One of Bailey’s first actions on arrival at Simla was to ask the Survey of India for news of this by now almost legendary figure. The Survey had nothing to offer: they assumed that Kinthup was long dead. Bailey then wrote to a friend of his in Darjeeling, who discovered Kinthup working as a tailor in the bazaar. After further pressure from Bailey Kinthup was summoned to Simla, where at last his worth as an explorer was publicly recognized. He and the young man who had not even been born at the time of his great adventure met and talked – and as they compared notes it emerged that Kinthup himself had never claimed to have found any great falls at the Tsangpo gorge. In his verbal report he had described a 150-foot waterfall from a sidestream as well as a lesser 30-foot fall in the main river, which in the written report had been merged into one.
Bailey had hoped that the Government of India would now make amends by awarding Kinthup with a pension. It was opposed on the grounds that Kinthup might live to be ninety, and an ex gratia payment of a thousand rupees was made instead. Kinthup returned to Darjeeling with his award, and a few months later Bailey received word that he was dead.
After the disruptions of the Great War both Bailey and Morshead returned to the Himalayas. Bailey continued his career in the Political Service with long spells as a Political Agent in Sikkim and elsewhere. He retired in 1958 and died at home in Scotland in 1967. By then his fellow explorer had already been dead for many years. In 1921 Henry Morshead had again gone to Tibet, this time as a member of the first Everest expedition. In the following year he and George Leigh Mallory became the first men to set foot on the upper slopes of Everest, an exploit that cost Morshead several frostbitten fingers and toes. A few years later, while out on a morning ride in Burma, he was attacked and murdered by unknown assailants.
Although Bailey and Morshead’s journey of 1913 effectively settled the last doubts about the exact course of the Tsangpo, one short gap remained unexplored. It was a forty-mile stretch of river into which neither they nor Kinthup had been able to penetrate – the mighty Tsangpo gorge itself. In 1924 the botanist Captain F. Kingdon Ward and a companion, Lord Cawdor, managed to close that gap still further by climbing down into the gorge at several points. Their explorations convinced Kingdon Ward that although the river dropped fast and dramatically through many thousands of feet in a more or less unbroken series of rapids and cataracts there was no longer any possibility that the unexplored sections might conceal a waterfall of any size.
Since Kingdon Ward’s day there have been no significant advances. The Tsangpo gorge still guards its secrets, and will continue to do so until the last great Asian adventure – a journey all the way up the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra from the Assam valley to the Tibetan plateau – is undertaken.
8
The Monk and the Gentleman-
Traveller: Ekai Kawaguchi and
Henry Savage Landor
In the Spring of 1897 two travellers were preparing to depart for Tibet. In London a thirty-year-old gentleman of private means, Henry Savage Landor, was collecting letters of introduction from the Prime Minister and a handsome commission from Alfred Harmsworth, propietor of the newly-launched Daily Mail, to write a series of articles on his adventures. In Tokyo a Buddhist monk in his mid-thirties, Ekai Kawaguchi, was calling on all his friends and relations and extracting from each a pledge of abstinence from some particular vice that offended him. One was asked to give up drinking, another smoking, a third fishing and a fourth running a restaurant that specialized in chicken dinners. The Japanese was off to Tibet to study Buddhist texts in their original Sanskrit rather than in the Chinese translations on which Japanese Buddhists were forced to rely. Savage Landor’s stated reasons changed according to circumstances, but perhaps the dominant motive was Tibet’s legendary isolation. It presented a challenge that no Englishman of highly developed sporting instincts could ignore.
It would be hard to imagine two more sharply contrasted personalities than Savage Landor and Kawaguchi. The first was the Victorian traveller in full fig, characterized by overwhelming self-assurance and conceit, a man who required thirty porters for his camping gear and provisions prepared by the Bovril Company ‘after instructions furnished by me’; the other was the solitary pilgrim personified, a traveller impelled by something beyond himself, something of a prig but a true innocent.
