In August 1861, a guide arrived at the Alpine town of Chamonix carrying a large sack on his back. Its contents, when they were spread across a table in the town hall, included three quarters of two skulls with some flesh and clumps of hair still attached; a jaw bone; a forearm with the hand still attached; one left foot, severed at the calf; and a portion of a spinal column.
The body parts were a relic of the first great disaster of Alpine exploration: the Hamel expedition of 1820, which lost most of its guides to an avalanche. (One of the surviving guides, Joseph-Marie Couttet, was so overcome when he viewed the remains that he tried to shake the hand that lay on the table, exclaiming: "This is Balmat's hand. I know it well!")
More debris was recovered the following year. One Francis Whey, finding a hand protruding from the wall of a crevasse, gave it an experimental tug only to discover that there was no body attached. Another severed hand was subsequently recovered, splinters of alpenstock embedded in the palm where its former owner had broken the wood in his death grip. Later, a portion of somebody's back became visible in the ice.
"There was always a suspicion that climbing was wicked or bad in some way," explains Fergus Fleming, the author of Killing Dragons, a new history of Alpine exploration that manages to be simultaneously engrossing, moving and blackly funny. "The Hamel disaster just confirmed everyone's fears, but it didn't keep people away for too long. The fascination of the Alps remained. For scientists, it was because they were unknown and could reveal clues to how the Earth was formed. But there were also the guys who just went up for the hell of it, because they were there and because they could get to them."
We are sitting in the Queen's Hotel in Cheltenham, once the largest purpose-built hotel in Europe and still home to a great many portraits of important-looking dead people. The Queen's - and indeed Cheltenham itself, which is Little England in a nutshell and has a kitchen equipment shop called, I kid you not, "Kitchener" - is just the kind of place in which a certain type of English gent might well have planned his latest assault on the Matterhorn, so it seems entirely apt that the softly-spoken and frankly non-mountaineering Fleming should be holding court in one of its chintzy armchairs.
"No, I've never tried mountaineering, and I don't imagine that I'd be very good at it," he admits. "When you think of mountaineering you tend to think of sheer cliffs and precipices, but the story of the Alps is more than that. I climbed an Alp, Ober Rothorn, which is a very small, undistinguished Alp of about 14,000 feet. All you have to do is walk to the top, and you can get a cable car most of the way, which is good because the lower slopes of these places are very boring. You just walk to the top, look around, then come down again. It's rather nice."
Fleming is 41, a former accountant, barrister and furniture maker, at none of which he proved to be notably successful. His interest in explorers, which he has developed into two excellent books, has a dual genesis. As a boy, he was exposed to the tales of derring-do common to a certain type of young men's literature, in which chaps with stiff upper lips endure great hardships to explore hazardous regions of the planet and still arrive home in time for tea and crumpets with Nanny. It's one of the fascinations of Killing Dragons that such depictions are revealed to be not simply the creations of romantic editors governed by mildly homoerotic fantasies, but historically and psychologically accurate in most details.
Take, for example, Charles Fellows and his companion, William Hawes. In 1827, they ascended Mont Blanc, dispensing with the usual niceties such as proper provisions, equipment and weather reports. Instead, they loaded themselves down with eight joints of meat, a dozen fowls, various breads and cheeses, and "42 bottles of red wine, brandy, capillaire and syrup of raspberries".
Fellows and Hawes, accompanied by 10 hastily assembled guides, slept in temperatures of minus five degrees Fahrenheit on two shelves of rock, measuring four feet square and eight feet by four feet respectively, on the very edge of a 300-foot drop. It was so cold that the silk tassel on Fellows's nightcap kept freezing. (It says a lot about Fellows that he was wearing a nightcap with a silk tassel in the first place.) When the climbers eventually reached the summit of Mont Blanc on July 25th, they were bleeding from every orifice due to the thin atmosphere. On the way back down a thunderstorm hit them (Fellows described it as "extremely irksome") and a 200-foot block of ice fell on a spot where they had stood only minutes before. They eventually returned to Chamonix on the morning of July 26th, having spent 48 hours on the mountains. The two Englishmen immediately went on a two-hour walk through the valley to stretch their legs, then caroused until midnight and were up at 6 a.m. the next morning to catch the train back to Geneva. They really don't make men like that any more. On reflection, that may be just as well.
But the real turning point for Fleming came while he was editing a work on exploration for Time-Life Books, in the course of which he encountered a reference to the explorer John Franklin eating his own boots. Franklin is most famous for leading two ships and 133 men in search of the NorthWest Passage in 1845 and promptly disappearing forever.
