Mountains before Mountaineering E-Book

Dawn L. Hollis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 406

Beschreibung

Today, mountains are spaces for adventure: treasured places for people to connect with nature, encounter the sublime and challenge themselves, whether it be skiing in the Italian Alps or scaling the heights of the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Some regard our love of mountains as relatively new, claiming that before modern mountaineers planted flags upon the peaks, the average European was more likely to revile and avoid a mountainous landscape than to admire it. Mountains before Mountaineering tells a different narrative. It reveals the way mountains inspired curiosity and fascination and how they were enjoyed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It gives voice to the early modern travellers who climbed peaks and passes with fear and delight; to the 'real mountaineers' who lived and died upon the mountain slopes; and to the scientists who used mountains to try to understand the origins of the world. This book invites you on a journey through the mountains, long before Everest was 'discovered' as the highest mountain in the world or before the first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc. It is the story of how our love of the mountains has been a part of us from the very beginning.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR MOUNTAINS BEFORE MOUNTAINEERING

Engrossing, astonishing, thought-provoking; shatters the long-standing illusion that mountains were held in abhorrence during the early modern era. Fascinating to read about mountains as seen through the eyes of early modern travellers, writers, poets, philosophers, naturalists, artists, map-makers, and the people who actually lived there.

Jo Woolf, author of Britain’s Landmarks and Legends

Like a passionate guide, Dawn Hollis leads you along the little-travelled paths of pre-modern mountains … With a sharp and reflexive eye for the practice of historical research, she challenges the prevailing notion of ‘Mountain Gloom’ associated with that era. Spanning centuries and continents, she unveils the diverse perceptions and uses of mountains beyond the single practice of mountaineering.

Dr Gilles Rudaz, University of Geneva

Dawn Hollis’s rich and compelling account will transform the way we think about the history of human engagement with mountains … Based on painstaking research across a vast range of sources, it brings to life the responses of individuals and communities whose stories have been sidelined from traditional histories of mountains and mountaineering.

Professor Jason König, University of St Andrews

Dawn L. Hollis’s thorough research strips the myth down to uncover our longer human respect, curiosity, and affection for the mountains that predates mountaineering. Hollis’ Mountains before Mountaineering challenges us to reconsider our human relationship with mountains and who we are as adventurers and people.

Andrew Szalay, The Suburban Mountaineer

Mountains before Mountaineering destroys the myth that mountaineering is a quintessentially modern pursuit, or that pre modern people feared mountains … Hollis is well aware of the exploitation of local communities and ecologies that mountaineering now so often entails. Packed with vivid anecdotes, this book is a historical anthropology of the peak.

Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History, University of Oxford

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Dawn L. Hollis, 2024

The right of Dawn L. Hollis to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 319 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

A Note on Transcriptions

Vantage Point: Climbing Wine Barrels, Climbing Alps

Chapter One: Mountain Ventures and Adventures

Vantage Point: A Chapel in the Mountains

Chapter Two: The Real Mountaineers

Vantage Point: Healing the Blind

Chapter Three: The Meanings of Mountains

Vantage Point: Into the Volcano

Chapter Four: Mysteries of Science, Mysteries of Faith

Vantage Point: But Who Was First?

Chapter Five: How a Myth Becomes History

Epilogue: Mountains After Mountaineering

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

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:

For over two thousand years mountains have been considered simply a nuisance: unproductive; obstacles to communication; the refuge of bandits and heretics. It’s true that in about 1340 the poet Petrarch had climbed one, and enjoyed the view at the top … and at the beginning of the sixteenth century Leonardo da Vinci had wandered about in the Alps … No other mountain climbs are recorded.

