A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  The course of the Brahmaputra had long been a subject of dispute among European geographers. ‘This river must needs have a very long course before it enters the Bengal Provinces,’ James Rennell had written in 1788, ‘since 400 miles from the sea it is twice as big as the Thames.’ He was not prepared to go along with the current popular belief, much in favour on the Continent, that the Brahmaputra’s headwaters lay south of the Himalayas and that the Tibetan Tsangpo was the same river as the Burmese Irrawaddy. There was, he believed, ‘the strongest presumptive proof possible of the Sanpoo and Burrumpooter being one and the same river.’ He was equally sure that positive proof could be obtained only by actually tracing the river all the way to its source – ‘a circumstance unlikely ever to happen to any Europeans or their dependants’. Two centuries later that circumstance still seems just as unlikely as it did in Rennell’s day.

  Shortly before the military column began its advance into Assam a remarkable young man in the Bengal Civil Service had been appointed Agent to the Governor-General for the North-East Frontier. His name was David Scott and, at the age of twenty-seven, he had already put in no less than eight years as Collector and Magistrate of several districts in the Bengal Pres idency. Like the best of his contemporaries during this period he was an all-rounder, a skilled administrator with an open and inquiring mind and a zest for action. Very characteristically, he took up his appointment by taking a dramatic short-cut from the plains of Bengal to the Assam valley that took him through the Khasi hills. This was a diplomatic as well as a geographical coup, for the Khasi hill tribes were then just as warlike and wary of strangers as any of the other Mongolian tribal groups of Assam.

  Scott found the Assam field force to be seriously hampered by a lack of accurate information about the surrounding country. He asked the Surveyor-General to send up a survey party as soon as possible and in the meantime set about recruiting his own team from the officers in the column. Two junior lieutenants of artillery soon came to his notice: Philip Burlton, aged twenty-one, and Richard Bedingfield, aged twenty-two, both former cadets of the Company’s military academy at Addiscombe. Burlton, who was from a well-to-do Leicestershire family and had been to Winchester, had been saddled with the reputation of a rebel. While stationed at the artillery depot at Dum Dum (near the site of the present Calcutta Airport) he had invited the editor of a Calcutta newspaper, a notorious critic of government policies, to dine at the mess. For this breach of regimental good taste Burlton had been dispatched upcountry to Assam, where he and another involuntary exile, Lieutenant Bedingfield, found themselves in charge of two howitzers and two 12-pounder carronades as the field force advanced on the old Ahom capital of Rungpore.

  In January 1825, with the Burmese invaders in retreat, both volunteered for exploration and survey work. In fact, Richard Bedingfield had already provided Scott with measurements of the discharge of the Brahmaputra that showed it to be a mightier river than the Ganga. However, for the next few months he was forced to stay with the field force as it chased the Burmese across the Assam valley. From information gained from captured prisoners he was able to put together the first cohesive map of Upper Burma.

  Bedingfield’s fellow gunner was given a more challenging commission, which was to explore the ‘perfect blank’ that lay upriver from Rungpore. Making his way up the Brahmaputra in a Bengali country boat by a laborious combination of sailing, poling and towing from the bank, Philip Burlton eventually came to an area about ninety miles upriver where the Brahmaputra broke up into a complex of several tributaries (see inset, Map B). On the north bank of what appeared to be the main tributary there was a small settlement called Sadiya, with a population of about three thousand. Today the town no longer exists, having been swept away by the floods that followed the Assam earthquake of 1950, but its position had always been precarious, since it was sited on one of the banks of sand and debris known as chapris that came and went as the watercourses swung back and forth across the Assam valley. With every monsoon new barriers of vegetation and silt were piled up and new channels gouged out of the plain. In time these chapris became overgrown with tall elephant grass and dotted with simul trees, providing a natural home for tiger, water-buffalo, swamp deer, pig, elephant and the stubby Indian rhino. Then came the fishermen, with their coarse-thatch bashas, and finally more permanent settlements, sited usually where there was a convenient ghat.

