Albert Smith returned to London, took up practice as a surgeon, wrote for Punch, and acquired a big reputation as an entertainer in The Overland Mail, written by himself and founded on a journey to Egypt and Constantinople. The songs and sketches made the piece popular, and insured a long run. At the close of the season he went to Chamounix again, fully determined to climb Mont Blanc. He was accompanied by William Beverley, the artist, and was lucky to fall in with some Oxford undergraduates with the same ambition as himself. They joined forces, and a party of twenty, including guides, prepared for the great expedition. Amongst other provisions, they took ninety-four bottles of wine, four legs of mutton, four shoulders of mutton, and forty-six fowls. Smith was out of training, and suffered terribly from mountain sickness. He was horrified by the Mur de la Côte, which he describes as “an all but perpendicular iceberg,” and adds that “every step was gained from the chance of a horrible death.” As a matter of fact, the Mur de la Côte is a very simple, if steep, snow slope. A good ski-runner could, under normal conditions, descend it on ski. If Smith had fallen, he would have rolled comfortably to the bottom, and stopped in soft snow. “Should the foot or the baton slip,” he assures us, “there is no chance for life. You would glide like lightning from one frozen crag to another, and finally be dashed to pieces hundreds of feet below.” It is pleasant to record that Smith reached the summit, though not without considerable difficulty, and that his party drank all the wine and devoured the forty-six fowls, etc., before their successful return to Chamounix.
Smith wrote an account of the ascent which provoked a bitter attack in The Daily News. Albert Smith was contrasted with De Saussure, greatly to Smith’s disadvantage. The sober, practical Englishman of the period could only forgive a mountain ascent if the climber brought back with him from the heights, something more substantial than a vision of remembered beauty. A few inaccurate readings of an untrustworthy barometer could, perhaps, excuse a pointless exploit. “Saussure’s observations,” said a writer in The Daily News, “live in his poetical philosophy, those of Mr. Albert Smith will be most appropriately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns, and stale, fast witticisms with an incessant straining after smartness. The aimless scramble of the four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc will not go far to redeem the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd of English to risks in Switzerland for a mindless, and rather vulgar, redundance of animal spirits.” Albert Smith did not allow the subject to drop. He turned Mont Blanc into an entertainment at the Egyptian Hall, an entertainment which became very popular, and was patronised by the Queen.
Narrow-minded critics affect to believe that Albert Smith was nothing more than a showman, and that Mont Blanc was for him nothing more than a peg on which to hang a popular entertainment. This is not true. Mr. Mathews does him full justice when he says: “He was emphatically a showman from his birth, but it is not true he ascended the mountain for the purpose of making a show of it. His well-known entertainment resulted from a lifelong interest which he had taken in the great summit, of which he never failed to speak or write with reverence and affection.” Mr. Mathews was by no means naturally prejudiced in favour of anybody who tended to popularise the Alps, and his tribute is all the more striking in consequence. Albert Smith fell in love with Mont Blanc long before he had seen a mountain. Nobody can read the story of his first journey with twelve pounds in his pocket, without realising that Albert Smith, the showman, loved the mountains with much the same passion as his more cultured successors. Mr. Mathews adds: “It is but just to his memory to record that he, too, was a pioneer. Mountaineering was not then a recognised sport for Englishmen. Hitherto, any information about Mont Blanc had to be sought for in isolated publications. Smith brought a more or less accurate knowledge of it, as it were, to the hearths and homes of educated Englishmen.... Smith’s entertainment gave an undoubted impetus to mountaineering.”
While Smith was lecturing, a group of Englishmen were quietly carrying through a series of attacks on the unconquered citadels of the Alps. In 1854 Mr. Justice Wills made that ascent of the Wetterhorn which has already been referred to. It is fully described in Mr. Justice Wills’s interesting book, Wanderings among the High Alps, and, amongst other things, it is famous as the first appearance in Alpine history of the great guide, Christian Almer. Mr. Wills left Grindelwald with Ulrich Lauener, a guide who was to play a great part in Alpine adventure, Balmat and Simond. “The landlord wrung Balmat’s hand. ‘Try,’ said he, ‘to return all of you alive.’” Lauener burdened himself with a “flagge” to plant on the summit. This “flagge” resolved itself on inspection into a very solid iron construction in the shape of a banner, which Lauener carried to the summit on the following day. They bivouacked on the Enge, and climbed next day without great difficulty, to the gap between the two summits of the Wetterhorn, now known as the Wettersattel. They made a short halt here; and, while they were resting, they noticed with surprise two men working up the rocks they had just climbed. Lauener at first supposed they were chamois hunters; but a moment’s reflection convinced the party that no hunter would seek his prey on such unlikely ground. Moreover, chamois hunters do not usually carry on their backs “a young fir-tree, branches, leaves, and all.” They lost sight of the party and continued their meal. They next saw the two strangers on the snow slopes ahead, making all haste to be the first on the summit. This provoked great wrath on the part of Mr. Wills’s guides, who believed that the Wetterhorn was a virgin peak, a view also shared by the two usurpers, who had heard of the intended ascent and resolved to plant their fir-tree side by side with the iron “flagge.” They had started very early that same morning, and hunted their quarry down. A vigorous exchange of shouts and threats resulted in a compromise. “Balmat’s anger was soon appeased when he found they owned the reasonableness of his desire that they should not steal from us the distinction of being the first to scale that awful peak; and, instead of administering the fisticuffs he had talked about, he declared they were bons enfants after all, and presented them with a cake of chocolate. Thus the pipe of peace was smoked, and tranquillity reigned between the rival forces.”
