The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named

The positions of these vital reference points could have been established by careful observation of the stars. But as Everest would repeatedly emphasise, astronomical observations only gave the desired degree of accuracy if conducted over many months, preferably years, from well-equipped and professionally-manned observatories. Constructing and operating such observatories across a subcontinent was out of the question; and for reasons that were only partly understood at the time, observatories seemed to be affected by their surroundings. Better and simpler was the geometrical approach of triangulation. It was not quicker. The Great Trigonometrical Survey had taken the field twenty years before Everest became involved and would not complete its work until twenty years after he left. Nor was it necessarily cheaper. As Everest was about to discover, in terms of lives lost and rupees spent the cost would exceed that of many contemporary Indian wars. But triangulation was well-tried, accurate to the point of mathematical certainty, and so more acceptable to the scientific world.

Such a survey still depended on the occasional astronomical observation in order to locate and orientate its triangles in terms of the earth’s grid of latitude and longitude. It also depended on the occasional measurement along the ground. Known as a ‘base-line’, this was needed to get the triangulation going in the first place by establishing the distance between the first two points. It was also a useful way of verifying the accuracy of a protracted triangulation, since the distance between any two points as established by triangulation could be checked by another actual measurement on the ground.

In the case of a ‘secondary triangulation’ like Everest’s between the Kistna and Godavari, base-line measurements and astronomical observations were not necessary. Everest’s job was to connect trig stations along the east coast (whose relative positions had already been established by the more elaborate methods and instruments of primary triangulation) with those of another chain of even more exacting primary triangulation about a hundred miles inland to the west.

The latter roughly followed the 78-degree meridian (or north – south line of longitude) and consisted of a continuous chain of triangles which had been carried from Cape Comorin at the tip of the Indian peninsula as far north as Hyderabad, a distance of about seven hundred miles. Already this ‘series’ was known as the Great Arc of the Meridian. As well as providing the spine on which the whole skeleton of the Great Trigonometrical Survey depended, it was the aspect of the Survey’s work which most appealed to George Everest. In fact his present assignment he saw mainly as a way of proving that he was pre-eminently qualified to succeed Colonel Lambton as the grand master of the Great Arc.

To one like Everest who happened to have been baptised (and so probably born) in the London parish of Greenwich, meridians must early have meant something. Greenwich had been the site of England’s Royal Observatory since the seventeenth century. British navigators and surveyors regarded the Greenwich meridian, or ‘mid-day’ line (because at any point along a north – south meridian the sun reaches its zenith at the same time), as the zero from which they calculated all longitudinal distances and from which on maps and charts they extended the graticule, or grid, of the globe’s 360 degrees of longitude. Later in the nineteenth century this British convention would win international approval. Greenwich Mean Time would become established as a world standard and the Greenwich meridian would be universally recognised as o degrees longitude. It became, in fact, the north – south equivalent of the east – west equator at o degrees latitude.

Everest therefore knew about meridians from childhood and may well have been intrigued by the problems of determining them. Later, at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, he had studied the mathematics, mechanics and measuring techniques essential for an officer joining the artillery. But his family background was not scientific, his father being a solicitor; and apart from some basic survey work in Java when British forces had invaded and occupied that island during the Napoleonic wars, his career had thus far differed little from that of other army officers in India. Appointment to the Great Trigonometrical Survey was his big opportunity. Neither mutiny, flood nor fever was going to impede his determination to excel.

Returning from the soaking at Sarangapalle, Everest revisited his first observation post, erected his theodolite – the instrument used for measuring the angles between sight-lines – and scanned the distant ridge of Panch Pandol through its telescope. Nothing had been heard of his signalmen for three weeks; nor was there now any sign of their signals. But a few days later a gap was noticed in the dark vegetation which covered the ridge. Day by day it was seen to grow into two sizeable clearings. ‘After a fortnight’s further waiting I had sufficient daylight behind [the clearings] to distinguish the colours of the Great Trigonometrical Survey flying on the one spot and a signal-marker on the other.’ Bearings could now be taken to ascertain the angle between the sight-line to this new marker and that to another marker at an already established observation post.