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:

What I pray you, is more pleasant, more delectable, and more acceptable unto a man than to behold the height of the hills … to view the hill Olympus, the seat of Jupiter? to pass over the Alps that were broken by Hannibal’s vinegar? … to behold the rising of the Sun before the Sun appears? to visit Parnassus and Helicon, the most celebrated seats of the Muses?3

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 her successful summit attempt to be vaunted for her supernumerary record-breaking. I dreamed of following in the footsteps both of my teacher and of Mallory and Irvine. I signed up for a week-long winter mountaineering course in the Highlands, and climbed Ben Nevis, Buachaille Etive Mòr, Stob Coire nan Lochan – more names to conjure with – with the North Face of Everest rising in my mind’s eye.

For me, though, it has always been peaks and books, the hiking boots and the armchair. As I worked on my fitness in the school gym in the mornings, in the evenings I filled my mind with every scrap of information I possibly could about the first three Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922 and 1924: George Mallory’s expeditions. It was like a historian’s Rubik’s cube. I wondered whether, if I turned the evidence over in my mind enough, I could fit it all together in just the right way to prove that they had made it.

Around this time, I applied to Oxford, another summit that rose high in my imagination, and was invited to interview for my chosen subject of history. Now, Sandy Irvine – Mallory’s climbing companion – had been a student at Merton College, Oxford, and his letters from the expedition were in the library there. So I wrote to the archivist of Merton College. I was coming up to Oxford, I said (and it is always up, like a mountain, that one goes to Oxford, no matter where in the world you are travelling from), and was wondering whether I could come look at the letters, diaries and photos they held from the 1924 expedition. To my amazement they said yes to my juvenile enthusiasm, and in between nerve-wracking interviews which I was convinced I had bungled, I made my first ever research trip to an archive, pencil and notebook in hand, ready to meet Sandy Irvine.

Fifteen years later, I can still remember how utterly electrifying it felt to sit in that leather chair, in that wood-panelled library in which my research subject would have studied, touching letters he had touched, my fingers tracing his handwriting, reading the words he had written to his mother. With the damp winter darkness outside and the warm lamplight inside, it was like the memory of a childhood Christmas; an inexpressible treat in the midst of winter. Sandy Irvine was 22 years old when he died, an engineering student, a Blues rower: tall, broad-shouldered blond. He was the ‘experiment’ of the 1924 expedition, a young man with immense strength but relatively little mountaineering experience. Over the course of the trek into Tibet, he became self-appointed tinkerer and technical expert, fixing watches and more or less redesigning the apparatus for inhaling bottled oxygen at high altitude (itself another experiment).5 He was also, I discovered that December, funny and good company.

It might seem strange to speak of someone who is long dead as ‘good company’, but that was truly how I felt reading Sandy Irvine’s irrepressible letters to his mother. Years later, a conversation with an eccentric tutor on my Master’s degree showed me I was not alone in feeling this way. I was writing my dissertation on Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715), who you will meet later, and fell into conversation with the tutor after a session on book history. ‘I hear,’ he said, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, ‘that you are working on one of my friends.’

I frowned as I tried to parse this sentence. Working ‘with’ one of his friends might have made sense, if that was how he identified the professor supervising my dissertation. But ‘on’? His impatient clarification cleared this up. ‘Thomas Burnet, of course! You know, I have a copy of his Theory of the Earth …’

Since then, I have rather enjoyed the idea of identifying the historical figures one studies as friends, acquaintances, or even (perhaps) enemies. I like people and I like uncovering the traces they leave of themselves, even in supposedly impersonal theological writings such as those composed by Burnet in the late seventeenth century. Throughout this book I will be introducing you to my friends, and making sure their mountain stories do not vanish into historical obscurity like Mallory and Irvine did into the fog of Everest.

