de Glace. Standing on the ice, they uncorked a bottle of wine and drank to the success of British arms. Their expedition contained at least three elements that would reappear throughout the history of British climbing: adventure, alcohol and a belligerent contempt for foreigners.
The motives of Colonel Mark Beaufoy, an Englishman who was the first foreigner to climb Mont Blanc (4,807m/15,770ft) in 1787 (the fourth ascent), remain obscure, but the beauty of the mountain landscape does not appear to have made a lasting impression. He had been moved by ‘the desire everyone has to reach the highest places on earth’25 and recorded that ‘he suffered much, thought he had gone blind, got a swelled face and regretted he had undertaken such a thing’.26 Nevertheless, he was the first Englishman to climb a major alpine peak.
In parallel with the Romantic movement, the growing popularisation of science during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century provided a further impetus to mountain exploration. The development of printing technology and publishing spread scientific knowledge as subscription libraries sprang up in major towns and cities and natural history became a popular pastime for the educated classes. Geologists and botanists were pioneering explorers of the British hills. The first recorded ascent of Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis (1,344m/4,406ft), in 1771, and the first recorded rock climb, on Clogwyn Du’r Arddu in Snowdonia in 1798, were both undertaken in order to collect plant specimens. The idea of mountain climbing purely for sport and pleasure had still not been accepted and, in keeping with the spirit of the age, many early pioneers insisted that their motives were primarily scientific. De Saussure, the Geneva-born founder of ‘scientific alpinism’ who sponsored the first ascent of Mont Blanc and made the third himself in 1787, wrote: ‘I was bound to make the scientific observations and experiments which alone gave value to my venture.’27 However, as his Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96) makes clear, he was interested in far more than natural history, and his book influenced future generations of British climbers to follow in his footsteps for reasons that were often far from scientific.
James Forbes, one of the founding fathers of British mountaineering, also claimed to be primarily motivated by science. He visited the Pyrenees in 1835 and the Alps in 1839, as well as making extensive journeys on foot across the Scottish Highlands, including the first ascent of Sgurr nan Gillean on Skye in 1836. The son of a wealthy banker, Sir William Forbes, and Williamina Belsches, the first love of Sir Walter Scott, Forbes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 23 and became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh one year later. He was particularly fascinated by glaciology, a subject that attracted widespread interest in Britain following the publication of a book by the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz in 1840 which suggested that glaciers had once been much more extensive. As evidence accumulated of an ‘Ice Age’ during which glaciers had scooped out the mountains and scoured the valleys of northern Britain, people travelled to the Alps just for the experience of walking on these rivers of ice. Forbes’ book Travels through the Alps of Savoy, published in 1843, contained both scientific observations and the first account in the English language of a series of alpine climbs, including the fourth ascent of the Jungfrau (4,158m/13,642ft) in 1841. The book, which was widely read, communicated Forbes’ enthusiasm for science and the pure joy of climbing: ‘Happy the traveller who...starts on the first day’s walk amongst the Alps in the tranquil morning of a long July day, brushing the early morning dew before him and, armed with his staff, makes for the hill-top – begirt with rock or ice as the case may be – whence he sees the field of his summer’s campaign spread out before him, its wonders, its beauties, and its difficulties, to be explained, to be admired, and to be overcome.’28
Glaciers also had an indirect impact on mountaineering because of the extraordinary popular interest in polar exploration in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the ‘Great Peace’ following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Royal Navy embarked upon a series of exploratory missions that were the most expensive in history before the United States and Soviet space programmes in the second half of the twentieth century. They set out to fill in the blanks on the map of the Congo, the Sahara and the Sahel, but in the period from 1820 to 1850, expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic captured the public imagination more than any other. The great polar explorers became household names, including William Parry, who found the entrance to the North-West Passage in 1819; John Franklin, ‘the man who ate his boots’ during a disastrous overland expedition to Canada’s northern coast in 1822; James Ross, who discovered the northern magnetic pole in 1831 and explored the Antarctic in 1839; and the leaders of numerous overland and naval expeditions that set out to search for Franklin when he and his crew disappeared once again in 1847. Accounts of these journeys in the press and in bestselling books formed part of the childhood experience of the generation of Englishmen that set out to conquer the Alps in the 1850s.
These great exploratory expeditions were, from a practical point of view, quite useless. The North-West Passage proved not to be a passage (although global warming has since made it one), the Arctic and Antarctic had no economic or strategic significance, and the leaders of the expeditions were often extraordinarily incompetent. But the public celebrated their failures almost more than their successes. To Victorians, explorers represented the romantic ideal of a quest: a reminder of England’s chivalrous and buccaneering past. With its combination of hardship and heroism, polar exploration, in particular, had the effect of making a virtue out of suffering. Franklin appeared alongside Frobisher, Drake, Cook and Nelson in children’s books, and a whole generation of young men grew up in the mid-nineteenth century with the ambition to become explorers and to suffer. Most of them never went near the poles, but some found that there was a region of glaciers and snow, accessible by railway in the heart of Europe, where it was possible to become an explorer for a few weeks each summer. Many of the first generation of alpine climbers openly acknowledged the inspiration that polar exploration provided. Edward Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn, wanted to be a polar explorer. Even Leslie Stephen, the great mid-Victorian intellectual, confessed that in the Alps he imagined himself walking across the Arctic wastes to encourage himself to keep going.
The importance of exploration was reflected in the status of the Royal Geographical Society, which was founded in 1830 and to this day occupies ‘the best country house in London’ on the edge of Hyde Park at Kensington Gore. The link between exploration, suffering and heroism was openly acknowledged. An article in 1881, celebrating the first 50 years of the Society, referred to them as ‘the most perilous and therefore the most glorious’.29 As the Empire expanded, so too did the need for geographers to survey, map and catalogue the resources of the conquered territories, and since high mountain ranges frequently form natural boundaries, exploration in mountainous areas on the edge of the Empire often had a military and strategic, as well as purely geographic, significance. In the Himalaya, in particular, much of the early exploration was motivated by the need to define and defend the boundaries between the British, Russian and Chinese empires. Ambitious and courageous young men were naturally drawn to this ‘Great Game’, which combined nationalism and heroism in romantic surroundings.
Europeans were late to realise the scale of the Himalaya, and when a reconnaissance expedition by Lieutenant Webb and Captain Raper in 1808 calculated the height of Dhaulagiri at 8,188m/26,862ft they were astonished by the result. Until that time it was widely assumed that the Andes were the highest mountains in the world. In 1848–50 Sir Joseph Hooker, a botanist and protégé of Charles Darwin who had already sailed to Antarctica with Captain James Ross, made a number of journeys into the Himalaya from Darjeeling to Sikkim. He also crossed into eastern Nepal (an area subsequently closed to Europeans for nearly a century), reaching the border of Tibet. When he was arrested and held prisoner by the Raja of Sikkim, the East India Company annexed a portion of southern Sikkim, thereby bringing the British Raj to the foot of Kangchenjunga (8,586m/28,169ft), the third highest peak in the world. The Survey of India started mapping the foothills of the Himalaya in 1846, and the height of Everest (8,848m/29,028ft) was first determined in 1852. Until 1883, when the first purely sporting expedition took place, the main purpose of Himalayan exploration was military and scientific: to map and survey the land and to collect specimens. The remoteness and huge extent of the region made it a scientific curiosity for much longer than the Alps, and British expeditions to the region often tried, usually unsuccessfully, to combine scientific and sporting objectives until the 1930s. As a result