by John Keay
More extraordinary still, what was by common consent one of the greatest scientific achievements of a science-mad century would go practically uncelebrated. It was very strange. Was science always so capricious, invention ever so perverse? As John Hodgson had noted, it was when the pioneer was apparently confounded that he stood on the threshold of a discovery.
Getting up, I had wandered towards the abyss beyond the terrace on which Hathipaon stands. Four thousand feet below lay spread the Dun. A broad and now open expanse of farmland about thirty miles long by ten wide, it separates the Ganges and Jumna rivers as they emerge from the mountains. Beyond it to the south, the crumbling hill profile was that of the Siwaliks – less a twenty-foot pinnacle; and beyond the Siwaliks stretched interminably the north Indian plain. From the ridge of Hathipaon the great plain was just discernible as a bilious haze pulsing with heat. There lay Delhi and Agra, their minarets and tower-blocks hidden at this range even to the telescope of a thirty-six-inch theodolite.
In contrast, the Dun in the foreground was clear in every detail. It was laid out, indeed, like a map. Immediately below the ridge, Dehra Dun, the main town, sprawled uncertainly outwards from a core of corrugated roofs to the parks, parade-grounds and arboreta of its prestigious academies, fee-paying colleges and government institutions. Amongst the latter I thought I could identify the headquarters of the Survey of India, the organisation over which Everest had presided in his role as Surveyor-General. In the Survey’s offices, alongside portraits of all the other Surveyors-General, hangs that leonine likeness taken long after his retirement. There, if you mispronounce his name, they still actually correct you. ‘Oh, you must be meaning EVE-rest.’ It is more than fifty years since the British left India but at the Survey he is yet remembered, his outbursts fondly quoted and his instruments proudly displayed. Quite apart from his scientific achievements, he is recalled with affection as the man who was responsible for first locating the Survey in the salubrious township of Dehra Dun.
In 1833, soon after Everest’s office and instruments had been so laboriously shipped upriver from Calcutta to Hathipaon, the government had begun raising objections. Its Surveyor-General, his staff, and the whole map-making directorate had no business relocating themselves in such a remote and inaccessible eyrie. The Survey’s headquarters were supposed to be in Calcutta. There, in the capital, fretting officials and idle presses awaited the surveys and charts which Everest’s department was supposed to be churning out. Throughout India new roads were being planned, irrigation canals laid out, and the first railways projected. There were new districts to be pacified, frontiers to be drawn and, most important of all, whole territories to be ‘settled’ (this being a euphemism for assessing and allocating the agricultural taxes which made India such an attractive country to rule). For all these activities maps were essential, and the Survey of India was there to provide them. It was quite unacceptable that it had decamped to a Himalayan retreat where it could barely be contacted, let alone supervised.
Everest, of course, protested. If he was to perform his dual duties, his headquarters as Surveyor-General would have to be handy for his fieldwork as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. That meant being near the Great Arc. Additionally, given the health hazards to which his men were exposed, headquarters needed to be located somewhere with recuperative potential plus a good monsoon climate, that being the only season when he could devote himself to administrative duties. Hathipaon, he insisted, was both. But the government remained unimpressed, and it was only reluctantly that a final compromise was accepted. While the computational, graphic and administrative core of the Survey of India was to remain in Calcutta under Joshua de Penning, the headquarters staff need only move down from the heights of Hathipaon to offices in the more accessible Dehra Dun. There they have been ever since.
Everest himself resisted even this short removal. As Surveyor-General he was expected to follow his office down to the town, but as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey he stayed put at Hathipaon. The workshops on the ridge continued to echo to the sound of hammers and grinders; and whenever operations in the plains were suspended, Logarithm Lodge and Bachelors’ Hall overflowed with his henpecked assistants. Everest would continue to run the Great Trigonometrical Survey, if not the Survey of India, as an extension of his domestic arrangements, and in the absence of a family he rejoiced in playing the awesome patriarch to his staff. Government might whinge about overdue maps and critics whisper about the neglect of surveys other than the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Everest knew better; his grid-iron of triangles must come first.
