The Great Arc Read online

  ‘I am particular in mentioning this circumstance,’ declared a jubilant Everest in his later account of the experiment, ‘because it is one which has changed the whole face of the Indian operations.’ As well as refraction being at its most helpful during the pre-dawn hours, night-lights were found to be impervious to the haze which proved so troublesome during the day. ‘For distances of forty and forty-five miles we can carve a passage right through it, even though it be so thick that the sun appears to set in a sea of molten lead.’ True, the surveyor would have to alter his working routine, but as well as changing the clock, he might also change the calendar. Operations need no longer be restricted to those sodden, fever-ridden months during and after the rains when daytime visibility was at its clearest. The cool dry season of November to February, and even the hot dry season of February to June, were suitable, indeed ideal, for night work.

  In fact, since Everest found that spying his lamps was greatly assisted by lighting large bonfires either side of them, and since dry firewood for such bonfires was unobtainable during the monsoon, it stood to reason that night surveying could be conducted only during the dry season. Henceforth the monsoon, instead of being the surveyor’s open season, would be his closed season, and the risks of blundering into another fever-haunted hell-hole, like that at Yellapuram, would be eliminated.

  It was all so gloriously simple. Even the smoke-and-dust haze of the plains north of Agra might yet be penetrated. As Christmas 1822 came and went, Everest continued west towards Bombay. Lambton and de Penning must by now have ended their season and perhaps be back in Hyderabad amongst their motley tribe of children. There could be no question of Everest’s not reaching Bombay before they sighted Agra. He was more than halfway there already. The thirty-mile sides of the Dharoor-Chorakullee triangle nicely gave way to the forty-five-mile sides of the next, from one of whose trig points a flare all of sixty-five miles away was clearly sighted.

  Nothing could be more favourable to my progress: all was cheering and couleur de rose; and I was busily occupied looking out for my blue lights on this distant station, when a letter reached me from Sir Charles Metcalfe [the British Resident in Hyderabad], communicating the death of my venerable predecessor.

  A chastened Everest immediately abandoned his work and began retracing his footsteps. Despite his posthumous diagnosis of Lambton’s deterioration, the ‘great man’s’ death seems to have taken him completely by surprise.

  It was also unforeseen by others. Dr Voysey, who had made the Superintendent’s health his particular concern, had been sent to Calcutta and on to Agra from where he was now marching south, reconnoitring the ground for the extension of the Great Arc. Meanwhile Lambton and de Penning, forgoing the festive season in Hyderabad, had been in the process of moving the headquarters of the Survey north to Nagpur so as to be better placed for the next stage of the Arc.

  They were accompanied by a Dr Morton as stand-in for Voysey. As so often in an age of medical folly, it seems to have been this man’s concern for his charge, as much as Lambton’s tubercular cough, which finally undermined a legendary constitution. Lambton was used to eating well and drinking copiously, but Morton, after twice bleeding his new charge, prescribed ‘the anti-phlogistic system of abstinence from meat and wine’. In their stead he ordained a diet consisting largely of oranges, for which fruit the Nagpur region is justly renowned. Lambton dutifully devoured them in abundance.

  But wine was a different matter. Morton had great difficulty keeping him off it and, at the first sign of improvement, Lambton celebrated his recovery by putting himself back on it. On 7 January he downed a pint of madeira and instantly went to sleep. Next day he was far from well, coughed a lot, and spoke little. Morton feared the worst. Hoping to reach Nagpur, the party crept forward and on the nineteenth camped at Hinganghat. Next morning Lambton was late rising. His servant went to rouse him but got no response. ‘So tranquilly and calmly had he breathed his last,’ wrote Everest, ‘that no one was aware of his death.’ The far-famed geodesist had died as unobtrusively as he had lived – and as he now lies buried amidst the mud hutments of Hinganghat’s squatting mill-workers.

