by Ed Douglas
Aged sixteen, the year his father died, he had entered the service of Saadat Ali Khan, nawab of Oudh, but moved swiftly on to be a cadet in the army of the outlandish French mercenary Pierre Cuillier-Perron, the former sailor leading the charge for the Maratha confederacy that dominated much of India in the late eighteenth century. Aged just seventeen, Hyder distinguished himself in the siege of Agra, earning Perron’s gratitude, but when the Frenchman began to see a chance to re-establish French power in India, many of his British and Anglo-Indian officers left him, Hyder Hearsey among them. Soon thereafter he found himself fighting his old commander in the service of the Irish mercenary George Thomas and, after Thomas’ death, starting his own army, which Hearsey led in the service of the East India Company. He also married Zuhur-ul-Nissa, adopted daughter of the Mughal emperor Akbar II, an illustration of his upward mobility. His new bride had estates near Bareilly, recently ceded to the Company by the nawab of Oudh, which is where Colebrooke found this fiercely self-reliant ‘rough diamond’. Needless to say, Webb and Raper didn’t like him.
This trio arrived in Haridwar during the spring fair, which coincided in 1808 with the Kumbh Mela, the ‘pitcher gathering’, not the immense event it is today but still significant. Held every dozen years, this vast, broiling assembly of pilgrims rarely passed without violence or mishap. Many of the pilgrims were gosain, there to do business as well as bathe in the Ganges. The fair was an opportunity for darker habits too: hundreds of slaves were for sale, ‘of both sexes, from three to thirty years of ages’, forced down from the hills. By chance, the expedition met there the Gorkhali governor of Srinagar, Hasti Dal Chautariya, a corpulent, jovial man who had come down for the festival. (Hyder Hearsey and Hasti Dal would meet again a few years later on opposite sides in the Company’s war with Gorkha: Hearsey led irregulars that would later become Gurkha regiments.) Hasti Dal was content for the British to continue upstream but soon afterwards he was replaced, and the new governor, Bhairav Thapa, wasn’t so congenial: the British were forced to pay a vastly inflated price for porters to continue their journey, entering the rugged valley systems of the middle hills, ‘a mighty maze without a plan’, as the surveyor general of India John Hodgson termed it.
Raper’s account of their journey is full of interest.
It is necessary for a person to place himself in our situation, before he can form a just conception of the scene. The depth of the valley below, the progressive elevation of the intermediate hills, and the majestic splendor of the ‘cloud-capt’ Himalaya, formed so grand a picture that the mind was impressed with a sensation of dread rather than of pleasure.
It was, Raper wrote, ‘a sight the most sublime and awful that can be pictured to the imagination’. He was even more interested in people, paying close attention to the social differences between the people of the mountains and the plains.
We perceived a great difference in the manners of the people. They appeared to be much more civilized, and so far from exhibiting any signs of apprehension, they came running towards the road, to see us pass. The women even, did not shew that bashfulness and reserve, which females in Hindostan in general exhibit; but, mixing with the crowd, they made their comments with the greatest freedom. . . . Their garments are made of coarse cloth; whereas those of the men are of thick blanket, manufactured from the wool and hair of the sheep and goats, which are of kinds peculiar to the hills. We could not help remarking, that, even in these unfrequented regions, the female mountaineers exhibited the general failing of the sex, having their necks, ears and noses, ornamented with rings and beads. When these are beyond their means, they substitute a wreath or bunch of flowers; for which purpose the white rose is chosen, both for its beauty and scent.
The trio did not make it quite to the source of the Ganges, reaching the confluence of the Bhagirathi with the Jadh Ganga, which rises in Tibet. By then they had done a lot more walking than they’d expected and the path ahead seemed even harder. Webb decided to send a local to scout out the terrain ahead and then report back. ‘Captain Hearsay’s moonshee [munshi, meaning ‘translator’ and ‘secretary’], a very intelligent man, was selected for that undertaking,’ Raper wrote. ‘To render his observations more correct, he was provided with, and instructed in the use of his compass.’ Raper made careful notes of what he saw of the Bhagirathi.
