The survey was begun in the southernmost point of the sub-continent, at Cape Cormorin, very close to where Somervell’s hospital at Neyyoor would later be built.
Begun by Major William Lambton, the survey was supervised for most of its extent by Colonel George Everest, a man noted for his exacting accuracy. When he took over the job the survey equipment used by Lambton was worn out. There was the great brass 36-inch theodolite made in London by Cary, weighing 1,000lb (which had been accidentally dropped a couple of times), a Ramsden 100ft chain that hadn’t been calibrated in 25 years, a zenith sector also by Jesse Ramsden, now with a worn micrometer screw, and a chronometer. These were all repaired by an instrument maker brought in from London, and Everest pressed on with his life’s work.
Ill-health, the bane of many a Briton in India, eventually caught up with Everest, and so Andrew Waugh had to finish off the job. Interestingly, he re-measured the Bidar baseline with the special Colby compensating bars. The error after 425 miles and 85 triangles was only 4 inches in a line length of 41,578ft.
What is not generally acknowledged is that the surveyors often became rich. Knowledge of the terrain was clearly useful. The Chamrette dynasty of surveyors – grandfather, father and son – owned over 1,800 acres, and George Everest bought 600 acres of land near Dehra Dun. The British Empire became wealthy, too, with the possession of this fabulous land. If I were an Indian citizen reading this now I would be feeling fairly angry. The only (poor) defence is that other nations were also playing the Great Game in the region, and partly what drove the British Empire to survey its borders was fear of invasion from the Russian Empire.
Eventually this great endeavour reached the border with Nepal, a land that was forbidden to the British. The surveyors focused their instruments on the far Himalayas, drew their triangles and measured 79 of the highest mountains, including K2 and Kangchenjunga. Eventually they computed in 1854 that the most lofty was a mountain on the remote border between Nepal and Tibet. They had to allow for the gravitational pull of the Himalayan range (which will even distort the surface of a puddle), the refraction of the atmosphere and a number of other variables, and it is a wonder to me that they got the height so close: 29,002ft. It took over 150 years to pin down a more accurate result, although still no one agrees on exactly how high the mountain is. All measurements are now made in metric units, and China insists that the measurement should be made up to the topmost rock, at 8,844m (29,015ft), whereas Nepal measures to the top of the overlying snow-cap, at 8,848m (29,028ft). The US National Geographic Society measurement using satellites came to 8,850m (29,035ft) – a difference of 33ft from the original Great Trigonometrical Survey result, or around 0.1 per cent error. Not bad, considering the pioneers were using telescopes and brass theodolites, aimed from across the border.
The first scrawl on the map announcing Mount Everest styled it as ‘Peak B’, then ‘Peak XV’, somewhat in the manner of K2 in the Karakorum, which after a brief existence as Mount Godwin-Austen reverted to its surveyor’s notation. There has been much debate about the name of Mount Everest. Traditionally, British surveyors always tried to use the local name for geographical features. This was an honourable intention, as otherwise the world’s maps would be plastered with the names of British dignitaries. In Mount Everest’s case, however, they found that there were several possible local names. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin claimed that it was called Tchoumou Lancma, and said that the name had been recorded by French Jesuit priests who had been in China in the 18th century. When spelled as Chomolungma, the name has been fancifully translated by imaginative writers as ‘Goddess Mother of the World’, but this has little connection with the truth. Charles Bell, who knew a thing or two about Tibetan culture, insisted that the local name was Chamalung. David Macdonald, the trade agent who dealt with the early Everest expeditions, claimed the mountain was called Miti Guti Chapu Longnga, which translates rather more convincingly as ‘the mountain whose summit no one can see from close-up [true only from the south], but can be seen from the far distance, and which is so high that birds go blind when they fly over the summit’. I rather like this name, except that my companion on the summit in 1993 saw an alpine chough fly right over us. It didn’t appear to go blind. This name would also make all the innumerable books about the mountain even longer. In the end, though, the British chose the name of the former Surveyor-General Sir George Everest.
It is unlikely that Everest himself ever laid his eyes on the mountain that bears his name, but Andrew Waugh, Everest’s successor as Surveyor-General in India, wrote: ‘… here is a mountain most probably the highest in the world without any local name that I can discover …’, so he proposed ‘to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of geographical research … Everest’.
This went completely against contemporary cartological practice, and it was the start of the long story of the mountain being hijacked for ulterior motives. Everest himself said his name could not be written in either Hindi or Persian, and nor could the local people pronounce it. Nor can we. He pronounced his name Eeev-rest, as in Adam and Eve, while the rest of us happily mispronounce it as Ever-rest, as in double-glazing.
At the beginning of the 19th century the British wanted to know how the Russian Empire might plan to invade India, and they were not going to be deterred by forbidden frontiers. Geographical knowledge was power. Heights of mountains were important, and even more important was the accessibility of the passes between them. In 1800 the Surveyor-General of Bengal permitted British officers to enter and survey any country they chose. Unfortunately, some were caught in Afghanistan and murdered, but not before some spectacular heights were reported among the Himalayan giants. It was clearly unwise to send blue-eyed, fair-haired young men into these parts, and Captain Montgomerie of the Survey (who surveyed and named K2) soon realised it would be better to employ local men from the Indian Border States as surveyors. They were given two years of training in the use of the instruments and were then sent over the border disguised as holy men or traders. They were known as pandits, Hindi for ‘learned man’. We derive our word ‘pundit’ from these remarkable men.
