THE GREAT ARC
The Dramatic Taleof how India was Mappedand Everest was Named
JOHN KEAY

Dedication

For Julia

Epigraph

Know …

That on the summit whither thou art bound

A geographic Labourer pitched his tent,

With books supplied and instruments of art,

To measure height and distance; lonely task,

Week after week pursued!

From ‘Written with a slate pencil on a stone

on the side of the mountain of Black Comb’,

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1818

India

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Maps

A Note on Spellings

Foreword

1 A Baptism of Fever

2 The Elusive Lambton

3 Tall Tales from the Hills

4 Droog Dependent

5 The Far-Famed Geodesist

6 Everywhere in Chains

7 Crossing the Rubicon

8 So Far as Our Knowledge Extends

9 Through the Haze of Hindustan

10 Et in Arcadia

11 A Stupendous Snowy Mass

A Note on Sources

Index

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Maps

The Great Arc and Associated Series

General Map of India

The Himalayas

A Note on Spellings

Some proper names in the text, especially place-names, will appear to be mis-spelled. This may be because a spelling acceptable to everyone has been hard to establish; or it may be because I have adopted some nineteenth-century spellings in order to be consistent with those used in the quoted extracts (e.g. ‘Kistna’ for ‘Krishna’, ‘Siwaliks’ for ‘Shivaliks’, ‘Ganges’ for ‘Ganga’, etc.). I trust that purists will show indulgence and that all the names are at least recognisable. In the case of the Bengali genius ‘Radhanath Sickdhar’, the spelling is that which he himself used, however improbable it now looks.

THE GREAT ARC AND ASSOCIATED SERIES

Foreword

Pressed about why Mount Everest is so named I would once, perhaps like most people, have come up with the explanation that it was as good a name as any. For a geographical feature of such obvious permanence and precedence, ‘Everest’ seems to say it all. Up there, more aloof from the bustle of life than anywhere else on earth, the raised snows proffer a pledge of peace, a promise of lasting repose, of being ‘ever-at-rest’. Presumably some international body had ordained the name; or perhaps it was a translation of the mountain’s local title. It scarcely mattered. Either way, it was perfectly acceptable.

But, as I now know, these suppositions were totally wrong. That the world’s highest point is in fact called after George Everest, a controversial British Colonel who had never even seen the mountain, let alone climbed it, first dawned on me when I was writing a book about the exploration of Kashmir. Everest did not feature in the region, either as man or mountain, but an institution, dear to the Colonel’s heart and known as the Survey of India, did. Most of Kashmir, including the Karakoram mountains, had first been measured and mapped by men of the Indian Survey. And the Survey being a government department within British India’s bureaucratic Leviathan, it had generated copious records. To these I turned.

Descriptions of nineteenth-century map-makers hauling their instruments up peaks of unknown altitude proved excellent value. Pelted by hailstones, their tents ablaze from the lightning and their trail obliterated by blizzards, the men of the Survey would dig in and wait. Survival depended on merino drawers, Harris tweeds and alpaca overcoats. Their boots were leather, and they ate mostly rice. They might be marooned for weeks. Then, without warning, in the chill first light of a day when the cloud had unaccountably overslept in the valleys, their patience would at last be rewarded. Sailing a sea of cumulus beneath an azure sky, a line of glistening summits would loom remotely from the ether.

With luck, from two or more of these summits tell-tale pinpricks of light would advertise the presence of other survey teams. If the theodolite was up and ready, sightings would be taken, bearings recorded and signals exchanged. The job was done. A speedy retreat down to the fleshpots of basecamp followed. Then it was on and up to the next peak.

Or so it seemed; but taking such bearings enabled the surveyors to plot the positions and heights of the distant peaks only if the location of their own peak was already known. Otherwise it was like seeking directions from a street map without first having identified your whereabouts. Fixing the positions of the other peaks depended on knowing that of the one from which one observed; its global location in terms of the world’s grid of longitude and latitude had to have been established, and so did its height above sea-level.

Obviously this information could have been obtained from prior observations taken at other vantage points in the rear. And those vantage points could in turn have been similarly established from somewhere in the foothills. But the Himalayas were hundreds of miles from any observatory capable of supplying a fix from astronomy; and they were even further from the sea, in terms of whose mean-level heights were expressed. Working back, then, somewhere there had to have been a starting point, a benchmark series of locations whose co-ordinates and heights had been deduced with a superior precision and were known with unimpeachable certainty.

I asked around, I dug out books, and the trail led back to the Great Arc – or, to give it its full title, ‘the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian’. I had never heard of it; but the Arc was indeed that benchmark series of locations. It was like the trunk of a tree, the spinal column of a skeleton. It ran for 1600 miles up the length of the subcontinent; and on the inch-perfect accuracy of its plotted locations all other surveys and locations depended.

Clearly, too, the Great Arc was something rather special. The mathematical equations involved in its computation seemed to fill enough volumes to line a library, while the instruments used to gather the raw data were man-size contraptions of cast iron and well-buffed brass which were still lovingly displayed in the Survey of India’s offices.

I ferreted further and I read on. Evidently the Great Arc was way ahead of its time. No scientific undertaking on such a massive scale had previously been attempted. Outside the regulated confines of Bourbon France and Georgian Britain, it was also the most minutely accurate land measurement on record. The accuracy was all-important because the Arc had as much to do with physics as with surveying. It was not simply an attempt to measure a subcontinent but also, incredibly, to measure and compute the precise curvature of the globe.

More prosaically, it was conceived by an elusive genius called William Lambton and was inspired by the first British conquests in the extreme south of India. The year was 1800. In North America Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had yet to set out on their epic journey across the continent. Australia was barely a penal colony; Napoleon still held Egypt; and most of the rest of Africa remained shrouded in that mysterious ‘darkness’ which was simply Europe’s ignorance.