Scanning the Dun westwards, I strained for signs of a place called Arcadia. It should have been four or five miles to the right of the town and on the far side of the Asan rivulet. But with no idea what to look for, I saw only villages and denuded fields, many now fringed with eucalyptus in a pallid apology for the great woods of sal and pine which once gave this landscape an elysian appeal. Everest, no doubt, would have been able to direct his gaze straight to the spot. It had been his main reason for buying Hathipaon in the first place. On the strength of Hodgson’s observations, he knew that the 78-degree meridian passed through the Dun, and on the strength of Herbert’s experience, he knew that only in the Dun was he likely to find the six to seven miles of tolerably level ground necessary for his Himalayan base-line. From the ridge, Hathipaon was sure to command the site, and in 1833, soon after his arrival, he had ‘had the good fortune to pitch exactly on the tract which proved in the end to be the most favourable’.
It was not the site used by Herbert. That lay on the other side of Dehra Dun. Everest needed a base-line whose terminal stations would connect with the two trig stations he had established on the Siwaliks and with The Chur, on whose summit he had already established another station. With the heavy compensation bars to position and with ample staff to assist, he planned something much more elaborate than Herbert’s base. Extensive clearance was undertaken, bridges were built where the terrain fell away, and stone markers were sunk in the ground at either end. These markers were then enshrined in tumuli and eventually topped with towers. In addition to the measurement of the base, the compensation bars themselves were compared against a brass standard before, during and after the measurement in order to detect any inconsistency. Following several hundred such comparisons, Everest pounced on a possible error which, compounded over the seven miles of the line, might come to 1.6 inches. He was disgusted; it was nearly double the margin of error found on the Calcutta base. In a rare criticism of his beloved bars he queried whether their accuracy was ‘commensurate with the increase of complication in the machinery and the expense incurred’. The bars, as he would discover, were nevertheless a lot more reliable than a chain.
The whole Dun base-line operation took from October 1834 till February 1835. It involved nearly all Everest’s assistants and sub-assistants – Waugh and Renny, Olliver and Rossenrode, plus three promising newcomers, Peyton, Logan and Armstrong, who between them would later explore the Himalayan potential of the Great Arc. Even the watchless Keelan, now reinstated, was allocated to one of the microscopes on the bars. Beside him worked Radhanath Sickdhar, a twenty-year-old Bengali recruited by de Penning for computational work in Calcutta and since poached by Everest as his number-crunching genius. As well as being the first Indian of rank in the employ of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and its undoubted mathematical star, Sickdhar too would be credited with Himalayan discoveries.
No conclusions could be drawn from the new base-line until it had been connected up by primary triangulation with that at Sironj. This work still awaited the completion of the masonry towers. Meantime instruments were readied and Everest switched his fire from his subordinates to his neighbours. In one of the more bizarre rows to rock British India the original culprit was a bored mule which, escaping one afternoon from the Survey’s Dehra Dun compound, entered a neighbouring garden in search of a herbaceous bite. The neighbour, a Lieutenant Henry
Kirke who was also the town’s Staff Officer, demanded satisfaction. When none was offered, Kirke retaliated: a herd of cattle appeared in the Survey’s compound. Some fouling of equipment resulted and several straw-thatch houses were eaten while their inhabitants, Survey employees, were out clearing the base-line. Everest, lately promoted to Major, promptly impounded the cattle, and Kirke demanded their release. When his demand was a second time ignored Kirke had recourse to arms. In an unseemly fracas, a Sergeant and four Privates with fixed bayonets routed the ‘compass-wallahs’ and reclaimed their herd.
Everest was by now beside himself. Long-winded letters stuttering with rage and innuendo were fired off to the town’s commanding officer and to the Adjutant-General in Calcutta. But Kirke gave as good as he got, and with the affair getting out of control it was referred to the Commander-in-Chief.
There, mercifully, the correspondence ends; who came off best is not known. But as a result of this and other run-ins with the civil authorities, Everest’s standing suffered. No one questioned his competence or dedication, but his arrogance was cordially detested and his outbursts openly ridiculed. Not all India would remember him fondly, and his achievements would be tarnished in consequence. When the later naming of a peak in his honour proved so controversial, it looks to have had as much to do with the man as with the mountain.
