Himalaya

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by Ed Douglas


  And so, to the annoyance of his employers, William Moorcroft spent much of the cold season of late 1811 sniffing around the horse markets of northern India, which is how he met Hearsey, at Saharanpur, sixty-five kilometres south of the Garhwali town of Dehra Dun, just as the Anglo-Indian was recruiting fighters to clear Gorkhalis off his land. In Hearsey, Moorcroft found someone with the knowledge and contacts to cross the Himalaya, and with the gall too. When this awkward pair sought approval for their journey, the Company agent in Bareilly was glad to be shot of them. They took off for the mountains in search of good horses, as well as Tibet’s famous shawl goats, before Calcutta could get wind of the plan and call them back.

  Lacking permission from the Gorkhali authorities, the two men went disguised as gosain, trader-monks like Purangir, servant of the Panchen Lama, who had accompanied George Bogle to Shigatse almost forty years earlier: the archetype for the sort of intermediary the British would come to rely on. Hearsey, with his Indian blood, looked the part. Moorcroft coloured his skin with walnut juice and the ashes from a fire of cow dung. They took the pseudonyms Hargiri and Mayapuri. With them went an Afghan soldier of fortune called Gholam Hyder Khan, an old friend from Hearsey’s mercenary days, and an older Brahman from Kumaon whom Moorcroft named Harballabh – this was the pandit, or ‘learned man’, who had proved so valuable on Hearsey’s earlier journey towards the source of the Ganges and who had spoken of the two lakes beyond the mountains. Moorcroft called Harballabh the ‘old pundit’ to differentiate him from his nephew Harkh Dev, who also accompanied them. Both these men would help Hearsey and Moorcroft survey their route. Though he lacked a theodolite, Hearsey took a compass and a thermometer to record altitude and Harkh Dev got the tedious job of counting his paces – four feet for two steps – to measure distance. With them went four dozen porters to carry goods they hoped to sell in Tibet.

  Hearsey knew the route as far as the junction of the Alaknanda and Dhauli rivers, where they turned east through a deep gorge. This travels up the west side of Nanda Devi, just as the Johar valley follows the east. These days there is a crumbling jeep track; then there was a crumbling footpath. Moorcroft was impressed at the agility of Harballabh, reminding himself that the ‘old pundit’ had been born in the mountains of Kumaon. But even the pandit had to shelter in a hollow while he summoned up the courage to cross a particularly exposed and dangerous section. Hearsey was almost hit by rocks knocked off the mountainside by bears traversing three hundred feet above him. Moorcroft noted that the path would be much better had not key bridges been washed away, bridges that could be restored for a small investment of no more than a hundred rupees. His account of this journey, published in the Asiatic Journal of 1816, is not only brimming with that eighteenth-century impulse for improvement, as though the remote Dhauli valley was an underperforming English estate, but crammed also with observations on every subject: the weather, crops, forestry, fauna and flora, obviously, but in great detail, listing the herbs he found near villages, the fashionable new subject of geology, hydrology and what we would now call anthropology. He saw how the locals wrote receipts on birch bark, examined a yellow snake Hearsey had killed and noted the differences in how sheep and goats, both used for carrying loads from Tibet, negotiated the steep paths.

  Moorcroft’s powers of observation were remarkable. Across the border in Tibet, he noted the kindness of a Tibetan woman who fetched them water and then described her appearance. Every detail of her dress was recorded, even more so her jewellery, especially that worn on her head:

  it was bordered with silver, and from this rim hung seven rows of coral beads, each row consisting of five, which were terminated by seven silver timashas [coins] that played upon the forehead. The crown was studded with small pearls distributed in seven rows, and the low part was decorated with green stones something like turquoises but marbled with coral beads, and many bands of silver and of a yellow metal, probably gold, about a finger’s breadth.

  Moorcroft saw the world with such intensity that he might one day have driven himself mad.

