoine Carrel, who had fought against the Austrians at the battle of Solferino in 1859, was determined that the peak should be climbed by an Italian from the Italian side. When Whymper succeeded in reaching the summit first from the Swiss side, he triumphantly threw rocks down the face to attract the attention of Carrel and his party below. Carrel climbed the Matterhorn by the harder route from Breuil (now called Cervinia) three days later, ‘to avenge our country’s honour’.34
Whymper was the first leading climber apparently motivated solely by the heroic impulse. He found little beauty in the mountains. Seeing for the first time the mountain with which his name would forever become linked, he recorded in his diary: ‘Saw of course the Matterhorn repeatedly; what precious stuff Ruskin has written about this, as well as about other things...Grand it is, but beautiful I think it is not.’35 His writing contains few descriptions other than the act of climbing, and first ascents were his sole preoccupation. He saw himself as fighting and overcoming nature. His interests were not primarily in the mountains, they were in himself: ‘We exult over the scenes brought before our eyes...but we value more highly the development of manliness, and the evolution, under combat with difficulties, of those noble qualities of human nature – courage, patience, endurance and fortitude.’36
Not surprisingly, opinions on such a figure are divided. Chris Bonington is an admirer: ‘His single-minded competitiveness and drive, whilst being very understandable to later generations, was suspect not only to Victorian mountaineers, but to the majority of the British climbing establishment until very recently.’37 Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the early twentieth-century poet mountaineer, was enthusiastic about Whymper’s book Scrambles Amongst the Alps but dismissive of its author: ‘Whymper founded no school. No one has succeeded in imitating anything but his egoism.’38 Part of the contemporary antipathy undoubtedly arose because Whymper was amongst the first to commercialise the sport of mountaineering, earning a living as a mountain illustrator, lecturer and writer. But he was also a supremely selfish man. In the preface to Fred Mummery’s book My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, published soon after his disappearance while attempting to climb Nanga Parbat in 1895, Douglas Freshfield wrote that Mummery’s death was a grievous loss to the Alpine Club. In the margin of his copy of the book, Whymper wrote: ‘I do not agree.’39 Joe Simpson lamented the decline of climbing ethics in the 1990s in his book Dark Shadows Falling (1997) and berated two Japanese climbers who in 1996 failed to assist three dying Indian climbers that they passed on their way to the summit of Everest. Simpson asked the rhetorical question: ‘Would Whymper or Mummery have behaved like this?’ In the case of Mummery there can be little question that he would not. But with Whymper it is harder to be so categorical. In the close-knit community of British climbing in the 1860s, peer group pressure was just sufficient to keep his ambition and selfishness in check, but in the large, impersonal climbing world of the 1990s perhaps Whymper would have sympathised with one of the Japanese climbers who allegedly said ‘above eight thousand metres is not a place where people can afford morality’.40
In 1867 Whymper achieved his original ambition of visiting the Arctic when he organised an expedition to Greenland which made some advances in exploration by sledge. In 1880 he travelled to South America, climbed Chimborazo (6,267m/20,561ft), once thought to be the highest mountain in the world, and spent a night on the summit of Cotapaxi (5,897m/19,347ft). He planned the expedition with his usual meticulous attention to detail and made a systematic study of altitude sickness. His account served as a blueprint for future expeditions to remote mountain areas. Mount Whymper in the Canadian Rockies marks a visit to the region in the 1900s, but by then his best climbing days were over. At the age of 66 he married Edith Lewin, aged 21. Women had played no previous part in his life and the marriage was an unhappy one. It broke up four years later. In 1911, feeling unwell during a visit to the Alps, he returned to his hotel and locked the door, refusing any medical help. He died some days later at the age of 71.
Unaware of events unfolding in Zermatt, the day after the Matterhorn tragedy Frank and Horace Walker, George Mathews, Adolphus Moore and their guides Melchior and Jakob Anderegg made an ascent of the Brenva Spur on the Italian side of Mont Blanc which was well ahead of its time. The climb is still graded AD+/D and was the only route up the daunting Brenva Face for the next 62 years. Frank Walker was a prosperous lead merchant from Liverpool who took up climbing at the age of 50 and was 57 at the time of the ascent of the Brenva Face. He climbed the Matterhorn with his daughter