  ‘It is now upwards of twenty years since I commenced [the Survey] on this great scale,’ Lambton had written shortly before his death. ‘These years have been devoted with unremitted zeal to the cause of science, and, if the learned world should be satisfied that I have been successful in promoting its interests, THAT will constitute my greatest reward. In this long period of time, I have scarcely experienced a heavy hour … A man so engaged, his time passes on insensibly; and if his efforts are successful, his reward is great … If such should be my lot, I shall close my career with heartfelt satisfaction, and look back with unceasing delight on the years I have passed in India.’

  SEVEN

  Crossing the Rubicon

  Lambton’s death in January 1823 meant that Everest, as his only assistant of rank, now took acting charge of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. With it went responsibility for the Great Arc. At last the direction of the world’s longest meridional measurement was his; Greenwich would be proud of him. For the next twenty years George Everest would make the Great Arc his personal affair.

  At thirty-two, he was younger than Lambton had been when he first launched the Survey, and less obviously a servant to science. No portrait of Everest exists from this period but, in a pen drawing dated 1843, he appears to have retained the Olympian profile of an ambitious youth. Black hair, close-cropped, surmounts the cloudless brow; a frigid stare complements the long cornice of a nose. Glimpsed looming by lamplight over the circle of the Great Theodolite, he may have looked a towering figure. Yet his stature was modest and the imperious brow was belied by a tight mouth and an irrelevant chin. Muttonchop whiskers only emphasised these deficiencies and, in old age, would be allowed to encroach across them, smothering his lower face in a tangle of beard. Then too, lionised by the scientific establishment, he would grow his hair into a mane and thus reward an 1860s photographer with a suitably leonine aspect. As for the lion’s roar, he already had it.

  In February 1823, having hastened back to base at Hyderabad, he had immediately begun berating those, now at Nagpur, who had been with Lambton at the time of his death. A visit to the graveside in Hinganghat and some active support for the idea of a memorial to the great man would have gone down well with Lambton’s mourning companions; but Everest thought only of the instruments and papers which might have been lost to the Survey by the hasty sale of the Colonel’s effects.

  March brought more soothing news: Everest was officially confirmed as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. The only uncertainty now was over whether there would be anyone for him to superintend. His promotion had prompted a staff crisis as ominous for the prospects of the Great Arc as had once been the Yellapuram fever or was now the haze of Hindustan.

  Dr Voysey, his companion in adversity in the Kistna-Godavari jungles, was the first to insist on leaving. Lambton had recently urged Voysey’s promotion to Assistant and may have hoped that he, rather than Everest, would succeed him. But the promotion had not been sanctioned and in late 1823 a disenchanted Voysey preferred an uncertain career in England to a subordinate role under Everest. During his recent reconnaissance south from Agra the Doctor had been much troubled by tigers. One, ‘a ferocious animal which had carried off five human beings’, killed his groom in a lightning attack which Voysey actually witnessed. With Everest, as with tigers, close personal acquaintance evidently argued strongly for a quick retreat. Additionally, Voysey was still suffering from the after-effects of the Yellapuram fever. He would in fact die before reaching Calcutta, let alone England.

  William Rossenrode, one of Lambton’s part-British sub-assistants, likewise tendered his resignation. Although he was later persuaded to stay on, it was a decision which he would often regret. Fearful alike of fevers, tigers and the demanding Everest, most of the Madras-men who had served Lambton so well for twenty years also sough
t their release. Everest put this down to the fact that the Great Arc was carrying them ever further from their homes and that, being used to Lambton’s indulgent and ‘child-like’ simplicity, ‘they could not immediately transfer their affection to his successor’.

  For this misplaced loyalty to Lambton, as for much else, he blamed Joshua de Penning. He had blamed de Penning, still three hundred miles away in Nagpur, for not preventing the sale of Lambton’s effects; he blamed him for taking umbrage at the barrage of reprimands which followed; he blamed him for then duly tendering his resignation; and he now blamed him for being so highly regarded by the Survey’s Indian staff that they all wanted to walk out with him. De Penning, in short, was a worthless ingrate, a traitor to the Survey and a scientific liability. ‘This person,’ Everest spluttered, ‘had not a particle of mathematical knowledge beyond decimals, the use of Taylor’s Logarithms, and the square and cubic root’; indeed it was only by pandering to all Lambton’s ‘little ways’ that he had insinuated himself into ‘the absolute mastery of the office and all the arrangements of the Great Trigonometrical Survey’.