From their resting-place they could see the final summit. From this point a steep snow slope, about three to four hundred feet in height, rises to the final crest, which is usually crowned by a cornice. The little party made their way up the steep slope, till Lauener reached the final cornice. It should, perhaps, be explained, that a cornice is a projecting cave of wind-blown snow which is usually transformed by sun and frost into ice. Lauener “stood close, not facing the parapet, but turned half round, and struck out as far away from himself as he could.... Suddenly, a startling cry of surprise and triumph rang through the air. A great block of ice bounded from the top of the parapet, and before it had well lighted on the glacier, Lauener exclaimed ‘Ich schaue den Blauen Himmel’ (‘I see blue sky’). A thrill of astonishment and delight ran through our frames. Our enterprise had succeeded. We were almost upon the actual summit. That wave above us, frozen, as it seemed, in the act of falling over, into a strange and motionless magnificence, was the very peak itself. Lauener’s blows flew with redoubled energy. In a few minutes a practicable breach was made, through which he disappeared; and in a moment more the sound of his axe was heard behind the battlement under whose cover we stood. In his excitement he had forgotten us, and very soon the whole mass would have come crashing down upon our heads. A loud shout of warning from Sampson, who now occupied the gap, was echoed by five other eager voices, and he turned his energies in a safer direction. It was not long before Lauener and Sampson together had widened the opening; and then at length we crept slowly on. As I took the last step Balmat disappeared from my sight; my left shoulder grazed against the angle of the icy embrasure, while on the right the glacier fell abruptly away beneath me towards an unknown and awful abyss; a hand from an invisible person grasped mine; I stepped across, and had passed the ridge of the Wetterhorn.
“The instant before I had been face to face with a blank wall of ice. One step, and the eye took in a boundless expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain and valley, lake and plain. The whole world seemed to lie at my feet. The next moment, I was almost appalled by the awfulness of our position. The side we had come up was steep; but it was a gentle slope compared with that which now fell away from where I stood. A few yards of glittering ice at our feet, and then nothing between us and the green slopes of Grindelwald nine thousand feet beneath.”
The “iron flagge” and fir-tree were planted side by side, and attracted great attention in Grindelwald. The “flagge” they could understand, but the fir-tree greatly puzzled them.
Christian Almer, the hero of the fir-tree, was destined to be one of the great Alpine guides. His first ascents form a formidable list, and include the Eiger, Mönch, Fiescherhorn in the Oberland (besides the first ascent of the Jungfrau direct from the Wengern Alp), the Ecrins, monarch of the Dauphiny, the Grand Jorasses, Col Dolent, Aiguille Verte in the Mont Blanc range, the Ruinette, and Morning Pass in the Pennines. But Almer’s most affectionate recollections always centred round the Wetterhorn. The present writer remembers meeting him on his way to celebrate his golden wedding, on the summit of his first love. Almer also deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of winter mountaineering. He made with Mr. Coolidge the first winter ascents of the Jungfrau and Wetterhorn. It was on a winter ascent of the former peak that he incurred frostbite, that resulted in the amputation of his toes, and the sudden termination of his active career. Some years later he died peaceably in his bed.
A year after Mr. Wills’s famous climb, a party of Englishmen, headed by the brothers Smyth, conquered the highest point of Monte Rosa. The Alpine campaign was fairly opened. Hudson made a new route up Mont Blanc without guides, the first great guideless climb by Englishmen. Hinchcliffe, the Mathews, E. S. Kennedy, and others, had already done valuable work.
The Alpine Club was the natural result of the desire on the part of these climbers to meet together in London and compare notes. The idea was first mooted in a letter from Mr. William Mathews to the Rev. J. A. Hort.[3] The first meeting was held on December 22, 1857. The office of President was left open till it was deservedly filled by John Ball; E. S. Kennedy became Vice-President, and Mr. Hinchcliffe, Honorary Secretary. It is pleasant to record that Albert Smith, the showman, was an original member. The English pioneers prided themselves, not without some show of justification, on the fact that their sport attracted men of great intellectual powers. Forbes, Tyndall, and Leslie Stephen, are great names in the record of Science and Literature. The present Master of Trinity was one of the early members, his qualification being an ascent of Monte Rosa, Sinai, and Parnassus.