Henry Savage Landor was the grandson of the poet Walter Savage Landor, and had the same vile temper that distinguished his grandfather. Both tended to resort to violence at the least provocation; the poet is remembered for having thrown a servant out of an upstairs window for breaking a soup tureen, and his grandson was to employ much the same technique, with even less provocation, when it came to dealing with Tibetans. Sven Hedin was to describe him as the Baron Münchhausen of Tibetan exploration but Landor’s account of his Tibetan adventure, written at speed while he was still recovering from its effects, suggests that he had more in common with the Marquis de Sade and Count von Sacher-Masoch. Published in 1898, In the Forbidden Land was, quite literally, a tour de force, a lurid catalogue of assaults that matched the late-Victorian appetite for bloody tales of derring-do from the far-flung corners of the Empire. His story made a great impression both in Europe and America and evoked a good deal of public sympathy. Modern readers might be inclined to feel that Henry Savage Landor got what he deserved.
Savage Landor set out for Tibet shortly before Kawaguchi. His original scheme had been to ride through Russia and across Central Asia, but at the last moment he decided to catch a P & O steamer instead, landing in Bombay in March 1897. From there he made his way to the railhead below the foothills of Kumaon and caught a tonga for Naini Tal, the lakeside hill-station that had become the summer residence of the United Provinces (UP) government. He waved his letters of introduction in front of a startled Deputy Commissioner and informed him that he was off to Tibet. The DC would not take him seriously, so Savage Landor rode on to the regimental depot of the 3rd Gurkhas at Almora, where he asked the colonel of the regiment for the loan of some thirty of his men to act as porters. When the colonel sent him packing Savage Landor recruited some coolies from the baazar, including an ex-policeman called Chanden Singh, whom he engaged as his personal servant.
Chanden Singh proved to be a man of exceptional devotion and stupidity. He enraged his new master almost at once by cleaning his shoes with a hairbrush and discharging a soda-water bottle into his face. Savage Landor responded by throwing him out bodily into the street, the first act of gratuitous violence recorded in his book, together with the comment that: ‘firm if not too severe a punishment administered in time is absolutely necessary with native servants and generally saves much trouble and unpleasantness in the end.’
The route Savage Landor took was the same as that followed by Henry Strachey six decades earlier. He had hoped to cross over the Lipu Lekh to Purang, but his attempt was frustrated by the Tibetans. So highly developed was Savage Landor’s aptitude for picking up native languages as he went along that when he met his first Tibetan official, at Garbyang, he knew at once that he was telling the assembled Bhotias that the English were cowards and afraid of the Tibetans. This provoked Landor into taking immediate action:
Throwing myself upon him, I grabbed him by his pigtail and landed his face a number of blows straight from the shoulder. When I let him go, he threw himself down crying and imploring my pardon. To disillusion the Tibetan on one or two points, I made him lick my shoes clean with his tongue, in the presence of the assembled Shokas [Bhotias]. He tried to scamper away but I caught him once more by his pigtail and kicked him down the front steps.
Not surprisingly, when Savage Landor set out from Garbyang he found that Tibetan soldiers had turned out in force to block the Lipu Lekh. They had also dismantled a bridge, providing him with the opportunity to make a spectacular detour which later became the subject of one of his highly imaginative watercolours. Prevented from crossing the Lipu Lekh, Savage Landor made for the passes at the head of the Kuti valley. The most frequentl
y used of these was Strachey’s Lampiya La, but there was another, rarely used, pass to the east, the Manshang La, which he decided to cross instead.
After setting up camp below this pass Savage Landor took out a small party on a reconnaissance. Undeterred by the fact that it was already half-past four in the afternoon he set off with three Bhotias and a Methodist missionary named Harkua Wilson, an Anglo-Indian doctor whom he had persuaded to come with him part of the way. Landor alone reached the head of the pass – shorty before midnight. It was a bright, moonlit night and he could see the ‘immense, dreary Tibetan plateau’ stretched out before him. Indeed, so very bright was it that he could see from his aneroid barometer that he stood at 22,000 feet above sea level; which was not at all bad considering that the pass was only 19,000 feet and that he was dressed in Norfolk jacket and breeches, together with a stout pair of walking shoes. Only the straw hat that usually completed his travelling outfit was missing; a few days earlier one of his coolies had been carrying some swan’s eggs in it and had stumbled and fallen, squashing both eggs and hat.
