38 



NA TURE 



[May lo, 1900 



FITZ GERALD'S ''HIGHEST ANDES." ^ 

 TN the book entitled "The Highest Andes," Mr. E. A. 

 -*■ Fitz Gerald relates the experiences of himself and his parly 

 upon the journey which he made in 1896-97 in the neighbour- 

 hood of Aconcagua, the highest mountain at present known in 

 South America, which it was his aim to map and to ascend. 

 He describes in considerable detail the various operations of 

 the expedition, and recounts with rare frankness the sensations 

 of himself and of his assistants at low atmospheric pressures. 

 Various other matters of considerable public interest are intro- 

 duced incidentally in his volume, such as the Trans- Andine 

 Railway and the Boundary dispute between Chili and the 

 Argentine Republic ; but the attention of the reader will be 

 mainly engrossed by his history of the attacks upon the two 

 great mountains Aconcagua and Tupungato, neither of which 

 was conquered easily. 



Although it is visible from Valparaiso, Aconcagua can 

 scarcely be said to have been known at the beginning of the' 

 nineteenth century. Humboldt was certainly unacquainted 



Engineer, got up and said of Aconcagua that "he believed ir 

 to be little less than 15,000 feet high. Admiral Fitzroy ha(t 

 described it as being higher than any of the Himalayan peaks i 

 but he must have been mistaken in his calculations, no doubt 

 in conseqence of the difficulty in getting a suitable base for a 

 trigonometrical measurement. He (Mr. Miers) had often seeiv 

 it void of snow, and as the snow-line in that latitude is about 

 15,000 feet, it is manifest that the iiioitntaiii cannot much exceed 

 that height.'" Though Sir Clements Markham (the present 

 President of the Royal Geographical Society) was at the meet- 

 ing, it does not appear that either he or any one else entered a 

 protest against this startling statement (see Proc. R. Geog. Soc.,. 

 December 9, 1872, pp. 66-7). Subsequently, Aconcagua rose 

 to a height exceeding 24,000 feet in the pages of the Daily 

 Chronicle (January 18, 1897), and it has now, according to Mr. 

 Fitz Gerald, dropped to 23,080 feet, or to almost exactly the 

 height assigned to it by Admiral Fitzroy. This appears to be 

 the greatest elevation that any one has hitherto reached upon 

 a niountain. 



Mr. Fitz Gerald's Expedition sailed from Southampton on 



-Looking down Horcones Valley from gi; 



with its name when he was travelling in Peru. He said many 

 years afterwards that, at that time, Chimborazo was everywhere 

 accounted to be the loftiest mountain in the world. But in his 

 "Aspects of Nature," published in England in 1849, he knew 

 differently, and referred to the Great Andes of Peru and 

 Bolivia which were brought to light by Mr, Pentland ; and to 

 Aconcagua, which had been found by the officers of the Ad- 

 venture and Beagle on Fitzroy's expedition to be between 

 23,000 and 24,000 feet in elevation. Since then the mountain 

 has had its ups and downs ; or, to employ the language of the 

 geologist, it has had its periods of elevation and subsidence. 

 It got to its lowest level about twenty-seven years ago at a 

 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. After the reading 

 of a paper by Mr. R. Crawford, C.E., upon a projected railway 

 route across the Andes, Mr. J. W. Miers, another Civil 



1 "The Highest Andes : a Record of the First Ascent of Aconcagua 

 and Tupungato in Argentina, and the Exploration of the Surrounding 

 Valleys." By E. A. Fitz Gerald. 8vo, pp. 390. (London : Methuen and 

 Co., 1899.) 



NO. 



1593. VOL. 62] 



October 15, 1896 ; left Buenos Aires November 29 ; and on 

 December 7 arrived at Punta de las Vacas (7858 feet), the 

 terminal station in Argentina of the Trans-Andine Railway.' 

 This terminus is only a little more than twenty miles to the 

 south-east of the summit of Aconcagua. No other mountain- 

 in the world of anything like its magnitude is approached so 

 closely by railway.- An abortive attempt to get to it was 

 first of all made via the Vacas Valley, which runs a little west 

 of north from the Terminus and leads to the eastern side of the 

 mountain ; and it was subsequently found that the true way 

 towards the summit was by the Horcones Valley, the upper part 

 of which lies to the' west of the main peak. After some pre- 



1 This line is intended to connect Buenos Aires and Valparaiso. Its con- 

 struction has been suspended for several year?, but it has been quite 

 recently stated that progress will shortly be resumed. About 44 miles 

 remain to be made. 



- The railway which is being constructed towards Chamonix terminates 

 at present at the village le Fayet, which is less than ten miles distant from 

 the summit of Mont Blanc. The summit of Mcnt Blanc is 13,875 feet above 

 le Fayet, and that of Aconcagua is 16,222 feet above Punta de las Vacas- 



