The Great Arc (9 page)

Hence the need for a geologist and hence, in time, a whole new field of geodetic experimentation in which pendulums were used to discover variations in the direction of gravity due to the variable density of the earth’s crust. These in turn would reveal that the vertical attraction exercised by mountains was compensated for, and often more than compensated for, by the greater density of the subterranean strata which supported the mountains. As with icebergs, these invisible substrata might extend well beyond that part of a mountain which was visible above ground. Plummet-lines, instead of being attracted towards visible mountain masses, were thus just as likely to be deflected away from them and towards the denser outlying sub-strata, a contradictory and compensatory effect known as ‘isostasy’. The Himalayan surveyor was in for more surprises.

In 1818 Lambton learned that he was at last to get both his geologist and his doctor, as combined in the person of Henry
Voysey. In the previous year he had submitted his third report, having in 1815 completed the Great Arc up to Bidar, about eighty miles west of Hyderabad. There he laid out his sixth base-line. The Arc, now of nearly ten degrees (or over seven hundred miles), was much ‘the longest that has ever been measured on the surface of this globe’. It had overtaken even that in Europe and, like the Anglo-French arc, ‘in grandeur and accuracy [it] must be allowed to exceed anything of the kind recorded in the history of practical science’. No longer merely a curiosity, the Arc had acquired a celebrity and a momentum of its own.

Lambton, too, was becoming something of a legend. In belated recognition of his achievement, the Survey, hitherto variously known as the ‘trigonometrical’, ‘astronomical’, or ‘mathematical’ survey of Mysore – or sometimes simply as ‘Lambton’s’ – was now officially designated as The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. And in recognition of its having passed beyond the territories controlled from Madras it was transferred from the Madras government to the supreme government in Calcutta and to the personal attentions of the Governor-General. First intended just to cover Mysore, it had since been extended to the whole peninsula, and now in 1818 it was hoped that it might be continued north, east and west at least until lateral chains of triangles could link Bombay and Calcutta.

This meant extending the Great Arc itself still further. Lambton’s initial ‘foray’ into the more unruly territories of the Nizam of Hyderabad had gone smoothly enough. Provided he could evade the ‘gangs of plunderers which infest that part of the country when the army is not in the field’, he planned to continue following the same 78-degree meridian through the northern districts of Hyderabad and on to Nagpur in central India. ‘Should I live to accomplish that,’ he wrote, ‘there will then be a foundation for extending the survey over the whole of the Deccan … through the Maratha dominions … and
finally into the upper districts of Hindustan [i.e. north India].’ The government endorsed this proposal by suggesting Agra on the edge of the Gangetic plain as a suitable termination.

But Lambton, possibly into his forties when he started on the Survey, had by now been in the field for sixteen years. Whatever his real age, he was beginning to show it. His few remaining hairs were grey, his formidable stamina a wheezing shadow of its old self. Despite his eagerness to carry the work forward, even he was giving serious thought to a successor.

I sincerely hope, that after I relinquish [the Survey] some one will be found possessing zeal, constitution and attainments wherewith to prosecute it on the principles already followed – It would indeed be gratifying to me if I could but entertain a distant hope, that a work which I began, and which will then be brought to so considerable a magnitude, should at some future date be extended over
British India.

The hint was taken. In 1818, as well as Dr Voysey, Lambton was also awarded the services of a senior assistant; and it was thus that, on Boxing Day of that year, there rode into Lambton’s no doubt riotously festive compound in Hyderabad a clean-shaven and mustard-keen Lieutenant George Everest.

By his own account, Everest approached ‘the great man’ with deference. Simple manners and reclusive habits did not mean that Lambton was indifferent to recognition and, though long delayed, fame had eventually caught up with him. The Astronomer Royal’s letter in 1806 had been followed by an authoritative and highly flattering article of 1813 in the
Edinburgh Review.
Penned by Professor Playfair, it carefully elucidated Lambton’s work, applauded his extraordinary dedication, and favourably compared both to those of William Roy, Lambton’s original inspiration. In fact Roy and Lambton were jointly hailed as ‘doing more for the advancement of
general science than had ever been performed by any other body of military men’.

