Ascent of the Matterhorn (eBook)
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EPUB
2024
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1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Gibson Square (Verlag)
978-1-78334-185-6 (ISBN)
240 Seiten
Gibson Square (Verlag)
978-1-78334-185-6 (ISBN)
'Unapproachable in Alpine literature.' THE TIMESFew thought of travelling to the Alps until John Ruskin extolled the rugged beauty of the Matterhorn in 1844. However, it was 25-year-old Edward Whymper who inadvertently re-established its haunted aura upon making its first ascent in 1865. His Alpine adventure spurred the birth of mountaineering, while his memoir is still as fresh as when he wrote it as a love letter to the unique world and fierceness of nature he discovered while ascending thirteen Alpine peaks for the first time. Armed with a pick-axe, he climbed in tweeds and hobnailed leather shoes, alone or with other Brits and local hunters and craftsmen, who carried ropes, stores, tents, and hacked steps in the ice. Yet, today, the Matterhorn is still treacherous and has recorded over 500 more deaths since four of Whymper's party lost their lives-one of whom has yet to be found.Forgotten photographs-as a young engraver, Whymper enthusiastically embraced the rapidly advancing art of photography. In 1874, he was the first to take a portable camera and plates up the Matterhorn to turn photographs into drawings for a new edition of his book, and, in 1883, to include as lantern slides with talks (rousing in teenage Winston Churchill, for one, a lifelong passion for the Alps). In this edition, 56 of them accompany his original engravings and Alpine advice to illustrate his dramatic story, and many appear in print for the first time.
Edward Whymper was born into a family of engravers in Lambeth, South London, dreamt of becoming prime minister but instead became an explorer and celebrity engraver, illustrating Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He travelled explored Greenland and the Andes, while dreaming of conquering the Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro.
'Unapproachable in Alpine literature.' THE TIMESFew thought of travelling to the Alps until John Ruskin extolled the rugged beauty of the Matterhorn in 1844. However, it was 25-year-old Edward Whymper who inadvertently re-established its haunted aura upon making its first ascent in 1865. His Alpine adventure spurred the birth of mountaineering, while his memoir is still as fresh as when he wrote it as a love letter to the unique world and fierceness of nature he discovered while ascending thirteen Alpine peaks for the first time. Armed with a pick-axe, he climbed in tweeds and hobnailed leather shoes, alone or with other Brits and local hunters and craftsmen, who carried ropes, stores, tents, and hacked steps in the ice. Yet, today, the Matterhorn is still treacherous and has recorded over 500 more deaths since four of Whymper's party lost their lives-one of whom has yet to be found.Forgotten photographs-as a young engraver, Whymper enthusiastically embraced the rapidly advancing art of photography. In 1874, he was the first to take a portable camera and plates up the Matterhorn to turn photographs into drawings for a new edition of his book, and, in 1883, to include as lantern slides with talks (rousing in teenage Winston Churchill, for one, a lifelong passion for the Alps). In this edition, 56 of them accompany his original engravings and Alpine advice to illustrate his dramatic story, and many appear in print for the first time.
Edward Whymper was born into a family of engravers in Lambeth, South London, dreamt of becoming prime minister but instead became an explorer and celebrity engraver, illustrating Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He travelled explored Greenland and the Andes, while dreaming of conquering the Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro.
'Unapproachable in Alpine literature.' THE TIMESFew thought of travelling to the Alps until John Ruskin extolled the rugged beauty of the Matterhorn in 1844. However, it was 25-year-old Edward Whymper who inadvertently re-established its haunted aura upon making its first ascent in 1865. His Alpine adventure spurred the birth of mountaineering, while his memoir is still as fresh as when he wrote it as a love letter to the unique world and fierceness of nature he discovered while ascending thirteen Alpine peaks for the first time. Armed with a pick-axe, he climbed in tweeds and hobnailed leather shoes, alone or with other Brits and local hunters and craftsmen, who carried ropes, stores, tents, and hacked steps in the ice. Yet, today, the Matterhorn is still treacherous and has recorded over 500 more deaths since four of Whymper's party lost their lives-one of whom has yet to be found.Forgotten photographs-as a young engraver, Whymper enthusiastically embraced the rapidly advancing art of photography. In 1874, he was the first to take a portable camera and plates up the Matterhorn to turn photographs into drawings for a new edition of his book, and, in 1883, to include as lantern slides with talks (rousing in teenage Winston Churchill, for one, a lifelong passion for the Alps). In this edition, 56 of them accompany his original engravings and Alpine advice to illustrate his dramatic story, and many appear in print for the first time.