Sandy Irvine made me giggle in the archive from his very first letters home, on the boat out to India. A week into the voyage, he commented drily that ‘One passenger only so far has died, and I didn’t know in time to see the funeral which was a disappointment.’6 Trekking through Tibet, he discovered that his assumption that the local inhabitants would not mind nudity was quite mistaken, and he had come without a bathing gown. Fortunately, he managed to cobble one together ‘out of a belt and two handkerchiefs’ – the mind boggles as to what this looked like.7 He did not always jest, however. The use of oxygen at high altitude was a new and controversial technology, with many climbers worrying that it represented using ‘unfair means’ against the mountain. Despite being the oxygen mechanic, Sandy was also conflicted about it, concluding seriously that ‘I think I’d sooner get to the foot of the final pyramid without oxygen than to the top with it’.8 He was also intrigued by the foreign land and culture he found himself immersed in, and sent descriptions and sketches of Tibetan life back to his family in Cheshire, along with occasional commentary on the ‘charming’ appearance of the local girls.

One line of discussion within the wider mystery of Mallory and Irvine is precisely why George Mallory chose the inexperienced youth for his climbing partner on that fateful summit attempt, and not one of the many other more seasoned mountaineers on the expedition. Whether it was for his strength (Irvine consistently outperformed the older men on their regular high-altitude fitness tests) or his technical expertise with the oxygen equipment that Mallory elected to use for the summit bid, the case remains that this choice tied their names together in the history books. George Mallory had 37 years to Sandy’s 22; dark hair beside his blond; slight, long-armed height to Sandy’s Odyssean broad chest. He was a light-blue Cambridge man, had studied history, and was a writer of long, eloquent passages rather than dashed-off, joking letters. He also had a penchant for being photographed naked – no handmade bathing gowns for him.

By the time I finally came to write my undergraduate dissertation – at Oxford, which I got into despite my pessimism at interviews – my interest in these two men had developed beyond the simple question of whether or not they summited Everest. Inspired by Irvine’s notes on the ways (and women) of Tibet, I decided to write about the moments of encounter between the British members of the 1920s expeditions and the Tibetan people whose villages they travelled through and whose labour they relied upon to haul tents and other supplies up the mountain.

Over my three years at Oxford, two important things occurred: I continued to climb mountains and I decided that I wanted to become an early modern historian. I joined the university mountaineering club, which, despite the name, was mostly focused on rock climbing. Towards the end of my first year in the club, a novice climber started flirting with me, and I unwisely attempted to teach him how to belay on an indoor climbing wall. I fell and was only caught a few feet above the floor when another club member grabbed the end of the rope that my Casanova should have put a brake on. Not long after, I met someone who preferred hillwalking to roped climbing anyway, and we became engaged on the summit of Blencathra in the Lake District.

Meanwhile, despite my fascination with twentieth-century mountaineering, I found myself increasingly drawn towards the early modern period of history: the era which slots between the end of the medieval age and the Industrial Revolution. For many people, the term ‘early modernity’ signals a sense of familiarity, the idea that it was the period in which the modern world as we know it was starting to begin. To me, early modernity is actually like that moment of falling: a sense of suspended exhilaration, as that which is certain falls away, and the historian travelling progressively backwards in time begins to encounter people whose modes of thinking are entirely distinctive from those of today. By the end of my undergraduate degree I knew this was the period I wanted to study in my Master’s and PhD.

It took a critical moment of route-finding to bring my two historical obsessions – mountains and early modernity – together. I was lucky in my choice of guide: the tutor with whom I had taken a first-year course on the early modern period. Brilliant and self-effacing, she exploded my preconceptions of what an Oxford don could be. Three weeks into the course, she had glanced down at the reading list we had been given and tapped her finger on the title of a book she herself had written. ‘You know,’ she mused, ‘I’m not entirely sure the author was right in her conclusions. What do you all think?’ She was also generous: when I told her, two years later, that I was thinking of applying to do postgraduate research, she offered to help me with my proposals.

I had a long list of different topics that I might write a Master’s dissertation and, ultimately, a doctoral thesis on, which I handed to her. Early modern experiences of pregnancy? Mental illness, with a focus on the early modern concept of ‘melancholy’? She shook her head at these as too well researched already. (For historians, as well as mountaineers, the less trodden ground is often the most attractive.) At the very bottom of the list I had written ‘mountains’. I had left them till last because it had seemed to me to be almost too greedy to imagine that I might get away with combining my passion with my research. My mentor stabbed her finger at the word. ‘Here you go,’ she said. This was the topic I should do – mountains were ‘cool’, and not a lot had been written about them in the early modern period since a book published in 1959: Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, written by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, the first woman to hold a full professorship at the University of Columbia.