Unaccountably, the scientific establishment in London had not immediately responded. Lambton, unlike Everest, had few distinguished connections and was a stranger to the wiles of self-promotion. But in 1815 his old friend and one-time assistant John Warren had headed home to France. With Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the French monarchy Warren sought a reunion with his family. Coincidentally he was also reunited in Paris with his old Colonel, Arthur Wellesley, fresh from victory at Waterloo. Reinstated in the French army and recognised as the 24th Comte de Warenne, Warren soon alerted the scientific authorities in Paris to Lambton’s work.

Rightly the French regarded geodetic discovery much as the British were coming to regard geographic discovery. They were the pioneers and the arbiters; it was their science, and in Lambton’s labours they generously recognised a worthy fellow-worker. In 1817 Jean-Baptiste Delambre, the eminent astronomer, joined Pierre La Place, a leading geodesist whose theorem for spherical excess Lambton had used, in sending him glowing tributes and extending to him the highest honour of a corresponding membership of the French Academy of Sciences.

This recognition finally prodded the Royal Society in London into offering him an honorary fellowship. The East India Company had then followed with what Lambton regarded as a particularly pleasing letter of congratulation from one of their oldest directors. It was especially welcome because the writer was Samuel Davis, once himself a surveyor, who forty years earlier had accompanied a trade mission to Tibet. In fact his were the observations which had alerted Sir William Jones to the great width of the Himalayan chain and which had prompted Jones’s still unproven claim about the Himalayas being the world’s highest mountains.

To the young Everest, the ‘big bald’ Lambton seemed a formidable figure. He calls him ‘the great man’ and claims to have been following his progress for years. A certain eccentricity, which in others Everest would surely have censured, only added to his stature.

I shall never forget the impression which the bearing of this veteran and far-famed geodesist made on my mind when I first saw him … at one of our stations; for though we had been in camp together for some days previous, he had displayed no symptom of more than common powers, but seemed a tranquil and exceedingly good-humoured person, very fond of his joke, partial to singing glees and duets, and everything in short which tended to produce harmony and make life pass agreeably; … but when he aroused himself for the purpose of adjusting the great theodolite, he seemed like Ulysses shaking off his rags; his native energy appeared to rise superior to all infirmities, his limbs moved with the vigour of full manhood, and his high and ample forehead gave animation and dignity to a countenance beaming with intellect and beauty.

Accolades so fulsome would rarely spill spontaneously from Everest’s pen. No doubt his regard for Lambton was sincere, but it was also calculated. In stressing the mystique of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and its founder, he enhanced his own stature as assistant and successor. Nor was anyone meant to infer that Everest’s subsequent achievements would owe anything to Lambton’s induction. ‘He left me,’ says Everest, ‘in full control of the camp in January 1819 [i.e. within a month of his arrival] to return to Hyderabad; and this was the last occasion of his ever taking part in the work of triangulation.’ Lambton had withdrawn because the Great Arc was temporarily suspended until those ‘gangs of plunderers’ could
be rounded up. But according to Everest it was because he was too ill to continue.

These moments of activity [i.e. the joke-telling and the duet-singing] were, however, like the last flickerings of an expiring lamp. It was evident that he was gradually wearing away under the corroding influence of a complaint of the lungs, attended with a most violent cough, which at times used to shake his whole frame as if to bursting.

Everest, in short, pretends that he found himself assisting a dying man. We are thus to understand that he took control of operations from the moment he joined the Survey. Yet it would be four years before Lambton did expire, during which time he was anything but an irrelevance. He would direct his field parties, calculate and recalculate his computations, visit Calcutta to lobby on behalf of his staff, and eventually carry the Great Arc a further 350 miles to the north. With the enigmatic Frances he also, while debating marriage, cheerfully started another family.

In 1822, four years after Everest’s arrival, Lambton’s portrait was painted by the artist William Havell during a visit to Hyderabad. Far from showing a wracked consumptive, it reveals a still genial and almost Pickwickian figure apparently amused by the artist’s attentions. He looks neither seriously ill nor mightily old.

At the time he sat for his portrait it was Everest, not Lambton, whose health was shattered and whose career was threatened. Having been struck down by the Yellapuram fever during his first disastrous survey of the Kistna-Godavari jungles in 1819, and then again in 1820, Everest had just returned from his convalescence at the Cape of Good Hope. Three years later his condition would become so serious that he was invalided home. Lambton, on the other hand, had never yet taken sick leave. Nor, despite that cough, was he showing
any readiness to retire. If anything, Everest’s concern may have reinforced his determination to soldier on. To Lambton, as to most Europeans in India, death would come quickly and unexpectedly.

