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Return to Old News home pageby Paul Chrastina
In the summer of 1860, Edward Whymper visited the Alps for the first time. Whymper was an athletic, twenty-year-old English artist who had been hired by a London publisher to make sketches and engravings of the scenic mountains along the border of Switzerland and Italy.
While sketching and painting his views of the mountains, Whymper decided
that he wanted to become the first man to climb the Matterhorn, the third-highest
mountain in Europe.
One of the most imposing of the Alps' many peaks, the Matterhorn was described
by travelers returning to England as "the most noble rock of Europe."
The Matterhorn had never been successfully climbed. It had a bad reputation
among mountain climbers who grimly referred to it as "that awful mountain."
Whymper made no attempt to climb the Matterhorn in 1860, but he did join
a club of English Alpinists, with whom he practiced the sport of mountain
climbing.
He went home to England for the winter, but returned to the Alps in the
summer of 1861, determined to reach the summit of the unconquered Matterhorn.
Whymper began his first ascent from the Italian village of Breuil, near
the Italian-Swiss border. Along with a Swiss guide, he was making his way
up a low ridge that led to the base of the Matterhorn when he encountered
an Italian mountaineer named Jean Carrel, who was accompanied by his uncle.
Whymper soon found that Jean Carrel also had ambitions to be the first to
reach the peak of the Matterhorn, and had already made several attempts
to climb the mountain. Carrel patriotically believed that a native Italian
like himself--and not some intrusive young Englishman--should be the first
to set foot on the Matterhorn's narrow summit, which lies partly in Italy
and partly in Switzerland.
That night, Whymper and his guide camped near Carrel and his uncle on an
exposed ridge. As the men tried to get some sleep, bitterly cold winds swept
down off the mountain above them. "About midnight," Whymper wrote,
"there came from high aloft a tremendous explosion, followed by a second
of dead quiet. A great mass of rock had split off and was descending toward
us. My guide started up, wrung his hands and exclaimed 'O my God, we are
lost!' We heard it coming, mass after mass pouring over the precipices,
bounding and rebounding from cliff to cliff, and the great rocks in advance
smiting one another." By luck, the men were missed by the oncoming
stone avalanche, which rumbled past them and poured down onto the glaciers
in the valley below.
The next morning, while Whymper was still asleep, Carrel and his uncle broke
camp early and headed up the mountain in an effort to outpace the English
climber. At about 7:00 a.m., Whymper and his guide set out in pursuit of
the Italians. Tied together by a length of rope, Whymper and the guide scrambled
up the steep slopes until they reached a tall slab of rock known as the
Chimney. Here, Whymper's guide refused to go any further, despite the Englishman's
arguments--and the sounds of the Italian climbers somewhere safely above
them. "I told him he was a coward, and he mentioned his opinion of
me," Whymper wrote. "The day was perfect; the wind had fallen;
the way seemed clear, no insuperable obstacle was in sight; but what could
one do alone?"
Frustrated, Whymper retreated from the mountain.
The Carrels, meanwhile, managed to ascend 300 feet above the Chimney before
turning back. With winter approaching, Edward Whymper was forced to delay
his campaign to conquer the Matterhorn. He went home to England and to his
engraving job until the following summer of 1862, when he returned to the
Alps.
On his first 1862 attempt to climb the Matterhorn he was turned back by
a violent windstorm. During the most intense part of this storm, Whymper
wrote, "Advance or return were alike impossible... we saw stones as
big as a man's fist blown away horizontally into space. We dared not attempt
to stand upright and remained stationary on all fours, glued, as it were,
to the rocks."
On another attempt, climbing alone, Whymper succeeded in surmounting the
Chimney and ascending to another sheer rock face called the Tower. Gripping
the narrow ledges and hairline cracks that crisscrossed the rock, he inched
his way up the vertical face "as if crucified, pressing against the
rock, and feeling each rise and fall of my chest as I breathed." Finally,
he pulled himself over the broad ledge at the top of the Tower. He continued
upward for another half hour, scrambling between huge boulders that reminded
him of the "gravestones of giants." As the afternoon grew late,
Whymper stopped at the edge of a snowfield, 1,000 feet below the mountain's
summit, and decided to turn back, confident that he could now reach the
top with the help of competent guides.
On the way down from his solitary climb, Whymper reached a snow-covered
ridge that descended to the Italian village of Breuil. Exhilarated by his
achievement of the day, and contemplating dinner, bath and bed in the village,
Whymper misstepped and slipped off the steep ridge, hurtling down a steep
slope toward the brink of a cliff that dropped 1,000 feet to the surface
of a glacier far below. Whymper fell about 200 feet "in seven or eight
bounds," before coming to rest only ten feet from the edge of the cliff.
Dazed, he pressed a handful of snow to a gash in his head to stop the bleeding.
He then fainted, collapsing in the shelter of some large rocks. When he
regained consciousness, it was dark, and he groped his way down to the village,
where a doctor dressed twenty separate wounds that he had suffered in the
fall.
