Edward Whymper becomes the first person to scale the Matterhorn - July 14th, 1865

On this day in 1865, British climber Edward Whymper and six companions completed the first ascent of the Matterhorn.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is production of iHeartRadio. Hello
and welcome to This Day in History Class, a show
that scales the peaks of history one day at a time.
I'm Gabe Lucier and today we're talking about a bittersweet

(00:22):
achievement in the sport of mountain climbing, the triumphant struggled
to the top of the Matterhorn and the disastrous descent
that followed it. The day was July fourteenth, eighteen sixty five.

(00:43):
British climber Edward Whimper and six companions completed the first
ascent of the Matterhorn. The seven man team reached the
summit of the Matterhorn after a fairly uneventful climb up
the Swiss side of the mountain. Unfortunately, the trip back
down the peak proved far more treacherous, and when one

(01:04):
of the team's ropes gave way, four of the climbers
wound up plummeting to their deaths. The tragic event is
now considered the symbolic end to the so called Golden
Age of Alpinism. That term refers to the decade between
eighteen fifty four and eighteen sixty five, when many of
the mountains that make up the Alp were summitted for

(01:26):
the first time. Those pioneering alpinists, most of whom were British,
relied on rudimentary equipment and techniques, yet their expeditions yielded
surprisingly few fatalities. That Sterling record ended with the first
ascent of the matter Horn, and from then on casualties
in the Alps became increasingly common. The name Matterhorn means

(01:50):
the peak in the Meadows in German. It's a reference
to the mountain's idyllic location, nestled on the border between
the sloping meadows of Switzerland in Italy. At nearly fifteen
thousand feet tall, the Matterhorn is only the sixth highest
mountain in the Alps, but it's arguably the most recognizable
mountain in the world due to its distinctive pyramid shaped peak.

(02:14):
Oh and there's also a famous ride based on the
Matterhorn at Disneyland, so it's got that going for it too.
The Matterhorn was also one of the last major peaks
in the Alps to be summitted. Plenty of attempts had
been made prior to eighteen sixty five, but none of
them succeeded, either from the Italian side or from the
Swiss side. This led many mountaineers to conclude the Matterhorn

(02:39):
was just too difficult to climb, but one British artist
turned mountaineer refused to stop trying. Edward Whimper first visited
the Alps in eighteen sixty, when he was twenty years old,
on an assignment as a wood engraver. He had been
commissioned to create a series of illustrations of major Alpine peaks,
and to get better acquainted with his subjects, he began

(03:02):
hiking through them and making sketches along the way. By
the end of that summer, Whimper had gained a new
appreciation for the majesty of the mountains and for the
challenges they posed to the people who sought to climb them.
He decided to become a mountaineer himself, and for the
next four years he returned to the Alps each summer,

(03:22):
gradually improving his climbing ability and tackling peaks of increasing complexity.
Wimper also made seven attempts to summit the Matterhorn during
this time. He was joined in most of those efforts
by an Italian guide named Jean Antoine Correll. Year after year,
the pair tried one approach and then another, with each

(03:44):
failure spurring them on to try again. Eventually, Wimper became
convinced that the Swiss side of the mountain was the
most accessible and that an approach beginning at the Zermatt
Glacier would be their best bet. However, the partnership between
he and Correll had soured by that point, with the
guide believing that a native Italian, not a brit should

(04:06):
have the honor of conquering the mountain first. The two
parted ways in eighteen sixty five, just prior to the
start of Whimper's approach from Zermat. Correll quickly teamed up
with a group of Italian climbers and began leading them
up the Italian side of the mountain. That left Whimper
scrambling to find a new team of his own, which

(04:26):
he eventually did by recruiting climbers who happened to be
in or around the small mountain town of Zermat. At
the time, seven men joined him at the outset, most
of whom had very little experience climbing mountains. They set
off on July thirteenth, climbing a little over eleven thousand
feet or about thirty four hundred meters before establishing their

(04:48):
base camp and settling in for the night. The next morning,
one of the climbers, Joseph Taugwalder, decided he'd had enough
and returned to Zermat. That left seven men to complete
the ascent, Edward Whimper, Michel Cross, Charles Hudson, Douglas Haddow,
Lord Francis Douglas, Peter Taugwalder, and his son Peter Junior,

(05:13):
the brother of the man who turned back. The team
set out at dawn and ascended the east face of
the mountain with relative ease. They reached the foot of
the upper peak just before ten a m. Then they
crossed over the ridge line to the north face, where
the slope was gentler. At that point, with just a
few hundred feet left to go, Whimper and Craws detached

(05:35):
themselves from the team's rope and began sprinting toward the summit,
with the others following behind. Whimper later recounted his moment
of triumph and a memoir titled Scrambles among the Alps.
The slope eased off, he wrote, and kras and I,
dashing away, ran a neck and neck race which ended
in a dead heat. At one forty p m. The