From the appearance of the river itself, which becomes contracted in its stream, and from the stupendous height of the Himálaya mountains, whence it flows; there can be no doubt but its source is situated in the snow range; and any other hypothesis can scarcely be reconciled to hydrostatical principles. The pilgrims, and those people in the vicinity of this place, who gain a livelihood by bringing water from the spot, say that the road beyond Gangotrí is passable only for a few miles, when the current is entirely concealed under heaps of snow, which no traveller ever has or can surmount. With respect to the Cow’s Mouth, we had the most convincing testimony to confirm us in the idea that its existence is entirely fabulous, and that it is found only in the Hindù book of faith.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Webb or to Henry Colebrooke that Gaumukh, ‘the cow’s mouth’, might be of ice rather than rock; it’s also possible the mythological name for the source of the Ganges was simply stuck to the actual place. The first Briton to reach Gangotri was James Baillie Fraser, a Scottish travel writer who visited the Gorkhali-built temple in June 1815, soon after the East India Company’s war with Nepal. He asked the temple priest about the cow’s mouth but the priest just laughed and said that ‘most of those pilgrims who came from the plains asked the same question.’
Webb and the others continued on to the Alaknanda valley and the temple at Badrinath, then to the Tibetan village of Mana, where the missionaries Andrade and Marques had hired guides to reach Tsaparang some two centuries earlier. Webb was satisfied this river was greater and reached deeper into the mountains than the Bhagirathi and was consequently the true source of the Ganges. Relieved that his assignment was a success, Webb turned for home. Robert Colebrooke’s cousin Henry was now president of the Asiatic Society and it fell to him to prepare Raper’s account for publication in its journal of 1812. The report is remarkable for several reasons, not least the near-absence of Hyder Jung Hearsey. It seems safe to assume that his deep experience of the region and overall toughness could only have been an asset to the party; of that we hear almost nothing. The stony silence masked a bitter and convoluted dispute over the origin of a map Hearsey sent to James Rennell in late 1808. Hearsey was hoping it would prompt some compensation for him, given that Gorkhali soldiers had robbed the expedition on its way out of the mountains. He was instead accused of stealing the map from Webb and, given his reputation and skin colour, the allegation was believed. Hearsey had kept his own journal, which records the surveying work he did, and the map William Webb eventually sent to his superiors two years later wasn’t remotely to the same standard as Hearsey’s.
Henry Colebrooke was careful in his preface to Raper’s article not to be too hasty in his judgment about the height of the Himalaya.
Without however supposing the Himálaya to exceed the Andes, there is still room to argue, that an extensive range of mountains, which rears, high above the line of perpetual snow, in an almost tropical latitude, an uninterrupted chain of lofty peaks, is neither surpassed nor rivalled by any other chain of mountains but the Cordillera of the Andes.
In 1816 he revisited the subject in another article for the Asiatic Journal. By then William Webb had taken his own reading of Dhaulagiri and learned its name, something Robert Colebrooke had not managed, giving it a height of 26,862 feet (8,188 metres), only twenty metres off its current measured altitude. Meanwhile, two other surveyors, John Hodgson and James Herbert, had reached Gaumukh itself and seen the soaring spire of Shivling. Reviewing all the evidence gathered so far, Henry Colebrooke was much more definitive:
I consider the evidence to be now sufficient to authorize an unreserved declaration of the opinion, that the
Himálaya is the loftiest range of Alpine mountains which has been yet noticed, its most elevated peaks greatly exceeding the highest of the Andes.
Colebrooke’s claim was sensational but met with a faint raspberry: this was another tall tale from the subcontinent. How could he be so sure? The anonymous author of a long and expert article in the influential Quarterly Review was deeply sceptical:
we cannot help thinking that he has come to this conclusion rather hastily. We have not one word to offer against his calculations nor his formula: we have such an opinion of his accuracy, that we are willing to take the results on trust. All we mean to protest against is the insufficiency of his facts to authorize the conclusion which he has drawn from them.
The reviewer zeroed in on Webb’s measurement of Dhaulagiri as the most convincing of his evidence and then argued just as convincingly that given the distance from which his observations were taken the possibility they were grossly inaccurate was too great to ignore. In a nutshell, the science behind the measurements of the Andes was a lot more convincing than Colebrooke’s. Interest in funding further work in measuring the Himalaya quickly faded after this sigh of indifference. William Webb, who in a harsh light appears something of a duffer, had been close to the height of Dhaulagiri, but as much by luck as by judgment. Passed over for promotion he quit the Company’s service. Budget cuts paused the Survey of India’s work in the Himalaya for a decade or so, and although the Anglo-Burmese war of 1824 allowed the Company access to the north-eastern parts of the Himalaya – Richard Wilcox and James Burlton explored Assam and the Brahmaputra valley in the late 1820s – surveyors didn’t yet have either the instruments or the mathematics to measure accurately the height of the Himalaya.
Until the late eighteenth century, the precise altitude of where you were standing hadn’t worried anyone unduly. In 1818, two Scottish brothers, Alexander and James Gerard, reached the upper slopes of a mountain near the Shipki La, in the district of Kinnaur near where the Sutlej emerges from Tibet, simply ‘to see the barometer below fifteen inches’, thus setting what they believed was a world altitude record. They suffered horribly from altitude sickness, comparing it to ‘the sedative effect of intoxication’. The brothers told the world they had gone higher than Alexander von Humboldt had on Chimborazo in 1802, but the man himself was unimpressed: ‘these mountain ascents, however they engage the curiosity of the public, are of very little scientific utility’. The relevance of altitude, on the other hand, was increasingly important, thanks in part to von Humboldt’s own scientific vision. Wherever you were in the world, altitude affected the distribution of plants, just as latitude did: a compelling scientific reason for accurately measuring the height of mountains. As the botanist William Griffith, who went to Bhutan in 1837, pointed out: ‘the Botanist who travels without the means of determining these points, destroys half the value of his collections’.
In a neat irony, the paper that followed Colebrooke’s in the Asiatic Journal of 1816 was by a man whose work would ultimately provide the platform for accurately measuring the height of the Himalaya. For more than a decade William Lambton had been gradually travelling up the length of India from south to north, working in near-obscurity, triangulating a masterfully accurate sequence of positions: the ‘Great Indian Arc of the Meridian’. A protégé of Arthur Wellesley, Lambton wasn’t just a surveyor: he was a geodesist, measuring accurately the geometric shape of the earth, taking as his inspiration the Scottish surveyor William Roy, whose innovative spherical trigonometry proved the pivot between the approximate maps of the past and modern cartography. From 1818 onwards, the slow but steady continuation of Lambton’s work, stetching over the next five decades, was known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, or simply the Great Survey. It’s hard now to appreciate the scale of what it achieved and at what human cost, like judging the miracle of an analogue telephone from the age of Google, but adding in the likely prospect of death. The geographer Clements Markham calculated that in the worst seasons of surveying along the frontier of Nepal, the number of dead, British and Indian, reached three figures. In the diagram of fixed positions that eventually emerged from the Great Survey in 1870, it is as if India has grown a spine of scaffolding with arms extended outwards to either side; it was from these arms that the true height of the Himalaya were finally measured. But no sooner had the survey been completed and marvelled at, than technology moved on and the scale of its enterprise was forgotten.
Lambton himself would die in the field, aged seventy, his more famous successor being George Everest, irascible where Lambton was self-effacing, but no less determined. His family came from Greenwich in east London, home of the prime meridian, and they pronounced their name Eve-rest; George would sharply correct anyone saying Ever-est. He was followed as surveyor general by Andrew Waugh, who, against protocol, appended his mentor’s name to a mountain he himself observed in 1847, a mountain that had by 1850 been calculated as the highest yet measured, higher even than Kangchenjunga, so clearly seen from Darjeeling. It did not happen the way it is sometimes reported: of a computer (meaning in those days a person who computes) rushing into Waugh’s office claiming he had discovered the highest point on earth. The work was a process of slow accretion, its conclusion not made public until 1856. Even then there was speculation that a new contender discovered in the neighbouring mountains of the Karakoram range, labelled K2 in the surveyor’s scheme, might be bigger. Everest himself never saw his mountain; his interest in the Himalaya was largely confined to enjoying the fresh air at his home near the new hill station of Mussoorie. He also stuck to the Survey of India’s rule of finding local names for whatever they measured. What he made of his name being applied to the world’s highest mountain is not recorded.
