1786.—Pierre Balmat, Marie Couttet, and another guide reached the top of the Dôme du Goûté, by the Aiguille of the same name, on the 8th June, suffering acutely from the rarifaction of the air. Here they fell in with François Paccard and three other guides, who had ascended by La Côte. Uniting their forces they went onwards and upwards, until they were brought to a stand by a ridge of ice—the Mauvaise Arête—which they considered to be inaccessible, and on their return they were nearly lost in a fearful storm of snow and hail.
"It so happened that one of Paccard's party, named Jacques Balmat, who appears just at this time not to have been very popular in the valley, had presented himself without invitation, and followed them against their will. When they turned to descend, they did not tell this poor man of their intention. Being on unfriendly terms with them, he had kept aloof; and whilst stopping to look for some crystals he lost sight of them, just as the snow began to fall, which rapidly obliterated their traces. The storm increasing, he resolved to spend the night alone in the centre of this desert of ice, and at an elevation of 14,000 feet above the level of the sea! He had no food; he got under the lee of a rock and formed a kind of niche in the snow; and there, half dead from cold he passed the long hours of that terrible night. At last morning broke—the storm had cleared away; and as Balmat endeavoured to move his limbs he found that his feet had lost all sensation—they were frost-bitten! Keeping up his courage he spent the day in surveying the mountain, and he was rewarded: he found that if the crevasses that border the Grand Plateau were once crossed, the path to the top of Mont Blanc was clear, and he then traced out the route which has, with little variation, been followed ever since. Balmat returned that evening to Chamonix. He took to his bed, and did not leave it for weeks. He kept his secret close, until moved with gratitude to Dr. Paccard, the village physician, the line of road was hinted at, and an attempt agreed upon as soon as Balmat recovered." On the 7th of August these two started alone. They ascended La Côte, and slept there. Before daybreak next morning they were on their march again. At three o'clock in the afternoon they were still uncertain as to the results of the enterprise. At last they arrived at the Summit, at sunset. Here they waited half an hour, and then returning got back to their night bivouac, where they again slept, by midnight. On the following morning they reached Chamonix by eight o'clock. Their faces were swollen and excoriated—their eyes nearly closed; and for the next week Balmat was scarcely recognisable.
1787.—De Saussure, accompanied by eighteen guides, started from Chamonix on the 1st August. The summit of the Montagne de la Côte was reached in about six hours, and then the party encamped for the night. At four o'clock in the afternoon of the following day they prepared to pass the night on the snow, at an elevation of 12,300 feet above the level of the sea. De Saussure suffered considerably, and a raging thirst added to his discomfort. Next morning they crossed the Grand Plateau, and, after suffering much discomfort, succeeded in reaching the Summit; there they remained several hours, and then commenced to retrace their steps at half-past three in the afternoon. Towards evening they arrived at the Grands Mulets, where they bivouaced for the night. At six the next morning—that of the fourth day of the journey—they left the rocks, crossed the Glacier de Taconnaz, descended the Montagne de la Côte, and finally reached Chamonix in safety.
1788.—The indefatigable M. Bourrit made his fifth—unsuccessful—and last attempt in the autumn of this year. Regardless of expense, he engaged seventeen guides, and took provisions enough to last six days. Just before starting he was joined by Mr. Woodley, an Englishman, and Mr. Camper, a Dutchman, who were attended by five guides. This large party passed the first night on the Côte, and attempted to reach the Summit the next day. Mr. Woodley, with four guides, distanced the others, some of whom gave in on the Grand Plateau and returned to the Grands Mulets. MM. Bourrit and Camper commenced to beat a retreat after having nearly reached the foot of the last slope; then a mist came on, which added to their difficulties, but they managed to find their way to the tent, where, towards night, they were rejoined by Mr. Woodley and his guides, the former with his feet frost-bitten. The following morning they returned to Chamonix. Mr. Woodley was obliged to keep his feet in snow and salt for a fortnight; one of the Balmats was blind for three weeks; Cachat had his hands frozen, and poor M. Bourrit made up his mind never to try it again!
1791.—Two of the guides accompanying four Englishmen were seriously injured by a fall of rocks on La Côte—one of them sustaining a broken leg, the other a fractured skull.
1802.—On the 10th of August, M. Forneret and Baron Doorthensen reached the Summit after suffering acutely from the rarified air. M. Forneret compared the agony he endured to that of a man whose lungs were being violently torn from his chest!
