Mountains before Mountaineering (eBook)

Introduction

In 1786, a doctor and a peasant burst into a spontaneous race for the final few metres of their shared journey to the summit of Mont Blanc, which had never before been conquered. Over the following century, the rest of the Alps became the ‘playground of Europe’, as triumphant first ascents were made across the range. In 1953, a New Zealand beekeeper and a Nepali-Indian Sherpa claimed Mount Everest for Britain; headlines celebrated, on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, ‘the crowning glory’ of Hillary and Tenzing reaching the summit of the world. Today, the mountains of the world attract innumerable visitors, ascending them in hiking boots and crampons, or descending them with adrenaline-filled rapidity upon skis, snowboards, or rugged bicycles. They are photographed, painted, and admired. This era of modernity – the era we still inhabit – is one in which mountains are places of heroism, of joyous sporting endeavours, of beauty and sublimity. But what came before?

Before this time, or so it is said, travellers shuddered at the very sight of the Alps. Peasants who lived in the shadows of the mountains whispered that the summits were the abode of dragons, best avoided. Mountains were ugly, seen as warts upon the face of the Earth. The very thought of climbing to the top of a mountain was an absurdity. It was only in the modern era, with the start of mountaineering and the new appreciation for nature, as expressed in the writings of poets such as William Wordsworth, that mountains came to be objects of love and admiration. One might say that today we are the inheritors of a uniquely modern appreciation for the natural landscape.

This is a compelling vision. It is fascinatingly strange to imagine a time when the overall view of mountains was so at odds with that of today, and deliciously tempting to cast ourselves as having a special relationship with mountains, unknown by our ancestors. It’s a vision you might be familiar with, since it is embedded in accounts of the origins of mountaineering, in articles about aesthetics and art, and in many ways in the very fabric of what it means to ‘be modern’. It is also, as I have discovered, wrong.

I am at my dad’s retirement party, on a visit back to the parental nest long after flying it for marriage and PhD research up in Scotland. For thirty-five years he worked for the local district council, in building control and planning permission. I am surrounded by Suffolk accents and builder-y types, who are about as far removed from my daily work of poring over centuries-old books as I am from inspecting walls for safety or architectural sketches for planning violations. One of my dad’s colleagues, who I am pretty sure dandled me on his knee when I was a toddler, pauses to ask me about my doctorate. What do I work on? The conversation goes a bit like this:

‘Oh, er, mountains. In history.’

‘Mountains, really? What about them?’

‘Well, I’m looking at mountains in the seventeenth century, what people thought about them …’

‘Oh, yes! People didn’t like mountains back then, did they?’

‘Well, actually …’

The same conversation plays out in any number of settings: making small talk at the doctor’s; at academic conferences; sitting next to random people on the bus. I am always amazed at the fact that this idea, that people didn’t like mountains then, seems to have burrowed into the collective unconscious. Early on in my PhD, I read a book by the historian Daniel Lord Smail which talks about ‘ghost theories’.1 I like this term, because it seems to capture exactly what I keep coming up against: an idea so old and so oft-repeated that it has taken on the status of fact, its real origins long forgotten.

I could share a dozen examples of this theory as expressed on television, in books, or in magazine articles. My favourite is an old one, from Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilisation, a then-groundbreaking documentary on the history of art, which was intended partly to take advantage of the full potential of the new technology of colour television. Seated on a large rock on a mountainside, incongruously dressed in a suit and tie, he declared in clipped, definite accents that:

He went on to observe that to most people ‘the thought of climbing a mountain for pleasure would have seemed ridiculous’, and when ‘an ordinary traveller of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries crossed the Alps, it never occurred to him to admire the scenery’.2

This book tells a different story. Long before Everest was ‘discovered’ as the highest mountain in the world, long before the first (recorded) ascent of Mont Blanc, mountains in fact inspired curiosity and fascination. A wonderful summation of this can be found in an oration on travel written by Hermann Kirchner (1562–1620), a professor of history and poetry at the University of Marburg. His goal was to urge young men to journey into foreign and distant lands for their edification and personal improvement. Mountains offered a special attraction:

Professor Kirchner invited his readers on a journey through the mountains. This book does the same, inviting you on a journey through mountains as they were viewed, experienced and loved before the modern age.

MY JOURNEY TO THE MOUNTAINS

I have now been studying the history of mountains for most of my adult life, long enough that I have replaced the verb of studying with that of being: I am a historian of mountains, specifically of early modernity. I am going to talk more later about that term, but for the time being let’s just say that by ‘early modern’ I mean the period between roughly 1450 and 1750. Before drilling down into questions of terminology, though, I want to explain how I got here. What journey did I take to becoming a historian of mountains, and to doubting the ghost theory that people didn’t like mountains back then?

There are many places this story could begin, because it starts not with history but with my own personal relationship with mountains. Maybe it starts with childhood holidays and hiking up hills in the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Northumbria. I particularly loved, and still love, the Lake District, the names of the peaks rolling off my tongue and around my head like incantations: Blencathra, Scafell, Skiddaw, Helvellyn. These names evoke visceral teenage memories: getting soaked and cold slipping up the shaley summit of Skiddaw, the foot-bruising monotony of the upper moonscape of Scafell Pike, the heady thrill of tracing the narrow stony top of Striding Edge up to the summit of Helvellyn.

Or maybe it starts with that peculiarly masochistic form of British youth improvement (I wonder what Hermann Kirchner would have thought of that), the Duke of Edinburgh award, and the two ‘Gold’ expeditions trekking through wild country with a tent and what felt like the kitchen sink on my back. At one memorable point on the second of the two expeditions, the team member, whose turn it was to route-find, stopped us at the top of a hill, glancing with dawning horror between the map and the peak across from us, before uttering the sentence: ‘I think we climbed the wrong mountain.’ Somehow, this still did not put me off.

I was certainly well down the path to my mountains of today – or maybe I should say my mountains of yesteryear – when the teacher who ran the Duke of Edinburgh scheme at my school lent me a pile of books on the Everest expeditions of the 1920s, and the ‘mystery of Mallory and Irvine’.4 George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, members of the 1924 team hoping to claim Everest for Britain, departed their tent for their summit bid on the morning of 8 June 1924. Later that afternoon, cloud enveloped the top of the mountain, and they were never seen alive again. The ‘mystery’ lay in the tantalising suggestion that they might have successfully reached the ‘top of the world’ almost thirty years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The same teacher also led an annual winter mountaineering weekend to Scotland, during which I wore crampons for the first time and learned to self-arrest with an ice axe. Two years later, she took a sabbatical from work in order to make her own attempt upon Mount Everest. My peers and I at school waited for updates coming down the mountain from her expedition team with bated breath. Some of us had figured out, with the obsessiveness of teenagers towards a beloved role model, that if she succeeded she would break the record for being the oldest British woman to summit Everest. This was apparently news to her; when she returned, she described with some indignation the experience of returning to Base Camp from...