At the time of Waugh’s observation, Everest was back in England, hunting foxes in Leicestershire. Later in life he settled permanently in London, by then the imperial city of Victorian England. At the time of his birth in 1790 the Himalaya had been on the fringes of the East India Company’s sphere of influence; Britain had been one among several competing powers. Now in Everest’s old age the mountains were the northern limit of the British Raj, in its philosophy and culture a very different enterprise. As British India evolved, reflecting the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution, so the purposes of Himalayan geography shifted with it, becoming a finely calibrated tool of, as William Webb termed it, ‘great practical utility’. And by then the political map of the Himalaya had been torn up and wholly redrawn.
11
The Tyrant and the Scholar
On the morning of 12 May 1857, a young army captain galloped into the Himalayan hill station of Simla with a telegram. The message had been sent from Delhi to the captain’s father Sir Henry Barnard, commanding officer of the Sirhind division of the Bengal army stationed two hundred kilometres north of the city at Ambala. His son was now forwarding it to the commander-in-chief of the Indian army. The message, sent to Ambala on India’s newly installed telegraph system, reported the opening shots in what British colonial powers would term the Indian or Sepoy Mutiny, and many Indians refer to as the First War of Independence. There had been no shortage of wars against British hegemony in South Asia, most recently the Anglo-Sikh conflicts of the 1840s. This was different. This was a rebellion from deep within, striking at the heart of the British security apparatus: the military and police. What began as a revolt among troops at the garrison town of Meerut, not far from the foothills of the mountains, soon spread south to Delhi and across the northern plains of India.
The commander-in-chief, General George Anson, tucked the telegram under his plate while he finished his breakfast in the cool of another Himalayan morning. Anson had little experience of the subcontinent. He had seen no fighting since Waterloo, when he was a young subaltern in the Guards, and had spent much of the interim as a member of parliament. He had a passion for horseracing and cards; his appointment the year before had been an unwelcome interruption. Being an officer in the Q
ueen’s service, Anson had little respect for the Indian army, which he regarded as ill disciplined; nor did he have much sympathy with the cultural concerns of Indian sepoys. Like many of the British troops under his command, he had come to the hills from Ambala to escape the heat of the Indian summer, which played havoc with his health, and at first was reluctant to move. He gave orders for arsenals to be secured and troops to move down from the mountains toward Delhi. Three days later, as the situation spiralled towards disaster, he was back in Ambala, complaining that the ‘conduct of the Native Army has destroyed all confidence in any regiment’. He would be dead from cholera within a fortnight and by then India was ablaze.
In the town of Simla itself, news of mutinous ‘native’ troops soon spread panic: a microcosm of the wider crisis, just as the hill station itself was a microcosm of the British in India. Forty years earlier, Simla, the future summer capital of the Raj, had been a small mountain hamlet set in dense forest, a prize taken from the Gorkhas in 1815 and given to the maharaja of Patiala as reward for his support in the war against Nepal. The region had been studded with Gorkhali forts, including one at nearby Jutogh, and so the country became familiar to British officers and agents stationed nearby. Simla’s rugged scenery combined contemporary romantic ideals of the sublime with relief from the often deadly hot summer months. The congenial political officer Charles Kennedy built the first ‘pukka’ house there and visiting friends began to acquire land so they could do the same. This started a small property boom. Sanatoria opened nearby. When the governor general Lord Amherst stayed in 1827, he set a fashion that turned Simla from a summer retreat into a bustling social whirl, ‘the resort of the rich, the idle and the invalid’, as the pleasingly waspish French botanist and traveller Victor Jacquemont described it in 1829.