In February 1828 Wilcox bade farewell to his friend and began a slow journey down the Brahmaputra. Hodgson was anxious that he should use this opportunity to complete the mapping of the river that Burlton had started three years earlier, and as a result nearly a year was to pass before Wilcox was able to begin his sea voyage, on a vessel bound for Dutch Batavia.
Some months after Wilcox’s departure Philip Burlton was joined in the Khasi hills by his fellow-artilleryman, Richard Bedingfield, who under Wilcox’s direction had been surveying large areas of the north bank of the Brahmaputra west of the Dihong. His health had also broken down and so in March 1829 he, too, took up residence at the Nongkhlao bungalow, together with Burlton and David Scott.
Ever since Scott had first entered their territory four years earlier relations between the Khasis and the British had been extremely cordial, so much so that Scott had asked for and secured their permission to open a second sanatorium in the Khasi hills, to be built on the cliffs of Cherrapunji overlooking the plains of Bengal. Suddenly, and without any apparent warning, the Khasis’ attitude changed. It was later put about that one of the Bengalis working on the new road had been mocking the Khasis about the ease with which they gave way to British demands. But whatever the immediate cause, the Khasis at Nongkhlao decided to repudiate their treaty with Scott and to expel the British before they could make further inroads.
On the morning of 4 April the occupants of the Nongkhlao sanatorium woke to find the bungalow surrounded by some five hundred armed Khasi warriors. Fortunately for David Scott he had set off for Cherrapunji only the day before, so it was Richard Bedingfield, the older of the two officers, who went out to talk to the crowd. According to the account published in the Bengal Observer, he was given no opportunity to find out what the disturbance was all about:
They immediately seized him, and after tying his hands behind his back and cutting the tendons of his legs, commenced shooting at him with their arrows. It is said that he told them, if it was his life they wanted, to kill him outright at once, which they accordingly did and, cutting off his head, placed it on a rock.
The killing of Bedingfield was over before Burlton could do anything to prevent it, but he quickly mustered a few sepoys who were quartered in the bungalow and successfully repelled the first Khasi attack. His little party held out ‘in gallant style’ for the whole of that day and the night. But at dawn on the following day the Khasis managed to set the roof of the bungalow alight with firebrands and the defenders were forced to make a break for it. Burlton and his men charged out in a body and by keeping up a constant fire, were able to hold the Khasis at a distance. They began to make their way along the road towards Cherrapunji, still keeping together and successfully preventing the Khasis from loosing off their arrows at close range. Eventually their luck ran out; a sudden shower of rain came down and wet their powder, making their firearms useless. One of the first to be slaughtered was Philip Burlton:
He was in the act of extracting an arrow from his wrist when he was cut down, being in an exhausted state from the intense exertions he had made, and his previous ill-health.
News of the Nongkhlao massacre soon reached Calcutta and perhaps it was no coincidence that Richard Wilcox finally sailed for Batavia on 30 April, within a fortnight of hearing of Burlton’s death. He never went back to Assam but, after returning to Bengal at the end of the year, contented himself with finishing his survey work on the lower Brahmaputra. So, over the years, he came to be closely identified with this river; the Brahmaputra became very much his river, just as the Ganga had once been Robert Colebrooke’s.
David Scott died suddenly at Cherrapunji sanatorium in August 1831, having regained the trust of the Khasis and won for himself a reputation for fair dealing that would keep his name alive among that warm-hearted people for many years. With the retirement of John Hodgson in 1829, Richard Wilcox found a new patron in his successor, George Everest, who recruited him for his monumental triangulation scheme known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Everest regarded Wilcox as the brightest star in his department, and when James Herbert, then the Deputy Surveyor-General, followed his old friend John Hodgson into retirement in December 1831, it was Lieutenant Wilcox whom Everest asked for as his new deputy. ‘He is the very person whom I should seek as a really efficient assistant,’ he wrote in his proposal.