As any mountaineer knows, once you have looked up at the route ahead of you it can be hard to turn back. That moment led me, eventually, to sitting in my home office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing the first draft of this book.

MAPPING THIS BOOK

Like a map, a book has limits. It will cover an area in detail, but there will always be blank space off the edges. To define the scope of a book of history you must answer four questions: what, when, where and how.

What is this book about? Mountains. But what exactly is a mountain? The answer to this question is more complicated than you might expect. Fairly early on in my research into early modern mountains, I gave a presentation at a conference intended for postgraduate students to gain their first experience of public academic speaking. This was back in the days when smartphones were still a relative novelty, and the act of quickly googling something mid-conversation had yet to become a widely accepted habit. During questions, one of the ‘real academics’ in the audience asked me what I meant by a mountain. I can’t quite remember what I answered – I think I said it was a pretty vague term – but I do remember that, just after I had answered the question following his, he looked up from his phone and interrupted triumphantly, ‘It’s 2,000ft! A mountain is 2,000ft! Anything lower and it’s a hill.’

This reminds me of the now disconcertingly vintage film, The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain. (In my PhD thesis, I referred to this film as featuring a ‘fresh-faced Hugh Grant’, and my supervisor, who I think deemed himself a contemporary of Grant, commented with a touch of desperation, ‘isn’t he still fresh-faced?’) The conceit of the film, set in 1917, is that two English cartographers arrive at a Welsh village to survey the local ‘mountain’, only to discover that it measures just a little short of the required 1,000 (in this case) feet. The community respond by carrying earth up to the top of the hill/mountain to build the summit up to the required height. There is also the inevitable love interest for Hugh Grant and a certain quantity of mountain/hilltop embraces.

The thing is that my seventeenth-century friends never watched Hugh Grant pretending to be a cartographer, and lived long before the US Board on Geographic Names defined a mountain as 1,000ft, or before the UK government placed the line at 2,000ft, or before Sir Hugh Munro’s list of Scottish peaks gave special prominence to summits over 3,000ft. They also lived before the United States Geological Survey concluded that there is no technical definition of a hill versus a mountain.9 As you will find as you read on, early modern landscape viewers used the terms hill and mountain with happy interchangeability, and landforms which we might today consider relatively small, on a global scale, could seem enormous to people who had never seen the Alps or even heard of the Himalayas.

It is necessary, then, to leave behind modern categories of scale. At the risk of being just as vague as I was at that conference, I am interested in what people thought about any hilly or mountainous landscape, no matter how insignificant the elevation might seem to a modern mindset that thinks of mountains in terms of high, higher and highest. Before modernity, what made a mountain was in the eye of the beholder.

In terms of the ‘when’, it should already be clear that this book focuses on the early modern period. The term is one which historians bandy about quite happily, without realising that it is actually somewhat obscure to people who are neither students nor researchers in the discipline. It doesn’t much help that historians cannot precisely agree on the date range it describes. At its broadest extent, I would say it ranges from about 1450 at the earliest to 1800 at the latest, but I can’t promise that you won’t find an academic who would date it as starting in 1400 or ending in 1850.

My attention in this book will largely be on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1500–1700). However, this book will share stories from both before and after those dates. Before, because no book on historical mountain experiences could go without reference to Petrarch’s famous (and problematic) ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. After, because the development of modern mountaineering is central to explaining that conversation I had at my dad’s retirement party, to understanding why the mountain stories I will be sharing herein have been so long neglected and forgotten.