Savage Landor was evidently a great believer in sworn depositions; forty-six pages of his book are given over to them. One is from Dr Wilson certifying that Savage Landor reached 22,000 feet on the Manshang pass. He knew this to be a fact because Savage Landor told him so: ‘Owing to the rarefied air, I and the other men accompanying Mr Landor were unable to go as far as he did. Mr Landor was at the time carrying on him a weight of 30 seers (60 lbs) consisting of silver rupees, two aneroids, cartridges, revolver, etc.’
The next day Savage Landor and his party crossed the main pass, the Lampiya La, and after various excitements came to the edge of the great camping grounds west of lakes Rakas Tal and Manasarovar, now rich with spring grass and covered with large herds of kiang, the Tibetan wild ass. The gentleman-traveller considered these beasts to be extremely dangerous: ‘their apparent tameness is often deceptive, enabling them to draw quite close to the unwary traveller, and then with a sudden dash seize him by the stomach.’ Beyond the wild asses Savage Landor could see through his telescope the tents of Tibetan nomads and Bhotia traders, surrounded by thousands of sheep and goats.
As they approached this encampment, Gyanema, a gong was sounded and the Tibetans began to run for cover inside a small fortification in the centre of the camp. After a while the more courageous ones re-emerged, carpets were laid out and Savage Landor sat down to parley with the local officials. They urged him to go no further; if he did either his head or theirs would be forfeit. Savage Landor’s reaction was predictable:
‘Cut off my head?’ cried I, jumping to my feet and shoving a cartridge into my rifle. ‘Cut off my head?’ repeated my bearer, pointing with his Martini-Henry at the official.
The Tibetans withdrew and soon afterwards messengers could be seen galloping off in different directions. The coolies now began to show signs of unrest, which Savage Landor quickly resolved by threatening to shoot the first man that deserted him. The next morning a posse of horsemen arrived, escorting the senior official of the district, the Tarjum of Barka. Savage Landor took an instant dislike to him – ‘he never looked us straight in the face and he spoke in a despicably affected manner’ – and when their negotiations began to falter he pointed his rifle at the Tarjum’s head: ‘He tried to dodge the aim right or left by moving his head but I made the weapon follow all his movements. With every meekness he expressed himself ready to please us in every way.’
Having thoroughly frightened and humiliated the Tarjum of Barka, Savage Landor suddenly announced that he had had enough. He unloaded his Mannlicher, ordered his tent to be struck and led his coolies back towards the Indian border. He had decided that his goal was nothing less than Lhasa itself – and that his only chance of success lay in getting there undetected. But to do this he had first to convince the Tibetan authorities, as well as the troop of armed horsemen set on to his tail, that he had left their country.
His chance came during a blizzard. During the night he and nine men – including the bearer, Chanden Singh – slipped out of the camp, leaving Dr Wilson and the remaining porters to continue the journey back to India in the morning. The ruse appeared to succeed and the next few days and nights were spent dodging nomads and groups of armed Tibetans in the hills south of Rakas Tal. Then it became apparent that the Tibetans still believed them to be in the area. Four of his Bhotias sent down to Taklakar to buy salt and flour brought back news that a thousand soldiers were out looking for him and that a price of five hundred rupees had been set on his head. That night, so Landor informs us, he feigned sleep and saw his remaining porters draw lots to decide who should kill him. He was, of course, too quick for the would-be assassin:
I lost no time in placing the muzzle of my Mannlicher close to his face, and the perplexed Shoka, dropping his kukri, went down on his knees to implore my pardon. After giving him a good pounding with the butt of my rifle, I sent him about his business.
