by John Keay
Under the new instrument-maker from England, workshops had to be set up in Calcutta and the Great Theodolite brought in for overhaul. Another highly skilled ‘artificer’ was attached to the Survey in the field. Engineers were also essential. Some £77,000 would be needed just for building towers. And then there would be a much higher figure for salaries and expenses. Instead of one or two parties in the field at any time, Everest proposed six: two to work on the Great Arc and four to work on the north-south ‘bars’ of his grid-iron either side of Olliver’s Calcutta series. By late 1832 the work of recruitment and training was already underway, with Olliver and Rossenrode being trailed from hill to hill, like doctors on their rounds, by a bevy of tongue-tied juniors. To process the flood of data and handle the number-crunching, more ‘computers’ were also essential. Joshua de Penning was recalled from Madras to head a Calcutta office devoted entirely to calculation.
As a result of this reorganisation the Great Trigonometrical Survey would acquire a much more institutional structure, although with a martinet like Everest in command it scarcely lost its personal character. To historians of the Survey the period 1833–43 would become ‘the Everest decade’. His age of unquestioned ascendancy and achievement was just beginning. If anything, the Survey’s augmentation reinforced his self-esteem and encouraged an even more wilful exercise of authority. During the winter of 1833–4, while he at last headed west to resume operations on the Great Arc, his now considerable field establishment was ordered to head for the hills. The journey took five months. In a flotilla of boats, some of which had to be specially adapted to prevent their sinking under the weight of machinery, the Survey’s main establishment of men, instruments and horses sailed up the Ganges, then took to roads and hill tracks to trail up to Mussoorie, seven thousand feet above sea-level on a ridge in the Himalayas.
There Everest had just purchased an estate which he had designated as his new headquarters and from which all operations would be conducted during his remaining years in India. The place, although he had never seen it, never been near Mussoorie, never even seen the hills, was carefully chosen. From atop the ridge, to the north and to the east, there stretched, in a breathtaking panorama of sublime savagery, the snow-scarred peaks of the Great Himalaya. Everest had finally set his sights on the mountains.
EIGHT
So Far as Our Knowledge Extends
Trying not to be distracted by the snowy spectacle to the north, I once tramped the sward up on the ridge of Mussoorie in search of Everest memorabilia. It was a summer’s morning. The grass was still moist and the stunted trees were in leaf. What I took to be Logarithm Lodge turned out to be roofless with thickets of prickly acacia sheltering in the lee of its crumbling walls. Of Bachelors’ Hall, another satellite bungalow, there was no sign at all. Perhaps it had been levelled by an earthquake, perhaps it had simply succumbed to the climate. Uniquely these south-facing ranges which buttress Asia’s mightiest mountains receive both the considerable force of the Indian monsoon and the icy blasts of a Himalayan winter. Architectural casualties tend to be heavy.
So it was cause for celebration to find that east along the ridge, on a grassy terrace at the edge of the void, the substantial shell of Hathipaon itself was still defying the elements. Frost and thaw had prised the rendering from the stonework; wind and rain had bleached the masonry of its rounded bays and gables. All the glass had long gone, and so had the timber of window frames and doors. Yet here it unmistakably was, the house which Everest called home. At Hathipaon he would devote himself exclusively to the Great Trigonometrical Survey, ‘my own darling profession’ as he called it; and from this podium in the Himalayas he would conduct the Great Arc to its climax in what he reckoned to be ‘as perfect a performance as mankind has yet seen’.
It was hard to associate the house with such triumphalism. Bewhiskered with seedlings, furrowed with cracks and slumped in its hollow on the ridge, it had an air of total self-absorption, like an old man in an armchair gazing out over India. I felt as much a trespasser as the buffalo men. A bearded patriarch with a hefty stick and a boy with a pan of water, they were crouching over a smoky pile of twigs in the middle of the drawing-room floor while their lumbering beasts splashed shit in the hallway and scratched long reptilian necks on the dining-room hatch. What could the buffalo men know of Hathipaon’s halcyon days? What could anyone know? The house was still there. The location was unbeatable. One day it might be restored. In 1990 it had been announced that the state government was planning to acquire it and, ‘as a memorial of Sir George Everest’, to develop it into ‘a TOURIST/EXCURSION spot’. Perhaps, if they ever get around to it, they will include a ‘Great Arc Experience’ with life-size dummies and a Bombay soundtrack. But in its present state of abstraction the house is saying nothing.