The Court of Directors refused to accept Everest’s nomination. Their reason for rejecting Wilcox was that they considered him, at the age of twenty-nine, to be too young – and besides there was another candidate to whom the post should go by virtue of his long service. After six months of dispute Richard Wilcox was informed that the job had gone to the Superintendent of the Sahaswan Survey, Captain James Bedford.
At this point in his career Richard Wilcox seems to have lost something of the drive and brilliance that had characterized his earlier ventures. He stayed with George Everest’s Trigono metrical Survey for another three years and then resigned from the Survey of India to become official astronomer to the Nawab of Oude at Lucknow. He was highly paid and had at his disposal the most advanced and best equipped observatory outside Europe, but it was hardly the distinguished position that his talents and his early years had promised. When he died in Cawnpore in October 1848 the work of the observatory ceased and all Wilcox’s records were put away into one of the Nawab’s storerooms and forgotten.
Shortly after the recapture of Lucknow that ended the siege of 1857 a visitor from the Survey of India walked through the ruins of the observatory. He found some of Wilcox’s instruments together with all his papers and observations piled up in a heap in a corner of a cellar. ‘The greater portion of the materials are eaten up by insects,’ he reported. ‘Whatever remain are quite useless.’
6
‘The Queerest, Coolest Fish at Rugby’:
Edmund Smyth and the Pundits
The Rawats of Johar valley claim that their ancestors were part of the large-scale Hindu exodus from Rajputana following the invasion of Mohammed Ghori in the twelfth century. In about 1680 a leading member of the clan named Hiru Dham Singh went on a pilgrimage to Kailas-Manasarovar. He took with him a large party of retainers and fellow-pilgrims and while he was in Tibet he joined with local forces to help drive out Chinese marauders. For this service he was rewarded by the Lhasa government with a trade agreement that gave him a virtual monopoly of the cross-border trade with Gartok in Western Tibet – an advantage that was exploited to the full by his descendants right up to the early 1950s, when the Chinese finally closed the borders.
On his way back from that eventful pilgrimage Hiru Dham Singh entered a valley east of Nanda Devi which he later occupied and made the home of his clan. Here in the Johar valley the Rawats traded and prospered, living in the lower villages during the winter months and moving up in early summer to Milam, a small settlement below the 17,500-foot Unta Dhura pass leading indirectly into Tibet (see Map A). They mixed and intermarried with people of Tibetan origin called Bhotias or Shokpas already settled in that region but maintained a dominant position as a ruling caste. As effective rulers of the valley and leaders among the Trans-Himalayan traders they maintained a position of supremacy during the period when Gurkhas overran Garhwal and Kumaon and when the British succeeded them in 1816.
An Englishman who could claim with good reason to know these Bhotia peoples of Kumaon and Garhwal ‘perhaps better than anyone else’ was Kumaon’s first Education Officer, Edmund Smyth. It was he who first recognized their unusual qualities as the go-betweens of the Central Himalayas:
The Bhotias have Hindu names and call themselves Hindus but they are not recognized as such by the Orthodox Hindus of the plains. While in Tibet they seem glad enough to shake off their Hinduism and become Buddhists, or anything you like. They pass their lives in trade with Tibet and they are the only people allowed by the Tibetan authorities to enter the country for purposes of trade. From June to November they are constantly going over the passes, bringing the produce of Tibe
t (borax, salt, wool, gold dust, also ponies) and taking back grain of all kinds, English goods, chiefly woollens and other things. The goods are carried on the backs of sheep, goats, ponies, yaks and jhoopoos (a cross between the Tibetan yak and the hill cow). Their villages are situated at an elevation of from 10,000 to 13,000 feet, at the foot of the passes leading into Tibet, though only occupied from June to November in each year. During the remainder of the year they move down to the foot of the hills and sell their produce to the Buniahs or traders.