Measuring such angles was the essence of trigonometrical survey work. Another triangle was thus completed and, once the sight-line to Panch Pandol had been calculated, it could serve as the base for the next triangle. The whole party then moved on towards the ridge to begin their observations anew and, in the case of the impatient Everest, to seek some explanation for his signalmen’s unconscionable delay in reaching Panch Pandol.

The explanation was soon obvious. Almost immediately the trail plunged into the formidable jungle region which now comprises the Pakhal and Eturnagaram game sanctuaries. The forests were of ebony and teak, and the trees ‘seventy, eighty, and even ninety feet high, thickly set with underwood, and infested with large tigers and boa constrictors’. As the Survey gingerly hacked its way forward, Everest began to think more kindly of his signalmen. ‘How … without water or provisions, and with the jungle fever staring them in the face, they could have wandered through such a wilderness until they selected the most commanding points for a station, utterly, I confess, surpasses my comprehension.’ His comprehension would soon again be found wanting. The scene which greeted him on arrival was even more impressive.

When I saw the dreadful wilderness by which I was surrounded; when I saw how, by means of conciliating treatment and prompt payment, my people had managed to collect a sufficient body of hatchet-men to clear away every tree which in the least obstructed the horizon over a surface of nearly a square mile; and when [I saw how] the gigantic branches of these were cut off and cleared away leaving only the trunks as trophies, – then – then I learned to appreciate the excellent management of Colonel Lambton who had been enabled to train up so faithful a body of men.

Then, somewhat incidentally, he also ‘learned how to value the natives of southern India’. But it was a lesson that was easily forgotten. Giving credit to subordinates would not come naturally to George Everest. From Panch Pandol he despatched his advance party to a hill site even deeper in the jungle and near the banks of the Godavari. Again the days slipped by with no sign of them; again Everest fretted and fumed. He sent out a second party to look for them, then a third. Finally he despatched his chief sub-assistant Joseph Olliver, who with Dr Voysey made up his entire British staff.

Olliver eventually reached the hill and hoisted the flag; but his news was not good. Most of the previous signalmen had succumbed to fever; some were near death. Should the whole survey party proceed to Yellapuram (the village after which the new site was named) the risks would be immense. Everest was unimpressed. Desperate to complete his assignment and so win the approval of Colonel Lambton, he reckoned that all risks were warranted.

The trail from Panch Pandol to Yellapuram wound through ‘the wildest and thickest forest that I had ever invaded’. It took three days; but at least the weather stayed fine and the vegetation was at its most spectacular after the recent rains. Voysey and Everest rejoiced as they rode, then quipped as they climbed. At last the canopy thinned and, seeing again the sky and the summit, both men spontaneously roared a favourite Shakespearian couplet:

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain’s top.

Everest, however, misquoted; and neither man seems to have been aware of Romeo’s next and more cautionary line: ‘I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’

After they dismounted at Yellapuram, the oppressive silence of the jungle brought to Everest’s mind a wilderness scene from the Arabian Nights. There was a spectacular view up the Godavari and, beside and beyond it, three excellent heights from which to complete his survey. Congratulating himself that ‘the end of my toilsome and laborious task seemed now to be within my grasp’, he immediately sent out flag parties.

But no sooner had jocund day forsaken the misty mountain’s top than fever struck. That evening Everest went down with what he called a violent typhus, the result of ‘my day’s ride through a powerful sun and over a soil teeming with vapour and malaria’. Dr Voysey succumbed soon after. Within five days most of their followers, including escort, signalmen, porters, mahouts and runners, nearly 150 in all, were also prostrated.

It seemed indeed as if at last the genius of the jungle had risen in his wrath to chastise the hardihood of those men who had dared to violate the sanctity of his chosen haunt. All hope of completing the work this season being now at an end, it remained only to proceed with as much expedition as possible towards Hyderabad … [and] to return, baffled and crippled, through an uninterrupted distance of nearly two hundred miles.