EDWARD WHYMPER
27 April 1840 (Lambeth)—11 September 1911 (Chamonix)
In many ways, the 17-year-old Edward Whymper expressed the buoyancy of 19th century Britain when he wrote in 1857 that ideas were ‘floating in my head’. He dreamed of going ‘to sea’, but also that he should be a judge, or ‘one day be Prime Minister’, or that he ‘should one day turn out some great person, be the person of my day’. Charles Darwin would shortly publish On the Origin of Species (1859), revealing how little we knew ourselves. Whymper felt, like many others, so little was known about ‘our little planet’. There was a sudden expansion of knowledge, technology, and living standards, and he was swept up in his generation’s optimism that opportunities in the world at large were limitless. By the 1850s, railway lines had shrunk distances like no decade before and brought Europe within easy reach. Literacy suddenly leapt as working hours decreased and there was an enormous demand for books, magazines and other media—particularly illustrated ones that revealed the exotic aspect of the unknown natural world. Everyone could take part in the quest for knowledge and satisfy their curiosity.
Moreover, the young Whymper found himself at the heart of this revolution. Whymper was born into a family of engravers based in South London’s Lambeth and engraving was a booming industry whose crest was to propel him (and his eight brothers—younger brother Henry’s home in Murree near Rawalpindi-Islamabad would five decades later become the official residence of the Prime Minister of Pakistan) around the world. It was a commission by publisher William Longman in the summer of 1860 that first sent the 20-year-old Whymper on his way to the Alps in order to gather illustrations for the waxing appetite for mountain books among Britain’s growing army of readers. Longman himself was a member of the Alpine Club founded three years earlier by 38 enthusiasts and he was the publisher of the members’ journal.
A dinner on 9 August 1860 in Zermatt accidentally proved a defining moment for Whymper. Unbeknownst to him, it set in motion what was to be a leading role in one of the greatest scandals of Victorian Britain. During this exuberant evening, he met Alpine Club members Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) and travel writer Thomas Hinchcliff. Both had him spell-bound with tales of their daring conquest that day to be the first to reach the summit of the Alphubel, north of Zermatt. Whymper’s destiny instantly projected itself on the ocean of spires suspended above Zermatt. Around the town alone 18 peaks pierced the sky, most of which had not yet been climbed (he describes 13 Alpine firsts in the three years to 1865). It included the daunting silhouette that hovered fierce over Zermatt, which some Swiss guides refused to go near—‘anywhere but the Matterhorn’. In the French Alps, it was equally a mer à boire.
Whymper’s first depiction of the Alps at Interlaken, 30 July 1860.
Like the big unfolding ideas of the age, everything about Zermatt was fresh. Its prosperity—like that of the Whympers—was newly minted and construction was buzzing around the town to keep up with demand from Brits wanting to be close to the rugged Swiss mountainside. In 1839, the town had but a plain chalet with 3 boarding rooms. But after John Ruskin’s ecstatic visit in 1844, the Matterhorn’s fame led in rapid succession to the building of two grand hotels in 1854—the Monte Rosa and the Mont Cervin, and soon many more—to house tourists who flocked to see the Swiss Alps for themselves. Zermatt’s romantic nature—both ‘savage and grand as well as peaceful and tender’ in Whymper’s words—appealed to every type of sensibility. A torrent of Matterhorn aficionados gladly walked the 25 miles up the valley from Visp, the last town connected to the outside world with proper roads.
