The Great Arc (6 page)

It seemed a no-win situation, but when Henry Colebrooke was posted away from Purnia, he strongly recommended the matter to the attention of cousin Robert. Robert’s opportunity would have to wait twelve years. Meanwhile Crawford and others brought back their exciting but scientifically questionable reports of the Nepal Himalayas.

At the time the Kingdom of Nepal afforded the only access to the highest peaks. Much bigger than today, its territory
then extended east to Bhutan and west to the Panjab, thus embracing almost the whole sweep of the mountains. If their secrets were to be explored, it had to be through Nepal. Briefly at the turn of the century this looked feasible as the Court at Kathmandu welcomed a couple of British missions, including that to which Crawford was attached. But in 1804 the Anglo – Nepalese treaty of friendship was cancelled and the border closed. The kingdom retreated back into an isolation which, to the chagrin of generations of surveyors and then climbers, would prevent all but diplomatic access for the next 150 years. If the British were ever to get within easy surveying distance of what Jones had so boldly dubbed ‘the world’s highest mountains’, it would have to be by removing some of these mountains from Nepali sovereignty.

Given the pace of British expansion under Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s direction, this did not seem too remote a possibility. No sooner had southern India been ‘settled’ by wresting Mysore from Tipu Sultan in 1799–1800 than the Governor-General turned his attention to the Marathas, a confederacy of rulers who exercised a loose sovereignty over much of the rest of India. There were three Anglo – Maratha wars, and the most sanguinary and significant of them was the second, waged by Wellesley in 1803–4; indeed, it was to ‘lay the foundations of our empire in Asia’, as he put it. It also laid the foundations of brother Arthur’s reputation as an inspirational commander when he won important battles in west and central India including that at Assaye, which he would always recall as a finer victory than Waterloo. As a result of these conquests, Bombay was at last rewarded with territorial gains in western India equivalent to those won forty years earlier by Calcutta in Bengal and four years earlier by Madras in Mysore.

Since Maratha power at the time reached north to Delhi and the Ganges, the opportunity was also taken to extend the territories of British Bengal upriver from Bihar. Called
the ‘Ceded [in 1801] and Conquered [in 1803] Provinces of the North West’, a large tranche of what later became the United Provinces and is today Uttar Pradesh was added to British India. It included Agra and Delhi itself, plus the banks of the Ganges and Jumna right up to where these rivers debouched from the mountains in what was then still western Nepal.

In these newly acquired districts lay Robert Colebrooke’s chance to take up the challenge suggested by his cousin Henry. As Surveyor-General for Bengal it was imperative that he map the new territories; and in doing so, he hoped for the first time to push up to the Himalayan foothills in the west and perhaps penetrate them to locate the sources of the Ganges and Jumna rivers.

His resultant survey of 1807–8 had no pretensions to the accuracy of Mackenzie’s in Mysore, let alone to the ‘correct mathematical principles’ in which Lambton took such pride. Colebrooke travelled as much as possible by river-boat. Distances were measured along the bank with a wheeled apparatus known as a perambulator, and bearings were taken to plot locations and occasionally establish latitude, but not with a view to triangulating the territory. It was, in fact, what was called a ‘route survey’, and its purpose was largely strategic and military. Roads and rivers by which troops could be moved were of the essence; so were fortified towns and other obstructions. The hills were of interest less for their heights than their hollows through which an enemy might invade or, more realistically, a British force advance.

But Robert Colebrooke was well aware of Lambton’s work and, while complaining that nothing had been heard of the elusive Yorkshireman for a long time, chanced to mention that it was ‘a pity that a survey conducted on such scientific principles is not extended all over India’. Others would soon be thinking along the same lines. Lambton was setting new standards of accuracy which rendered all prior surveys approximate
if not redundant. There was no point in wasting weeks plotting triangles with pocket-size theodolites if the Great Trigonometrical Survey with its half-ton instruments and its page-long equations might one day appear over the horizon.