(05:58):
world was at our feet and the matter Horn was conquered. Hurrah.
Not a footstep could be seen. The lack of footprints
meant that Correll's party hadn't beaten them to the top,
and indeed, when the pair looked over, they spotted the
opposing team on the opposite ridge, still about six hundred
and fifty feet below the summit. As for Whimper's group,

(06:22):
they spent roughly an hour at the top of the
matter Horn, marveling at their well earned view. Whimper recalled
the scene in his memoir, writing quote, there were forests
black and gloomy, and meadows bright and lively, bounding waterfalls
and tranquil lakes, fertile lands and savage wastes, sunny plains

(06:44):
and frigid plateau. There were the most rugged forms and
the most graceful outlines, bold perpendicular cliffs and gentle, undulating slopes,
rocky mountains and snowy mountains, somber and solemn or glittering
in white, with walls, turrets, pinnacles, pyramids, domes, cones, and spires.

(07:05):
There was every combination that the world can give, and
every contrast that the heart could desire. After enjoying what
he called a crowded hour of glorious life, Whimper and
his team began the perilous trek back down the mountain.
They descended in a rope line, with mountain guide Michelle

(07:25):
Kraus in the lead, followed by Douglas Hadow, Charles Hudson,
Lord Francis Douglas, Peter Taugwalder Senior, and then his son
and Edward Whimper pulling up the rear. Roughly an hour
into the descent, Hadow slipped and fell into cross, knocking
them both off the cliff face. As they fell, Hudson

(07:45):
and Douglas were pulled along with them. Luckily, Whimper and
the Taugwalders were able to brace themselves in time and
keep from falling. They held onto the rope with all
their might and tried desperately to secure it as the
four men at the other end dangled helplessly. Then a
moment later, the rope broke for a few seconds. Wimper wrote,

(08:08):
we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downward on their backs
and spreading out their hands, endeavoring to save themselves. They
passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one and
fell from precipice to precipice onto the Matterhorn Glacier below,
a distance of nearly four thousand feet in height. From

(08:30):
the moment the rope broke, it was impossible to help them.
It was later determined that the team had been using
the oldest, weakest rope they had one, which had only
been brought along as a backup to be used as
a last resort. It's unclear why that rope was used
for the descent, though it was likely just an oversight

(08:52):
brought on by a mix of fatigue and euphoria from
having reached the top of the mountain. Whimper and the
Taugwalders made it back to Zermat on the morning of
July fifteen. A rescue expedition was launched the following day,
with Whimper joining in the effort. After several days of searching,
the bodies of cross, Hadow and Hudson were recovered and

(09:14):
brought back to town for burial, but the body of
Lord Francis Douglas was never found. The tragic end to
the expedition shocked the British public, who until that point
had mostly viewed the sport of mountain climbing as a
way to bring glory to crown and country without the
need for bloodshed. But the death of four climbers and

(09:35):
a single accident challenged the rosy perception of the sport.
Queen Victoria in particular was deeply disturbed by the death
of Lord Francis Douglas. In fact, she considered issuing a
ban on mountaineering altogether, pledging that she would never again
allow English royal blood to be wasted on such a
foolish endeavor. In the end, the Queen's ban was never implemented,

(10:00):
and her suggestion wound up sparking new interest in the sport.
Alpinists from England and beyond began flocking to zermat In droves,
curious to see if they too could sum at the
Matterhorn and hopefully have better luck on the way back down.
The popularity of mountain climbing and of the Matterhorn itself

(10:20):
continued to grow from that point on, fueled by the
compelling mix of triumph and tragedy that characterized Whimper's first ascent.
In the years since then, an estimated five hundred people
have lost their lives attempting to climb the Matterhorn. A
metal cross now stands at the mountain's peak as a
monument to their memory, and at the Matterhorn Museum in

(10:43):
Zermat Below there's another kind of memorial to the mountain's
first victims, a piece of broken rope displayed behind glass
on a velvet pillow. As for Edward Whimper, he went
on many more expeditions before his death than nineteen teen eleven,
at the age of seventy one, shortly after his last

(11:04):
expedition of the Alps, But for all that time he
remained haunted by his experience on the Matterhorn. He spoke
of it often in lecture halls, in periodicals, and in
personal correspondence. He seemed desperate to prove the accident wasn't
his fault, as some had claimed, but it's clear he
was never fully able to put the incident behind him.

(11:28):
Years later, Wimper described that lingering trauma, writing quote, every night,
do you understand I see my comrades of the Matterhorn
slipping on their backs, their arms outstretched one after the other,
in perfect order, at equal distances. Kraus the guide first,
then Hadau, then Hudson, and lastly Douglas. Yes, I shall

(11:53):
always see them. I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(12:16):
drop me a line by writing to This Day at
iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays and Ben Hackett
for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again soon for another day
in history class.