Only in Asia, and especially India, was an embryonic imperialism detectable. Already the infant was outgrowing the womb of trade, stretching and kicking prodigiously, and taking its first unsteady strides towards dominion. Just so the Great Arc. Mirroring the progress of empire, it would forge tentatively and then inexorably inland. During forty years of high-risk travel, ingenious improvisation and awesome dedication it would come to embrace the entire length of India. And when Lambton, its endearing founder, died in central India, it would be carried to its grand Himalayan finale by the bewhiskered and cantankerous martinet who was Colonel George Everest.

At the time the scientific world was frankly amazed. The Arc was hailed as ‘one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science’. It was ‘as near perfect a thing of its kind as has ever been undertaken’. Lambton and Everest ‘had done more for the advancement of general science than … any other body of military men’. Their celebrity was assured. Lambton was internationally fêted. George Everest was knighted by Queen Victoria; and in his honour that peak, whose discovery and measurement the Arc had made possible, was duly named.

Yet today they are utterly forgotten. Lambton is not even among the fifteen thousand worthies included in Chambers’ Biographical Dictionary. Everest is just a mountain. The progress of nineteenth-century invention was such that their science was almost instantly superseded. It now features only in histories of cartography, in academic critiques of imperialism, and in the dusty records of the Indian Survey. The Great Arc, like the great auk, has been consigned to oblivion.

Which is a pity, for it deserves better. At a time when to foreigners India was more a concept than a country, a place of uncertain extent and only fanciful maps, the Great Arc and the surveys based on it were indeed tools of imperial dominion as well as scientific enterprises. But thanks to that voluminous documentation and to George Everest’s published memoirs, the story of the Great Arc transcends both its science and its politics. Uniquely for an official scientific venture, we can savour the setbacks, share the excitement, discern the personalities. In writing this book the challenge has not been that of embroidering bare facts with vivid shades of plausible detail but of stitching into the riot of authentic adventure a thread of scientific and political plausibility. Given half a chance, jungle mishaps would have put paid to the science, personal vendettas would have obliterated the politics, and the tigers would have made off with the narrative.

If the impression given is less that of a scientific set-piece and more of a monumental example of human endeavour, then so it was. Travelling India with an eye on the Arc, I found it impossible not to become obsessed by the sheer audacity of the enterprise. Like Mount Everest, which seen from afar looks a respectable peak but not obviously the world’s highest, so the Arc viewed from a distance of two hundred years looks impressive but slightly quixotic. Get up close, though, breathe the sharp air and sense the monstrous presumption, and the Arc like the mountain soars imperiously to dwarf all else. Measuring the one, like climbing the other, is revealed as the ultimate challenge of its age.

ONE A Baptism of Fever

The word ‘jungle’ comes from India. In its Hindi form of jangal, it denotes any area of uncultivated land. Indian jungles are not necessarily forested, and today less so than ever. But well away from centres of population there do still survive a few extensive and well-wooded jungle tracts, especially in eastern and central India. Often they are classed as game sanctuaries, a designation which implies few facilities for the visitor but some much-advertised protection for the wildlife.

Here tigers and elephants yet roam, hornbills flap about in the canopy like clumsy pterodactyls, and hump-backed boar rootle aggressively through the leaf mould. In the dry season a safari might seem an attractive prospect. But be warned: ‘dry’ is high-baked. Like splintering glass, dead leaves explode underfoot to alert the animals. The tracks of crumbled dirt are hard to follow, spiked with ferocious thorns, and spanned by man-size webs patrolled by bird-size spiders.

The wet season is worse still. Then, the vegetation erupts. The tracks become impassable, and the air fills with insects. Only fugitives take to the jungle in the monsoon. Fugitives and, in days gone by when maps were rare, surveyors. In the year 1819, in just such a tract between the Godavari and Kistna rivers in what is now the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, an English Lieutenant, lately attached to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and uncommonly keen to make his mark, underwent a baptism of fever.

Matters had gone badly for the twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant from the start. Barely a month into this, his first season in the field, he had been confronted by a mutiny. ‘The infliction of corporal punishment is an odious task,’ he noted. But it was either that or abandoning the assignment. His escort obviously knew the perils of the monsoonal jungle and had seized every chance of escaping from the camp back to the city of Hyderabad. Something had to be done. Not without misgivings, the Lieutenant ordered one of these defaulters to be thrashed, whereupon the whole troop, about forty in number, took up their weapons and announced that they would decamp en masse. The British bluff had been called; in this insignificant and still today unfashionable corner of the subcontinent the myth of empire was at stake.

As might be inferred, by 1819 the British were already well on their way to becoming masters of India. Some areas had been won by conquest and were now under direct British rule; others were merely attached by treaty and remained nominally independent states under their own rulers. This was the case with the large principality of Hyderabad, through whose densest jungle the Kistna and Godavari rivers converged on the coast. Special permission had been obtained for the Great Trigonometrical Survey to operate in Hyderabad; but in ‘a native state’ the standards of subservience exacted in areas under direct British rule could not be taken for granted.

In fact, they could seemingly not be taken at all other than at the point of a gun. The mutineers, who now repaired to the nearby shade of a mango orchard, comprised a detachment of local troops lent by Nizam Sikander Jah of Hyderabad to protect and assist the British survey. In addition, the Survey had its own escort of twelve men who had been recruited in British territory, were paid out of the Survey’s budget and had already amassed many years of loyal service. This in-house escort was now ordered to load muskets and take aim at the mutineers. A volley into their midst was threatened if they did not immediately surrender.

The ploy worked. The mutineers submitted, and this time the Lieutenant offered no apology for calling for the cane. Three men were publicly flogged, then dismissed; and thus, the Lieutenant tells us, ‘was settled, very early in my career, a disputed point which had been a source of constant contention and annoyance to Colonel Lambton ever since his entering into the Nizam’s territory’.