Hathipaon means ‘Elephant’s Foot’, although whether this refers to the stumpy profile of one of the flanking hills or to the indentation left between them is unclear. It had been built in 1829–30, when Everest was in England, by a British Colonel who had taken a fancy to this commanding ridge on the edge of the Himalayas. Evidently he foresaw its potential as a bracing retreat from the searing temperatures of the plains six thousand feet below. At the time, along the ridge to the east, the little village of Masuri was already developing into the toffee-nosed township of ‘Mussoorie’, one of British India’s premier hill resorts. The Colonel’s investment proved as sound as his house. When he headed back to Britain in 1832 it was reportedly ‘at a very heavy cost’ that both Hathipaon and the surrounding six-hundred-acre Park estate were purchased by the now Captain George Everest.
The new owner had plans for the place. Within the main house, the five hundred square feet of deal flooring and decorative plasterwork which had been a drawing room now became a drawing office. Outside he built workshops, a small observatory and extensive storage facilities. Logarithm Lodge and Bachelors’ Hall were laid out to house his assistants; other members of his staff would be encouraged to erect their own temporary accommodation within the grounds. The near-perpendicular access track was regraded as a carriage road. Heavy and extremely fragile loads were soon being hauled gingerly up the four-thousand-foot escarpment by cart and porter. The woods sang with saws and the workshops billowed with smoke.
It was hard to imagine such scenes of industry. Edging away from the house, I sat on the grass in the summer silence to admire the view. A goatherd and his flock emerged from the abyss and tripped daintily off to tea with the buffalo men. They were followed out of the void by lazy puffs of cloud which hesitated before being snatched up by the wind, tumbled and shredded as they were bundled across the ridge, and then sent swirling off to the snowfields in the north. Sliding over the grassy saddle or snagged among the conifers, these wraiths of cloud spread a clammy chill which troubled the spirit. As the view suddenly vanished, I fancied that I felt the passage of unclaimed souls, flying the land of reincarnation and hellbent for Tibet.
Cloud was the mountain surveyor’s greatest enemy. It could detain you for days in the most inhospitable places imaginable. Bearing roughly north-west from the ridge, though hidden from Hathipaon itself, stands a handsome peak known as The Chur or Chaur. At 12,000 feet it is not a giant by Himalayan standards. But it stands alone, is easily recognised and is eminently climbable. Surveyors keen to sight the much higher peaks to the north and east invariably adopted The Chur as one of their observation posts.
There Everest himself would spend many an icy hour waiting impatiently for the cloud to clear. Indeed, if there was one Himalayan peak with which the name of Everest was most commonly associated during his working life, it was this humble eminence. Godfrey Thomas Vigne, a freelance traveller, artist and sportsman, would find him there in October 1834. Everest’s tent was perched as near the top as possible and, despite a stove and an ample supply of claret, ‘our chief object was to keep ourselves warm,’ reports Vigne. He stayed the night and next morning, a particularly fine one, climbed to the summit where a stone
platform and a mast were being erected to mark the Survey’s actual point of observation. The panorama, which to Everest would by then have been commonplace, took Vigne’s breath away.
I can never forget the glorious view of the snowy range, some sixty or seventy miles from us, as the morning broke over the sacred peaks of Jamnutri and Gangutri … The entire range of the Himalayas – upon whose most elevated pinnacles the rose-coloured light seemed to pause before it ventured into the yet gloomy atmosphere to the south – was extended from west to east as far as the eye could reach, rearing itself high and magnificently above the great valleys at its base like the turbulent billows of an inland sea.