A family man and a happy one, Robert Colebrooke took along on his survey his wife Charlotte, or ‘my young lady’ as he always calls her, plus the two eldest of the nine children which she had borne him in as many years of marriage. Travelling light was not, therefore, an option. According to Colebrooke’s diary, when they forsook their boats his ‘equipage consisted of 4 elephants which carried two marquees and 6 private tents; five camels for my baggage; a palanqueen, a mahana and a dooly [different kinds of litters] (the latter two carrying my two children and their nurse), 12 bhangies [bearers for carrying the litters], 12 coolies [all-purpose porters], 12 lascars for pitching the tents, and an escort of 50 sepoys [Indian soldiers]’. Not surprisingly the Colebrookes stuck mainly to their boats.

Throughout his diary Colebrooke happily mixes domestic details with professional notes and extempore sketches. Tigers kept them awake at night, the boats got repeatedly stuck on mud banks, and whole districts turned out to stare at them. Clearly the people had not previously come across a European – let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring. Colebrooke bore it all with grace and humour. Out with his gun of a dewy morning, nostrils flared to enjoy the post-monsoon freshness, the forty-four-year-old Colonel was loving every minute of it. This was the life. It was snipe for breakfast, it was tea with the Nawab, it was India in all its pre-colonial innocence. There was no better place, no better job.

During 1807 the Colebrookes pushed up the Gogra and the Rapti, tributaries of the Ganges, and came within sight of the mountains. At Gorakhpur Robert took his first series of observations of the snowy peaks. Christmas was spent with the
small European community in the city of Lucknow. Then, leaving his family behind for what would be a long overland slog, in early 1808 he pressed on to the north-west.

Working along the foot of the mountains, he now encountered thick swamp-forest and the most tiger-infested jungles in India. This was the infamous
terai
, a low-lying belt of tall grasses and towering trees which skirted Nepali territory and was a more effective frontier than the hills themselves. It would claim the lives of a legion of surveyors. Colebrooke himself went down with fever. He took another series of observations to the snow-capped peaks from a place called Pilibhit (near Bareilly at the south-west corner of today’s Nepal frontier), but gave up the idea of pursuing the Ganges and the Jumna to their sources. Instead he deputed his assistant, Lieutenant William Webb, to make the attempt.

By April Colebrooke was too weak for anything but river travel. The fever was diagnosed as malaria, complicated by dysentery. He continued to write his journal but the sketches became fewer and the entries shorter. Drifting downriver to Cawnpore (Kanpur) in mid-August he was ‘much worse’; and the heat was greater than anything he could remember. Debilitated and delirious, he became obsessed by the monsoon thunder-clouds which piled ever higher and heavier above the river. White-flecked, they towered above him with Himalayan menace. On 12 September he wrote again of an approaching storm. The lightning and thunder continued throughout the night.

13th. The weather was so bad as to oblige us to lay
all day at Jungeera. Rainy and stormy night.
14th.—

With a date and a dash the diary ends. Robert Colebrooke died in the early hours of the morning of the twenty-first, ‘a victim to his exertions in the cause of science’ as one of his colleagues kindly put it. He was forty-five, not a great age but
about the average for Europeans in India at the turn of the century. Life, however delicious, was short. By chance he breathed his last at Bhagalpur, the place whence Sir William Jones had first hailed ‘the highest mountains in the world’.

Cousin Henry now owed it to Robert’s memory, to the nine fatherless children and the thirty-three-year-old widow, as well as to his own convictions, to present an overwhelming case for the Himalayas. Marshalling the testimony of those earlier travellers into Tibet, of Crawford in Nepal, of Jones, and particularly of cousin Robert and his assistant Webb, he laboured intermittently over his great paper
On the Height of the Himalaya Mountains
for the next seven years.

Like Henry, it appeared from his diaries that Robert too had become convinced that the peaks he had observed from Gorakhpur and Pilibhit were ‘without doubt equal, if not superior, in elevation to the Cordilleras of South America [i.e. the Andes]’. At Gorakhpur, Robert had reported that, while a small crowd ‘watched me and my instrument in silent astonishment’, he had taken angles to two peaks and had deduced for each ‘more than five miles in perpendicular height above the level of the plain on which I stood, which must be considerably elevated above the level of the sea’. Five miles was 26,400 feet. He could not be more precise because of uncertainty about the allowance to be made for refraction, that bending of sight-lines by the earth’s atmosphere which had so exercised Lambton in Madras. He had used the standard tables showing the deductions to be made, but he had little confidence in them.

