The Matterhorn First Ascent — A broken rope killed four on the way down
Summary
On 14 July 1865 a party of seven led by the English illustrator Edward Whymper made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, the 4,478-metre Alpine peak straddling the Swiss–Italian border above Zermatt — and then, on the descent, four of them fell to their deaths when the rope linking the party snapped. The victims were the French guide Michel Croz, the young and inexperienced Englishman Douglas Hadow, the experienced clergyman-climber Charles Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas. Whymper and the two Zermatt guides, Peter Taugwalder the elder and Peter Taugwalder the younger, survived because the rope broke between them and the falling men. The accident closed what later chroniclers called the "golden age of alpinism."
The Matterhorn had been the last great unclimbed summit of the Alps, and the 1865 contest for it was a race. Whymper had failed on it repeatedly from the Italian side, partnered with the local guide Jean-Antoine Carrel; when Carrel committed to a rival Italian team, Whymper hurried around to the Swiss side and assembled a scratch party for an attempt up the Hörnli ridge. They reached the top on the afternoon of 14 July, with Carrel's party still several hundred metres below on the Italian flank, and beat them to the summit.
The descent was the killing ground. About an hour below the top, on steep rock made treacherous by the order of the rope, Hadow slipped and knocked Croz off his stance; the shock pulled Hudson and Douglas after them, and the four fell roughly 1,200 metres down the north face to the glacier below. The connecting rope — later established to be the oldest and weakest length the party carried — parted under the jerk. Three bodies were recovered; Lord Francis Douglas was never found. Throughout, the Zermatt guides Peter Taugwalder father and son carried the local knowledge and labour that made the Swiss-side route possible, and the elder Taugwalder would spend the rest of his life under an unproven suspicion of having cut the rope to save himself.
Timeline
The last great peak and the race for it
By the mid-1860s the conquest of the Alps was nearly complete. British and Continental climbers, almost always guided by local men, had picked off summit after summit in a burst of activity that historians would name the golden age of alpinism. The Matterhorn alone resisted. Its sheer, isolated pyramid above Zermatt looked unassailable, and a folklore of impossibility had grown around it. For Edward Whymper, a young wood-engraver sent to the Alps to sketch and then captured by the climbing itself, the mountain became an obsession. Between 1861 and 1865 he attempted it again and again from the Italian side, usually with the gifted Valtournenche guide Jean-Antoine Carrel, and was repeatedly turned back.
In July 1865 the contest came to a head. Carrel, a Val d'Aosta patriot, joined an Italian team determined to claim the peak for Italy from the south. Whymper, learning he had been left behind, reacted with the competitive urgency that shadows so many mountain disasters: he crossed to Zermatt and threw together a party for the untried Hörnli ridge on the Swiss side. It was a mixed group. The guides were first-rate — the Chamonix man Michel Croz, one of the era's best, and the Zermatt father-and-son Taugwalders. But among the amateurs was Douglas Hadow, nineteen, with almost no serious mountaineering behind him; the experienced Reverend Charles Hudson vouched for him. Lord Francis Douglas, a young Scottish peer, completed the seven. The presence of a near-novice on a first ascent of an unknown route was, in hindsight, the seed of the disaster.
To the summit, and the slip on the way down
The Hörnli ridge proved easier than its reputation. On the morning of 14 July the party moved steadily up the ridge and the upper east face, and around 1:40 in the afternoon Croz and Whymper stepped onto the untouched summit, the others close behind. Looking down the Italian side, Whymper saw Carrel's party still well below; the Italians, realizing they had been beaten, turned back. For an hour the seven savoured a summit no one had ever reached.
Then they roped up for the descent, and the order on the rope sealed their fate. Croz went first to cut steps and place the feet of the man behind him; Hadow, the least capable, came next, then Hudson, then Douglas, with old Taugwalder, Whymper and young Taugwalder above. On the steep rocks below the summit, about an hour down, Hadow slipped — by Whymper's account Croz was actually helping place Hadow's feet when it happened — and fell against Croz, knocking him off. The two slid, and the rope snatched Hudson and Douglas after them. For an instant the whole strain came onto the line between Douglas and old Taugwalder, and there the rope broke. The four men fell, one after another, down the sheer north face onto the glacier nearly 1,200 metres below. Whymper and the two Taugwalders, suddenly alone, stood frozen on the ridge, then crept down in shock, reaching Zermatt the next day to deliver the news.
A frayed rope and a lifelong suspicion
The recovery and the reckoning came quickly. On 19 July a party of Zermatt men descended to the Matterhorn glacier and found the bodies of Croz, Hadow and Hudson, terribly broken; Croz, Hadow and Hudson were buried near the Zermatt church. Lord Francis Douglas was never recovered — only fragments of clothing and equipment were ever found, his body presumably lost in the crevasses or carried away. The broken rope became the centre of the inquiry. The party had with them strong, sound Manila and Alpine Club ropes, but the fatal length proving to have been the oldest and weakest they carried, a thin reserve line never meant to bear a serious fall. Why that rope was tied between Douglas and old Taugwalder at the critical point was never fully explained, and it fed a darker rumour.
A Swiss official investigation considered whether Peter Taugwalder the elder had cut the rope to keep himself and the others from being dragged off. The inquiry found no evidence that he had; the rope had simply snapped under the impact of four falling bodies. Taugwalder was, in effect, cleared, but the suspicion clung to him for the rest of his life and helped drive him into a bitter decline. Whymper himself, who survived and wrote the most influential account, was never charged with wrongdoing, but he carried the catastrophe to the end of his days. The episode also collided with Victorian public opinion: the deaths of four men, including a peer's son, on a peak climbed for sport provoked a wave of revulsion in Britain against the whole enterprise of alpinism — sentiment that reportedly reached as high as the Crown.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Four men died on the first descent of the Matterhorn, and the accident reverberated far beyond Zermatt. Three of the dead were buried near the village church; Lord Francis Douglas was never found, and the search for his body became part of the mountain's grim folklore. The Swiss inquiry cleared Peter Taugwalder the elder of cutting the rope, but the rumour ruined him, and he died years later still under its shadow. Edward Whymper never climbed seriously in the Alps again on the same terms; he turned to other ranges and to writing, and his 1871 account Scrambling Amongst the Alps made the tragedy famous and fixed his own version of events in the public mind.
The disaster is generally taken to mark the end of the golden age of alpinism — the last of the great Alpine summits had fallen, and at a cost that shocked the Victorian public into questioning whether such risks were justified for sport. Yet the deaths did not end mountaineering; if anything the notoriety drew more climbers to Zermatt, and the Matterhorn became one of the most ascended great peaks in the world, with the Hörnli ridge its standard route. The 1865 catastrophe is remembered now not as a triumph marred by accident but as an early, defining lesson in the asymmetry of the mountains: that the summit is only the halfway point, and that a party's safety rests on its least secure member and its weakest rope.
Lessons
- Match every member of a roped party to the difficulty of the ground; a single unprepared climber endangers everyone tied to the line.
- Never stake survival on the weakest or oldest piece of equipment, and check the rope that must hold a fall before it has to.
- Order the rope so that a slip can be arrested rather than transmitted; rope discipline is a life-or-death decision, not a formality.
- Resist the urgency of a race or a closing season when deciding who belongs on a hard route — competition corrodes judgment about safety.
- Descend with the same care as the ascent; most mountain deaths come on the way down, when the summit feels won and vigilance fades.