1820.—The first recorded fatal accident occurred in this year. Dr. Hamel, accompanied by M. Selligue and two Oxford men—Messrs. Durnford and Henderson—and twelve guides, reached the Grands Mulets the first day. Here they were detained all the next by bad weather. At two the following morning the storm passed off, and day broke most beautifully. All were anxious to proceed, with the exception of M. Selligue, who considered that a married man had no right to risk his life in such a perilous adventure. Remonstrances proving of no avail, he was left behind with two guides, who were much disgusted with the arrangement. At twenty minutes past eight in the morning the party reached the Grand Plateau, where they made an attempt at breakfast, but there was no great appetite amongst them. At half-past ten they had arrived nearly below the Rochers Rouges, and shortly afterwards a frightful disaster happened, which is thus described by Mr. Durnford:—
"I was obliged to stop half a minute to arrange my veil; and the sun being at that moment concealed behind a cloud, I tucked it up under the large straw hat which I wore. In the interval, my companion, H——, and three of the guides, passed me, so that I was now the sixth on the line, and, of course, the centre man. H—— was next before me; and as it was the first time we had been so circumstanced during the whole morning, he remarked it, and said we ought to have one guide at least between us in case of accident. This I over-ruled by referring him to the absence of all appearance of danger at that part of our march; to which he assented. I did not then attempt to recover my place in front—though the wish more than once crossed my mind—finding, perhaps, that my present one was much less laborious. To this apparently trivial circumstance I was indebted for my life. A few minutes after the above conversation, my veil being still up, and my eyes turned at intervals towards the summit of the mountain—which was on the right, as we were crossing obliquely the long slope above described, which was to conduct us to Mont Maudit—the snow suddenly gave way beneath our feet, beginning at the head of the line, and carried us all down the slope on our left. I was thrown instantly off my feet, but was still on my knees and endeavouring to regain my footing, when, in a few seconds, the snow on our right—which, of course, was above us—rushed into the gap thus suddenly made, and completed the catastrophe by burying us all at once in its mass, and hurrying us downwards towards two crevasses about a furlong below us and nearly parallel to the line of our march. The accumulation of snow instantly threw me backwards, and I was carried down, in spite of all my struggles. In less than a minute I emerged, partly from my own exertions and partly because the velocity of the falling mass had subsided. I was obliged to resign my pole in the struggle, feeling it forced out of my hand. A short time afterwards I found it on the very brink of the crevass. This had hitherto escaped our notice from its being so far below us, and it was not until some time after the snow had settled that I perceived it. At the moment of my emerging I was so far from being alive to the danger of our situation, that, on seeing my two companions at some distance below, up to the arms in snow and sitting motionless and silent, a jest was rising to my lips, till a second glance shewed me that, with the exception of Mathieu Balmat, they were the only remnants of the party visible. Two more, however, being those in the interval between myself and the rear of the party, having quickly re-appeared, I was still inclined to treat the affair as a perplexing though ludicrous delay, in having sent us down so many hundred feet lower, than in the light of a serious accident, when Mathieu Balmat cried out that some of the party were lost, and pointed to the crevass, which had hitherto escaped our notice, into which he said they had fallen. A nearer view convinced us of the sad truth. The three front guides, Pierre Carrier, Pierre Balmat, and Auguste Tairraz, being where the slope was somewhat steeper, had been carried down with greater rapidity, and to a greater distance, and had thus been hurried into the crevass, with an immense mass of snow upon them, which rose nearly to the brink. Mathieu Balmat, who was fourth in the line, being a man of great muscular strength, as well as presence of mind, had suddenly thrust his pole in the firm snow beneath, when he felt himself going, which certainly checked, in some measure, the force of his fall. Our two hindermost guides were also missing, but we were soon gladdened by seeing them make their appearance, and cheered them with loud and repeated hurrahs. One of these, Julien Devoussaud, had been carried into the crevass where it was very narrow, and had been thrown with some violence against the opposite brink. He contrived to scramble out without assistance. The other, Joseph Marie Couttet, had been dragged out by his companions quite senseless, and nearly black from the weight of snow which had been upon him. It was a long time before we could convince ourselves that the others were past hope, and we exhausted ourselves fruitlessly for some time in fathoming the snow with our poles." After relating how every effort had been made to recover the poor fellows, the abandonment of the ascent, and the melancholy return to Chamonix, he goes on to explain the cause of the accident. "During two or three days a pretty strong southerly wind had prevailed, which, drifting gradually a mass of snow from the summit, had caused it to form a sort of wreath on the northerly side, where the angle of its inclination to the horizon was small enough to allow it to settle. In the course of the preceding night that had been frozen, but not so hard as to bear our weight. Accordingly, in crossing the slope obliquely, as above described, with the summit on our right, we broke through the outer crust and sank in nearly up to the knees. At the moment of the accident a crack had been formed quite across the wreath; this caused the lower part to slide down under our weight on the smooth slope of snow beneath it, and the upper part of the wreath, thus bereft of its support, followed it in a few seconds and was the grand contributor to the calamity."
The route (l'Ancien Passage) followed on this occasion is no longer used—indeed, the guides are forbidden to go that way. On the 12th August, 1861, or thirty-nine years later, the remains of the three unfortunate men who had lost their lives in this ill-fated expedition were discovered at the orifice or "Snout" of the Glacier des Bossons. Besides the fragments of human bodies were found portions of clothing, boots, a lantern, and a boiled leg of mutton. These relics were identified by Couttet, who had formed one of the party when the accident occurred.
1843.—In the early part of September Sir Thomas Talfourd, with his son Francis, and Messrs. Bosworth and Cross, formed a party, and, attended by guides and porters, reached the Grands Mulets rocks, where they rested for some hours before starting for the summit. Sir Thomas, however, was compelled to return after having reached the spot where S—— was taken ill (vide page 35). The start at midnight, and the cause of his return, is thus described by his own pen: