by Ed Douglas
Whatever charges may be imputable to the Managers for the Company, the neglect of useful Science, however, is not among the number. The employing of Geographers, and Surveying Pilots in India; and the providing of astronomical instruments, and the holding out of encouragement to such as should use them; indicate, at least, a spirit somewhat above the mere consideration of Gain.
To take up his post, Rennell was commissioned as an ensign in the Bengal engineers and in the autumn of 1764 he started work on the course of the Ganges. The manuscript he produced with his geographical and meteorological observations so impressed Vansittart that he got Rennell an income of a thousand pounds a year, a colossal amount compared to his navy salary; Rennell built a house at Dacca, now the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, which became his base, making the first plan of the city. In 1766, he volunteered to accompany an old navy friend, now serving in a sepoy regiment, on a mission to drive out a band of sannyasi, who had looted a town on the borders of Bhutan. Here he first encountered the vast white wall of the Himalaya, which he called the Tartarian Mountains. In a village he called Deehoota, thought to be safe ground, Rennell’s little band of officers was unexpectedly surrounded. The others cut their way to safety but Rennell was trapped, his pistol misfired and his Armenian assistant killed. Armed only with a short sword, Rennell retreated, so peppered with sabre cuts that the sannyasi thought him done for. He stumbled towards a detachment of troops rushing to his aid but collapsed before he reached them. His wounds were packed with crushed onions and he was laid in an open boat, which returned him in six days to Dhaka, more dead than alive. One of the blows left a wound a foot long that had cut his right shoulder blade and several ribs; Rennell never again had full use of his right arm, and lost the use of his left index finger too. Robert Clive, the new governor, recognised his sacrifice by appointing Rennell surveyor general and giving him a detachment of sepoys to protect him as he worked. He also cut Rennell’s salary, under pressure from the Court of Directors to reduce costs.
Rennell spent seven years in the field on four separate, extended expeditions, his work completed, in the words of one biographer, ‘at the point of a bayonet’. Surveying was and remained formidably dangerous. A leopard once mauled five of his men before he managed to drive a blade down its throat. He also suffered further ambushes. In late 1767, one of his sepoys was killed in an encounter with Bhutanese soldiers. Quite how far Rennell made it into Bhutan is a matter of some conjecture; he wrote home to Devon, shortly before this encounter, that ‘I am now in the midst of my Journey to Thibet being got into a more Northern Climate and in the neighbourhood of the Mountains, I breathe a cool and healthy air.’ It’s certainly likely that he was ahead of Bogle in visiting the country.
In 1772 Rennell married Jane Thackeray, great-aunt of the novelist, and his long absences became increasingly burdensome. Successive bouts of malaria took their toll on his health and Rennell’s old wounds plagued him. In late 1777, some eighteen years after arriving in India, and with the Bengal Atlas almost ready for publication, the couple embarked for London with a pension of six hundred pounds from a grateful East India Company. James Rennell had just turned thirty-five.
Rennell is remembered not only as one of the great authorities on Indian geography. He was, as his biographer Clements Markham judged him, ‘an explorer both by sea and land, a map compiler, a physical geographer, a critical and comparative geographer, and a hydrographer’. Elected to the Royal Society in 1781 for his map of Bengal, he became a hub for further research and friends with many of the great scientific explorers of the age, like Sir Joseph Banks. Rennell’s map of India was first published in 1782 and he continued to update it. Awarding him the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1791, Banks said, ‘I should rejoice could I say that Britons, fond as they are of being considered by surrounding nations as taking the lead in scientific improvements, could boast a general map of their island as well executed as Major Rennell’s delineation of Bengal and Bahar [Bihar].’
This was no exaggeration, yet when it came to the Himalaya, on Rennell’s horizon and in his notes as he worked his way across Bengal, he had no choice but to rely on the earlier work of Jesuit surveyors and mapmakers published in d’Anville’s atlas. Rennell was full of praise for d’Anville. ‘When it is considered that this excellent Geographer had scarcely any materials to work on for the inland parts of India but some vague itineraries, and books of travels, one is really astonished to find them so well described as they are.’ Yet the Himalaya in both maps were necessarily hazy and incomplete. Rennell accurately located Kathmandu and the trading town of Kuti, across the border in Tibet, but the mountains of Nepal appear simply as a jagged crest with the legend: ‘Snowy mountains supposed to be a ridge of the Emmodus of the Ancients’, a name lifted from Ptolemy’s map of the second century.
James Rennell had no compelling reason to be concerned with surveying the mountains to the north: Kinloch had led his nightmarish expedition into Nepal, to help Jaya Prakash Malla, raja of Kathmandu, to resist Prithvi Narayan Shah’s forces, in the year Vansittart commissioned Rennell, but British entanglement with Nepal still lay decades in the future. So did the Sublime and later Romanticism, and the passion for mountain landscapes they both inspired. ‘These are among the highest of the mountains of the old hemisphere,’ he wrote in a footnote to his account of Indian geography.
I was not able to determine their height, but it may in some measure be guessed by the circumstance of their rising considerably above the horizon, when viewed from the plains of Bengal, at the distance of 150 miles.
That these were the tallest mountains in the ‘old hemisphere’ was not much of a boast: science had hitherto considered El Teide, the peak of Tenerife, the likeliest contender. It was calculated to be around 4,500 metres at the time, almost one thousand metres higher than its true altitude, an indication of the technical challenges surveyors then faced. And El Teide was relatively easy to measure, being visible from busy shipping lanes and, therefore, sea level. Remote mountains far from the ocean were a much greater challenge.
Another man who grasped the implication that the Himalaya were visible from such vast distances was the orientalist and philologist Sir William Jones. Regarded in Europe as one of the greatest minds of his age, he was called by Goethe ‘a far-seeing man who seeks to connect the unknown to the known’. His father, also William, had been a talented mathematician from Anglesey, dubbed ‘Longitude’ Jones for his knowledge of navigation: he died aged sixty-nine when William was three. His mother, the remarkable Mary Nix Jones, poured everything into her son, taking work as a seamstress to pay his school fees at Harrow. Her sacrifice worked. Despite a radical political edge, by the autumn of 1784 William Jones was, like his father, a member of the Royal Society as well as being a judge at the High Court of Calcutta; earlier that year he had founded the Asiatic Society. On 5 October, Jones was at Bhagalpur on the Ganges, almost due south of Mount Everest. To the north-east, just after sunset, he saw the alpenglow of a peak to the north-east he identified as ‘Chumalary peak’, Chomolhari or Jomolhari as it’s spelled now. This mountain was well known on the plains, a familiar landmark dominating the ancient trade route between Sikkim and Tibet above the Chumbi valley. It is sacred too, particularly to the Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism, being associated with the Tsering-ma: the five ‘sisters of long life’. The Tsering-ma feature in myths surrounding the eleventh-century poet and yogi Milarepa and are protectors of the dharma; one of them, Miyo Langsangma, yellow in colour with a bowl of food in one hand and a mongoose in the other, rides a tigress. She has also been associated with another mountain: Chomolungma, or Mount Everest.
Jones was never afraid to speculate, and his vision of Jomolhari inspired his curiosity. His father had written a famous instruction manual on navigation, so while Jones was famous as a philologist and linguist rather than a surveyor or cartographer, the subject was both familiar and congenial to him. Jones had known both George Bogle and Samuel Turner in Calcutta; their
information had given him a good idea of how wide the mountain range was. And thanks to the work of Rennell and others, he guessed Jomolhari ‘must be at least 244 British miles’ away from his position. In fact, as the crow flies, it is 228 miles (367 kilometres), but even so, that kind of distance had an obvious implication for Jones: these mountains were not only exceptionally high, there was ‘abundant reason to think that we saw from Bhagilpoor the highest mountains in the world, without excepting the Andes’.