Colonel Lambton was the originator and now Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. For seventeen years he had been spinning a web of giant geometry across the Indian peninsula without ever having had to thrash any of its teeming peoples. Tactful, patient and indestructible, Lambton seemed immune to India’s frustrations, the result of a long wilderness experience in North America and of an attachment to science so obsessive and disinterested that even his critics were inclined to indulge him. Colonel Lambton beguiled India; but Lieutenant George Everest, his eager new assistant, chastised it.

The name, incidentally, was pronounced not ‘Ever-rest’ (like ‘cleverest’), but ‘Eve-rest’ (like ‘cleave-rest’). That was how the family always pronounced it, and the Lieutenant would not have thanked you for getting it wrong. Years later a fellow officer would make the mistake of calling him a ‘Kumpass Wala’. No offence was meant. ‘Kumpass Wala’, or ‘compass-wallah’, was an accepted Anglo-Indian term for a surveyor. Everest, however, accepted nothing of the sort. He detested what he called ‘nicknames’ and, though it was not perhaps worth a dawn challenge, he demanded – and received – abject apologies. Getting on the wrong side of George Everest was an occupational hazard with which even British India would only slowly come to terms.

With the mutiny quelled and the mutineers ‘finding that, when they knew me better, good behaviour was a perfect security against all unkindness’, a self-righteous Everest pressed on for the jungles beside the Kistna. It was July, the month when the monsoon breaks. On time, the heavens duly opened just as he climbed a hill to his first observation post.

Survey work was conducted during and immediately after the monsoon because, regardless of the discomfort, it was only then that the dust was laid and the heat-haze dispersed. In the interludes of bright sunshine, the atmosphere was at its clearest; in fact it became so transparent that Everest fancied he could see forever and that ‘the proximity of objects was only to be judged by their apparent magnitudes’. Trigonometrical surveying depended on the sighting of slender signal posts over distances of more than twenty miles. The monsoon’s perfect visibility was therefore ideal. Spying a long dark ridge all of sixty miles to the east, Everest despatched his four best signalmen to occupy its heights. The ridge, he understood, was called Panch Pandol, and the signalmen were to erect their flagpole there in readiness for his observations. Meanwhile he continued south to the Kistna with the rest of his party.

Although visibility was greatly enhanced by the monsoon, mobility was not. Dry riverbeds instantly became raging torrents full of uprooted trees. The Musi, a tributary of the Kistna, rose so rapidly that Everest found himself cut off from his supplies. On iron rations therefore, and denied the normal crossing on the Kistna, which was on the other side of its confluence with the Musi, he headed downstream to where an alternative ferry was said to operate at a spot about fifty miles above the modern city of Vijayawada.

The Kistna, one of India’s mightiest rivers, was now thrashing dementedly over steeply shelving rock like a panic-stricken patient beneath the surgeon’s knife. Crossing it meant trusting oneself to a coracle, a small circular vessel, more bowl than boat, made of woven rattans and faced with hide. Everest likened it to a leather basket. Such craft, still used in many parts of India, are highly portable and sometimes formed part of a surveyor’s outfit. Although not so provided, Everest found one abandoned by the river.

While it was undergoing the necessary repairs at the hands of the village cobbler, Everest ordered his ‘carriage-cattle’ to be swum across the flood. Fortunately they were not actually cattle, ox-carts being useless in roadless jungle, but a species he deemed ‘more at home in the water than any other quadruped’, namely elephants. As he also noted, elephants are extraordinarily sagacious. The Survey’s beasts duly swayed to the bank, took a long look at the rocks and the raging waters, assessed the mix of caresses and curses on offer, and opted to stay dry. ‘Probably it was fortunate,’ Everest adds, ‘for these powerful animals … are, from the size of their limbs, in need of what sailors term sea-room, and in a river like the Kistna … were very liable to receive some serious injury.’

This reverse meant a change of plan. Dr Henry Voysey, one of Everest’s two British companions and the Survey’s geologist-cum-physician, was left on the north bank with the main party plus elephants, horses, tents and baggage. Meanwhile Everest and a dozen men, balancing the Survey’s cumbersome theodolite between them, crossed to the other side. Three trips had to be made; and since the coracle had to undergo repairs after each, it took most of the day. Then, deceived by the visibility into thinking it was only a couple of miles away, Everest immediately set out for his next observation post.

The couple of miles turned out to be twelve. They included both jungle work and rock-climbing. By the time the hill of Sarangapalle was reached it was dusk, and big black clouds, aflicker with lightning, were piling up overhead. ‘At last,’ noted Everest, ‘when all their batteries were in order, a tremendous crash of thunder burst forth, and, as if all heaven were converted into one vast shower-bath, the vertical rain poured down in large round drops upon the devoted spot of Sarangapullee.’

Tentless in the deluge, Everest and his men bent branches to make bivouacs. His own was improved by a bedstead and an umbrella, between which he slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted, oblivious alike of his squelching tweeds, puddled bedding and benighted followers. ‘These evils might have been borne without any ill effects,’ he insists, ‘but for other circumstances of more serious consequence.’

The natives of India, according to Everest, ‘with their minds bowed down under the incubus of superstition’, attributed all fevers to witchcraft, and ignored natural causes. He, on the other hand, while amused by the idleness and absurdity of these doctrines, knew better. Malaria and ‘typhus’ fevers were alike the result of ‘a poisonous influence in the air’ which emanated from moist and ‘unwholesome’ soils. Under the impression that he was contributing to medical research, he examined the different schists and shales, the crystalline sandstone of Sarangapalle, the blue limestones of the Kistna and the porous sandstone of the Godavari in minute detail. These, he believed, were the ‘other circumstances’ which would prove of such serious consequence for his survey.

At the time most of his contemporaries shared these medical views. But, in a nice case of geographical coincidence, Hyderabad would host a further attempt to discover the natural causes of malaria. Seventy years later in a house in Begampet, now a suburb of Hyderabad city, Surgeon Ronald Ross would experiment on the insects of the Kistna-Godavari jungles and trace the malaria parasite to the anopheles mosquito. Everest’s ideas of ‘malarial vapours’ would thereby be exposed as every bit as idle and absurd as those of his followers.