Throughout this book I will sometimes refer to the ‘premodern period’, or to ‘premodern experiences of mountains’. The traditional history of mountain attitudes tends to tar all of the eras which came before the modern period with the same brush: today, we love mountains, but back then, whether early modern, medieval, or classical, they did not. I think that story is wrong about the early modern period and is wrong about ancient times too. Although it does not form the main focus of this book, there is a wealth of material and scholarly work out there that reveals rich and complicated relationships between people and mountains across different cultures and time periods.10 Moreover, early modern responses to mountains were influenced by, and echoed, older experiences and traditions. It is this sense of connection and continuity which I intend to flag by using the term ‘premodern’ as well as ‘early modern’.

To return to the mapping metaphor, the book operates at three different scales of time and detail. At the widest scale, this book will tell you about mountains before modernity, and will also give a sense of what changed (and what did not) during modern times. At the intermediate scale, it offers a slightly closer view of mountain responses from the Renaissance to Romanticism. At the smallest scale, the highest density of detail will provide you with a clear sense of the contours of mountain attitudes and ideas during the two centuries at the heart of the early modern period.

There are many mountains in the world. Which mountains, where, am I interested in? Yet again there is no tidy answer. This book will focus upon the engagements that Europeans had with mountains. Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, travellers ranged far afield, and geographically speaking the mountains in this book include the Elburz range and the hills of the Holy Land.

At another talk about my work, another well-meaning audience member asked me why I had not included anything about mountains in ancient Chinese literature. I am sure there is material out there. I am equally sure that a global history of premodern mountains would fill far more than a single volume. Early modern Europe, on the other hand, represents a more manageable scope. It is also, due to the particularly cultural flows of the period, a category which makes coherent sense. Europe in this period was subject to fairly self-contained currents of ideas – books, published in the common learned language of Latin, made their way from the book fairs of Frankfurt to the private libraries of Britain; British natural philosophers (scientists) were published in Amsterdam, and so on. There was a shared European culture in this period which underpinned responses to mountains whether in Wales or Westphalia.

Finally, we reach the ‘how’, by which I mean what sources, whose stories am I using to fill in my map of early modern mountains in the European mind? With a sigh, I must respond: mostly dead white men. They were also men who, whilst they might not all have thought of themselves as wealthy, were highly privileged in terms of their access to education. These were the individuals who possessed the literacy necessary to record their thoughts about mountains. They were also privileged in that their words have been preserved for us to read today, largely thanks to having been published. (More copies means more chances for at least one copy to survive.) Many people in early modern Europe could not read or write, and relatively few of those who could would have had the means, status or connections to get their words into print.

That is not to say that poor people, or women, or members of minority cultures did not travel among, or have emotions evoked by, the mountains. They did, and traces of their experiences survive in archaeology, in ethnographic evidence, and indeed in the writings of those dead white men. Chapter 2 shines a spotlight on the ‘real mountaineers’ of early modern Europe: the people who lived and worked among the mountains. But confining them to one chapter in this way is not to imply anything about the relative importance of their experiences; it is merely a reflection of the relative wealth of sources surviving for, well, the wealthy and privileged.

It remains only for me to offer a brief route description to guide you through this book. It is divided into five chapters, each one preceded by a ‘Vantage Point’. Each vantage point shares just one or two historical sources which encapsulate the theme of the chapter to follow. You could, if you just wanted to read a few brief stories that summarise the key themes of this book, just read the vantage points. The chapters include more stories, but they also go into more depth exploring some of the ‘workings out’ involved in the writing of history. Studying history is about a lot more than just figuring out ‘what really happened’; it is about figuring out what ‘truth’ we can recover from biased historical sources, deciding what sort of information we can get from things like poems or works of art, and about recovering the experiences of people who did not get to record their own words and ideas for posterity. In this book, I hope to give you an insight into the challenges and debates surrounding all of these things.

The chapters will also contain a bit more about my own journey, as well as those of my early modern ‘friends’. It is not, as one might expect of a mountain-themed book, a journey involving my own heroic escapades up snowy peaks. Instead, it is my journey of the mind, of moments of discovery and understanding which helped me cross the crevasses of time in order to begin to understand mountains as my early modern writers did. For me, that journey has been just as exciting and enriching as any made with crampons and ice axe.