  It was certainly typical of him to pay close attention to women. Years later, the French traveller Victor Jacquemont repeated gossip he’d heard in Kashmir about Moorcroft, that ‘his chief occupation was making love’. It wasn’t altogether true. Moorcroft was also writing a detailed treatise on the shawl-wool trade, and Jacquemont himself was no better in that regard. Moorcroft’s interest in women extended far beyond his own sexual appetite. His account of the journey to Tibet is full of telling details about the position of women in the cultures he moved through. He admired the strength and courage of Bhotia women carrying loads. He saw a woman whom he tipped for this service have the coin taken from her by a man he assumed to be her husband; when Moorcroft discovered he wasn’t, he chased him for his ‘petty tyranny’ and recovered the coin for her. He admired women’s skill at weaving, ‘learned from Tibet’, and literally measured how quickly they could produce cloth. He noticed also the widespread practice of slavery, an industry dominated by Gorkhali agents, who sold slaves to rich families of the district. Above all, he noted how women outnumbered men, who were either trading across the border or else had been forcibly recruited into the Gorkhali army, a resentment the British would exploit in their war with Nepal three years later.

  When the expedition arrived at Niti, the last village before the pass into Tibet, Hearsey and Moorcroft were forced to stop and negotiate their way across the border. This left the local Bhotias, known as Marchas to Moorcroft and today as Rong-pa, facing a conundrum. Here were wealthy feringhi – white foreigners – wanting to spend whatever it took to do something that might annoy officials in Tibet, who could make life difficult for them. Their cover story, that they were pilgrims on the road to Manasarovar, was an obvious sham. Pilgrims didn’t go to Manasarovar this way; certainly not pilgrims this wealthy. The obvious answer was to delay, thus stripping the group of money while at the same time hoping they’d give up and go home.

  Moorcroft and Hearsey wrote a letter to the deba, or local Tibetan official, explaining they were pilgrims. The headman of the village told them to expect a delay; the route the letter had to take wasn’t yet clear of snow and it would be weeks before any messenger could travel. Almost immediately, two Tibetans appeared, coming down from the supposedly blocked pass. The letter was sent. Two days later the locals despatched an ambassador, a man so drunk he fell off the yak he was riding four times before he crested the hillside above the village. There was little cause for optimism. Eight days later the deba came back with a firm refusal. There were more meetings, more promises, more rupees spread around to ease concerns. Moorcroft got his medical kit out and used his skills to win friends. Finally a man called Amer Singh, son of the village chief Arjun Singh, told the ‘old pundit’ Harballabh that he could get the foreigners across the pass to Tibet, or Undes as Moorcroft called it.

  Even with Amer Singh’s help, Moorcroft and Hearsey were driven to distraction with prevarication and delay; Hearsey resorted to painting a picture of the village, an image now in the British Library. Eventually terms were agreed but both men knew they had been fleeced. The night before departure, the locals held a party and the foreigners donated a bottle of brandy to raise morale. Yet when they rose early the following morning to start, there was no sign of anyone, just the yaks they had hired. Eventually Amer Singh’s father Arjun arrived, now doubtful about the wisdom of it all. More rupees were spread around and finally the caravan got underway. Then, after an hour, their guides announced there was a ceremony planned for a villager who had died the year before and they were heading back to the village. Two days later, bored with examining the local rhubarb and observing how easily the sun at high altitude burned his face and lips, Moorcroft sent a messenger to find out what was going on. The messenger reported how the villagers were still sleeping off the party, all piled up in a big heap on the floor of a house. They would be along presently.

  In the end, worn down by the foreigners’
relentless determination, Amer Singh led Moorcroft and Hearsey across the pass at the head of the valley and into Tibet. Moorcroft’s account of lying awake at their high camp before the long ascent to the top of the Niti La is one of the earliest descriptions by an Englishman of altitude sickness and what is now called Cheyne–Stokes breathing, and one of the best.

  I awoke at a very early hour and was immediately seized with difficulty of breathing and great oppression about the heart, which was removed for a few seconds by sighing deeply. When on the point of falling asleep, the sense of suffocation came on, and the sighing became very frequent and distressing: however, as the air became a little warmer, this affection [effect] somewhat subsided.

