It ended badly
The cover of Pushing His Luck shows a black and white photograph of Whitcombe Pass. The mountains on each side are dark and fractured, although the pass itself is bare, open country and hardly difficult travel. But beyond, to the west, the ground drops away sharply, the sky lightens, and there is sunshine on low clouds in the distance that seem to promise an escape from the bleakly inhospitable high country.
As an image, it confirms what we think we know about mountains – that, as Kipling wrote about the Himalaya, they are no place for men. And it must be rather similar to the picture Henry Whitcombe had in his mind in 1863, when he left his horses in the upper Rakaia valley and set off with his companion, the Swiss Jakob Lauper – against the instructions of his superior back in Christchurch – to cross to the West Coast.
As Whitcombe discovered, the truth was quite different. While the mountains, Lauper wrote, were ‘a vivid reminder of my youth, when so often I would roam about, light-hearted and carefree, in country just like this’, the coast brought snow, and then rain, huge boulders choking the riverbed, sheer bluffs thickly covered in bush, deep swamps, no food and flooded rivers.
It ended badly: just over three weeks after setting out, Whitcombe drowned, washed out to sea trying to force a crossing of the Taramakau river mouth in an leaky old canoe he had found on the riverbank.
In the 1860s, the only reason for going to the Southern Alps was to get through to the other side. But what Whitcombe’s experience and Low’s book suggest is that the Alps were as much a barrier to knowledge and understanding as a physical obstacle.
Two years earlier, Samuel Butler and John Baker had found the same pass, an experience that Butler later used in his novel Erewhon to describe the route through the mountains to reach a satirical topsy-turvy land.
When you can't see where you're going, it becomes that much easier to fill the void with wishful dreams. Canterbury's provincial government imagined the wealth that it could funnel east over the Alps (instead of losing it out to sea and over to Australia), if only there was a road. That is why the surveyor was sent out exploring.
Whitcombe the second son in wealthy English family, whose grandfather had been private attorney to the king. As an engineer he had helped build railways in England and India, but ended up in New Zealand, aged 34, as a road surveyor. Hilary Low describes him as impulsive, off-hand and even arrogant, perhaps bored and frustrated, and certainly impatient with rules and regulations. There’s a suggestion of dissatisfaction, that his decision to disobey instructions and cross the Alps might have been down to to some yearning for things to be different.
Lauper was another restless man whose dreams seem never to have exactly matched reality. Born in rural Switzerland, he joined the Vatican’s Swiss Guard at the age of 20, then very likely the French Foreign Legion. Although he returned home and married, he left his wife and small children at the age of 42 to go gold mining in Australia and New Zealand.
It’s this deceptive power of dreams that gives this story its strength. That, and the fact that Jakob Lauper survived Whitcombe’s disastrous failure of judgement at the Taramakau and wrote a gripping narrative of the experience. Lauper clung to the waterlogged canoe as the river swept out into the breakers, and drifted for hours in the dark and the pouring rain. ‘My strength was gone and I felt utterly wretched, but I could not loosen my hands. They were cramped up tight, as though they were nailed on.’ He washed up on the beach and survived.
It’s a story that is worth remembering and retelling in its own right, and in this new book it’s matched with a very detailed background text from Low, which gives the story context, and extensive, well-researched illustrations. The publisher’s justification for the new account is that John Pascoe’s earlier edition, published 50 years ago, perpetuated geographic inaccuracies that stem from the original 1863 translation of Lauper’s account, and which Low has been able to resolve by translating Lauper's orginal German text. This is correct, but the confusion over which bank of the Rakaia the party began its journey up is hardly critical. More interesting, I thought, are the ways Low has shown how the original translation subtly played down Whitcombe’s shortcomings and emphasised his senior role – apparently even to the extent of omitting a reference to Whitcombe lying down on his stomach on a boulder, which he did to hear Lauper over the noise of the rapids, as they crossed the river.
It seems we can add dreams of social superiority to all the other misplaced illusions that have given this story its stature and persistence.
Pushing His Luck: Report of the Expedition and Death of Henry Whitcombe, by Jakob Lauper; a new translation and commentary by Hilary Low
https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/oclc/667590263
This review appeared in the Climber 73, Spring 2010