  Outbursts like this explain the unpopularity of the new Superintendent; during the trying times which lay ahead their language would become even more humiliating and unreasonable. Judged by his reports and correspondence, George Everest may have been the most cantankerous sahib ever to have stalked the Indian stage. His pen spat venom; each of his innumerable subordinate clauses was baited with sarcasm and barbed for maximum injury. Yet the effect was mixed, and his sense of outrage was often ludicrously disproportionate to the supposed crime. Like a terrier snapping at the furniture, such attacks could reflect more unfavourably on the biter than the bitten. In time, a few brave souls, noting how the vitriol was neither sustained nor consistent, would come to regard them with a certain affection.

  While savaging the inoffensive de Penning in one sentence, in the next Everest could somehow manage to applaud him as ‘highly capable and useful’ and express sincere regret over losing him. Far from regarding de Penning’s departure as good riddance, he in fact persuaded him to stay on for another year, thereby forestalling the mass resignation of the Madrasi establishment. He then helped him to find an alternative post; and he would eventually coax him back to the Survey’s Calcutta office where, accompanied by a now enormous family, de Penning would become Everest’s deputy and, belying the classroom maths, his most trusted handler of impossible equations.

  More immediately, Everest needed de Penning’s help in bringing him up to date with recent progress on the Great Arc. He therefore ordered him and his men to wait out the monsoon in Nagpur, as per the new dry season regime, and then to meet him in October at the Ellichpur (Achalpur) baseline. This was located west of Nagpur within the state of Berar. It had been measured by Lambton in 1822; but the astronomical observations taken by the ailing Colonel required some revision, and the base-line had yet to be connected to the triangulation brought up from Bidar in Hyderabad.

  Everest planned to fill in these missing triangles en route to Nagpur. But as ill luck would have it, just before leaving Hyderabad he was caught in a heavy shower and, mysteriously, ‘seized suddenly with an uneasy sensation in my loins’. Next day he was running a high fever and aching all over; by the end of a week he was delirious, his limbs paralysed, his skin peeling and his sleep disturbed by ‘the most frightful and hideous dreams’. The Yellapuram malaria had returned with a vengeance.

  Doctors urged him to head for the sea air at Madras; the jungles of central India, they warned, were a certain death sentence. But Everest was adamant. ‘I had made up my mind to resist all these remonstrances, from the fullest conviction that now or never the question was to be decided whether the Great Arc was to be carried through to Hindustan, or terminate ingloriously in the valley of Berar.’

  This was no idle speculation. De Penning and his fretting staff, having already been stuck in Nagpur for nine months, would have taken any further delay as cause to disperse. The mass desertion which had so narrowly been averted would become irresistible and, without the experienced Madrasis whose efforts had so impressed Everest in the Kistna-Godavari jungles, the Survey would be grounded. All momentum on the Great Arc would be lost, and the difficulty of recruiting and training new men might well prompt the authorities to think again about the whole exercise. Everest therefore had no choice. Chattering with fever, in October he headed north for Nagpur and the Ellichpur base-line.

  But it was a desperate resolution; for my limbs being in great measure paralysed, I was under the unpleasant necessity of being lowered into my seat at the zenith sector, and raised out of it again, by two men, during the whole of the operations with that instrument. At the Great Theodolite, in order that I might reach the screw of the vertical circle, it has frequently happened that I have been under the necessity of having my left arm supported by one of my followers; and on some occasions my state of weakness and exhaustion has been such that, without being held up, I could not have stood to the instrument.

  For six months he remained a semi-invalid, carted about by palanquin and unable to sleep for more than three hours without being awakened by what he called ‘convulsive paroxysms’. Considering that nocturnal observations comprised the main work at Ellichpur, this may not have been a handicap. Everest insists that he made more than three hundred observations for latitude and longitude at each end of the base and then personally visited and took provisional angles at every one of the twenty trig stations north from Ellichpur to Sironj.

