Hinchliff was a minor figure of the
golden age of alpinism, between
Wills's ascent of the
Wetterhorn in 1854 and
Whymper's conquest of the
Matterhorn in 1865. In 1857 he was a founding member of the Alpine Club, the club meeting in his Lincoln's Inn chambers before it leased rooms of its own at 8 St Martin's Place,
Trafalgar Square in 1859.
John Ball was elected the club's first President, with
E. S. Kennedy as Vice-President and Hinchliff as Secretary. In 1857 Hinchliffe published
Summer Months Among the Alps: With the Ascent of Monte Rosa, a work which some twenty years later
Mark Twain referred to as "Hinchliffe's book". In his
A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain's narrator advises his friend Harris to read this book to learn about mountain climbing, and a description in it of a fall influences the course of Twain's story. With
Leslie Stephen and the guide
Melchior Anderegg, Hinchliff made an early ascent of the
Wildstrubel on 11 September 1858 and the
first ascent of the
Alphubel on 9 August 1860. He spent some months on extensive travels in
Brazil and
Argentina, with expeditions into the
Serra dos Órgãos,
Teresópolis,
Petrópolis, and
Juiz de Fora, and these were recounted in his
South American Sketches of 1863. In 1873 he set off to travel around the world with a friend named William Henry Rawson, and in two years they crossed some 35,000 miles of ocean while spending a further six months on land. Shortly after his return to England in 1875, Hinchliff was elected President of the Alpine Club, and in 1876 he published
Over the Sea and Far Away, an account of his journey around the world. His obituary in the
Alpine Journal said he had had "a kind of genius for friendship", while the
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society noted that "the Society loses a member who, if not an explorer, was an indefatigable traveller". In 1910, a climbing anthology called him "one of the first to penetrate the higher solitudes of the world of ice and snow". ==Works==