Dr Voysey took to his palanquin. Everest, lacking such a conveyance, had a stretcher made. For porters they looked not to their prostrate followers but to the retinue of ‘a rebellious chief who aided my progress most manfully’. It took three weeks for them to reach Hyderabad, throughout which time ‘the jungle fever pursued my party like a nest of irritated bees’.

When news of the disaster reached the city, all available carts, palanquins, elephants and camels were commandeered and sent out to bring home the sick. Most were indeed retrieved but, out of the total of 150, fifteen had died on the road and not one had escaped unscathed. The survivors, wrote a shaken Everest, ‘bore little resemblance to human beings, but seemed like a crowd of corpses recently torn from the grave’.

So ended Lieutenant George Everest’s first season in the employ of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. A long convalescence was necessary; it was anyway October, by which month the visibility had lost its champagne clarity. For Everest the experience had been an eye-opener. He recalled it with a mixture of horror and naivety which is seldom found in his other writings. It was not exceptional; greater catastrophes would overtake the Survey and many more lives would be lost. But it was a testing induction for a novice, and it was an ominous overture to an illustrious but controversial career.

Dr Voysey would never fully recover. Though he soldiered on, he would die four years later from a recurrence of the Yellapuram malaria. Everest, too, would never regain what he calls ‘the full vigour of youth’. In the following year he returned to Yellapuram to complete his observations but again succumbed to a ‘violent attack of jungle fever’. The work was in fact completed by his dependable assistant Joseph Olliver. Meanwhile Everest, ‘deeming it unwise to sacrifice myself for an unimportant object’, took a year’s sick leave and sailed to the Cape of Good Hope to convalesce. He would return to duty in 1822 but within a year was racked by fevers both old and new. Gruesome complications ensued which would temporarily reduce him to a cripple. In 1825, aged thirty-five, he would again sail away on sick leave, this time to England. He would not return to India for five years.

Critical for Everest, the period from 1820 to 1830 would prove even more critical for what he proclaimed to officials in London to be ‘the greatest scientific undertaking of the kind that has ever been attempted’. By this he meant not the ambitious map-making programme of the Survey of India, nor even the rigorous methods of its Great Trigonometrical Survey, but the latter’s supreme expression, the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian.

As his birthplace of Greenwich was to meridians, so George Everest would become to the Arc. The two became inseparable. The Arc would be his life’s work, his dearest attachment, his near-fatal indulgence; and while he lived, his name would be synonymous with it. Yet it was not his brain-child, nor in large part his achievement – those honours belong to the less articulate genius of William Lambton. Nor, when Everest died, would he long be remembered for the Arc. Instead, his name was purloined for a peak.

It was not in his nature to decline the lasting fame of having his name ‘placed a little nearer the stars than that of any other’. Even the controversy which the naming of Mount Everest would prompt is in character. On the other hand, his truculent spirit must surely be turning in its grave at being remembered only for the mountain and not for the measurement. Other than as convenient trig stations, mountains barely featured in his life. He saw the Himalayas only towards the end of his career and he hailed them then only as a fitting conclusion to the Great Arc. There is nothing to suggest that he was particularly curious as to their height.

Yet there was a connection between the Arc and the Himalayas, and there was a logic in naming the earth’s greatest protuberance for Everest. For the Great Arc would solve the mystery of the mountains. The painstaking measurement of a meridian up through India’s burning immensity would make possible the measurement of the ice-capped Himalayas. This is the story of both, of the Arc and of the mountains.

TWO The Elusive Lambton

Everest’s predecessor as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey is less obviously commemorated. In fact, to this mild and reclusive man of science there seems to be no memorial at all. There is not even any structure which can certainly be associated with his work. It has, though, been my privilege to stand at his graveside. The place proved hard to find and was not at all distinguished. I doubt if anyone has been to Hinganghat to look for it in the past fifty years. The locals knew nothing of its whereabouts nor, until my wife began spelling out his epitaph, had they ever heard the name of William Lambton.