The first British contact with the Johar Bhotias had been made in 1812 when Moorcroft and Hearsey met the Rawat brothers, Deb Singh and Bir Singh, in Niti; but the first Englishman to penetrate the Johar valley was William Webb, during the five years of his lonely survey of Kumaon. In 1830 the first Commissioner of Kumaon, G. W. Traill, made a spectacular entry into the valley across the south-eastern shoulder of the Nanda Devi massif, over what is still known today as ‘Traill’s pass’. Traill stayed on as Commissioner for nearly twenty years, earning himself the unofficial title of the ‘King of Kumaon’ and preserving the friendship of the Bhotia traders by a policy of benevolent non-interference.
After the Anglo-Nepalese war the focus of British attention had shifted away from the Himalayas to the fertile land of the five rivers, the independent state of the Punjab ruled over by the old Sikh warrior Ranjit Singh. With his death in 1839 the usual internecine struggles for power began – exactly the sort of unsettled border situation that the Company deplored. An unwise raid across the Sutlej in December 1845 provided the necessary opportunity for rectifying the position and within a couple of weeks a British victory at Sobraon brought the first Anglo-Sikh war to a close.
During this same period there was an equally ill-judged Sikh military incursion into Western Tibet. In 1841 an army of Sikhs and Dogras from Ladakh and Kashmir advanced across the plateau, scattering an undisciplined Tibetan army and establishing itself at a winter camp on a knoll overlooking Taklakar, the district capital of Purang, two days’ march south of lake Manasarovar. Tibetan records state that it was the Tibetan winter rather than their own forces that finally destroyed the invaders. Caught in an unusually heavy fall of snow the half-frozen Sikhs were chased for five days up the Purang valley, losing some three thousand men who were rounded up and beheaded. Among them was the Sikh commander, whose body was chopped up in the traditional Tibetan manner with portions of his flesh being distributed to every house in the area to be kept as talismans. In the circumstances, it was hardly a good moment for any foreigner to think of entering Tibet unbidden.
The first to do so after the Sikh invasion was Henry Strachey, a lieutenant in the 66th Bengal Native Infantry stationed on the coast at Chittagong and a member of one of the most outstanding and influential British families in India. During the hot weather of 1846, ostensibly on sick leave but determined to visit the holy lakes and undeterred by a new government ban on travel across India’s northern border, he made his way to Milam, where he met Moorcroft’s old friend and protector, Deb Singh Rawat. On his advice Strachey made no attempt to cross the Unta Dhura but made his entry into Tibet by way of a less well-guarded crossing further to the east, the Lampiya Dhura pass. Like Moorcroft and Hearsey before him, Henry Strachey disguised himself as a Hindu pilgrim – and regretted only that he had not dyed his three pairs of pyjamas to a ‘dirt colour’ to match those worn by his Bhotia companions.
Theirs was a small party and it travelled fast and inconspicuously, keeping off the well-known paths and making elaborate detours to avoid contact with nomads and other travellers. Five days of hard marching brought them to the south-west corner of Rakas Tal, the lesser of the two lakes, and to the point where – according to Hearsey’s map – the Sutlej took its source. Here, to Strachey’s surprise, he found water flowing into the lake instead of out of it. Moving northwards along the western shoreline he went on to discover that there was no real channel of water leading out of Rakas Tal, merely a seepage from its north-western corner across marshy ground – which Hearsey and Moorcroft had failed to see.
Strachey was even more surprised when he began to cross the isthmus between the two lakes and found a large stream a hundred feet wide and three feet deep running from east to west along a well-defined channel between the two lakes. This was undoubtedly the outlet from Manasarovar – and yet Moorcroft, Hearsey and their pundits had all walked along the western rim of Manasarovar without finding any such outlet.
It was one of the Bhotias who provided an answer to this curious discrepancy – and Moorcroft’s own description of his walk along the shore that confirmed it. Blocking the Manasarovar entrance to the channel was a raised bar of shingle through which the water from the lake percolated. Moorcroft had noted this raised bank of shingle but because he and his companions had all stuck to the shore they had failed to see what lay on the other side – and so had failed to link the Sutlej to its original source, the Manasarovar lake.