Perhaps the most remarkable was Pandit 001, Nain Singh, a Bhotian school teacher. He left Dehra Dun in 1865 and entered Nepal, travelling through the country into Tibet, where he reached Lhasa and met the Panchen Lama. Using a sextant (I wondered where he hid it) and a boiling-point thermometer he calculated the location and the altitude of the forbidden city.
I used the boiling-point technique to determine altitude at Base Camp on Mount Everest in 2007 while filming a science programme for the BBC. The first thing we did was to get a big pan of water to a good rolling boil, as Mrs Beeton would call it (she was writing her cookbook just as the pundits were setting off in the 1860s). I then stuck the big glass thermometer into the water and got a reading of only 85°C. Water boils at 100°C at sea level. This meant the altitude was around 4,600m (15,000ft). The reason that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitude is that water is trying to turn into a gas (steam) when it boils, and it is easier for the steam to push against the air molecules when there are fewer of them (lower pressure). Bubbles – or boiling – are the result. When I got frostbitten fingers on the summit in 1993 I was able to dangle them in a pan of boiling water at Camp II. It only felt hot, rather than painfully hot.
If someone were to boil up a kettle for tea on the summit of Mount Everest – and I’m sure they will sooner or later – it would start boiling at only 68°C. And it wouldn’t make very good tea. Incidentally, it was hard to keep the long glass thermometer unbroken on our journey into Base Camp in 2007. Pundit Nain Singh concealed his in a walking-staff, but how he didn’t break it is beyond me.
The map-makers of British India now had a mystery on their hands. As well as locating the city of Lhasa, Nain Singh had also mapped a large section of a huge river in Tibet, the Tsangpo, which plunged into a gorge and disappeared. Hundreds of miles away the sacred river Brahmaputra issued fr
om the Himalayas, but there were thousands of feet of height between them. Were they the same river? Nain Singh thought they were. So was there an undiscovered giant waterfall, many times higher than the Victoria Falls? That was the riddle of the Tsangpo.
It was partly solved by another pundit, Kinthup, in a truly amazing journey. In 1880 he was sent into Tibet in the company of a Chinese lama, to whom he would act a servant. They were to throw marked logs into the Tsangpo and surveyors on the Brahmaputra would wait to see if any logs came through. Unfortunately, the lama was a less than ideal master. He womanised and drank, then sold Kinthup into slavery. The pundit eventually escaped, but was captured and resold to another lama.
It took Kinthup four years to get to the point on the Tsangpo from which he had to send his timber signal. He prepared five hundred logs and threw fifty into the river per day. Eventually he got back to India, where he asked if anyone had seen the logs. But all of those who had sent him on his mission had either left India or died. ‘Which logs?’ the men of the Survey said, and poor, disillusioned Kinthup left to become a tailor. One can only imagine his chagrin after so many years of work, and what a modern employment tribunal might make of it all. In the end the surveyors Morshead and Bailey explored the river from the south, and at last, in 1913, Kinthup’s reports were believed. The Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were accepted as the same river, and this great explorer was at last recognised with a pension, grants of land and a medal.
I have a personal theory about the pundits: I think they were partly the inspiration for James Bond, Agent 007. Consider this: they were numbered 001, 002, 003, etc., and were spies in enemy territory. They carried maps hidden in prayer wheels, and counted their carefully practised 2,000 paces a mile on special Buddhist rosaries on which every tenth bead was slightly larger …
At about the time Mount Everest was being measured, thousands of miles away in Europe the leisure sport of alpinism was being invented by the sons of English gentlemen who had been enriched by the Industrial Revolution. Before then, most sensible mountain-travellers regarded the high peaks as dangerous wastelands inhabited by demons. All this started to change in the early 19th century, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet, wrote about his climb on Broad Stand, in England’s Lake District.
In June 2010 three friends and I retraced Coleridge’s route to try to experience exactly what he felt. He was on the summit of Scafell, England’s second highest mountain (Scafell Pike is the highest), having scrambled up a safe route. He then decided to experiment with the then fashionable sublime feelings of terror by picking a descent route that looked possible – but only just – down through a series of tumbling rock terraces. Later, boasting to his girlfriend (as we all do), he wrote:
I began to suspect that I ought not to go on, but then unfortunately tho’ I could with ease drop down a smooth Rock 7 feet high, I could not climb it, so go on I must and on I went. The next 3 drops were not half a Foot, at least not a foot more than my own height, but every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs – I shook all over, Heaven knows without the least influence of Fear, and now I had only two more to drop down, to return was impossible – but of these two the first was tremendous, it was twice my own height, and the Ledge at the bottom was so exceedingly narrow, that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself.