After observing from Sarangapalle, he recrossed the Kistna and rejoined his camp to head north towards the Godavari. On the way he conducted observations to prominent hills like that to which he had earlier sent his signalmen. The survey on which he was engaged was what was known as a ‘secondary triangulation’. It was intended to cover all the country between the Kistna and the Godavari with a network of imaginary triangles whose sides connected intervisible observation posts.

Triangulation means simply ‘triangle-ing’, or conceiving three mutually visible reference points, usually on prominent hills or buildings, as the corners of a triangle. Knowing the exact distance between two of these points, and then measuring at each the angles made by their connecting sight-line with those to the third point, the distance and position of the third point can be established by trigonometry. One of the newly determined sides of this triangle then becomes the base for a second triangle embracing a new reference point whose position is determined in the same way. Another triangle is thus completed and one of its sides becomes the base for a third, And so on. A web, or chain, of triangles results; and Everest’s job was to extend this web of triangulation over the whole Kistna-Godavari region.

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.

Between 1756 and 1766 Company men in Calcutta deployed troops intended for another war with their French rivals to overthrow the local Nawab and establish a claim to the revenues of Bengal. One of the largest and richest provinces in all India, Bengal comprised the modern Bangladesh plus the neighbouring Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It was from northern Bihar’s border with Nepal that British officials first glimpsed the sawtooth profile of the high Himalayas, and it was from this substantial Bengal bridgehead that British forces in northern India would begin their inexorable march up the Gangetic plain towards the old Mughal capital of Delhi.

Meanwhile Madras in the south and Bombay in the west had remained separately governed ‘Presidencies’ (because each had its own British ‘President’, or Governor). Still dedicated to the ancient imperatives of trade, they were much more vulnerable to attack than Bengal, whose officials increasingly regarded them as political liabilities, a feeling which was intensified when in the 1770s Calcutta was named the capital of British India and its Governor was appointed Governor-General over all the British holdings in India.

At the time Madras, although relieved of the French challenge from Pondicherry, confronted an Indian challenge from the expansive ambitions of an upcountry neighbour in the state of Mysore, roughly the modern Karnataka. There ensued no fewer than four Anglo – Mysore Wars, that of the Wellesleys and Lambton being the Fourth. It was also much the most one-sided. The gauntlet first thrown down in the 1760s–80s by Mysore’s Haidar Ali, a formidable campaigner, had come to look more like a glove-puppet when tossed into the ring in the 1790s by his quixotic son Tipu Sultan. By then the British, buoyed by their successes in Bengal, were capable of overwhelming any opposition and happily construed all but abject compliance as punishable defiance.

Tipu Sultan had counted on French support. To this end he had reversed the one-way traffic of colonial diplomacy by despatching an impressive mission to Versailles. It had arrived in France in 1788 only to find Louis XVI desperately trying to stave off his own crisis – the deluge which within a year would plunge France into Revolution. No Franco – Mysore alliance resulted, and in India Tipu now stood alone against the mighty concentration of British power. He remained defiant. Dubbed the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, he delighted in a working model, complete with sound effects, of a tiger devouring an English soldier (now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum). But in the Third Anglo – Mysore War of 1790 it was the tiger who was severely mauled; and in the Fourth of 1799 it remained only to despatch him.

Lambton played his part in this war with distinction. By consulting the stars he was able to avert a disaster when during a night march General Baird mistakenly led his column south towards enemy lines rather than north to safety; and at the great set-piece siege of Tipu’s stronghold at Srirangapatnam he set a rather better example of derring-do than the future ‘Iron Duke’. The war itself, waged with such overwhelming superiority, proved little more than the expected tiger-hunt. It lasted just four months. Srirangapatnam was ravaged with an ardour worthy of Attila the Hun, and Tipu was found slain amongst the ruins.

Rounding up the spoils took longer and was much more gratifying. The territories of Mysore stretched across peninsular India as far as the west, or Malabar, coast and south almost to its tip. Following Calcutta’s example in Bengal, Madras had at last acquired a sizeable hinterland of Indian real estate, most of which would henceforth be directly ruled by the British.

It was while travelling with Arthur Wellesley and his staff across this fine upland country of teak woods and dry pasture, subduing a recalcitrant chief here and plundering a fortress there, that Lambton conceived his great idea.

As when New Brunswick was settled, the country was virtually unknown to the British. To define it, defend it and exploit it, maps were desperately needed, and two survey parties duly took the field in 1799–1800. One concentrated on amassing data about crops and commerce. Its three-volume report, a rambling classic of its kind, would include such gems as an account of cochineal farming – or rather ranching, for the small red spiders from which the dye is extracted required only tracking and culling as they spun their way along the hedgerows, multiplying prodigiously.

The other survey was a more formal affair, similar to surveys already undertaken in Bengal. It was equipped with theodolites for triangulation, with plane-tables for plotting the topographic detail, and with wheeled perambulators and steel chains for ground measurement. Colonel Colin Mackenzie, who conducted it, was another noted mathematician who had originally forsaken his home in the Hebridean Isle of Lewis to visit India in order to study the Hindu system of logarithms. His Mysore Survey was a model of accuracy and the maps which it yielded faithfully delineated the frontiers of the state as well as indicating ‘the position of every town, fort, village … all the rivers and their courses, the roads, the lakes, tanks [reservoirs], defiles, mountains, and every remarkable object, feature, and property of the country’. Additionally, Mackenzie collected information on climate and soils, plants, minerals, peoples and antiquities. The last was his speciality. In the course of the Mysore Survey and other travels, he amassed the largest ever collection of Oriental manuscripts, coins, inscriptions and records. Congesting the archives of both India and Britain, the Mackenzie Collection was still being catalogued a hundred years later.