  Its location made Sadiya the obvious base for the exploration of this furthest corner of Assam – and for its future administration, now that the Company had decided to maintain its hold on this newly-liberated land. Just as Peshawar was the lynchpin of the North-West Frontier in later years so, in its own more modest way, did Sadiya become the focal point of the North-East Frontier. It was where the Hindu culture of the plains gave way to the tribal and largely animist culture of the surrounding hills. In its crowded bazaar Burlton soon found himself face to face with representatives of a dozen or more ‘rude hill races’, people very different from any that he had hitherto come across in India.

  The two largest groups in the area were the Mishmis and the Abors. The first inhabited the mountains and dense rainforests north and east of Sadiya and were, according to Burlton’s fellow-explorer in later years, Richard Wilcox, ‘wild-looking but inoffensive, rather dirty people’ who rarely wore more than a G-string and whose most distinctive ornament was an earring ‘nearly an inch in diameter, made of thin silver plate, the lobes of the ears having been gradually stretched and enlarged from the age of childhood to receive this singular ornament.’ They were also great smokers from an early age, rarely being seen without a bamboo pipe in their mouths.

  West of the Mishmis was the tribe that the Assamese called Abors or ‘unknown savages’, a dozen or so quarrelsome clans tightly packed along both banks of a river known locally as the Dihong, and said to be ‘very averse to receiving strangers’. The men habitually wore arms or armour; cane helmets and breast-plates, short stabbing or throwing spears, long swords known as daos and crossbows with arrows dipped in poisonous concoctions of aconite and deadly nightshade. ‘A very rude, barbarous people of open manners and warlike habits’ was how a Political Officer chose to describe them two decades later:

  They appear to be descendants of the Tarter race and are large, uncouth, athletic, fierce-looking, dirty fellows. Like all the hill tribes of Assam, the Abors are void of beards: invariably plucking them, and leaving only scanty moustaches. They wear three kinds of helmets, one of the plain cane, and others trimmed with an edging of bear’s skin, or covered with a thick yellow skin of species of deer. A more formidable covering of the head could scarcely be worn. The dress of the Abor chiefs consists of Thibetian woollen cloaks, and a simple piece of cotton cloth, about a foot square, which is passed between the legs and suspended by a string around the waist: but not so effectively as to screen their persons from exposure every time they sit down. Of delicacy, however, the Abors are as void as they are of cleanliness.

  Soon after coming to Sadiya, Burlton learned from local Hindus that the true source of the Brahmaputra was said to be close at hand. It was believed to be located at a lake called Brahmakund sited at the head of the River that ran past Sadiya, the Lohit. When Burlton set out to explore this eastern branch of the Brahmaputra, however, his cumbersome country boat could only get a few miles beyond Sadiya; the Lohit was far too shallow for its deep draught. Below and west of Sadiya there were two other rivers that flowed into the Brahmaputra – the Dihong and the Dibang. Despite local Hindu opinion, these appeared to Burlton to look much more promising. When he returned to the Agent’s headquarters he was able to report to Scott that one of these rivers, the Dihong, carried much more water than either the Dibang or the Lohit and that: ‘most probably this branch is the continuation of the Sanpo.’

  The British advance into Burma and Assam had greatly stimulated public interest in these two regions and the controversy about the sources of the Brahmaputra and the Irrawaddy was then at its height. Addressin
g the Royal Asiatic Society in London, the German geographer and orientalist Heinrich Julius von Klaproth had expressed his firm conviction that the ‘Sanpoo, or River of Tibet’ was connected with the Irrawaddy or ‘River of Ava’. John Hodgson, now Surveyor-General, dismissed Klaproth as a ‘continental coxcomb’ but it was clear that in London and Calcutta as well as on the Continent opinion was swinging in Klaproth’s favour.

  The evidence that David Scott now held indicated that the Brahmaputra was an extremely large river and that it entered India from the north. But its connection with the Tsangpo had still to be proved beyond doubt, and so when the official survey team arrived in Assam in answer to Scott’s request it was directed to regard the source of the Brahmaputra as its chief goal. Its officer-in-charge, Captain James Bedford, was ordered to ‘unravel the mystery regarding its fountainhead’ and to make his way as far upstream as he could.