  This new sector of the Great Arc, over two hundred miles long, sliced through the heart of the subcontinent. The two years which it took were as decisive geographically as they were administratively. But central India’s geography is, to say the least, discouraging. It lacks definition and, without the peninsula’s familiar coastline or the north’s mighty river systems, it defies easy representation. Hills follow no obvious logic and nor does the hydrography. Indeed the tributaries of the Godavari, which drains into the Bay of Bengal, are so entwined with those of the Tapti, which drains into the Arabian Sea, as to make even the east-west watershed a catalogue of contradictions.

  North of the Tapti, the deeply scouring Narmada river nearly severs the subcontinent and has often played the role of a Rubicon in Indian history. Delhi’s Muslim sultans once ventured across it on blood-and-plunder raids into Maharashtra and the south. Earlier, Hindu dynasties in the peninsula had signalled their ambitions for a pan-Indian dominion by wading its waters to raid and rule up to the gates of Delhi. Following the latter, the sight-lines of the Great Arc were carried across the Narmada valley near a town called Hoshangabad. The British had here established a garrison in whose cantonments the Survey took refuge during the 1824 monsoon.

  Voysey and de Penning had by now taken their leave of the Survey. But even they, before departing, had conceded that sighting at night to Everest’s terracotta lamps and flares was much easier than scanning the horizon for flagpoles; that it also saved days of waiting for the atmosphere to clear; and that switching operations from the monsoon to the dry season was a masterstroke. Everest himself was greatly encouraged by progress and, feeling better, eagerly planned his next move.

  From Hoshangabad the Arc would forge on up the 78-degree meridian, past the city of Bhopal and the great Buddhist stupas of Sanchi (Vidisha), and on to the plain of Sironj beside the Betwa river south of Jhansi. The Betwa flows north-east into the Jumna just before the latter’s confluence with the Ganges. It therefore belongs to the same river system as that which drains the Himalayas. Only the great Gangetic basin, with its dearth of hills and its dense mists, would then lie between George Everest and the mountains. Whatever the personal cost, he would soon be able to congratulate himself on having at least wrenched the Arc out of the uncertainties of central India and on to the high road to Agra and Delhi.

  Sironj, just two hundred miles south of Agra, had been identified by Dr Voysey in the course of his earlier reconnaissance as an ideal site f
or the next base-line. Voysey had reported very favourably on the whole line of march. The summits of the hills were mostly bare of vegetation – which must have been a great relief to the ‘hatchet-men’ – and the camel-eating alligators of the Narmada were either hibernating or extinct. Everest duly reported that he was able to swim his horses and elephants over the river ‘with perfect confidence’. From personal experience Voysey had made tigers out to be a much more serious problem. Everest soon agreed; judging by their pug marks, they ‘were very large and very ferocious’. To keep them at bay it was sometimes necessary to surround the lampmen throughout their night-long vigils with ‘shouts and revelry and the blaze of fires and the discharges of musketry’. Unfortunately the resultant observations, ‘which should be made in peace and tranquillity’, proved useless.

  During thirty years in India Everest himself never actually encountered a tiger. This so impressed his Indian staff that they supposedly credited him with supernatural powers; either that or tigers knew from whom to keep their distance. He was better acquainted with scorpions. At Ranipur, his first vantage point after Hoshangabad, he had a small tent pitched on the cramped summit of the hill while his main tent was erected at the bottom. Having spent the night on the summit, he was next morning presented with a large leaf, stitched so as to make a basket. It was not breakfast but a collection of creepy-crawlies, just a taste of what he had missed; all were scorpions and all of them had been caught by his servants in his lower tent. ‘Upon counting them, it appeared that there were, young and old, in number twenty-six – some old gentlewoman, perhaps, with her daughters and her nieces, thus suddenly cut off in their ambitious projects of a suitable settlement.’