Henry, however, was much more confident; for Webb too had submitted observations of a peak which, taken from four different stations on the Nepal border, gave a height of 26,862 feet. Moreover Webb had a name for his peak; he understood that it was called Dhaulagiri, or ‘The White Mountain’. So it still is; and within fifty feet, Webb’s height is indeed the height now given to Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh highest
mountain. But luck as much as science had produced the figure; and Henry Colebrooke then made matters worse by dismissing it as an underestimate; he reckoned Webb’s observations gave ‘more than 28,000 feet above the level of the sea’. The conclusion of Colebrooke’s paper was therefore no surprise.

I consider the evidence to be now sufficient to authorize an unreserved declaration of the opinion, that the
Himalaya
is the loftiest range of Alpine mountains which has yet been noticed, its most elevated peaks greatly exceeding the highest of the Andes.

First published in the journal of his Bengal Asiatic Society and then widely reported in Europe, Colebrooke’s findings caused a minor sensation. But they came up against a certain indifference to all things Indian and were not readily accepted. Armchair scholars, inured to absurd claims from the land of rope-tricks and reincarnation, pooh-poohed these tall tales from the hills. Even recognised authorities with some experience of the Himalayas were not readily convinced. Henry Colebrooke seemed to have overstated his case, to have protested too much. High as they undoubtedly were, the Himalayas were too inaccessible and mountain surveying too approximate to justify his sweeping conclusions.

The most disparaging notice came from the most influential publication. In the
Quarterly Review
, a magisterial journal which until the foundation of London’s Royal Geographical Society monitored the course of discovery, an anonymous but highly competent reviewer found Colebrooke’s paper ‘most curious’. He had no complaint about Colebrooke’s methods or his mathematics but, dealing in turn with each of his cited examples, he demolished them one by one. Crawford’s Nepal observations were ‘of very little value’ because his bearings, distances and triangles were unknown. Robert Colebrooke never got nearer than ninety miles to any of his measured
peaks, nor did Webb to Dhaulagiri, and nor had Henry Colebrooke at Purnia. Even assuming that the supposed distances were nevertheless correct, the observed angles of elevation, typically about one to three degrees above the horizontal, were too small for confidence. For every error of one second of one minute of a degree (so 1/360th of a degree) in either the instrument or the observation, fifty feet would be added to or subtracted from the supposed height.

And then there was the problem of refraction. The table of allowances which Robert Colebrooke had used was deduced from astronomical observations. It was never intended for terrestrial observations at such low angles over such long distances. The
Quarterly Review
’s contributor went into this problem in some detail. Peering out across the English Channel the people of Dover could sometimes see the houses of Calais standing proud of the sea, and at other times, when the atmosphere was equally clear, they could not see them at all. Whale fishers moored off Greenland had noticed the same phenomenon, with snow cliffs appearing and disappearing above the horizon according to the state of the weather and the position of the ice. The whalers called it ‘ice-blink’ and reckoned that objects thirty miles ‘beyond the limit of direct vision’ could yet be clearly seen when conditions were favourable. Temperature, humidity and even the time of the day all seemed to affect the amount of refraction, and in one case it had been found to increase angles of observation by over four degrees. Given that in India the difference of temperature between points of observation in the plains and the ice-encrusted pinnacles protruding above the clouds might be a good 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the properties of refraction could only be guessed at.

In short, Colebrooke’s advocacy was fatally flawed. His facts were ‘insufficient’, his data ‘incorrect’, his conclusions ‘hasty’. ‘On every consideration therefore,’ intoned the
Review
, ‘we conceive that we are borne out in concluding that the height
of the Himalaya mountains has not yet been determined with sufficient accuracy to assert their superiority over the Cordilleras of the Andes.’