  When he received his orders to take on the survey of Assam, James Bedford was engaged in revenue surveying in Sahaswan in Upper Bengal. He had made Sahaswan his home and was well established there with a bibi and two natural sons who would later follow him into the Survey of India. By all accounts, he was a solid and able worker but temperamentally more of an office-wallah than a frontiersman. Accompanying him as his assistant was a young surveyor named Richard Wilcox. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries in the Company’s service, Wilcox was not from the landed gentry; his father was a woollen draper from the Strand. But whatever he lacked in his family connections he made up for in talent. Already at twenty-two he was regarded by his employers as ‘one of the cleverest young men we have’ and was being marked out as someone who would go far.

  These two officers began their work in Assam in the early summer of 1824. At first they accompanied the Assam field force as it harried the retreating Burmese through the jungles, then worked independently, each with his own escort of sepoys. But for Richard Wilcox there was one constant source of grievance: his superior officer made it plain from the start that he alone was to be the first to explore ‘the upper parts of the Burrumpooter’. One of the very few compensations of working on this dangerously unhealthy frontier was the greater opportunity for recognition and advancement that the survey offered, and evidently Bedford was not prepared to forgo or share the opportunity with his junior. Yet, while he prevented his assistant from going upriver, Bedford himself made little effort to do any exploring there himself. After more than a year had passed without any signs of action, Wilcox finally went over his head and complained to the Agent to the Governor-General.

  David Scott immediately wrote to the Surveyor-General calling for positive action. It was a private letter but unmistakably a threatening one. Scott suggested that the young Wilcox be given his head; he was ‘quite zealous in the cause and very desirous of being allowed to explore the country north of the mouth of the Dewung [Dihong]. I fear he will not be permitted to do this, or anything else worth notice, whilst under Captain Bedford, there being some sort of jealousy on the Captain’s part.’ The Surveyor-General was wise enough to take a hint and Richard Wilcox was immediately placed on special duty to trace the Brahmaputra to its source.

  When the news came through to Assam, Bedford was at Rungpore while his assistant was downriver at Goalpara. Still determined not to be outdone, Captain Bedford ordered Wilcox first to explore the Subansiri river, another of the main river’s northern tribu taries, while he himself set off to explore the Dihong tributary. Bedford moved upriver at such speed that he took with him only two sepoys by way of escort, apparently quite unaware that the Dihong river flowed through the territory of the most aggressive of all the Assamese hill tribes.

  When Captain Bedford’s boats approached the first outlying Abor settlement on the Dihong river – sited a few miles below the first range of foothills at a crossing-point known as Pasighat – he found his landing opposed by a large group of heavily armed warriors. ‘I was received by the villagers in arms,’ he reported bluntly in a letter to the Surveyor-General. ‘All my endeavours to persuade this mountain tribe to permit my further progress proved unavailing – although the water would have admitted my further progress.’ Having failed to make any progress up the Dihong he turned his attentions to the second major tributary, the Dibang. But here too his hopes were foiled by the ‘prejudices and fears of the inhabitants’; abandoning the attempt he made his way to Sadiya, where he was joined in due course first by Richard Wilcox and then by Philip Burlton.

  For the two younger men this proved to be a most happy and fruitful encounter; the Wykehamist and the draper’s son soon found that they had a common interest in the subject of the Brahmaputra’s source. They both believed the river to be linked to the Tsangpo by the Dihong so they decided to work together to establish the necessary proof. It was some time, however, before they could put their partnership to the test, principally because Captain Bedford was still treating the Dihong-Dibang area as his own special preserve. In his reports written over the next few months Richard Wilcox twice refers to plans to explore promising overland routes leading towards the upper reaches of these rivers that he and Philip Burlton had been forced to abandon ‘in deference to Capt. Bedford’s wishes’.