Over the next few years, as publishers’ demand for illustrations grew exponentially, money would pour in for Whymper from his skills as a celebrity engraver. Despite being in his early twenties, plenty of funds allowed him to spend his summers abroad in tandem with the leisure classes who took to the newly-laid international railways like ducks to water. At this early moment in Alpine tourism, there were only the contours of the different types of visitors. Sightseers would stay at Zermatt’s Mont Cervin, named after its main attraction, the Matterhorn, but the more ambitious travellers, such as most Alpine Club members, would stay at the Monte Rosa, named after the mountain whose summit was first vanquished in 1855, the year prior to the hotel’s opening.
Monte Rosa’s guests were mainly made up of Cambridge alumni with a fair sprinkling of schoolboys from Rugby, Harrow and Eton, as well as the other public schools. In the convivial, wine-, beer-, champagne- and enthusiasm-filled atmosphere of these Alpinists Whymper was like a fish in water. Unlike the general run of Zermatt visitors, there was very little room for condescension in the mountain ranges. Roaming through the untrodden Alps required reliance on local experts to find one’s way safely through the forests, rocks, ice and snow, and avoiding having to stay overnight on a glacier—something considered at the time to be avoided at all costs. If close proximity for several days to a hunter or workman triggered status anxiety despite sturdy tweeds, the wilderness, crags and crannies, ice, snow and glaciers of the Alps were the wrong place to be.
Only four years into the existence of the Alpine Club, its by now 158 members were by no means all hardened climbers. They were a broad church who distinguished themselves through ‘literary contributions or mountain exploits’. The latter group themselves had not yet divided into those who walked or rambled, or those who had mountaineering skills that allowed them to take exceptional risks to conquer all of what local guides called the ‘disagreeables’ that came one’s way up in the Alpine heights. The river that ran through the various tribes was neatly expressed in 1862 by Leslie Stephen’s brother James, also an Etonian and Cambridge alumnus, as well as Alpine Club member, during a scrambling tour around Zermatt with Whymper: ‘I want very much to ascend these high mountains, but do not want to break my neck’.
Whymper viscerally felt that here was his chance to stand out from others, and make a name for himself. He was more than happy to accept its risks. Despite a lack of training in technical climbs that would today be commonplace, he had a natural gift for climbing, self-confidence, fearlessness and attentativeness. In 1862, his third year in the Alps, he climbed the Matterhorn on his own on a whim. Reaching 500 ft higher than anyone before him, he gained kudos and a reputation as a daredevil upon his safe return. During the four years before he conquered the Matterhorn’s summit in 1865, at least two previous climbs would have ended in tragedy but for sheer luck. On the way down from his solo climb he fell 200ft, narrowly coming to a halt before a yawning precipice with an 800 ft drop. In the words of The Times, he had ‘one of the most miraculous escapes from instant death’. Whymper himself wrote that he would have been ‘utterly smashed’. And, in 1864, he was part of a group of guides and Alpine Club members who tried a new mountain pass across to Zermatt. A massive tower of ice (sérac) of several storeys high crushed the group’s path moments after they had traversed it. The only lesson drawn from these years—and he was not the only one—was that a summit climb needed at least more than one climber with experience to succeed.
But it wasn’t just Alpine tourism that energised the Alpine Club, or indeed Whymper. Climbing mountains also had a scientific purpose in these early days of understanding the earth’s geology. To fuel this knowledge, academics needed rock samples and relied on the restless souls who had the money and drive to risk life and limb to go and collect them from around the world. Whymper’s Alpine Club rival for the summit of the Matterhorn was Professor John Tyndall, one of Britain’s foremost geologists. Throughout his life Whymper himself was to correspond with academic geologists and share with them the specimens he collected during his travels and expeditions. Only months before he successfully climbed the Matterhorn, Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton had proposed Whymper as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Whymper was also a member of the British Association, the science equivalent of the Alpine Society that gathered autodidacts like Whymper and academics alike in the developing pursuit of science. The famous 1860 debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley on Darwin’s theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species was organised by this association, and Whymper himself had made the engravings for Darwin’s book.
Whymper was...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 14.7.2024 |
|---|---|
| Vorwort | Theresa May |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport |
| Reisen ► Reiseberichte | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-78334-185-8 / 1783341858 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-78334-185-6 / 9781783341856 |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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