After adventures and escapes ‘too numerous to mention’ Savage Landor brought his little band to the southern end of the strip of land between the two lakes. ‘Here,’ he records, ‘it was my good fortune to make quite sure from many points that the ridge between the Rakas and Mansarovar lakes is continuous and no communication between the two lakes exists.’ Of the many implausibilities and downright whoppers in Henry Savage Landor’s narrative this was one that could be – and was – easily disproved. In nearly every other respect, the gentleman-traveller would beat his critics hands down; for he had actually been to Tibet and they had not, and who was to say which mysteries were genuine and which were exaggerated or fraudulent?
By now Savage Landor’s credit was all but exhausted. At a monastery on the southern shores of the holy lake he detected further signs of treachery among his porters and sacked five of them. The remaining pair defected two nights later, leaving him with two yaks and two men, the faithful Chanden Singh and Mansing, a leper of uncertain origins who had attached himself to the expedition and had become Chanden Singh’s dogsbody.
From Manasarovar, Savage Landor led his forlorn hope up past the Tage Chhu towards the Maryum La; but now they no longer made any attempt to conceal their movements: there was a large body of armed horsemen following them at a safe distance and another group of horsemen riding ahead. When Savage Landor pitched his tent beside the Gunchhu lake, the Tibetans set up their own camps nearby. Some of the soldiers even helped to gather dried yak dung for his camp fire and brewed Tibetan tea for him. ‘They seemed decent fellows,’ Savage Landor acknowledged, ‘though sly, if you like.’
The Maryum La marked the division between the western province of Nari Khorsum and the Tsang province, and it was as far as the two squadrons of cavalry could go. To Landor’s great satisfaction they allowed him to proceed over the pass without hindrance, a fact which he put down to their fear of him but which was more likely a simple matter of passing the buck:
We descended quickly on the eastern side of the pass, while the soldiers, aghast, remained watching us from above, themselves a most picturesque sight as they stood among the obos [cairns] against the sky-line, with the sunlight shining on their jewelled swords and the gay red flags of their matchlocks, while over their heads strings of prayer flags waved in the wind.
Soon after beginning the descent Savage Landor came to a small rivulet which he decided was the source of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra and accordingly named the ‘Landor source’. He evidently knew nothing of Desideri and Freyre’s crossing of the Maryum La in 1715 or of Smyth and Drummond’s visit to the area in 1864, and the Chief Pundit obviously did not count:
I must confess that I felt somewhat proud to be the first European who had ever reached these sources, and there was a certain childish delight in standing over this sacred stream which, of such immense width lower down, could here be spanned by a man standing with legs slightly apart.
Some years later, when the whole business of Sven Hedin’s claims had come out into the open, Savage Landor was als
o to assert that it was he and not a certain ‘Swedish traveller’ who was the true discoverer of the great range of mountains north of the Tsangpo to which Sven Hedin gave the name Trans-Himalaya. This assertion found no supporters because by then Savage Landor’s claims were not to be trusted. His map, for instance, was said to have been drawn ‘entirely from my surveys of an area of twelve thousand five hundred square miles of Tibet proper’ – although all that Savage Landor had had with him when he emerged from Tibet was a rough sketch on a scrap of paper drawn in blood. Yet, to be fair to our gentleman-traveller, he was certainly the first European to set down an accurate appreciation of the mountain range north of the Tsangpo:
From the Maium Pass a continuation of the Gangri chain of mountains runs first in a south-easterly direction, then due east, taking a line almost parallel to the higher southern range of the Himahlyas, and forming a vast plain intersected by the Brahmaputra. This northern range keeps an almost parallel line to the greater range southward; and, though no peaks of very considerable elevation are to be found along it, yet it is of geographical importance, as its southern slopes form the northern watershed of the holy river as far as Lhasa.
The journey down the Tsangpo valley lasted for five days. There were more narrow escapes, more close encounters with armed horsemen and, inevitably, more one-sided fisticuffs. But now even Savage Landor had to admit that his luck had run out:
We were in the centre of Tibet, with no food, no clothes, no extra shoes, and no way of really defending ourselves if it actually came to a fight. We were surrounded by enemies. Still we went on, here and there picking up what we could, but the days were long and dreary and the daily adventures – each of which would provide a lifelong subject of conversation for most Europeans – almost passed unnoticed.
A Mountain in Tibet Page 19