Vigne ventured heights of ‘20–25,000 feet’ for those magnificent pinnacles; but how high the Himalayas really were remained a matter of heated debate in the 1830s. The debate, if anything, had intensified. Earlier in the century surveyors in India had simply tried to prove that the Himalayas were higher than the Andes and therefore the loftiest mountain range yet discovered. This had been Henry Colebrooke’s contention in that memoir on Himalayan observations which had been so rubbished by the Quarterly Review. But now, as this contention gradually won acceptance, the question of how much higher they were – and, more especially, which was the highest of all – became matters of much wider interest.
By an odd coincidence, a copy of the Quarterly Review which had so roundly discredited Henry Colebrooke’s claims was a mute witness to their vindication. It had been addressed to William Webb, Robert Colebrooke’s one-time assistant, who in 1819 had returned to the mountains to pursue the headwaters of the Ganges into their deepest recesses. Tracking him up the cliffs and along the parapets of one of the world’s hairiest trails, the much post-marked Review had finally caught up with him, along with some badly needed provisions, when he was encamped at Kedarnath, a bleak spot 12,000 feet above sea-level where a small stone temple sanctified the source of one of the sacred river’s main feeders.
The river, an icy rill, here issued from a chaos of glacier and moraine. That glaciers were commonplace in the Himalayas, despite the mountains being only thirty degrees from the equator, might have caused the Review’s critic to hesitate. So would the skyline. While Webb, perched on a boulder, read about how convincing proof had yet to be given that any Himalayan peak was higher than those in the Andes, a cluster of six snowy giants, each superior to Ecuador’s Chimborazo, peered incuriously over his shoulder.
Webb, moreover, was reasonably confident of the altitudes which he had just assigned to these giants. By 1820 surveyors were at last getting to grips with the mountains. Instead of long-range sightings from the plains, Webb and others had pushed up the headwaters of the Ganges and Jumna rivers to brush round the flanks of some of the main Himalayan peaks and even pass beyond them onto the Tibetan plateau. They had new ways of assessing altitudes, new instruments for measuring the effects of altitude, and new ideas of how this information could be used to advantage.
The breakthrough had come courtesy of the Anglo – Nepali, or Gurkha, War of 1814–15. Militarily it had been one of British India’s less successful aggressions. Kathmandu had proved to be beyond the reach of British arms and the Gurkhas had given such a good account of themselves that their enlistment as mercenaries was reckoned more worthwhile than their submission as feudatories. But as well as acquiring Gurkha recruits, the British had detached certain territories which the Gurkhas, themselves comparative newcomers to dominion, had only recently conquered. These included two adjacent districts, Garhwal and Kumaon, in what had been western Nepal. Besides containing the headwaters of the Jumna and the Ganges, both districts comprised a complete cross-section of the Himalayas – from the dusty outer foothills of the Siwaliks to the Alpine slopes of future hill-stations like Mussoorie, to the rock-strewn canyons and snowy peaks of the main range, and on to the high dry passes into Tibet.
As usual, these new territories demanded new surveys. As well as the sources of India’s greatest rivers, ‘the heights and distances of the snowy peaks are now within the reach of British research and enterprise,’ noted a directive from the Governor-General’s office. ‘These are objects becoming the attention of an enlightened government.’ No longer purely a matter of scientific curiosity, ascertaining the heights of the mountains was now official policy. To Webb was given the responsibility of surveying Kumaon, while Captain John Hodgson, another officer with some experience of the region, was awarded Garhwal. Both had taken the field in early 1816.
Hodgson, who knew something of Lambton’s work, realised the importance of starting with a measured base-line. When no suitable site could be found to the south of the outermost Siwalik hills, he made for the Dun, more a broad strath than a valley, which lies at the foot of the ridge on which Mussoorie and Hathipaon now stand. There he again sought a level stretch of ground, but was this time frustrated by the combination of tall elephant-grass, which would not burn so early in the year, and extensive forest, which he lacked the means to clear. Webb was having similar problems. In the end neither secured the ground measurement reckoned so essential for a trigonometrical survey.
