The Great Arc

by John Keay

  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 L
ondon, 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 Fr
ance 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.