  This absurd situation was finally resolved by James Bedford’s decision to retire from the field. In 1826 he applied for transfer back to his original revenue survey work and then made one final exploratory boat journey up the Lohit tributary. His intention was to reach the fabled lake associated with the Brahmaputra, the Brahmakund – and, indeed, he did find such a place. It turned out to be no more than an insignificant ox-bow lake beside the Lohit river that attracted a small number of Hindu pilgrims to its banks every year; hardly the prize that he had hoped to secure. In January 1827, after a long recuperation, Bedford was back with his family and his revenue surveys in Sahaswan.

  Although the field was now clear for Wilcox and Burlton they knew very well that there would be no progress through tribal territory until the inveterate hostility shown towards outsiders by the Abors and, to a lesser extent, by the Mishmis, had been overcome. While Burlton was away from Sadiya on a short spell of military duty Wilcox set himself to learn as much as he could about the languages and the culture of the Abor and Mishmi tribes in the surrounding hills. He evidently made some progress, since he was able to persuade one of the Abor chiefs to meet and parley with David Scott during the latter’s visit to Sadiya in 1826.

  Encouraged by his success Richard Wilcox decided to put his new-gained knowledge to the test by making an extended trek deep into Mishmi country. This was, he admitted on his return, an error of judgment on his part and one that he was lucky to survive unscathed. His journey took him more than fifty miles up the Lohit river beyond the point reached by Captain Bedford a year earlier, and he turned back only when it had become obvious that he and his party were in imminent danger of attack. Warned by a friendly Mishmi that an assault on his camp would be made at dawn Wilcox had quietly withdrawn his men during the night. He was told afterwards that ‘an hour or two before daylight the assembled warriors had invested our position, and concealing themselves in the jungle, while advancing from all sides, they at last rushed upon our huts, and to their infinite disappointment found them empty.’ Wilcox was not exaggerating the dangers of his journey; the next Europeans to penetrate as far into Mishmi territory – two French missionaries in 1854 – were attacked and killed.

  Towards the end of the year Wilcox was rejoined in Sadiya by his ‘staunch friend’ James Burlton, and together they prepared to launch their first major expedition into the Abor hills. They received unexpected encouragement from the Abors themselves in the form of a round stone – ‘an emblem of the stability of their friendly inclination’ – sent from the village of Membu. Greatly cheered by this gesture Wilcox and Burlton set off for Membu in January 1827, taking with them a generous assortment of gifts as well as a modest escort of fifteen musketeers.

  They found Membu to be made up of some one hundred houses per
ched on a hillside. In the middle of the village was the morang, a large long-house perched on stilts which served as ‘a hall of audience or debate, as a place of reception for strangers, and as a house for the bachelors of the village generally.’ They were expected by their hosts to lodge here but, as Richard Wilcox recorded in his Memoir, ‘the effect upon our olfactory nerves of certain appendages of convenience was so appalling that we made good a very hasty retreat from it.’ Pitching a tent nearby Wilcox and Burlton tried to settle down for the night but found themselves plagued by curious Abors determined to make the most of this brief visitation. ‘Our situation was worse than that of unfortunate wild beasts,’ Wilcox lamented, ‘inasmuch as that we had not the advantage of cages and bars to keep our annoyers at arm’s length.’

  The next day they returned to the morang, to distribute their gifts as best they could and to listen to a great many speeches. However, their patience and generosity went unrewarded: ‘It suffices now to say that our visit was not attended with any advantageous result; they would not consent to our proceeding further by land, and they assured us of the utter impossibility of our going on by water.’ Greatly disappointed, they led their men back to their boats moored at Pasighat. Here the Abors seemed a little friendlier so they decided to follow the river as far up into the hills as they could go. When armed warriors blocked their further progress along the bank they took to a small dugout canoe that they had brought with them and in this way they were able to negotiate a few more miles of the river. Eventually they were brought to a halt by a rapid ‘too formidable to ascend and promising destruction to the boat on return’. Before they turned back Wilcox scrambled over the rocks along the bank and saw above the rapid a long reach of undisturbed water leading away into the hills in a westerly direction.