Under the circumstances, Lambton’s big idea to launch yet a third survey looked like a case of overkill; and with Mackenzie’s efforts promising to make Mysore the best-mapped tract in India, Lambton anticipated official resistance. But as Arthur Wellesley now appreciated, his subordinate was proposing not a map, more a measurement, an exercise not just in geography but in geodesy.

Geodesy is the study of the earth’s shape, and it now appeared that while holed up through a dozen long Canadian winters Lambton had made it his speciality. Studying voraciously, reading and digesting all the leading scientific publications, he had taken a particular interest in the work of William Roy, founder of the British Ordnance Survey, and of Roy’s even more distinguished mentors in France.

Surveying of a basic nature had been among Lambton’s early responsibilities in Canada. Some old maps of New Brunswick actually show a ‘Lambton’s Mountain’. It is not very high and the name, unlike Everest’s, would not stick. Instead it became ‘Big Bald Mountain’ – which was more or less what Lambton would also become. But such surveying, although based on the simple logic of triangulation, was child’s play compared to what the Cassini family in France and William Roy in Scotland and England had been attempting.

Triangulation, together with all its equations and theorems (like that of Pythagoras), is strictly two-dimensional. It assumes that all measurements are being conducted on a plane, or level surface, be it a coastal delta or a sheet of paper. In practice, of course, all terrain includes hills and depressions. But these too can be trigonometrically deduced by considering the surface of the earth in cross-section and composing what are in effect vertical triangles. The angle of elevation between the horizontal and a sight-line to any elevated point can then be measured and, given the distance of the elevated point, its height may be calculated in much the same way as with the angles on a horizontal plane. Thus would all mountain heights be deduced, including eventually those of the Himalayas. Adding a third dimension was not in theory a problem.

However, a far greater complication arose from the fact that the earth, as well as being uneven, is round. This means that the angles of any triangle on its horizontal but rounded surface do not, as on a level plane, add up to 180 degrees. Instead they are slightly opened by the curvature and so come to something slightly more than 180 degrees. This difference is known as the spherical excess, and it has to be deducted from the angles measured before any conclusions can be drawn from them.

For a local survey of a few hundred square miles the discrepancies which were found to result from spherical excess scarcely mattered. They could anyway be approximately allocated throughout the measurement after careful observation of the actual latitude and longitude at the extremities of the survey. This was how Mackenzie operated. But such rough-and-ready reckoning was quite unsatisfactory for a survey of several thousand square miles (since any error would be rapidly compounded); and it was anathema to a survey with any pretensions to great accuracy.

The simplest solution, as proposed by geographers of the ancient world, was to work out a radius and circumference for the earth and deduce from them a standard correction for spherical excess which might then be applied throughout any triangulation. But here arose another and still greater problem. The earth, although round, had been found to be not perfectly round. Astronomers and surveyors in the seventeenth century had reluctantly come to accept that it was not a true sphere but an ellipsoid or spheroid, a ‘sort-of sphere’. Exactly what sort of sphere, what shape of spheroid, was long a matter of dispute. Was it flatter at the sides, like an upright egg, or at the top, like a grapefruit? And how much flatter?

Happily, by Lambton’s day the question of the egg versus the grapefruit had been resolved. In the 1730s two expeditions had been sent out from France, one to the equator in what is now Ecuador and the other to the Arctic Circle in Lapland. Each was to obtain the length of a degree of latitude by triangulating north and south from a carefully measured base-line so as to cover a short arc of about two hundred miles. Then, by plotting the exact positions of the arc’s extremities by astronomical observations, it should be possible to obtain a value for one degree of latitude. Not without difficulty and delay – the equatorial expedition was gone for over nine years – this was done and the results compared. The length of a degree in Ecuador turned out to be over a kilometre shorter than that in Lapland, in fact just under 110 kilometres compared with just over 111. The parallels of latitude were thus closer together round the middle of the earth and further apart at its poles. The earth’s surface must therefore be more curved at the equator and must be flatter at the poles. The grapefruit had won. The earth was shown to be what is called an ‘oblate’ spheroid.

There remained the question of just how much flatter the poles were, or of how oblate the spheroid was; and of whether this distortion was of a regular or consistent form. This was the challenge embraced by the French savants and by William Roy in the late eighteenth century. Instruments were becoming much more sophisticated and expectations of accuracy correspondingly higher. The pioneering series of triangles earlier measured down through France was extended south into Spain and the Balearic Islands and then north to link across the English Channel with Roy’s triangles as they were extended up the spine of Britain. The resultant arc was much the longest yet measured and, despite a number of unexplained inconsistencies, provided a dependable basis for assessing the earth’s curvature in northern latitudes, and so the spherical excess.

Lambton was now proposing to do the same thing in tropical latitudes, roughly midway between the equator and northern Europe. But like his counterparts in Europe, he played down the element of scientific research when promoting his scheme and stressed the practical value that would arise from ‘ascertaining the correct positions of the principal geographical points [within Mysore] upon correct mathematical principles’. The precise width of the Indian peninsula would also be established, a point of some interest since it was now British, and his series of triangles might later be ‘continued to an almost unlimited extent in every other direction’. Local surveys, like Mackenzie’s, would be greatly accelerated if, instead of having to measure their own base-lines, they could simply adopt a side from one of Lambton’s triangles. And into his framework of ‘principal geographic points’ existing surveys could be slotted and their often doubtful orientation in terms of latitude and longitude corrected. Like an architect, he would in effect be creating spaces which, indisputably sound in structure, true in form and correct in position, might be filled and furnished as others saw fit.

