A very modest pioneer
Jack Clarke remains a distant, even difficult figure through most of Graham Langton’s account of his life. This is the man who, at the age of 19, in his second year of climbing, joined the first climb of Aoraki Mt Cook. Who joined the first climb of Tasman the next year, and also Silberhorn and Haidinger, and who later made first ascents of Darwin, Annan, Hamilton, D’Archaic, Malcolm, Tyndall, Nicholson, Edward and Aspiring. Who climbed four new routes on Aoraki. Who became New Zealand’s first proper mountain guide and made a career out of it.
Most of that will mean something only to climbers, but it is extraordinary all the same – a 20-year climbing record in New Zealand between 1894 and 1914 that is unmatched.
‘A very modest pioneer,’John Pascoe called Clarke in the 1930s. By then he was working as a storekeeper in a works camp on the Arthur’s Pass road. But if you want to glimpse something of the man, Pascoe’s photograph, on page 223, might be the closest you’ll get. It’s someone more human, stronger but also more frail than the verbal descriptions bestowed on him in his lifetime, which rarely offer more insight than the Bishop of Wellington, who wrote in 1905 that Clarke ‘behaved during the whole of my stay of weeks with the utmost consideration to every visitor at the Hermitage’.
There is the whiff of a suggestion that he was gay (wealthy men took him on lengthy overseas trips, which included climbing), confined to footnotes by Langton and rightly so, you’d have to think. It’s about as useful as the idea that Clarke, Graham and Fyfe wanted to climb Aoraki out of a sense of national pride. The consequences of the nationalist approach to mountaineering are demonstrated when Langton notes that the Press ‘published a telegram of 175 words . . . giving the news, and accompanied that with an even longer editorial’. No, the climbers were young, they were competitive, and they wanted to get there first.
Later, there is a hint of unrequited, or perhaps suppressed, love. There is a developing drinking problem, damagingly obvious later but hinted at as early as September 1894, when Clarke climbed the East Peak of Earnslaw, solo: ‘I felt that I deserved my lunch, and had a capital one on the rocks just below the top. Leaving my card in the bottle, I commenced the descent . . .’
Langton’s history is scrupulous. He largely avoids speculation and sticks to presenting the evidence that remains. And in a curious way this acknowledgement of the limits of what we can know about Jack Clarke adds to the poignancy of what we cannot know or understand about this very private man who did remarkable things. Those remarkable things are in this book, carefully researched and extensively illustrated, and giving the man his rightful place at the centre of the story of early New Zealand mountain climbing. This was our Golden Age of mountaineering, and amidst the splendour and the excitement of the climbing adventures, surrounded by the barren rugged grandeur of the Alps, Langton has found an idiosyncratic but genuine working class hero.
Summits and Shadows: Jack Clarke and New Zealand Mountaineering by Graham Langton
https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/oclc/746154952
This review appeared in the Climber 76, Winter 2011