The reputation of his office also suffered. Indeed the Survey was so ‘hated’, according to one contemporary, that its unpopularity discouraged promising recruits. On the other hand, the sequel to this affair of the mule is also revealing. Just as the saga mysteriously vanishes from the records, so the hatchet seems to have been quietly buried in the Dun. Kirke and Everest subsequently got on well. It was Kirke who would purchase the ground across which Everest had laid out his base-line and, planting it up as a tea garden, would call it Arcadia. The name, reported a gleeful Everest, was ‘in commemoration of, and compliment to, the Great Arc!!!’, a handsome gesture which he handsomely acknowledged with congratulations to Kirke on his tea bushes as well as those three unwonted exclamation marks. Clearly, those who fell foul of the fiery Major, whether subordinates or colleagues, were not left to nurse their grievances.
Everest’s irascibility, like that of generations of other choleric Englishmen in the East, may charitably be explained by his recurrent ill-health. Rebellious bowels lent an urgency to the working day, and malarial rheumatics made nocturnal observations an agony. From England, as earlier from the Cape of Good Hope, he had returned to India convalesced but far from cured. During base-line operations in the Dun he again experienced great pain in his joints. A course of drastic treatment included the ‘phlogistic diet’, which may have killed Lambton, and much bleeding with leeches and ‘cups’ (the cup, or glass, was pressed against an area of scraped skin after being heated so as to suck out ‘bad’ blood).
Somewhat recovered, in March 1835 Everest completed the connection of his Dun base-line to neighbouring stations. Then he again took to his sickbed. Four successive attacks of fever kept him there for the next six months, ‘during which time I was once bled to fainting, had upwards of 1000 leeches, 30–40 cupping glasses, 3 or 4 blisters … besides daily doses of nauseous medicine, all of which produced such a degree of debility as to make it of small apparent moment whether I lived or died’.
His fate was, though, of increasing moment to his employers. There was now serious concern about whether he would ever be able to finish the Arc. ‘I have survived the storm,’ he announced in October 1835. But his recovery did not stop him reminding all and sundry that he was living on borrowed time, and lest he succumb again, he insisted on having Waugh by his side for the final triangulation. Meanwhile the government was sufficiently alarmed to start casting about for a possible successor.
News of this development, which Everest chose to interpret as an attempt to supersede him, would prove a greater restorative than any number of leeches. To scupper the appointment of Thomas Jervis, a man whom he deemed hostile to his achievements and scientifically unworthy of his post, Everest would pen and then publish his most vitriolic series of letters. If Jervis still fancied his chances, Everest would also demonstrate that rumours of his retirement were premature. To spite the wretched Jervis, he gritted his teeth and decided to soldier on, regardless of the consequences, until the Arc was finished.
By late 1835 the towers were ready. At the head of another large cavalcade Everest crossed the Siwaliks to begin the final triangulation between the Dun and Sironj. Needless to say, he found that the towers did not always conform to specifications. Those constructed by engineers from Delhi had been built of ‘inadhesive materials’, while instructions to isolate the pillar (for the instrument) from the gallery (for the observer) had been ‘entirely lost sight of’. Agra’s engineers had done much better, one of their towers being ‘a perfect model of symmetry and elegance’.
For the most part, all that tedious work with flares and masts had paid off. Taking his angles in the early hours of the morning when refraction was at its greatest, Everest had little difficulty in sighting from one station to the next. The only setback came at the tower of Dateri, just east of Delhi, whence the sight-line to the next station on a ruined mosque at Bulandshahar proved to be blocked despite extensive tree-felling. It seemed, in fact, to be twice interrupted, once by a village called Ramnagar and then again by ‘the lofty houses of the large town of Bhataona’. This was precisely the problem which all the preliminary triangulation had been designed to eliminate. There was now nothing for it but ‘to cut a gap 30 feet wide’ straight through both the village and downtown Bhataona.
To Rossenrode fell the unenviable task of placating the townsfolk and assessing the compensation to which the evicted would be entitled. ‘How Mr Rossenrode has contrived to effect this severe operation … surprizes me,’ wrote Everest. The people were Jats, agriculturalists with a reputation for extreme belligerence whom even well-wishers invariably described as ‘sturdy’. It was, moreover, mid-winter. Being put out of one’s house meant braving a heavy frost and bone-chilling fogs. Yet Rossenrode, venturing forth on his task unarmed and unsupported, somehow carried the day. In Ramnagar ‘5 huts, thatched, were crushed by the fall of the trees,’ while in Bhataona ‘37 flat-roofed houses and 52 huts of mud [were] razed to the ground.’ The hardship, as also the expense, was, in Everest’s word, ‘disastrous’. ‘I hope,’ he added, ‘it will never again fall to my lot to have so disagreeable a task to discharge.’