He could, however, scarcely forbear to mention that his programme would also fulfil another ‘desideratum’, one ‘still more sublime’ as he put it: namely to ‘determine by actual measurement the magnitude and figure of the earth’. Precise knowledge of the length of a degree in the tropics would not be without practical value, especially to navigators whose charts would be greatly improved thereby. But Lambton was not thinking of sailors. As he tried to explain in long and convoluted sentences, his measurements aimed at ‘an object of the utmost importance in the higher branches of mechanics and physical astronomy’. For besides the question of the curvature of the earth, doubts had surfaced about its composition and, in particular, the effect this might be having on plumb lines. Plumb lines indicated the vertical, just as spirit levels did the horizontal, from which angles of elevation were measured both in astronomy (when observing for latitude and longitude) and in terrestrial surveying (when measuring heights). But inconsistencies noted in the measurement of the European arc had suggested that plumb lines did not always point to the exact centre of the earth. They sometimes seemed to be deflected, perhaps by the ‘attraction’ of nearby hills. If the vertical was variable – as indeed it is – it was vital to know why, where, and by how much. New meridional measurements in hitherto unmeasured latitudes might, hoped Lambton, provide the answers.

Whether, reading all this, anyone in India had the faintest idea what Lambton was on about must be doubtful. But Arthur Wellesley warmly commended his friend’s scientific distinction, Mackenzie strongly urged the idea of a survey which would surely verify his own, and Governor-General Richard Wellesley was not averse to a scheme which, while illustrating his recent conquests, might promote the need for more. The beauty of map-making as an instrument of policy was already well understood; it would play no small part in later developments.

In early 1800, therefore, the third Mysore Survey was approved, if not fully understood, and Lambton immediately began experimenting with instruments and likely triangles. For what was described as ‘a trigonometrical survey of the peninsula’ it was essential first to establish a working value for the length of a degree of latitude in mid-peninsula. Like those expeditions to Lapland and Ecuador, Lambton would therefore begin in earnest by planning a short arc in the vicinity of Madras. It was not, though, until April 1802 that he began to lay out the first base-line which would also serve as the sheet-anchor of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.

The delay was caused by the difficulty of obtaining suitable instruments. Fortuitously a steel measuring chain of the most superior manufacture had been found in Calcutta. Along with a large Zenith Sector (for astronomical observation) and other items, the chain had originally been intended for the Emperor of China. But as was invariably the case, the Macartney Mission of 1793 had received an imperial brush-off and Dr Dinwiddie, who was to have demonstrated to His Celestial Highness the celestial uses of British-made instruments, had found himself obliged to accept the self-same instruments in payment for his services.

Subsequently landing in Calcutta, Dinwiddie had made a handsome living from performing astronomical demonstrations. But he now graciously agreed to sell his props for science, and the chain in particular would serve Lambton well. Comprised of forty bars of blistered steel, each two and a half feet long and linked to the next with a finely wrought brass hinge, the whole thing folded up into the compartments of a hefty teak chest for carriage. Thus packed it weighed about a hundredweight. Both chain and chest are still preserved as precious relics in the Dehra Dun offices of the Survey of India.

A suitable theodolite for the crucial measurement of the angles of Lambton’s primary triangles was more of a problem. A theodolite is basically a very superior telescope mounted in an elaborate structure so that it pivots both vertically about an upright ring or ‘circle’, thus enabling its angle of elevation to be read off the circle’s calibration, and horizontally round a larger horizontal circle so that angles in a plane can be read in the same way. Plummets, spirit levels and adjustment screws are incorporated for the alignment and levelling of the instrument, and micrometers and microscopes for reading the calibration. Additionally, the whole thing has to be rock stable and its engineering, optics and calibration of the highest precision. In fact there were probably only two or three instruments in the world sufficiently sophisticated and dependable to have served Lambton’s purpose. Luckily he had discovered one, almost identical to that used by William Roy, which had just been built by William Cary, a noted English manufacturer. But it had to be shipped from England, a considerable risk in itself for an instrument weighing half a ton and about the size of a small tractor. And unfortunately the ship chosen was unaccountably overdue.

It had still not arrived when Lambton marked out and cleared his Madras base-line. The site chosen was a stretch of level ground between St Thomas’s Mount, a prominent upthrust of rock where the ‘doubting’ apostle was supposed to have once lived in a cave, and another hill seven and a half miles to the south. Situated on the south-east edge of the modern city, the Mount has since been overtaken by development, but the other end of the base-line is still predominantly farmland and scrub as in Lambton’s day. Having cleared and levelled the ground and aligned the chosen extremities, Lambton commenced measurement with Dinwiddie’s hundred-foot chain.

By now he had received from England a second chain, but this was reserved as a standard against which Dinwiddie’s was frequently checked for any stretching from wear or expansion. Expansion and contraction due to temperature change was a major problem. William Roy of the Ordnance Survey, while measuring his first base-line on Hounslow Heath (now largely occupied by Heathrow Airport), had discarded both wooden rods and steel chains before opting for specially made glass tubes. Lambton in India had no such handy alternative; he had to make the best of the chains. When in use, the chain was drawn out to its full hundred feet and then supported and tensioned inside five wooden coffers, each twenty feet long, which slotted cleverly onto tripods fitted with elevating screws for levelling. Each coffer he now equipped with a thermometer which had to be read and recorded at the time of each measurement. By comparison with the other chain, which was kept in a cool vault, a scale of adjustment was worked out for the heat-induced expansion.

But April and May are hot months in Tamil Nadu. The temperature seesawed between 80 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Although Lambton says nothing of the inconvenience of working in such heat, he was worried sick by the variations. After endless experiments he came to the conclusion that a one-degree change of temperature made a difference of 0.00742 of an inch in the hundred-foot length of the chain. But were the locally purchased thermometers sufficiently accurate? And might the temperature not have changed in the interval between marking the measurement and reading the thermometer? Lambton was deeply concerned; measurements and readings were to be taken only at dawn or in the early afternoon when the temperature was as near stable as it got; the thermometers were checked and rechecked, both chains measured and remeasured against a standard bar. Nothing gives a better idea of his passion for shaving tolerances to an infinitesimal minimum than this pursuit of a variable amounting to just seven thousandths of an inch.