G
eorge Everest’s first catastrophic survey through the jungles of the Kistna-Godavari region had important consequences. For one thing it left most of the Survey’s staff chronically debilitated. Even when recovered, they would be highly susceptible to further attacks, usually of malaria or dysentery. Cholera, though less common, was more deadly, sparing neither the fit nor the feeble. And fatalities from other unspecified fevers, although scarcely mentioned in Lambton’s reports, become commonplace in Everest’s.

Not untypical was the record of another survey party in Hyderabad, a counterpart to Everest’s in the Kistna-Godavari jungles, which was conducting a secondary triangulation west of the Great Arc. Under Lieutenant James Garling it had taken the field in 1816 and had made good progress. But ‘in 1819 one of Garling’s assistants died’, notes an official summary, ‘and Garling himself died the following year. Conner then came up from Travancore but died within a month of reaching Hyderabad. Robert Young took charge in December 1821, but after two field seasons he also succumbed, and died in July 1823.’ Under a man called Crisp the work then ‘proceeded steadily’, but in 1827 Crisp handed over to Webb and the grim saga began again. ‘Webb took sick leave to England in 1829 …’

Added to Everest’s dismal record of fifteen dead in a single season, such casualty rates cast doubt over the practicality of extending so comprehensive a survey to other regions. The
cost of the Hyderabad operations in lives, time and money was deemed excessive. Lambton reckoned that the effort expended in surveying the Nizam’s territories would have accounted for an area four times as large, had it been lavished on territories under direct British rule. More worryingly, the government now estimated that the cost of the Great Trigonometrical Survey was running at over £6,000 per year and, with no end in sight, was likely to go on escalating indefinitely. Under the circumstances it was inevitable that the 1818 transfer of the Great Trigonometrical Survey from the supervision of Madras to that of Calcutta occasioned some radical rethinking about both its scope and its priorities.

In this reappraisal the northward extension of the Great Arc was not seriously challenged. Lambton had repeatedly demonstrated the Arc’s geographical importance, and international recognition had established its geodetic credentials. The challenge to the Arc in the years ahead would come from the terrain rather than from officialdom. North of Hyderabad, through the heart of central India, lay more hill and jungle, much of it under Indian rather than British rule. There then came the vast Ganges-Jumna plain which stretched north for nearly four hundred miles from Agra to Delhi and on to the Himalayas.

Here trigonometrical surveying looked to be an impossibility. In the early 1820s neither Lambton nor Everest envisaged the Arc ever crossing the plains and reaching the mountains. Agra, where the 78-degree meridian bisected the Jumna and where stately edifices like the Taj Mahal promised commanding views, was regarded as the Arc’s likely termination. Thence north there were practically no hills from which to triangulate. Visibility across the plains’ interminable patchwork of fields and villages was impeded by a variety of large trees, including the umbrageous banyan, the sacred pipal and the valuable mango, none of which could be casually felled. It was also habitually obscured by a haze compounded of the smoke of
several million dung-fuelled cooking fires and the dust kicked up by the world’s largest concourse of cattle. The climate promised complications undreamed of in the south, like a cold foggy winter. And the presence of a vast and rather conservative population posed all manner of human problems. Physically the challenge resembled that which Lambton had confronted in the Kaveri delta, but on a much bigger scale, under much trickier conditions, and without the convenience of those soaring south Indian temple towers and gateways.

It looked, then, in the 1820s as if surveys in the northern plains would have to be controlled not by trigonometrical certainties but by astronomical reference. Already those who had succeeded the Colebrooke cousins in their quest for Himalayan heights were experimenting with base-lines whose length was calculated purely by celestial observations at their extremities. Although far from satisfactory, some such method of astronomically ascertained locations was envisaged as the only solution to survey control in the plains.

But if the Great Trigonometrical Survey was to be foiled by the northern plains, there was still plenty of scope for it elsewhere. In addition to pushing the Great Arc forwards to Agra, it was considered essential to ‘tie in’ Bombay to the west and Calcutta to the east. This was to be achieved by way of lateral or ‘longitudinal’ triangulations extending outwards along the parallels of latitude. Thus would be established the positions of these cities relative to Madras, and thus would they be linked cartographically as features in the same survey and components of the same map.