Whymper was soon back on the mountain with a local guide. They worked their
way up to a point about 600 feet from the top of the Matterhorn, where the
pitch of the mountain's rock walls became too steep and unstable for further
ascent. Deciding that he would need more guides and a ladder to ascend any
further, Whymper came down from the mountain. He returned to England a few
weeks later.
In the summer of 1863, Edward Whymper came back to the unconquered Matterhorn,
more determined than ever, he wrote, "to find a way up it or to prove
it to be really inaccessible." With him he brought a pair of folding
ladders to surmount the vertical cliffs high up on the Italian Ridge.
Reasoning that he and Jean Carrel ought to join forces instead of competing,
Whymper tried to persuade the Italian mountaineer to work for him as a guide.
Carrel agreed, and the two men began climbing the Matterhorn together. A
storm blew in when they were about halfway to the summit, however, and the
climbers were pinned down together for twenty-six hours in a small tent;
then Carrel persuaded Whymper to give up the attempt and return to the village.
Whymper's alliance with Carrel dissolved, and Whymper went home to England.
He did not return to the Alps for two years.
Whymper decided to try some new tactics when he renewed his assault on the
Matterhorn in June of 1865. Although he had come within 600 feet of the
summit by way of the Italian Ridge, he now decided to attack the Matterhorn
from a new direction, by climbing partway up its south face, where a broad
natural gully sloped upward one thousand feet before joining another ridge
that led to the summit.
On the morning of June 21, Whymper set out on this new route with three
Swiss guides. At about ten o'clock in the morning, the group stopped for
lunch in the gully, about halfway up to the ridge. Whymper later wrote "Almer
[one of the guides] was seated on a rock, carving large slices from a leg
of mutton, the others were chatting, and the first intimation we had of
danger was from a sudden roar, which reverberated awfully amongst the cliffs;
and looking up we saw masses of rocks, boulders and stones, big and little,
dart round the corner eight hundred feet or so above us."
As the avalanche plummeted toward the climbers, Whymper wrote, "The
precious mutton was pitched on one side, the winebag was let fall"
while the four men quickly sought shelter behind defending rocks, "endeavoring
to make ourselves as small as possible." Shaken but unhurt , the group
retreated from the gully, which had been carved by frequent avalanches similar
to the one that had just passed by them.
Whymper's seventh attempt to conquer the Matterhorn had failed. As his guides
left him to fulfill "previous engagements," he climbed several
other nearby mountains in Switzerland, but returned to Breuil a month later,
on July 7, 1865.
Jean Carrel, meanwhile, was making his own plans to conquer the Matterhorn,
under the auspices of the newly formed Italian Alpine Club. The club's leader,
Felice Giordano, had hired Carrel to make the ascent before Whymper could
succeed.
Hearing of Whymper's arrival in Breuil, Giordano quickly sent a letter summoning
the men who were to accompany Carrel. "I have tried to keep everything
secret," he wrote, "but that fellow whose life seems to depend
on the Matterhorn is here, suspiciously prying into everything. I have taken
all the best men away from him; and yet he is so enamored of the mountain
that he may go with others...He is here in the hotel and I try to avoid
speaking to him."
Whymper found Carrel and tried to hire him for another climb, but the guide
claimed that he had already made other plans and declined. Finding that
no one else in the village was willing to accompany him, Whymper finally
learned of the Italian's plan to climb the mountain before Whymper could
do it. Feeling "bamboozled," Whymper desperately hiked ten miles
to the village of Zermatt, on the Swiss side of the mountain, in search
of guides.
In Zermatt, Whymper chanced to meet two other climbing parties who were
also intending to climb the Matterhorn, and he persuaded them to combine
into one large party. The other climbers were: Lord Francis Douglas, a nineteen
year-old mountaineer; the Reverend Charles Hudson and his traveling companion,
Douglas Hadow; Michael Croz, a Swiss guide; and two other Swiss guides,
a father and son, both named Peter Taugwalder.
At half past five on the morning of July 13, 1865, Whymper and his party
left the village of Zermatt. Six hours later they reached the base of the
mountain. As they began climbing up the Zermatt Ridge of the Matterhorn,
Whymper was keenly aware that Jean Carrel and six other Italian climbers
were simultaneously working their way up the Italian Ridge on the other
side of the mountain.
After his many failed attempts on the treacherous Italian Ridge, Whymper
was surprised and delighted at the ease with which the Zermatt Ridge could
be climbed. "We were now fairly upon the mountain," he wrote,
"and were astonished to find that places which... looked entirely impracticable,
were so easy that we could run about.... The whole of this great slope was
now revealed, rising for 3,000 feet like a huge natural staircase."
After camping overnight partway up the Matterhorn, Whymper and his companions
climbed swiftly the next morning to within 300 feet of the summit, where
a difficult section of steep rock forced them to leave the ridge and traverse
across the north face of the mountain. Young Douglas Hadow began to have
difficulties at this point, and was helped by the others. Cautiously, the
men advanced across the rock wall. Scrambling upward to regain the ridge,
the climbers were thrilled to see that "The Matterhorn was ours! Nothing
but two hundred feet of easy snow remained to be surmounted!"