To complete the full seven and a half miles of the base-line required four hundred individual measurements with the chain. For each of these measurements the coffers and tripods as well as the chain itself had to be moved forward. It was a slow business even after Lambton’s men had been drilled to do it by numbers. The whole measurement took fifty-seven days, and that did not include the time needed for the construction of end-markers. These were meant to be permanent and so had to combine the durability of a blockhouse with the hairline precision required for registering in the ground the actual mark over which the theodolite would be aligned for triangulation.

And still the all-important theodolite had not arrived. In fact report now had it that the ship in which it was stowed had been captured by the French. This turned out to be true. The ship had been conducted into Port Louis in Mauritius and the great theodolite had there been landed and unpacked. Happily the French authorities, when they realised what it was, rose nobly to the occasion. Repacked and unharmed, it was gallantly forwarded to India and arrived in September ‘along with a complimentary letter to the government of Madras’.

Lambton could at last begin his triangulation. In late September he took angles from his base-line to pre-selected points to the south and west. The short southern series of triangles down the coast was to determine the length of a degree; it took about a year. Then in October 1804 he turned his back on the coast. Heading west and inland, he would carry his triangles right across the peninsula and then begin the north – south series known as the Great Arc.

Over the next twenty years sightings of Lambton in Madras would be of rare occurrence. As in Canada, he seemed again to have disappeared into a continental void; perhaps after six years on the public stage, he was happy enough to slip back into the wings of obscurity. But the government insisted on progress reports and the scientific world awaited his findings. Lambton’s personal papers would disappear with him. Until the young Everest joined him in late 1818 there are few firsthand accounts of his conduct or his establishment. But his reports found their way into the Survey’s files and his scholarly monographs into learned journals. Additionally one of his assistants would pen some recollections; and there is the unexpected evidence of two Lambton children, both born while he was working on the Great Arc. As he later admitted, the years spent in India pursuing his obsession would be the happiest of his life.

THREE Tall Tales from the Hills

When measuring a base-line it was important to discover, as well as its precise length, its height above sea-level. Other heights ascertained in the course of triangulation could then be expressed in terms of this universal standard rather than in terms of individual base-lines. To establish what would in effect be the vertical base of his whole survey Lambton had therefore chosen a site for his base-line which was only three or four miles from the Madras coast and looked, given the lie of the land, to be only a few feet above it. But working out exactly how many was still a matter of some delicacy.

First, on the sands to the south of Madras’ famous Marina Beach, the highest tides had been carefully observed and their maximum reach marked with a flagpole. (In 1802 ‘sea-level’ was construed as high water, although later in the century a mean between high tide and low tide would be adopted as the standard and all altitudes adjusted accordingly.) From this flagpole on the beach the horizontal distance to the grandstand of the Madras racecourse, still today hard by St Thomas’s Mount, was carefully measured by chain; it came to 19,208 feet. Next, from the railings at the top of the grandstand the angle of depression to the flag on the beach was observed by theodolite. Then the process was reversed with the angle of elevation from the beach to the stand being observed.

The repetition was necessary because Lambton was keen to measure the effect of a phenomenon known as refraction, whereby sight-lines become vertically distorted, or bowed, by the earth’s atmosphere. Here was another of those subtle variables which bedevilled geodetic surveying. In particular, refraction would play havoc with long-range observations to distant mountain peaks, although, as George Everest would discover, it also had its advantages.

Having deduced a factor for this refraction, Lambton adjusted his measured angles accordingly. Now, conceiving the sight-line between the flagpole on the beach and the grandstand of the racecourse as the hypotenuse of a rectangular triangle (the right angle being deep beneath the grandstand where a vertical from its railings would intersect with a horizontal from the beach), Lambton had measurements for two of the angles and for one side (the 19,208 feet). Elementary geometry then revealed the length of the other two sides, one of which was the desired elevation of the grandstand above sea-level.

It was important to factor in the height of the flagpole, since its flag, not its base at ground-level, had been observed from the grandstand. Likewise the height of the theodolite’s telescope above the ground. And finally, to get the height of the base-line, it was still necessary to deduct the height of the grandstand above it.

This last was done by measuring the stand itself and then ‘levelling down’ towards the base-line, a comparatively simple process in which the incline was broken into ‘steps’ whose fall was measured by calibrated staves between which horizontal sightings were taken with a telescope equipped with a spirit level. The base-line itself was not perfectly level and had also involved some of this ‘stepping’. So had the original estimate for the distance from the flagpole to the grandstand. All having finally been ‘conducted with as much correctness as the nature of any mechanical process will admit of … I may venture,’ wrote Lambton, ‘to consider it as as perfect a thing of the kind as has yet been executed.’ He then proudly announced that ‘we have 15.753 feet for the perpendicular height of the south extremity of the [base-]line above the level of the sea.’

Not much attention was paid to this calculation at the time. It had taken several days and much careful planning, but a rise of fifteen feet was no great revelation, and the account of its measurement was buried deep in more technical data about the base-line itself. This in turn was buried deep in a large leather-bound volume whose 1805 publication happened to coincide with news of rather more dramatic elevations elsewhere.

Twelve hundred miles away, beyond the northern borders of British Bengal, a surveyor named Charles Crawford had entered the Kingdom of Nepal in the heart of the Himalayas just as Lambton was laying out his base-line. From around Kathmandu Crawford had got a good look at the Himalayas and, according to an 1805 report of his journey, he had become ‘convinced that these mountains are of vast height’.

… bearings were taken of every remarkable peak of the snowy range, which could be seen from more than one station; and consequently the distances of those peaks from the places of observation were … determined by the intersection of the bearings and by calculation. Colonel Crawford also took altitudes from which the height of the mountains might be computed and which gave, after due allowance for refraction, the elevation of conspicuous peaks.

This sounded most promising. It looked as if Crawford had made the first serious attempt at measuring the Himalayas. Sadly expectations, raised to the snowline in one paragraph, were promptly dashed to the plains in the next.

But the drawings and journal of this survey have been unfortunately lost.