It was natural for Jones to think of the Andes. In the late 1730s, France’s Académie des Sciences had launched an expedition to calculate the length of a single degree of longitude at the equator, with a view to solving the conundrum posed by Isaac Newton: whether the circumference of the earth was greatest at the equator or around the poles; in essence, do we live on a grapefruit or an egg? The measurements for this calculation were taken in the modern state of Ecuador, work that eventually led to the metric system. The scientists, who included two Spaniards, also measured the altitude of a huge volcano called Chimborazo in the Andes, close to the city of Quito and just south of the equator. The French mathematican Charles-Marie de La Condamine arrived at an altitude of 6,274 metres; his Spanish counterpart Jorge Juan y Santacilia came up with 6,586 metres, a considerable difference. Later in the century, a five-year exploratory expedition led by Alessandro Malaspina calculated Chimborazo’s altitude at 6,352 metres. Alexander von Humboldt, having measured the peak himself at 6,544 metres and attempted to climb it in 1802, spent a lot of time trying to unpick the reasons for this disparity: differences in calculating barometric pressure and the refraction of light through the atmosphere were among the culprits. (The true figure is actually 6,263 metres.) In other words, some of the best minds of the eighteenth century had invested a lot of time thinking about the Andes, and educated opinion accepted Chimborazo as the highest mountain in the world. As it turns out, because the earth bulges at the equator, Chimborazo’s summit is indeed the furthest point from the planet’s centre, Everest being more than 3,100 kilometres further north at a latitude of almost 30° N. Yet in terms of its height above sea level Chimborazo is pretty average fare by Himalayan standards. Jomolhari, the peak Jones was looking at, is more than a kilometre higher.
Toppling the Andes would take decades, despite the gathering weight of evidence. Sir William Jones died in 1794 and was buried in the same Calcutta cemetery as George Bogle. At the time of his death, he had been working on a monumental translation of Hindu law, a task taken over by Henry Colebrooke, a civil servant and noted Sanskrit scholar. In the mid 1790s, Colebrooke was an assistant revenue collector at Purnia in northern Bihar. Like Jones, he made observations of the mountains to the north, but from a position some 140 kilometres closer, calculating an approximate altitude of twenty-six thousand feet, or around eight thousand metres. This was of great interest to his cousin Robert Colebrooke, who had just been appointed surveyor general of Bengal, but was also a matter of frustration. The Himalaya were still at a great distance and any measurement made from the plains was burdened with conjecture and doubt.
An opportunity to take a closer look arrived in April 1802, when a young surveyor arrived in Kathmandu with the trade mission of Captain William Knox, sent under the terms of the 1801 treaty at Danapur. Captain Charles Crawford, the man who actually signed the document, commanded the military escort that travelled with Knox and the botanist-surgeon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton. During the eleven months the mission spent in Kathmandu, Crawford set about making a map of the Kathmandu valley. Drawn to a scale of one inch to a furlong (an eighth of a mile; so approximately 2.5 cm to just over 200 metres), the map not only offered an impressively accurate interpretation of the valley’s geography, it was also a thing of beauty. Buchanan-Hamilton included a copy with his collection of herbarium specimens, elegant coloured illustrations and manuscripts that he gave to James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnaean Society: the root of botanical studies in Nepal. The map was sensitive military information but the botanist’s patron was the governor general Richard Wellesley, who allowed Crawford to pass it on to Smith. Robert Colebrooke was also impressed with Crawford’s work, finding it ‘executed with particular neatness’; Crawford was promoted and given the job of surveying Bengal’s northern frontier.
Crawford hadn’t just surveyed the valley while he was in Kathmandu. He had taken a good look at the mountains to the north and was convinced they were of ‘vast height’. He took bearings on all the most obvious peaks visible from more than one position, presumably Langtang Lirung and Dorje Lhakpa among them. Having ascertained his approximate altitude, taken bearings, allowed for refraction, computed distance and applied trigonometry, Crawford calculated the mountains to the north were between eleven and twenty thousand feet (3,350 to 6,100 metres) above his ‘stations of observation’. Annoyingly, for Crawford and for us, he didn’t forward his homework to Calcutta: the drawings and journal of his survey. Crawford later told Henry Colebrooke that his data were in England, but the documents have never surfaced and are often assumed to have been lost. There’s no way to address the various questions his work raises. How did he know how far away the mountains were? How did he calculate his altitude in the valley? There were certainly techniques available to do this. The scientist Jean-André Deluc had calculated altitude from the boiling point of water in 1762. But there’s no evidence Crawford did the same.