I was impressed by Coleridge’s boldness. The route descends over downward-sloping ledges that are separated by higher and higher rock walls, with a deadly drop-off onto the jagged scree below. It all feels rather intimidating. Halfway down an irreversible descent he got himself completely stuck above a big drop, unable to return upwards or progress downwards. This same predicament has since led to the deaths of climbers. He then experienced those feelings of terror that are only too familiar to us:
My Limbs were all in a tremble – I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight – and blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!1
I lay in exactly the same spot and thought about Coleridge’s power of Reason. He was clearly not just an excitable Romantic. He had calmed himself down and thought about how to get out of his predicament. Just below and to the left of this final ledge there is a narrow chimney that is not immediately obvious. In the event he was able to explore sideways and slither down this chimney, which is now known as Fat Man’s Peril. If there had been no exit we may have lost one of our most interesting literary figures. This just goes to show the importance of careful reading. If only British climbers had stuck to Coleridge’s idea of rock-climbing downwards, modern mountaineering would be very different.
His wasn’t the first rock climb in Britain, though. There are modern routes that were first climbed long before the sport evolved, some by shepherds rescuing crag-fast sheep, some by birds-nesters, and some just by young dare-devils. In 1695 men were described using ropes for rock climbing on traditional fowling expeditions in the St Kilda archipelago. Slowly, rock climbing evolved into an activity in its own right, and as with many cultural movements it is hard to pin down a moment when rock climbing as a sport began. It started in at least three areas: the sandstone crags of the Elbsandsteingebirge, near Dresden; the Dolomites in Italy; and the Lake District in England, where a small group of climbers started rock climbing above the valley of Wasdale, beneath Scafell Pike.
Many were serious-minded, middle-class Victorian gentlemen who sought an escape from the industrial northern towns of Liverpool and Manchester. The father of English rock climbing was Walter Parry Haskett Smith, who, 84 years after Coleridge’s climb, made a solo first ascent (upwards instead of downwards) of Napes Needle, an obelisk-like pillar just across the Wasdale valley from Broad Stand. An early climb that is in touch with modern standards was O. G. Jones’s 1897 climb of Kern Knotts Crack, graded Very Severe, and significantly Jones was attracted by a photograph of Napes Needle that he saw in a shop on the Strand in London. Similarly, the television films that we make on Mount Everest draw new recruits to mountaineering. And if they learn about the fun of climbing, then why not?
The British are usually credited with inventing the sport of alpinism, and it was largely because of leisure. Britain was ‘an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish’, and happened for many reasons to be the first nation to industrialise (it could so easily have been the Romans, who were close to steam power, or the Indians, who had even more resources). The Industrial Revolution provided many a wealthy man’s son with ample time and money while the average Swiss peasant was far too busy scraping a living off the mountainsides to waste time raising his eyes to the summits.
Sir Alfred Wills, who was Edward Norton’s grandfather, kicked off the Golden Age of Alpinism with his 1854 ascent of the Wetterhorn (although it wasn’t actually the first ascent, which had been made ten years earlier by Stanhope T. Speer with his Swiss guides). There then followed an explosion of climbing, with most of the major peaks being bagged within ten years. There was a similar period in the Himalayas a century later, when all the 14 peaks over 8,000m (26,247ft) were climbed within 11 years of each other.
The Alpine Club was founded in London in 1857. Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory notes that the members of the Club were predominantly upper-middle-class rather than aristocratic, and that they thought of themselves as a caste apart, a Spartan phalanx, tough with muscular virtue, spare with speech, seeking the chill clarity of the mountains just because, as Leslie Stephen, who became the club’s president in 1865, put it, ‘There we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pairs of lungs.’2
It is curious that so many writers had brothers who became Himalayan climbers: Greene, Spender, Auden. It is interesting, too, that it seemed to be the lef
t-wing intellectuals who wanted to place themselves above the masses. John Carey writes:
The cult of mountaineering and alpine holidays among English intellectuals … seems to have been encouraged by Nietzschean images of supremacy. Climbing a mountain gave, as it were, objective expression to the intellectual’s sense of superiority and high endeavour, which otherwise remained rather notional.3
There is a danger in this search for purity that surfaced later in the Nazi fascination with mountain climbing.
The pace of Alpine climbing accelerated, with Edward Whymper knocking off the Col de Triolet, the Aiguille de Tré-la-Tête and the Aiguille d’Argentière in one week in 1864 with guide Michel Croz. His 1865 book Scrambles in the Alps was a sensation, describing the first ascent of the Matterhorn and the ensuing accident that killed four of his companions. Suddenly, the new sport assumed a dangerous new edge in the public mind, and the short but golden age of Alpine climbing was over.
Back in England there was a disaster high on Scafell Pinnacle in 1903 that Somervell and Mallory would have been very well aware of, as it was much discussed at the time. The tradition then was that ‘the leader must not fall’, because the hemp ropes climbers used were not strong enough to take much of a shock, and modern protection devices such as Friends – camming devices that expand into cracks in the rock and to which a climbing rope can be attached – were as yet undreamt of. All that the climbers could do was to loop the rope over a spike of rock, if available, or jam a rock into a crack and pass the rope behind it. In the 1903 accident, there was no belay point available, and four men fell 200ft to their deaths.
Last Hours on Everest Page 2