Fittingly, then, the first viewpoint and chapter will start with journeys, tracing the stories of some hardy (and not-so-hardy) travellers to the mountains. The second chapter will focus not on travellers but on mountain-dwellers: the ‘real mountaineers’ who knew almost as much about mountain safety as climbers of today. In Chapter 3, I tackle possibly the most difficult sources of the whole book: artworks and poetry. These do not necessarily tell us much about what happened on mountains in the past, but they do help us figure out what they meant to people. Chapter 4 turns to the question of early modern mountain science. This was an era before modern geology and before an understanding of deep time, and writers interested in the history of the Earth got into some surprisingly heated arguments trying to figure out how mountains were formed. The final chapter then turns back to the problem this introduction started with: the idea that people ‘didn’t like mountains back then’. I explain where that idea came from, and what it tells us about our own, modern, relationship with mountains.

I think that is all the map required to navigate this book. Let us begin the journey.

A Note on Transcriptions

Throughout this book I quote from texts written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and earlier. Variations in spelling and printing conventions (the use of a long ‘f’ for an ‘s’ in the middle of a word, or the use of a ‘u’ to represent a ‘v’) mean that writing from this period can appear somewhat obscure to modern eyes. Since my goal is to introduce you to my early modern friends and to help them share their stories and ideas about mountains, I have silently modernised spellings in all quotations, though not in the titles of books. The references provided should enable you to find the original words – unusual spellings and all – should you so wish.

Vantage Point: Climbing Wine Barrels, Climbing Alps

To get a sense of the irrepressible personality of Tom Coryate (1577–1617), traveller and courtier, you need look no further than his account of ascending not a mountain, but a wine barrel.

This wine barrel, located in the palace at Heidelberg, Germany, was ‘the most remarkable and famous thing’ that he saw on his extensive journeys. Had it been around in ancient times, Coryate believed it would have been added to the list of wonders alongside the Colossus of Rhodes and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even the ‘gravest and constantest man in the world’ (a phrase which most certainly does not describe Coryate) would have been struck with wonder at the sight. What was so special about this wine barrel? Well, it was huge. Coryate’s book included an illustration, which he claimed was made from accurate sketches that he took at the time, showing a barrel five times the height of the people gathered at its base. The woodcut also shows the man himself, balanced on top of the barrel ‘with a cup of Rhenish wine’ in hand. Coryate described his ascent, up twenty-seven rungs of a ladder, to the bung-hole from which his guide, with the aid of ‘a pretty instrument of some foote and a halfe long’, drew up wine with which to ‘exhilarate’ his visitor. On this point, Coryate offers his reader a stern warning:

I advise thee … if thou dost happen to ascend to the top … to taste of the wine, that in any case though dost drink moderately, and not so much as the sociable Germans will persuade thee unto. For if thou shouldst chance to over-swill thyself with wine, peradventure such a giddiness will benumb thy brain, that thou wilt scarce find the direct way down from the steep ladder without a very dangerous precipitation.1

Dangerous – or at least nervous – precipitations seemed to be a theme of Coryate’s actual mountain ventures. Coryate did not call himself a climber, but he was proud of his lengthy and adventurous perambulations. He was nicknamed (or, more likely, for he excelled at self-promotion, nicknamed himself) ‘the Odcombian leg-stretcher’ in honour of his home village of Odcombe, Somerset. He was an eccentric, a wit and self-appointed court jester to Prince Henry, the youngest son of James I and VI.