South of Agra it was as if the populace had taken their revenge. Operating here not from towers but from the hill sites selected four years earlier, Everest found that many of his markers had been deliberately removed. It was further evidence of what he always called ‘the suspicious native mind’. Like Lambton, he had already fallen foul of protective princelings anxious about the privacy of their womenfolk. In fact he could quite understand their concerns. An instrument which could turn women upside down (‘an indecent posture, no doubt, and very shocking to contemplate’) might also be able to see through things. It was, therefore, ‘natural enough that they should assign to us the propensity of sitting all day long, spying through stone walls at those they deem so enchanting’. Likewise he was rather touched by the reverence sometimes extended to his instruments. The Great Theodolite attracted particular attention and, in backward areas like the rugged ravine country which he now encountered along the Chambal river, the instrument was much fêted by childless brides and other credulous supplicants. But he had no sympathy at all with those who, for much more understandable reasons, removed his markers.
The trouble seems to have stemmed from the mutual incomprehension which had come to characterise British – Indian relations. According to Colonel William Sleeman, a contemporary of Everest who was then famously engaged in suppressing the criminal caste known as ‘Thugs’, the Survey was causing deep rural anxieties. In particular its nocturnal habits and its predilection for hilltops, which were often the abode of a local deity, were deemed highly
suspicious.
Needless to say, the choleric Everest was not the man to allay such superstitions, and nor, according to Sleeman, were the local Brahmins: ‘The priests encouraged the peasantry to believe that men who required to do their work by the aid of fires in the dead of night on high places … must be holding communion with supernatural beings which might be displeasing to the Deity.’ What more natural, then, than that pious locals should quickly exorcise the affront by digging up the embedded stone left by these unwanted sorcerers, or at least erasing the mystical mark which they had gouged in its surface.
Such wilful sabotage entailed the Survey in additional observations to relocate the original site, and then more laborious sinking of markers. The delays meant that it was impossible to complete the primary triangulation during the 1835–6 season. When the work was resumed in 1836–7, Everest compounded the delay by picking a quarrel with the authorities of the important state of Gwalior, through which the Arc passed between Agra and Sironj. Princely states in India, although not administered by the British, were invariably lumbered with a British Resident who acted as advisor and liaison officer to the state government, or durbar. The Resident in Gwalior, an exalted being in the coveted Political Department of British India, had a high regard for Gwalior’s Maharajah, and had experienced some difficulty in convincing him that the Great Trigonometrical Survey should be made welcome in his territories. Everest thought he knew why. The Resident was incompetent; witness one of his letters to the Maharajah which referred to himself as ‘one Major Everest engaged in measuring’. It was as bad as being called a ‘compass-wallah’. Indeed it was ‘the first instance of rudeness and opposition which I have experienced on the part of a British functionary’.
The Resident had since explained that, writing in Persian (the diplomatic language of India), he had been unable to find terms which could do justice to a title like ‘Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and Surveyor-General’. Everest remained incensed. He dashed off an official letter of remonstrance to Calcutta, he made the cardinal mistake of short-circuiting the Resident by appealing direct to the durbar, and he then found further cause for complaint when the promised escort of Gwalior troopers did not meet him on the state’s frontier. For two weeks of the precious surveying season, the entire Great Trigonometrical Survey, about one thousand strong, languished on the Gwalior frontier while Everest waged his pointless vendetta. Since he was already provided with his own escort, the Gwalior troops were no more essential than had been the Hyderabad troops with whom he had come to blows nineteen years earlier in his first season with the Survey. But this time the outcome was different. When the Gwalior escort did eventually materialise, it was not they who were chastised but Everest. In no uncertain terms the government reprimanded him for assuming diplomatic status, wasting valuable time (its as well as his), and insulting one of its senior dignitaries.