Whymper and Croz raced for the summit, reaching it together. From the snow-covered
peak, the two men looked down the opposite side of the Matterhorn and saw
Carrel's team nearly 1,200 feet below, still laboring up the far more difficult
slopes of the Italian Ridge.
Whymper and Croz shouted themselves hoarse and waved their arms to attract
Carrel's attention, but went unseen. Finally, heady with triumph, Whymper
wrote, "We drove our sticks in, and prized away the crags... soon a
torrent of stones poured down from the cliffs. There was no doubt about
it this time. The Italians turned and fled."
When the rest of the party reached the peak, Michael Croz produced a tent
pole from his rucksack and planted it in the snow, tying his shirt to it
as a makeshift pennant. The party built a cairn of rocks to commemorate
their victory, and spent an hour on the summit, delirious with their success.
Then they began their descent. Whymper and young Peter Taugwalder came down
from the summit last. Croz, Hadow, Hudson, Douglas and the elder Taugwalder
were already roped together and in line as the artist and the teenage guide
caught up with them. "Great care was being taken." Whymper noted.
"Only one man was moving at a time; when he was firmly planted the
next man advanced."
When they reached the steep traverse off the ridge that had been their only
difficulty on the way up, Douglas Hadow again began to have trouble keeping
his footing. Michael Croz stood below Hadow, placing the young climber's
feet into the toeholds afforded by the sheer rock wall. Then, Hadow slipped
and fell against Croz, knocking him off the cliff.
Whymper later described the accident:
"In another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord F. Douglas
immediately after him. All this was the work of a moment.... Immediately
we heard Croz's exclamation, old Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly
as the rock would permit: the rope was taut between us, and the jerk came
on both of us as one man. We held; but the rope broke midway between Taugwalder
and Lord Francis Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions
sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavoring
to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one
by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorn glacier
below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet.... From the moment the rope broke
it was impossible to help them."
Stunned by the sudden accident, Whymper and the two Taugwalders clung to
the steep rock wall, staring after their companions. Down in the village
of Zermatt, a young boy excitedly reported having seen an avalanche high
up on the mountain. "For the space of a half-hour," Whymper wrote,
"we remained on the spot without moving a single step. The two Taugwalders,
paralyzed by terror, cried like infants, and trembled in such a manner as
to threaten us with the fate of the others."
Finally, Whymper shepherded the Taugwalders across the slippery rock wall
to the safety of the ridge. "I asked for the rope which had given way,"
he wrote, "and found, to my surprise--indeed, to my horror--that it
was the weakest of the three ropes. It was not brought--and should not have
been employed--for the purpose for which it was used. It was old rope and,
compared with the others, was feeble. It was intended as a reserve in case
we had to leave much rope behind attached to rocks.
"For the next two hours," Whymper wrote, "I thought almost
every moment that the next would be my last; for the Taugwalders, utterly
unnerved, were not only incapable of giving assistance, but were in such
a state that a slip might have been expected from them at any moment."
Tying pieces of the remaining rope onto rocks for added safety, the survivors
inched their way back down the Zermatt Ridge. "Several times,"
Whymper recalled, "old Peter turned with an ashy face and faltering
limbs, and said, with terrible emphasis, 'I cannot!'"
Just before nightfall, the three men reached the base of the mountain. "We
frequently looked, but in vain, for traces of our unfortunate companions;
we bent over the ridge and cried to them, but no sound returned." Whymper
and the Taugwalders bivouacked "upon a wretched slab," barely
large enough to hold them.
Early the next morning, the men reached Zermatt with news of the tragedy.
A quickly organized search party found the mangled bodies of Croz, Hudson
and Hadow embedded in the glacier below the mountain. Lord Francis Douglas's
body was never found.
When Douglas Hadow's boots were examined, it was found that the hobnails
on their soles were worn almost smooth.
Because Whymper had not returned with the broken rope, having used it to
safeguard the final descent, his story was called into question. Old Peter
Taugwalder was wildly accused of having cut the rope at the last minute
to save himself, his son, and Whymper from being pulled down with the others.
Although an official inquest found no proof for this accusation, Taugwalder
was tainted by its implications for the rest of his life. He later emmigrated
to America.
Edward Whymper became famous in the aftermath of his triumph and tragedy
on the Matterhorn. Supporting himself by giving lectures and writing books,
he gained a reputation as a solitary and remote individual, as well as a
heavy drinker. He went on to climb high mountains in South America, Greenland
and the Canadian Rockies. Whymper died of natural causes in Switzerland
in 1911.
SOURCES:
Scrambles Among the Alps. by Edward Whymper. 1871.
The Age of Mountaineering. by James R. Ullman. Lippencott, 1964.
Great Ascents: A Narrative History of Mountaineering. by Eric Newby. Viking
Press, 1977.
On Top of The World: An Illustrated History of Mountain Climbing. by Showell
Styles. Macmillan, 1967.
Lowell Thomas' Book of the High Mountains. by Lowell Thomas. Simon &
Schuster, 1964.
The Big Walls. by Reinhold Messner. Oxford U. Press, 1978.
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