  Before they reached the pass the caravan met two Tibetans bringing salt down to Niti. Amer Singh told Moorcroft that these traders raised ‘many objections to our proceeding’ and that they should return with them to the main village thirty kilometres over the pass, a place called Daba. At the top Moorcroft found them lighting a fire and burning juniper,

  in the midst of which was a statue having a piece of cloth tied to it, and whilst walking, [they] uttered a long prayer. To the East was the sacred mountain near the lake of Mansarovar, tipped with snow, and called Cailas or Mahadeo ka Ling. Turning his face towards this mountain, and after raising his hands with the palms joined above his head, then touching his forehead, [one of them] suddenly placed them on the ground, and going on his knees pressed his forehead to the ground.

  It is presumably these two traders that Hearsey later painted in a jaunty impression of this awkward encounter, smoking their pipes astride their Chamurthi mountain ponies with their yaks behind them fully loaded. Hearsey and Moorcroft, wearing their disguise, are riding their yaks towards the holiest mountain Kailas; in the distance is a small group of khyang, or wild asses.

  Two days later the party reached Daba, perched on a rocky prominence that dominates the valley, where Amer Singh incurred the displeasure of the officials who had earlier sent messages denying the ‘pilgrims’ access. Moorcroft reports a meeting between the head lama of the local monastery; the son of the deba; the local big landowner; Amer Singh; the old pandit Harballabh; a man from the Johar valley, whom Moorcroft doesn’t name; and another man, also unnamed, described as a sirdar – a chief, or boss. Everybody understood the stakes: the best advantage for the least trouble and not too many questions asked. Amer Singh had the least power and so had to be the most persuasive, picking his way carefully along a treacherous path, meeting the needs of his employers while not causing himself difficulties with local Tibetan officials whose cooperation he needed for future business. Moorcroft and Hearsey were not fools but neither spoke Tibetan so the course of these negotiations was largely obscured from them. They were almost wholly reliant on their intermediary, who led them the following morning into the presence of the lama and the son of the local chief. Having handed over gifts of three yards of scarlet broadcloth, some sugar and spices, the chief’s son flourished a letter to the district governor at Gartok that would reassure him that Moorcroft and Hearsey really were gosain traders on a pilgrimage and asking for instructions about what to do with them.

  A short while later, the governor, or garpon, sent word summoning them to visit him. This suited Moorcroft very well. His journey to Tibet in 1812 is best remembered now for his visit to the sacred lake of Manasarovar, the first by an Englishman, and his conviction that it was wholly landlocked, being neither the source of the Indus nor linked, as Harballabh claimed, in any way to its brackish neighbour Rakshas Tal. (In fact, Harballabh was right: there is a link between the two, but it’s ephemeral. Moorcroft speculated that an earthquake had interrupted its flow since Harballabh’s visit.) But while Moorcroft was intensely curious about the region’s geography, it was in fact the possibility of trade – not just horses, but shawl wool too – that was foremost in his mind, and Gartok was the centre of it.

  Having left Daba and crossed the Sutlej above the decaying Guge fortress of Tsaparang, their caravan reached the upper Indus and the vast plateau of Gartok in six days. ‘The intervening plain,’ Moorcroft wrote,

  and indeed as far as the eye can reach until it is bounded by a pass to the N.W. is covered by prodigious bodies of sheep, goats and yaks, amongst which is a small number of horses. The number of cattle cannot I think be less than 40000.

  Gartok itself was little more than a temporary collection of tents and a rather mean house for the garpon. The rolling hills north from here where the sheep and goats grazed had few permanent villages: this was nomad country. Animals were driven here and then shorn, their wool and hair shipped on. It was clear to Moorcroft that a great deal of money was changing hands. When he met the garpon, Moorcroft paid close attention to his jewellery and when he asked the Tibetan what he could bring from Hindustan should trade between them prosper he was impressed at the precise and educated list of precious objects the garpon requested. The suspicion that they were Gorkhalis or Peling, as the Tibetans called the British, soon wore off, as Moorcroft wryly observed, ‘either by the representations of the Deba, or by the weight of our presents’. There was money to be made.

