The Great Arc

The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named (Text Only)

John Keay

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007404520
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

A vivid description of one of the most ambitious scientific projects undertaken in the 19th century, and the men who undertook the measurement of the Himalayas and the mapping of the Indian subcontinent: William Lambton and George Everest.

ONE

A Baptism of Fever

The word ‘jungle’ comes from India. In its Hindi form of jangal, it denotes any area of uncultivated land. Indian jungles are not necessarily forested, and today less so than ever. But well away from centres of population there do still survive a few extensive and well-wooded jungle tracts, especially in eastern and central India. Often they are classed as game sanctuaries, a designation which implies few facilities for the visitor but some much-advertised protection for the wildlife.

Here tigers and elephants yet roam, hornbills flap about in the canopy like clumsy pterodactyls, and hump-backed boar rootle aggressively through the leaf mould. In the dry season a safari might seem an attractive prospect. But be warned: ‘dry’ is high-baked. Like splintering glass, dead leaves explode underfoot to alert the animals. The tracks of crumbled dirt are hard to follow, spiked with ferocious thorns, and spanned by man-size webs patrolled by bird-size spiders.

The wet season is worse still. Then, the vegetation erupts. The tracks become impassable, and the air fills with insects. Only fugitives take to the jungle in the monsoon. Fugitives and, in days gone by when maps were rare, surveyors. In the year 1819, in just such a tract between the Godavari and Kistna rivers in what is now the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, an English Lieutenant, lately attached to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and uncommonly keen to make his mark, underwent a baptism of fever.

Matters had gone badly for the twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant from the start. Barely a month into this, his first season in the field, he had been confronted by a mutiny. ‘The infliction of corporal punishment is an odious task,’ he noted. But it was either that or abandoning the assignment. His escort obviously knew the perils of the monsoonal jungle and had seized every chance of escaping from the camp back to the city of Hyderabad. Something had to be done. Not without misgivings, the Lieutenant ordered one of these defaulters to be thrashed, whereupon the whole troop, about forty in number, took up their weapons and announced that they would decamp en masse. The British bluff had been called; in this insignificant and still today unfashionable corner of the subcontinent the myth of empire was at stake.

As might be inferred, by 1819 the British were already well on their way to becoming masters of India. Some areas had been won by conquest and were now under direct British rule; others were merely attached by treaty and remained nominally independent states under their own rulers. This was the case with the large principality of Hyderabad, through whose densest jungle the Kistna and Godavari rivers converged on the coast. Special permission had been obtained for the Great Trigonometrical Survey to operate in Hyderabad; but in ‘a native state’ the standards of subservience exacted in areas under direct British rule could not be taken for granted.

In fact, they could seemingly not be taken at all other than at the point of a gun. The mutineers, who now repaired to the nearby shade of a mango orchard, comprised a detachment of local troops lent by Nizam Sikander Jah of Hyderabad to protect and assist the British survey. In addition, the Survey had its own escort of twelve men who had been recruited in British territory, were paid out of the Survey’s budget and had already amassed many years of loyal service. This in-house escort was now ordered to load muskets and take aim at the mutineers. A volley into their midst was threatened if they did not immediately surrender.

The ploy worked. The mutineers submitted, and this time the Lieutenant offered no apology for calling for the cane. Three men were publicly flogged, then dismissed; and thus, the Lieutenant tells us, ‘was settled, very early in my career, a disputed point which had been a source of constant contention and annoyance to Colonel Lambton ever since his entering into the Nizam’s territory’.

Colonel Lambton was the originator and now Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. For seventeen years he had been spinning a web of giant geometry across the Indian peninsula without ever having had to thrash any of its teeming peoples. Tactful, patient and indestructible, Lambton seemed immune to India’s frustrations, the result of a long wilderness experience in North America and of an attachment to science so obsessive and disinterested that even his critics were inclined to indulge him. Colonel Lambton beguiled India; but Lieutenant George Everest, his eager new assistant, chastised it.

The name, incidentally, was pronounced not ‘Ever-rest’ (like ‘cleverest’), but ‘Eve-rest’ (like ‘cleave-rest’). That was how the family always pronounced it, and the Lieutenant would not have thanked you for getting it wrong. Years later a fellow officer would make the mistake of calling him a ‘Kumpass Wala’. No offence was meant. ‘Kumpass Wala’, or ‘compass-wallah’, was an accepted Anglo-Indian term for a surveyor. Everest, however, accepted nothing of the sort. He detested what he called ‘nicknames’ and, though it was not perhaps worth a dawn challenge, he demanded – and received – abject apologies. Getting on the wrong side of George Everest was an occupational hazard with which even British India would only slowly come to terms.