At first glance, all seventeenth-century books seem serious with their densely typeset pages, heavy paper and dark leather bindings. Thomas Coryate’s 1611 book, Coryate’s crudities hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells, quickly dispels any such preconceptions. The title played on a double meaning: the ‘crudities’, alluding both to things that were crude or unformed, but also to crudités, sticks of raw vegetables to be ‘gobbled up’. The ornate frontispiece – effectively the illustrated ‘front cover’ of early modern books like this one, albeit contained inside the leather-bound boards – depicts key moments in his absurd adventures, such as sitting in a gondola and being bombarded with eggs by a woman leaning out of a window above. The opening pages of the book include verses written by his friends, supposedly in recommendation of the volume, but mostly making jokes at the author’s expense.

Coryate’s journeys took him across Europe, to the eastern Mediterranean, through Persia and finally to his death in India. His Crudities relate his European travels which passed through the mountainous region of Savoy (then a Duchy and a country in its own right and now incorporated into the modern-day borders of France). He met with a mountain mishap, which he retold with much relish, in climbing ‘the Mountaine Aiguebelette, which is the first Alpe’ en route to the town of Chambéry.

Now, in modern usage there is no peak by this name, although Lac d’Aiguebelette is noted as one of the largest natural lakes in France and is recommended today as an attractive tourist spot due to its blue-green waters and hot water springs. This lake, in Coryate’s account, is termed ‘an exceeding great standing poole’ beside a ‘poore village’, where he and his companions paused to refresh themselves before launching their ascent. Moreover, despite his frequent references to climbing to the top of a mountain, it seems likely that Coryate in fact crossed through one of the three passes along the Chaîne de l’Épine, the ridge dividing Lac d’Aiguebelette and Chambéry. The highest of these, and the closest to Chambéry, is the Col de l’Epine, at 987m, or 3,238ft.

Coryate was not a confident horse-rider, and he lent his horse to one of his companions, for he deemed it ‘more dangerous to ride than to go afoot … but then this accident happened to me’: he and his group of travellers were accosted by ‘certain poor fellows who get their living especially by carrying men in chairs from the top of the hill to the foot thereof towards Chambéry’. These men ‘made a bargain with some of my company, to carry them down in chairs, when they got to the top of the mountain’. Coryate – the Odcombian leg-stretcher, you must remember – disdained such measures, but was also conscious that these palanquin-bearers knew the way up and down the pass. The bearers likewise knew that Coryate did not know the way, and, ‘they being desirous to get some money of me, led me such an extreme pace towards the top, that how much soever I laboured to keep them company, I could not possibly perform it.’2

Poor Tom: faced with a path of ‘innumerable turnings and windings thereof’, beset ‘with an infinite abundance of trees’ on all sides, and forced to follow in the hasty footsteps of local guides whose main goal was to exhaust him into paying them to carry him. At last, ‘finding that faintness in myself that I was not able to follow them any longer, though I would even break my heart with striving’, Coryate gave in, and paid them to carry him the final half mile to the top. He did not enjoy the experience one bit:

This was the manner of their carrying of me: They did put two slender poles through certain wooden rings, which were at the four corners of the chair, and so carried me on their shoulders sitting in the chair, one before, and another behind: but such was the miserable pains that the poor slaves willingly undertook: for the gain of that cardecu [coin], that I would not have done the like for five hundred. The ways were exceeding difficult in regard of the steepness and hardness thereof, for they were all rocky … and so uneven that a man could hardly find any sure footing on them.3

As he descended from his chair, Coryate, like any good seventeenth-century courtier, quoted Latin to himself, thinking ‘with Æneas in Virgil: Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’. This passage (Aeneid, 1.203) is a tricky one to translate. It comes from a speech given by Aeneas, the future founder of Rome, to his Trojan men. They were stranded on an island after losing thirteen of twenty ships to a storm at sea, having fled their city following the admittance of the Trojan horse and the pillaging and defeat of the city by the Greeks concealed within. (The Aeneid is, in modern terms, the ‘sequel’ to the Iliad of Homer, told from the side of the Trojans rather than the Greeks.) Modern translations generally give some variation upon ‘A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this’, and the 1550 translation by Thomas Phaemer – which Coryate may well have read – gives the suggestion that, ‘To think on this may pleasure be another day.’