The loss might have been recouped by another writer who happened to have cited Crawford’s original findings, but he had done so only in a tantalising telegraphese: ‘Double altitudes observed by sextant – allowances for refraction – bearing – computed distance – height by trigonometry – additional height for curvature of the earth – Result, 11,000–20,000 feet above stations of observation.’

The method of operation remained unclear. How, for instance, had the distance of the peaks from Crawford’s points of observation been ‘computed’? Clearly not in the manner of Lambton constructing his triangle between the beach and the grandstand; but if by horizontal triangulation, this required a base of precisely known length between two points of observation at least twenty miles apart. Crawford’s base was rumoured to have been less than a quarter of a mile, and of doubtful accuracy.

Moreover, ‘heights above stations of observation’ were useless without knowing how high such stations of observation were above sea-level. This information was not given, and an inferred height of about 4,500 feet was mere conjecture. Sea-level deep in the mountains would remain conjectural for the next fifty years, another of the many imponderables which dogged Himalayan observations.

Nevertheless the report put paid to one common misconception. The Himalayas were not a line of active volcanoes. The plumes of smoke which appeared to stream from their summits were simply windblown snow. Additionally, Crawford’s attempted measurements represented an important advance on the guesswork which had preceded them. During the next two decades, while Lambton laboured at the triangles of his Great Arc far away in the tropical south, Crawford’s Himalayan claims would trigger a wave of both curiosity and controversy in respect of the snowy mountains which, swagged below the Tibetan plateau, defiantly described a great arc of their own along India’s northern frontier.

The existence of the Himalayas had been known to the ancients. Ptolemy, the first-century astronomer and geographer, had called them the ‘Imaus’ and ‘Emodi’, both words presumably derived from the Sanskrit (H)ima-alaya, or ‘Abode of Snow’. He showed them as a continuation of the Caucasus mountains running east from the Caspian Sea. Subsequent travellers, like Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, usually trod some version of the ancient Silk Route which, though skirting the north of the western Himalayas, left Tibet and the central Himalayas well to the south. But Tibet had been regularly penetrated in the seventeenth century by Jesuit missionaries from India, and the first convincing account of the mountains comes from one of their eighteenth-century successors. This was the Italian Ippolito Desideri who in 1715 departed Kashmir for Lhasa and was horrified to find, even in late May, the snow deep on the trail and the mountains ‘the very picture of desolation, horror and death itself’. ‘They are piled one on top of another,’ he wrote, ‘and so close as scarcely to leave room for the torrents which course from their heights and crash with such deafening noise against the rocks as to appal the stoutest traveller.’

Fifty years later the eruption of British arms into Bengal which presaged the beginnings of the Raj brought more sober appraisals. In the 1760s Lord Clive had commissioned Major James Rennel to survey the territories which, as Colonel Robert Clive, he had so unexpectedly seized. Rennel, the father of the Bengal Survey and its first Surveyor-General, travelled north to the frontier with Bhutan and thence noted several peaks which were snow-covered throughout the year. One in particular stood out; it may have been Chomo Lhari. Although he made no attempt to measure it and considered the hills as outside his field of operations, Rennel did alert the world to the possibility that the Himalayas were ‘among the highest mountains of the old hemisphere’.

Curiously, their main rival as Eurasia’s highest summit was thought to be not Turkey’s Mount Ararat (16,946 feet) nor France’s Mont Blanc (15,781 feet), but ‘the peak of Tenerife’ (12,195 feet). While other quite prominent heights remained uncertain, mainly because they lay so far from the sea and could not therefore be assessed against sea-level, that on the island in the Canaries conveniently rose straight from the Atlantic and lay on a busy sea-route round Africa. Mariners usually possessed sextants, and so the Tenerife peak had been much observed. But at the then accepted height of 15,000 feet, it was still overvalued by almost a quarter. Such was the difficulty of measuring even convenient altitudes.

Rennel had made comparison only with ‘the highest mountains of the old hemisphere’. The new hemisphere, or New World, was a different matter altogether. Already the Andes in particular were known to be exceptionally high. Courtesy of that French expedition to measure a degree of latitude on the equator, the peak of Chimborazo in Ecuador had been correctly measured to within a few feet of its 20,700 above sea-level, and so was reckoned the world’s highest. That Bhutan’s Chomo Lhari was in fact over three thousand feet higher than Ecuador’s Chimborazo would have surprised Rennel.

One of Rennel’s most distinguished contemporaries was less reticent and actually knew the name Chomo Lhari, or ‘Chumalary’. Sir William Jones, a judge in the Calcutta High Court, was unquestionably the greatest scholar England ever sent to India. Dr Johnson had hailed him as ‘the most enlightened of men’, Edward Gibbon as ‘a genius’. Linguist, poet, historian, philologist and naturalist, Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, whose publications would include Lambton’s occasional reports, and he led the field in almost every branch of Oriental studies. It was thanks to Jones that the height of the Himalayas had been added to the agenda of Orientalist research.

‘Just after sun-set on the 5th of October 1784,’ writes Jones, ‘I had a distinct view from Bhagilpoor [Bhagalpur on the Ganges in Bihar] of Chumalary peak … From the most accurate calculations that I could make, the horizontal distance at which it was distinctly visible must be at least 244 British miles.’ This extraordinary sighting argued strongly for an immense elevation; but Jones also had the advantage of having corresponded with two men who had actually crossed the mountains. They had been sent on separate trade missions to Tibet and had followed an existing and not especially challenging route through Bhutan. But from their reports of latitudes observed and distances gauged, Jones correctly surmised that the mountain wall was many miles thick as well as high. The highest peaks lay well back from the immediate horizon ‘on the second or third ridge’. And despite Rennel’s caution, after careful study of these and other reports Jones was prepared to chance his arm. He was in fact the first to declare that there was now ‘abundant reason to think that we saw from Bhagilpoor the highest mountains in the world, without excepting the Andes’.

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