With the mutiny quelled and the mutineers ‘finding that, when they knew me better, good behaviour was a perfect security against all unkindness’, a self-righteous Everest pressed on for the jungles beside the Kistna. It was July, the month when the monsoon breaks. On time, the heavens duly opened just as he climbed a hill to his first observation post.

Survey work was conducted during and immediately after the monsoon because, regardless of the discomfort, it was only then that the dust was laid and the heat-haze dispersed. In the interludes of bright sunshine, the atmosphere was at its clearest; in fact it became so transparent that Everest fancied he could see forever and that ‘the proximity of objects was only to be judged by their apparent magnitudes’. Trigonometrical surveying depended on the sighting of slender signal posts over distances of more than twenty miles. The monsoon’s perfect visibility was therefore ideal. Spying a long dark ridge all of sixty miles to the east, Everest despatched his four best signalmen to occupy its heights. The ridge, he understood, was called Panch Pandol, and the signalmen were to erect their flagpole there in readiness for his observations. Meanwhile he continued south to the Kistna with the rest of his party.

Although visibility was greatly enhanced by the monsoon, mobility was not. Dry riverbeds instantly became raging torrents full of uprooted trees. The Musi, a tributary of the Kistna, rose so rapidly that Everest found himself cut off from his supplies. On iron rations therefore, and denied the normal crossing on the Kistna, which was on the other side of its confluence with the Musi, he headed downstream to where an alternative ferry was said to operate at a spot about fifty miles above the modern city of Vijayawada.

The Kistna, one of India’s mightiest rivers, was now thrashing dementedly over steeply shelving rock like a panic-stricken patient beneath the surgeon’s knife. Crossing it meant trusting oneself to a coracle, a small circular vessel, more bowl than boat, made of woven rattans and faced with hide. Everest likened it to a leather basket. Such craft, still used in many parts of India, are highly portable and sometimes formed part of a surveyor’s outfit. Although not so provided, Everest found one abandoned by the river.

While it was undergoing the necessary repairs at the hands of the village cobbler, Everest ordered his ‘carriage-cattle’ to be swum across the flood. Fortunately they were not actually cattle, ox-carts being useless in roadless jungle, but a species he deemed ‘more at home in the water than any other quadruped’, namely elephants. As he also noted, elephants are extraordinarily sagacious. The Survey’s beasts duly swayed to the bank, took a long look at the rocks and the raging waters, assessed the mix of caresses and curses on offer, and opted to stay dry. ‘Probably it was fortunate,’ Everest adds, ‘for these powerful animals … are, from the size of their limbs, in need of what sailors term sea-room, and in a river like the Kistna … were very liable to receive some serious injury.’

This reverse meant a change of plan. Dr Henry Voysey, one of Everest’s two British companions and the Survey’s geologist-cum-physician, was left on the north bank with the main party plus elephants, horses, tents and baggage. Meanwhile Everest and a dozen men, balancing the Survey’s cumbersome theodolite between them, crossed to the other side. Three trips had to be made; and since the coracle had to undergo repairs after each, it took most of the day. Then, deceived by the visibility into thinking it was only a couple of miles away, Everest immediately set out for his next observation post.

The couple of miles turned out to be twelve. They included both jungle work and rock-climbing. By the time the hill of Sarangapalle was reached it was dusk, and big black clouds, aflicker with lightning, were piling up overhead. ‘At last,’ noted Everest, ‘when all their batteries were in order, a tremendous crash of thunder burst forth, and, as if all heaven were converted into one vast shower-bath, the vertical rain poured down in large round drops upon the devoted spot of Sarangapullee.’

Tentless in the deluge, Everest and his men bent branches to make bivouacs. His own was improved by a bedstead and an umbrella, between which he slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted, oblivious alike of his squelching tweeds, puddled bedding and benighted followers. ‘These evils might have been borne without any ill effects,’ he insists, ‘but for other circumstances of more serious consequence.’

The natives of India, according to Everest, ‘with their minds bowed down under the incubus of superstition’, attributed all fevers to witchcraft, and ignored natural causes. He, on the other hand, while amused by the idleness and absurdity of these doctrines, knew better. Malaria and ‘typhus’ fevers were alike the result of ‘a poisonous influence in the air’ which emanated from moist and ‘unwholesome’ soils. Under the impression that he was contributing to medical research, he examined the different schists and shales, the crystalline sandstone of Sarangapalle, the blue limestones of the Kistna and the porous sandstone of the Godavari in minute detail. These, he believed, were the ‘other circumstances’ which would prove of such serious consequence for his survey.

At the time most of his contemporaries shared these medical views. But, in a nice case of geographical coincidence, Hyderabad would host a further attempt to discover the natural causes of malaria. Seventy years later in a house in Begampet, now a suburb of Hyderabad city, Surgeon Ronald Ross would experiment on the insects of the Kistna-Godavari jungles and trace the malaria parasite to the anopheles mosquito. Everest’s ideas of ‘malarial vapours’ would thereby be exposed as every bit as idle and absurd as those of his followers.