Such an all-embracing map, or atlas, was now considered highly desirable. To the British, somewhat in the manner of a tomcat scent-marking its territory, the map would define the area in which they had a personal interest. They called this area ‘India’, a term then alien to the peoples of south Asia and imprecise even in European usage, and they conceived this ‘India’ as a distinct Asian entity and hence, by the criteria of
colonial expansion, as a legitimate subject of dominion. The map would substantiate this idea by demonstrating their knowledge of the spatial relationships between its component cities, strongholds and geographical features, a knowledge more intimate and accurate than had ever been displayed by the country’s inhabitants. And by portraying these relationships in ink on paper, with or without the invisible chains of triangulation, the map would foreshadow their actual linkage by the best chains that the ferrous technology of the age could offer – metalled roads, steel rails and, soon, copper telegraph wires.

More conquests in 1817–19 (the Pindari and Third Maratha wars), which not incidentally cleared a bandit-free path for the Great Arc through central India, were now making British political supremacy a reality throughout the whole subcontinent save for its extremities in Assam and the modern Pakistan. Such independent states as survived within this ‘India’ no longer posed a threat to British arms, British surveys, or British conceits. In fact the Great Trigonometrical Survey was coming to be regarded as the most explicit expression of the newly won paramountcy.

For reasons of cost as well as of changing ideology, earlier ideas of intensive ‘webs’ of triangles being spun over the entire territories of, say, Mysore or Hyderabad were being gradually abandoned in favour of an all-India grid composed of crisscrossing ‘chains’, or ‘bars’, of triangles centred on the Great Arc. The holes in the grid could be filled in later by cheaper and less rigorous topographical surveys. Lambton himself had been forced to accept this compromise in parts of Hyderabad, and Everest would soon systematise the ‘grid-iron’ for the whole of India. Whether directly or indirectly ruled, the entire surface of what the British now understood by the word ‘India’ was, wherever possible, to be speedily subjected to the same standard of measurement.

With scant regard for ancient particularities of environment and culture, a large part of south Asia would thus be engrossed,
defined and ‘enchained’ as one. Critics would rightly see the ‘grid-iron’ as a symbol of India’s incarceration; but to admirers, it symbolised India’s incorporation. It was as much about holding peoples together as holding them down; in due course Indian nationalists as well as British imperialists would applaud the work of the Survey.

By its British champions the progress of the Survey thus came to be seen as an enlightened and comparatively bloodless paradigm of the progress of imperial dominion. Its trials became a source of imperial concern, its triumphs of imperial satisfaction. The terminology of the Survey would reflect this. In Everest’s reports, each season’s operations would constitute a ‘campaign’, angles would be ‘bagged’, and mountains, where they occurred, would require ‘conquering’.

The lateral, or ‘longitudinal’, series designed to link the Great Arc to Bombay was the next task entrusted to George Everest when, in late 1822, he returned from his year’s convalescence at the Cape. As well as prompting a rethink about the scope and purpose of the whole Survey, the horrors of the Kistna-Godavari jungles had alerted Everest to the need for new methods and practices. Heading west from the Great Arc for Poona (Pune) and Bombay (Mumbai) in October 1822, he began to test out various innovations which would dramatically improve the Survey’s prospects.

Compared to his earlier experience, the new assignment was soon proving a joy. ‘The face of the country is quite denuded of trees,’ he reports, ‘here are no jungles to foster fevers, no musquitoes to torment, no banditti to infest the path, no roaring rivers to cut off communications; but a fertile and well-peopled country inhabited by the Mahratta [Maratha] tribes, who are the best natured and kindest of all the natives of India.’ Excitements were few and inconsequential. At Achola, a
droog
-like eminence where he established his first station, a pair of striped hyenas, even in those days a comparatively rare species, had established their lair in a cave past which Everest
daily strode from his camp to his theodolite. The hyenas refused to move out; it was their territory. Everest refused to alter his route; it was his. The conclusion was foregone. ‘Detected lurking in a field of very high corn’, one of the ‘luckless creatures’ was shot.