  The following day, Moorcroft and Hearsey put the wares they had carried over the Niti La on display. The Kashmiri trade agent of the king of Ladakh, there to buy wool, sent word that he was ready to buy the lot if the garpon didn’t want them. When they met, Moorcroft pumped him for information about Central Asia’s trade routes. He learned that Gartok was a vast temporary marketplace plugging the Chang Tang, the northern region of the Tibetan plateau, and its huge herds of sheep, goats and yaks, into the major trading route between Lhasa and the trade hub of Leh, the capital of Ladakh, which the Kashmiri told him was ten days’ journey from there. Kashmir itself, he said, was another ten days beyond Leh. The horse fair at Bukhara, also famous for its carpets, would take a month. The roundabout route to Bukhara from Delhi via Kabul and on to Central Asia ‘he represented as very circuitous’, in comparison to this route across the Himalaya. Moorcroft also discovered that the sparse population of western Tibet relied on the people of the Johar valley and other Himalayan groups for grain, which they traded for sheep wool. The Kashmiris were most interested in the more valuable shawl wool from goats, a trade they had monopolised thanks to their Mughal overlords, trading saffron in return. Ladakh couldn’t produce enough pashmina to satisfy manufacturers in Kashmir so prices in Tibet were high. He also discovered, with some alarm, that trade with Russia was also well established; a Russian trade agent called Mehdi Rafailov, a Persian Jew, had been in Kashmir in 1808. Later a Ladakhi trader showed Moorcroft samples of French woollen cloth and Russian leather that had arrived from Central Asia, now falling under the shadow of the expanding Russian Empire. The implications of this would trouble Moorcroft for the rest of his life, provoking him to fire off prophetic memos to Calcutta about the Russian threat to India at a time when London and St Petersburg were allies against Napoleon.

  Before leaving for Manasarovar, Moorcroft and Hearsey had themselves done a deal with the garpon to buy a quantity of shawl wool. One morning as they prepared to leave a place called Misar this wool arrived on horseback, accompanied by the garpon’s officer, a man called Tharchen. The garpon had sent more wool than Moorcroft had requested and would accept only silver rupees in return. Moorcroft realised this was a test of whether he was in fact a trader or had some other more nefarious motive for coming to Tibet. It also attracted the attention of Johari traders in the village ‘who were troublesomely inquisitive as to who we were, what could be our motives for coming, and why we purchased shawl wool’. The Joharis were at the time the chief conduit for goods from India and had much to lose.

  The sight of some of our wares seemed to convince them, that we were what we appeared to be. I consider this day as the epoch at which may be fixed the origin of a traffic which is likely to be extremely beneficial to the Honourable Company.

  If Moorcroft had gone to the mountains looking for horses, he
left with a grand strategy of Himalayan trade. The final legacy of his journey would prove to be neither.

  *

  Hearsey and Moorcroft were told to cross back over the Himalaya the way they had come and when they reached Daba the two had an encounter whose consequences would stretch out to the end of the nineteenth century. A Rawat trader called Dev Singh made himself known to Moorcroft. Singh, the son of a powerful landowner from the Johar valley, offered to lend the travellers money; their journey had been unexpectedly expensive and they might need some. Moorcroft demurred, but instead offered to trade a valuable set of coral beads for some shawl-wool goats and sheep. He asked they be delivered to Niti where the ‘young pundit’ Harkh Dev would be waiting to bring them down to Moorcroft on the plains. The deal was done. Having proved himself useful in this and other ways to Moorcroft, Dev Singh asked Moorcroft for a certificate that would essentially allow him to trade in the East India Company’s jurisdiction at the local rate. This Moorcroft was happy to supply.

 

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