But not all Strachey’s attentions were fixed on the two lakes. A few miles to the north was the most beautiful peak he had ever seen, ‘a king of mountains, full of majesty’, which he estimated to be 21,000 feet high:
the general height of it, I estimate to be 4250 feet above the plain, but from the west end the peak rises some 1500 feet higher, in a cone or dome rather, of paraboloidal shape; the general figure is not unlike that of Nanda Devi, as seen from Almora. The peak and the upper part of the eastern ridge were well covered with snow, which contrasted beautifully with the deep purple colour of the mass of mountain below; the stratification of the rock is strongly marked in successive ledges that catch the snow falling from above, forming irregular bands of alternate white and purple: one of these bands more marked than the rest encircles the base of the peak, and this, according to the Hindu tradition, is the mark of the cable with which the Rakshasa [demons] attempted to drag the throne of Siva from its place.
Instead of retracing his footsteps back along the high ground that formed the watershed between the Sutlej and Karnali river-systems, Strachey then went south into the Purang valley, scene of the Sikh defeat four years earlier. Travelling by night whenever possible he and his party slipped past the fort and the regional capital at Taklakar and made their way unchallenged up the other side of the valley and back across the border.
It was a bold venture that paid off handsomely, winning Strachey the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society as well as a place on a British mission to Ladakh. Two years later, in 1848, it was the turn of his younger brother, Richard Strachey, to make a name for himself. Of the many Stracheys who served in India over five generations Richard was perhaps the most talented; although trained as an engineer in the Bombay Army he later became an outstanding botanist and geologist. He too came to Kumaon on what was officially designated sick leave and made his own brief excursion to lake Manasarovar, taking as his guide Deb Singh Rawat’s son, Mani Singh. His findings confirmed that there was a channel between the lakes, which he drew and measured with characteristic accuracy. He also established the position and height of Mount Kailas; later topographical surveys showed his figure of 22,000 feet to be just 28 feet on the low side.
After the Strachey brothers came the Schlagintweits, three Bavarian geographers sent to India at the request of Baron Humboldt and received with a marked lack of enthusiasm by the Survey of India. In 1855 Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit went up into the Johar valley and found old Deb Singh Rawat not only alive but still in possession of a chit of thanks signed by William Moorcroft and inscribed ‘Northern foot of the Himachal Mountains near Daba in Chinese Tartary, August 25th 1812’. On his advice they recruited three members of his family for their expedition: Mani Singh Rawat and two younger cousins of his – Dolpa, described as being ‘full of courage, energy and devotion’, and the ‘well disposed and intelligent’ Nain Singh Rawat. Nain Singh was then twenty-five years old, a hillman very much in the traditional Bhotia mould, short and stocky in stature, stubborn and reserved in character. A
ll three Bhotias accompanied the Schlagintweits north to the lakes and on to Gartok and a year later went with them to Ladakh.
When Edmund Smyth first came to Johar is something of a mystery. By conventional Anglo-Indian standards his career was undistinguished, and he left little mark either in public or in government records. Yet enough traces of his activies remain to suggest that he was a most remarkable character.
A contemporary of Thomas Hughes at Rugby, Edmund Smyth was immortalized by him as ‘Crab Jones’ in Tom Brown’s Schooldays – ‘sauntering along with a straw in his mouth, the queerest, coolest fish at Rugby’. From Rugby he came out to India as a military ensign in 1842 and fought with his regiment, the 13th BNI, through the battles of Chenab and Gujerat in the Second Sikh War (1848–9). In the early 1850s his regiment was stationed at Delhi, which was close enough to the hills to allow him to make brief forays into the Himalayas during his hot weather leaves. According to Dr Tom Longstaff, who met Smyth when he was in his eighties, he was on leave in Almora in 1848 when Richard Strachey set out from there for Manasarovar and in July 1851 actually went swimming in the holy lake – ‘although his movements were very much hampered by the necessity of avoiding discovery at the hands of the Hunias.’
A Mountain in Tibet Page 13