Hodgson, however, convinced himself that a long base between two intervisible points whose distance apart could be deduced from their respective latitudes as determined by zenith observations would serve just as well. This was how meridional arcs had been measured by, for instance, Lambton when he began his survey from Madras; and in the almost south-north alignment of over sixty miles between a point in the plains near Saharanpur and The Chur mountain beyond the Dun, Hodgson thought he had the perfect line. Both places commanded fine views of the snowy peaks; and he had soon ensconced himself atop The Chur to take the necessary zenith readings for latitude and, with rather more relish, to train his theodolite on the peaks.
At the time the Great Arc was making painfully slow progress through Hyderabad territory; Everest had yet to join it and Lambton was unable to contemplate its extension beyond Agra. With no chance of the Arc ever reaching the Himalayas, Hodgson and Webb saw their work as transcending its mountain context. Incorrigible optimists both, they believed not only that they would be able to establish the co-ordinates of all the more obvious peaks but that these peaks could then provide ‘fixes’, as sure as that of the pole star, by which locations throughout the northern sector of the Gangetic plain could be precisely determined. For ‘it cannot be denied,’ wrote Hodgson, ‘that when their [the snowy peaks’] latitudes and longitudes are known, the geographical position of any place from whence one or more of them are visible may be determined with ease and accuracy.’ Webb actually detailed a number of case studies to show how this might be done. And both men fervently believed that this simple method held the key to the problem of surveying in the plains of ‘Hindustan’. If the Himalayan peaks extended for a thousand miles from west to east, and if they were clearly distinguishable for at least 150 miles to the south, then a vast belt of territory whose murky atmosphere was considered impenetrable for trigonometrical surveying might by this simple method be speckled with the precisely-known locations which a trig survey was designed to supply.
In other words, Hodgson and Webb were turning the problem on its head. Instead of trying to ascertain the heights and locations of the peaks by observations from the plains, they aimed to make it possible to ascertain the heights and locations of places in the plains by observations to the peaks. All they had to do was to pinpoint the peaks, an exercise which promised to be much easier now that they could get to close quarters with some of them. For proximity would afford bigger, and so better, angles for both horizontal and vertical observations, as well as greater definition of the summit to be observed (and so easier identification of it from other observation points) and less distortion from refraction.
They were further encouraged by having theodolites and zenith sectors superior to those available to their predecessors in the mountains, and by having the option of barometers, which instruments had occasionally been tested by Lambton but never yet
employed in the mountains. A barometer indicates atmospheric pressure; and two barometers, read simultaneously, reveal the difference in atmospheric pressure between their different locations. By factoring in the temperature at the time and place of each reading, the difference in altitude at which the readings have been taken can also be deduced, since pressure decreases with altitude. Obviously this was not much use for measuring the snowy peaks; you had to get your barometer to the top first, and no sane person yet even contemplated shinning up mountains twice as high as The Chur. But it did promise to solve the problem of not knowing the height of the place from which one was observing such peaks. If, for instance, barometrical readings were taken on top of The Chur and other readings were taken simultaneously at sea-level, say in Calcutta, Hodgson could, and did, work out the height of his observation post on The Chur.
There were several other variables which had to be taken into account in such comparisons, but it was the barometers themselves which presented the greatest challenge. Before the 1843 invention of the aneroid (which measures the air pressure by its effect on the surface of a contained vacuum) the barometer relied on the volatile properties of mercury and closely resembled a giant thermometer. A tripod was needed to hold the thing upright, and the glass tube, three feet long, which contained the mercury posed an almost insurmountable carriage problem. Spare tubes were recommended but, as Hodgson found, those not already broken before they reached the mountains soon succumbed to the knocks and tumbles which were an inescapable hazard of Himalayan portage. The last of his tubes was broken on The Chur at the very beginning of his survey. Although some replacements did eventually reach him intact, it proved almost impossible to fill them. The mercury had to be boiled so as to exclude air bubbles, and boiling was as sure to shatter the glass as bashing it.