Even so, the young officer’s story made an impact. The East India Company’s rapid expansion at this time was bringing more and more territory within its orbit. The governor general Richard Wellesley, his commander-in-chief General Gerard Lake, and Wellesley’s brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington, prospered against the Maratha Empire during the first years of the nineteenth century, bringing the upper portion of the Ganges within reach of British exploration for the first time. This provided a tantalising opportunity for Robert Colebrooke. James Rennell’s map of the upper Ganges had been speculative, since the Tibetan surveyors working for the Jesuits hadn’t gone there, simply passing on stories they heard. The river, Rennell wrote, was ‘well known to derive’ its source ‘from the vast mountains of Thibet’. He showed it arriving in India via a subterranean tunnel and repeated the Hindu legend that the river emerged from a great rock called the ‘cow’s mouth’. Rennell and Colebrooke had clashed subsequently over Colebrooke’s idea of building a canal in the lower reaches of the Ganges to solve the problem of its regularly shifting course; Rennell thought the plan unworkable and had warned the Company to leave well alone. Now there was an opportunity for Colebrooke to burnish his reputation as surveyor general and solve the puzzle of the source of the Ganges, something unknown to Rennell. ‘An actual survey,’ his cousin Henry wrote in the Asiatic Journal, in a sly dig at Colebrooke’s predecessor,
of the Ganges above Haridwar (where it enters the British territories,) to the farthest point to which it had been traced by Hindu pilgrims, and to its remotest accessible source, was an undertaking worthy of British enterprise.
Robert Colbrooke began his last journey in the autumn of 1807, taking with him his wife and the two eldest of their nine children, drifting up the Ganges in a country boat towards Kanpur. At night the family listened to the roar of tigers and by day they drew crowds of onlookers, who, in the words of historian John Keay, ‘had not previously come across a European – let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring’. On the way to Kanpur they explored the Rapti river and the town of Gorakhpur, which is almost due south of the Annapurna range in Nepal. Here, surrounded by curious locals, Colebrooke took bearings on two peaks to the north, quite probably Annapurna itself and the other peak over eight thousand metres: Dhaulagiri. He calculated that each was ‘more than five miles in perpendicular height above the level of the plain on which I stood’.
Having spent Christmas in Lucknow, Colebrooke’s wife and children headed home and the surveyor spent the rest of the cold season in the jungles of Kumaon. This country was more hostile and so at Kanpur he
had picked up a detachment of sepoys under the command of Lieutenant William Webb, only twenty-two but with some training in survey work. Then Colebrooke fell ill: malaria and dysentery. Like so many of the surveyors that came later to the fringes of the Himalaya, the jungle of the terai had undone him. At a place called Pilibhit, about fifty kilometres north-east of Bareilly and just off the south-west tip of modern Nepal, Colebrooke took another series of observations of the mountains but could no longer continue overland. He returned to Bareilly, charging Webb to continue his mission to find the source of the Ganges. By August, weakening fast, he was on board a boat to Bengal; he died a month later at Bhagalpur, where William Jones had years before observed Jomolhari, glowing in the evening light.
Webb was not alone in his mission to the source of the Ganges. Captain Felix Raper, a friend from his regiment, the 10th Bengal Native Infantry, came too, keeping a lively journal of their adventure. The third member of their party was very different, a near-mythical Anglo-Indian called Hyder Jung Hearsey. At just twenty-five he was already a hardened soldier, a mercenary named after the emperor Hyder Ali of Mysore, whom his father Andrew had been fighting shortly before Hyder was born in 1782. (His name is sometimes written as Hyder Young Hearsey.) The boy’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been on the losing side at the Battle of Culloden, when the Jacobite rebellion was finally crushed, thereby forfeiting the family estates in Cumberland; something of the rebel stuck to Hyder too. His mother was Andrew Hearsey’s Indian common-law wife, whose name is unknown. Andrew later married an Englishwoman, Charlotte Crane, while he was in Britain pursuing a legal case. While her children were able to find employment in the East India Company – Hyder’s half-brother John had a distinguished military career, reaching the rank of general and fighting in the rebellion of 1857 – Hyder Hearsey, as an Anglo-Indian, was excluded. He got a little education at school in Woolwich but otherwise had to take his chances.