Luckily the day was a Sunday, for to our visit coinciding with morning mass in Hinganghat we owed the discovery. Enquiries about a Christian cemetery had at first been received with blank stares from the congregation of Keralan immigrants as they spilled forth into the fields. Then, with the organ still playing, there emerged a man of more bracing faith. Mr K.J. Sebastian, an English teacher, might rather have devoted his day of rest to his young family; but grasping the gist of my story, he leapt to the challenge and sped off on his scooter, we following close behind, to explore the byways of the parish.

Hinganghat lies about fifty miles south of Nagpur and is as near the dead centre of India as anywhere. It also epitomises much that is unlovely about the country. Unless your business is cotton there can be no possible reason for turning off the Wardha road. Two large mills, their machinery housed in untidy hangars of rusty corrugated sheeting, dominate the prairie landscape and provide some badly paid employment. The rhythm of their shifts regulates Hinganghat’s day, and to the farmyard ordure of what is otherwise just an overgrown village they add an oily slick of industrial squalor. As the driver had warned, ‘Hinganghat like shit.’

Behind a street frontage of tented tea-stalls and tyre-repair shops a game of cricket was being played on a piece of waste land. It was our third point of call. Dodging the worm castings of human excrement which dotted the pitch like daisies, we trailed round the outfield towards a small whitewashed mosque. According to a report of 1929 Lambton’s grave had been joined by others and the spot consecrated as a Christian cemetery. Since no such place now existed in Hinganghat’s collective memory, and since, apart from Christians, only Muslims bury their dead, Mr Sebastian thought that the Maulvi, the local prayer-leader, might be able to help. Yes, said the Maulvi, there had been Christian tombs in what he called the Muslim cemetery, and although the hallowed ground had lately been built on by squatters, two were still intact.

One, mysteriously known as ‘the Belgian’s Stone’, turned out to be an obelisk within a circular walled enclosure which now served the squatter colony as a central urinal. The other was just a plain oblong plinth with the raised outline of a casket on its surface. Children used it for climbing on. There was no headstone and the whole sepulchre had at some point been encased in mortar. Into this mortar, when wet, someone had written three lines of text with a finger. The letters were ill-formed and were much too large ever to have conveyed more than the most basic information. There might originally have been twenty, and they looked to have been copied, perhaps from an earlier inscription, by someone not confident with Roman script. The mortar was now crumbling so badly that barely half were legible. But the ‘L’, ‘A’, ‘M’ and ‘B’ running along the top line were still clear. So was the word ‘DATE’, an annoyingly superfluous survival. It was followed by the three numerals ‘1’, ‘7’ and ‘6’, at which point the mortar had broken away.

If this date was to be read as seventeen-sixty-something, it was wrong. There could hardly be any question that this was indeed Lambton’s resting place, but he died in 1823. Moreover, seventeen-sixty-anything was rather early for a European grave in such an out-of-the-way place. It occurred to me, therefore, that it must be a birth date. On slender evidence Lambton’s birth is usually given as 1753. This would make him fifty when he started on the Great Arc, sixty-six when Everest joined him in Hyderabad, and an impressive but improbable seventy when he died. He was still in the field at the time, indeed looking forward to carrying his triangles on to Agra in the north of India, another two years’ work at least. Amongst Europeans exposed to India’s lethal climate seventy-year-olds were as rare then as centenarians today. A working seventy-year-old would have been a great curiosity and would certainly have attracted much contemporary comment. On the whole, then, I was ready to give the tomb the benefit of the doubt. Sometime in the early 1760s seemed a more plausible birth date than 1753. It also disposed of a decade-long void when Lambton, supposedly in his twenties, unaccountably disappears from the record.

Where he was born is more certain. It was on a debt-ridden farm in the North Riding of Yorkshire whose plight would oblige him to make the support of his impoverished parents an important career consideration. Early promise in mathematics won him a place in a grammar school and, in 1781, an Ensign-ship in an infantry regiment. With the 33rd Foot he promptly sailed for the war (of Independence) in America and was there promptly taken prisoner at York Town. After release he was ordered to the then wilderness of New Brunswick on the north-eastern seaboard. He helped divide and apportion its land amongst British loyalists displaced by the American victory, and was involved in surveying and delineating what now became the boundary between British Canada and the United States.