From Achola Everest moved rapidly west. Speed was important. Lambton had confidently predicted his own arrival in Agra before Everest could reach Bombay. Everest took this as a challenge. He saw himself, as he grandly put it, ‘pitted against one whose name had been sounded by fame’s trump in every corner of the learned world’, and he was determined to forestall him. Less fancifully, he also felt that he had a score to settle.

On his return from South Africa what he calls ‘certain trivial circumstances’ had embittered his relations with Lambton. He had, perhaps, voiced some of the minor criticisms which he would subsequently put on record concerning Lambton’s conduct of the latest base-line measurement; perhaps he had also grumbled about the ‘reckless exposure’ [to the climate? fever?] for which he held Lambton responsible. More certainly he had taken strong exception to the Colonel’s continued preference for his lowly Madras assistants, the ‘mestizoes’ (as Everest calls them) Joseph Olliver, William Rossenrode and especially Lambton’s ‘agent’ Joshua de Penning. De Penning had been entrusted with carrying northwards, under Lambton’s guidance, the primary triangulation of the Great Arc; Everest, on the other hand, a British officer and an English gentleman as well as Lambton’s senior assistant, had been fobbed off with the Bombay series. Could he but admit it, it was the unassuming de Penning rather than the fame-trumped Lambton against whom he was pitted; and it was de Penning’s arrival in Agra which he must forestall.

Annoyingly the Maharastrian countryside west of Achola permitted no long strides like those by which Lambton had once swept across Mysore. Because of its ridged nature, distant views were blocked and the sides of Everest’s triangles rarely
exceeded twenty miles. North of Sholapur, though, the landscape opened out into the flatter, blacker terrain typical of the Deccan plateau. Broad horizons and fifty-mile triangles beckoned. The only difficulty was that, for reasons of accuracy, it was a bad idea to triangulate from a twenty-mile base to a point three times more distant. Triangles were supposed to be as near symmetrical as possible. In fact he would later make it a rule that none which included angles of less than thirty degrees or more than ninety degrees would be acceptable. If the size of triangles was to increase, or decrease, it must do so gradually. To take advantage of the plateau country ahead, he therefore determined to force the expansion of his triangles over the last of the ridges.

From his station at a place called Dharoor he sent forward his flagmen to occupy the most distant point from which Dharoor was visible. They chose a hill called Chorakullee, thirty miles away and behind an intervening ridge. Everest could see nothing over the ridge, but the flagmen insisted that they could clearly see Dharoor, ‘a circumstance which the wild imagination of my native followers attributed, as usual, to magic’. Keen, for once, to credit his men’s eyesight, Everest ordered the construction of stone cairns at both stations. If the sight-line was just brushing the ridge, it might be raised sufficiently by increasing the height of the two hills.

Stone was piled upon stone; the cairns became towers. At last, when each was over twenty feet high, a clearer morning than usual revealed not only the Chorakullee tower but the whole hill on which it stood. Runners were immediately despatched to carry the good tidings to Chorakullee and to order the erection of ‘a large mast with a torch at the top of it’. On the appointed day, at sunset, Everest was perched atop his tower with the Great Theodolite trained on the horizon. At first he could see nothing but the intervening ridge. It stood at seven and a half minutes of a degree below the horizontal. Then at around 8 p.m. the light at the top of the Chorakullee
mast was seen to break the line of the ridge. ‘I watched it rising up the vertical wire [a sighting device bisecting the lens of the theodolite’s telescope, and so fine that it was usually made from the thread of a spider’s web] till it gradually came to within three minutes of zero.’

The towers, in effect, were superfluous; the flagmen had been right all along; and Everest was now, as he put it, ‘fully assured that nature would help me more by the increased terrestrial refraction of the night than any tower less than two hundred feet could do’. Here was a revelatory instance of how refraction, that bending of sight-lines by the earth’s atmosphere which Lambton had tried to quantify in respect of the grandstand at the Madras racecourse, fluctuated during the course of the day. As the Himalayan surveyors were discovering, this introduced yet another variable into the vertical triangulation of altitudes; no universal adjustment for refraction could take account of such hourly variation. But as Everest now swiftly appreciated, the same phenomenon could be decidedly advantageous to one primarily concerned with horizontal angles; for points on the earth’s surface not apparently intervisible might indeed become so at favourable times of the day and night.