1. Thomas Coryate being carried to the top of an Alpine pass on a chair. Frontispiece of Coryate’s crudities (1611). (CC-BY, reproduction kindly provided by the National Library of Scotland)

Talk of joy or pleasure sounds like overstating the case in the original context of the Aeneid, given the trauma suffered by the Trojans. However, in the case of an eventful mountain ascent and when written by a man known for having his tongue in his cheek, I suspect that Coryate’s Latin reference can be read as saying, ‘one day I’ll look back on this and laugh.’ Indeed, ever ready to invite the laughter of others at his own expense, Coryate included a depiction of his ignominious ascent in the illustrated frontispiece to his Crudities (fig. 1). Even modern-day climbers less prone to self-parody may recognise the truth in Virgil’s sentiment: the most unforgiving slog up and down through miserable weather suddenly seems more enjoyable in retrospect once dry, warm and fed back at one’s tent or hut. There is even a modern term for this phenomenon: ‘Type 2’ or ‘second degree’ fun.

Once at the ‘top’ of the ‘mountain’ – or more likely the saddle of the pass – Coryate enjoyed some first-degree fun too. He was satisfied to discover that he could now ‘justly and truly say, that which I could never before, that I was above some of the clouds’, for though the mountain he was upon was dwarfed by its taller neighbours, he could nevertheless observe clouds gathering on the sides of the mountain beneath his feet.4

From Chambéry, Coryate travelled onwards, with mountains looming over him ‘on every side like two walls’. Coryate admired the mountain springs rippling down the mountain sides, the wild trees of every variety, and the sight of a ‘wondrous high mountain … at the top whereof there is an exceeding high rock’ a mile beyond Chambéry (probably the Nivolet, 1,547m). But the mountains were not wonders without danger: Coryate feared rockfalls, and again dismounted his horse when traversing precarious mountainside paths with long drops to one side, noting ravines ‘four or five times as deep in some places as Paul’s tower in London is high’ and anxiously imagining himself at the bottom of them.5

Coryate’s next mountain ascent was that of the Mont Cenis pass (2,081m). Crossing this pass, Coryate’s attention was all for the view, and for the strange story attached to it. ‘I observed,’ he commented, ‘an exceeding high mountain … much higher than any that I saw before, called Roch Melow: it is said to be the highest mountain of all the Alps, saving one of those that part Italy and Germany. Some told me it was 14 miles high.’6

The mountain to which he referred was Rocciamelone. At 3,538m, it is far from the highest mountain in the Alps by modern reckoning. It is possible – given that the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the ‘German-Roman Emperor’, contained Switzerland at the time – that the one higher mountain to which Coryate alluded was in fact Mont Blanc. Whatever its absolute altitude, Rocciamelone was a sight to see, ‘covered with a very microcosm of clouds’, all but ‘a little piece of the top’ concealed, and this appearing like ‘three or four little turrets or steeples in the air’ – a veritable castle in the clouds.7

Coryate dedicated several pages to relating a story that his local guide told about Rocciamelone. Legend or, as Coryate put it, ‘a pretty history’ told that ‘a notorious robber’ whose conscience suddenly struck him ‘for his licentious and ungodly life’ decided to carry two paintings, one of Christ and one of the Virgin Mary, to the top of the ‘highest mountain of all the Alps’, where he would spend the remainder of his life making atonement through fasting and prayer. He thus ‘went up to a certain mountain that in his opinion was the highest of all the Alpine hills’, and settled down for the rest of his days. Unfortunately, it seemed this robber-turned-mountain-dweller had climbed the wrong mountain, for two more paintings suddenly appeared to him, causing him to realise (Coryate was not quite sure how) that ‘he had not chosen that mountain which was the highest of all’. He then wandered until he came to Rocciamelone, which he ascended and never came down. The story entertained Coryate, but he ultimately deemed it no more than a ‘tale or figment’.8