After observing from Sarangapalle, he recrossed the Kistna and rejoined his camp to head north towards the Godavari. On the way he conducted observations to prominent hills like that to which he had earlier sent his signalmen. The survey on which he was engaged was what was known as a ‘secondary triangulation’. It was intended to cover all the country between the Kistna and the Godavari with a network of imaginary triangles whose sides connected intervisible observation posts.

Triangulation means simply ‘triangle-ing’, or conceiving three mutually visible reference points, usually on prominent hills or buildings, as the corners of a triangle. Knowing the exact distance between two of these points, and then measuring at each the angles made by their connecting sight-line with those to the third point, the distance and position of the third point can be established by trigonometry. One of the newly determined sides of this triangle then becomes the base for a second triangle embracing a new reference point whose position is determined in the same way. Another triangle is thus completed and one of its sides becomes the base for a third, And so on. A web, or chain, of triangles results; and Everest’s job was to extend this web of triangulation over the whole Kistna-Godavari region.

The positions of these vital reference points could have been established by careful observation of the stars. But as Everest would repeatedly emphasise, astronomical observations only gave the desired degree of accuracy if conducted over many months, preferably years, from well-equipped and professionally-manned observatories. Constructing and operating such observatories across a subcontinent was out of the question; and for reasons that were only partly understood at the time, observatories seemed to be affected by their surroundings. Better and simpler was the geometrical approach of triangulation. It was not quicker. The Great Trigonometrical Survey had taken the field twenty years before Everest became involved and would not complete its work until twenty years after he left. Nor was it necessarily cheaper. As Everest was about to discover, in terms of lives lost and rupees spent the cost would exceed that of many contemporary Indian wars. But triangulation was well-tried, accurate to the point of mathematical certainty, and so more acceptable to the scientific world.

Such a survey still depended on the occasional astronomical observation in order to locate and orientate its triangles in terms of the earth’s grid of latitude and longitude. It also depended on the occasional measurement along the ground. Known as a ‘base-line’, this was needed to get the triangulation going in the first place by establishing the distance between the first two points. It was also a useful way of verifying the accuracy of a protracted triangulation, since the distance between any two points as established by triangulation could be checked by another actual measurement on the ground.

In the case of a ‘secondary triangulation’ like Everest’s between the Kistna and Godavari, base-line measurements and astronomical observations were not necessary. Everest’s job was to connect trig stations along the east coast (whose relative positions had already been established by the more elaborate methods and instruments of primary triangulation) with those of another chain of even more exacting primary triangulation about a hundred miles inland to the west.

The latter roughly followed the 78-degree meridian (or north – south line of longitude) and consisted of a continuous chain of triangles which had been carried from Cape Comorin at the tip of the Indian peninsula as far north as Hyderabad, a distance of about seven hundred miles. Already this ‘series’ was known as the Great Arc of the Meridian. As well as providing the spine on which the whole skeleton of the Great Trigonometrical Survey depended, it was the aspect of the Survey’s work which most appealed to George Everest. In fact his present assignment he saw mainly as a way of proving that he was pre-eminently qualified to succeed Colonel Lambton as the grand master of the Great Arc.

To one like Everest who happened to have been baptised (and so probably born) in the London parish of Greenwich, meridians must early have meant something. Greenwich had been the site of England’s Royal Observatory since the seventeenth century. British navigators and surveyors regarded the Greenwich meridian, or ‘mid-day’ line (because at any point along a north – south meridian the sun reaches its zenith at the same time), as the zero from which they calculated all longitudinal distances and from which on maps and charts they extended the graticule, or grid, of the globe’s 360 degrees of longitude. Later in the nineteenth century this British convention would win international approval. Greenwich Mean Time would become established as a world standard and the Greenwich meridian would be universally recognised as o degrees longitude. It became, in fact, the north – south equivalent of the east – west equator at o degrees latitude.

Everest therefore knew about meridians from childhood and may well have been intrigued by the problems of determining them. Later, at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, he had studied the mathematics, mechanics and measuring techniques essential for an officer joining the artillery. But his family background was not scientific, his father being a solicitor; and apart from some basic survey work in Java when British forces had invaded and occupied that island during the Napoleonic wars, his career had thus far differed little from that of other army officers in India. Appointment to the Great Trigonometrical Survey was his big opportunity. Neither mutiny, flood nor fever was going to impede his determination to excel.

Returning from the soaking at Sarangapalle, Everest revisited his first observation post, erected his theodolite – the instrument used for measuring the angles between sight-lines – and scanned the distant ridge of Panch Pa...