To be fair, the omens hadn't been good for Franklin from the start. He was painfully shy, overweight, and suffered from poor circulation that left his fingers and toes painfully cold, even during the English summer. He was also unfit, unable to hunt, trek or canoe, and was incapable of travelling more than eight miles a day unless he was carried. Naturally, he was the obvious candidate to send into the wilderness in search of this navigator's Eldorado.
"In 1820, during an earlier expedition, Franklin was walking overland to find the North-West Passage and walked too far in the wrong direction," says Fleming. "He went north, then east, and had to cut across the other side of the triangle. That was when I found this little piece of information about Franklin eating his own boots. So I thought, this is stupid, and boldly crossed it out. Then I found out that he and his men did in fact eat their own boots. After that, they ate moss. Finally, they ate themselves."
ONE of Franklin's party, a man named Michel, unfortunately turned out to be a homicidal lunatic who killed four of his fellow explorers and used three of the bodies as his own private larder. He fed pieces of them to his companions, claiming that it was wolf meat. The tale provided the initial inspiration for Fleming's first book, Barrow's Boys, a study of the programme of exploration set in train in the first half of the 19th century by the Englishman John Barrow. Killing Dragons, meanwhile, has a particular element of Irish interest in the form of the brilliant scientist John Tyndall, who climbed Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa - the latter he conquered alone fortified by only a bottle of tea and a ham sandwich. "Tyndall, I liked. He was an extraordinary man, very stern on the outside but very vulnerable on the inside. Out of them all, his were the most human of the diaries I encountered in the archives."
Tyndall was both an exceptional scientist and something of a pioneer in mountaineering terms - he at least recognised the need for proper equipment in an age when climbing ropes were regarded as slightly effeminate - but the casual reader may, at times, be inclined to the view that some of his fellow explorers may not have been playing with a full deck. "By modern standards, I don't think you had to be mad to do it," Fleming disagrees. "For example, when they went up one of these Alps for the first time it was a lot more difficult. It wasn't technical mountaineering in the modern sense, but I think they were brave."
While not wishing to impugn the bravery of the explorer class, at this point I feel compelled to point out to Fleming that, in his latest book, the British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes describes in excruciating detail how he cut the rotting fingertips off his left hand with a fret-saw, holding the hand in place with a Black & Decker vice. It took him about a day to hack off each fingertip, a little longer for the thumb. He performed this act, not in the wilds of Antarctica but in the shed of his own home in England, and in the full knowledge that he was about to have further amputations performed on the hand within weeks. Call me judgmental, but regular folk do not go around performing home surgery with fretsaws on their fingertips.
Fleming, to his credit, looks suitably aghast. "I suppose you could admire most of them," he continues. "I don't necessarily like some of them. Edward Whymper [who conquered the Matterhorn in 1865, at the cost of four lives, and was described as the Robespierre of mountaineering] was an admirable man, but an extremely unpleasant one. William Coolidge [a mother-fixated American who was attracted to the Alps in the aftermath of the Whymper disaster and proceeded to climb them accompanied by his spinster aunt and a mongrel dog named Tschingel] wasn't even admirable; he was just unpleasant."
Barely a century has passed in the history of formal Alpine exploration, but the dangers still remain. Avalanches have claimed the lives of almost 100 people in the last 10 years, while the recent rail disaster at Kitzsteinhorn, which killed over 170 people, was one of the worst Alpine disasters in history. And the Alps themselves are also changing dramatically, with more worrying long-term consequences. "The glaciers are shrinking horribly," says Fleming. "All over the place the ice is disappearing, and the glaciers are what feed several of Europe's largest rivers. One reads about these things in the papers and thinks, yes, well, it's all over there. Then you go over and see how much they have shrunk. It's rather frightening."
Fleming is currently at work on his third history of exploration, a description of the many attempts to reach the North Pole, and has already uncovered the tale of the unfortunate Germans whose ship sank, leaving them adrift on a shrinking ice floe which eventually drifted all the way to Greenland, and the American party who found themselves stuck on a similarly disintegrating ice floe for nine months, during which time one of their Eskimo guides gave birth on the ice. When they were eventually picked up, the ice floe itself was underwater. The attraction of such tales, for both the chronicler and the reader, is obvious.
"They're just great stories," concludes Fleming simply.
Killing Dragons is published by Granta (£20 in UK). Barrow's Boys is available in paperback (£8.99 in UK)