Nine years later, apparently as a result of an oversight, he was still in New Brunswick and still an Ensign, although drawing additional pay as a civilian Barrack-Master. A hint, however, that his years in the wilderness were numbered came in 1793 when he was unexpectedly promoted; ‘to his astonishment,’ in the words of the Royal Military Calendar, ‘he found himself a Lieutenant.’ Two years later he was ordered to choose between the army and his civil appointment; and having plumped for the army, in 1796 he was posted to India.

The man behind this flurry of orders was the new Commandant of Lambton’s regiment, a twenty-seven-year-old Colonel called the Honourable Arthur Wesley. Wesley, better known by the later spelling of ‘Wellesley’, would one day become better known still as the Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo. Besides commanding the 33rd Foot, he was the younger brother of Richard Wesley (or Wellesley), then Earl of Mornington and also about to leave for India. Richard had been appointed Governor-General of the British possessions in the East and blithely perceived his task as that of augmenting them. Young Arthur and his regiment, including the elusive Lambton, were in for a busy time.

The two men first came face to face when sailing on the same ship from Calcutta to Madras in 1798. Arthur Wellesley, en route to a war which his brother was aggressively fomenting with the ruler of the independent state of Mysore, was much too preoccupied to quiz the newcomer. He was, though, puzzled by him. Lambton, now perhaps in his late thirties, had obviously been out of circulation far too long. Tall, strongly built and clean-shaven, with reddish hair already thinning, he was awkward in society and unusually economical in his habits. ‘[His] simplicity of manner gave many people a very inadequate idea of his powers of mind and knowledge of the world,’ recalled John Warren, an old friend. ‘Some peculiarity of manner adhered to him from having lived so long out of the world. His face wanted expression, and the old accident gave a cast to his eye.’ The ‘old accident’ had occurred while observing a solar eclipse in Canada. Omitting the elementary precaution of attaching a smoked glass to his telescope, Lambton had partially lost the use of his left eye. The result was a slightly glazed expression and a heightened concern for any subordinate using such instruments under his direction.

Despite these peculiarities, Arthur Wellesley was impressed by Lambton’s abilities. He asked others to corroborate them and, when their ship reached Madras, he invited Lambton to share his residence. Whatever thirteen years in the wilderness had done to the man’s social skills, they had not been wasted professionally. Lambton had somehow acquired a familiarity with higher mathematics, mechanics and astronomy which would have been impressive in London, let alone India. On arrival in Calcutta he had contributed a paper, full of the most awesome mathematical equations, to Asiatick Researches, India’s leading academic publication. Invitingly titled ‘Observations on the Theory of Walls’, it demonstrated that for any fortifying wall there was an optimum depth of foundation which it was mathematically pointless to exceed. Such knowledge, although of limited use at a time when the British in India had taken the offensive, convinced Colonel Wellesley that Lambton was far from being the dolt he appeared. Lambton continued to regret that the Colonel never spoke to him. Perhaps Wellesley was anxious not to betray his scientific ignorance. But clearly he valued Lambton’s company and would soon prove a useful patron.

Lambton’s opportunity came courtesy of the war with Mysore which finally got underway in 1799. At the time the British had been established at Madras for more than 150 years. Merchants of the English East India Company had been buying cotton textiles from this part of peninsular India since the early seventeenth century and took great pride in the fort, and now city, which they had founded at Madraspatnam in 1640. But it was not until a century later, when wars in Europe had embroiled them with their French rivals based at nearby Pondicherry, that the British had begun to take an interest in Indian territory as opposed to trade. By then there were numerous other British, or rather East India Company, trading settlements around the coasts of India, and it was in fact from one of these, Calcutta, that the first move towards an Indian dominion had been made.