The Great Arc Read online

  Piling up the metaphors, Everest and then Waugh, his successor as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and Surveyor-General, conceived this Gangetic grid, or segment of the tree, as a quadrilateral. The ‘bars’ were contained within four sides consisting of the Great Arc itself, its two longitudinal branches (the Sironj-Calcutta series and the North-East Longitudinal) and an upright series linking them in the east known as the Calcutta Meridional. At each corner of this quadrilateral, accuracy was ascertained by a base-line measurement with the compensation bars. The bases at Calcutta, Sironj and the Dun had, of course, already been conducted by Everest himself. To complete the quadrilateral it remained only for Waugh to measure a fourth base-line in the far north-east.

  The Himalayas

  The site chosen was at a place called Sonakhoda, below the Darjeeling hills where the North-East Longitudinal intersected the meridional upright carried up from Calcutta. There, in the moist plains of northern Bengal, Waugh and his assistants assembled with the compensation bars in late 1847. As with the Dun base-line, connection to the primary series, in this case the North-East Longitudinal, was made via stations on the neighbouring hills. It was while choosing and linking these, in the latter half of 1847, that Waugh found a new contender for the title of the world’s highest mountain and so reopened the debate about the height of the Himalayas.

  Everest himself had taken little interest in the subject. From the back door of Hathipaon he had been confronted by as fine a panorama of glistening summits as any in the world. They were good for the soul, but to his life’s work on the Great Arc they were peripheral. From The Chur he may have actually sighted Nanda Devi; but there is no record of his having attempted to verify its height. Bagging mountain peaks was not his business. For those who had pursued the subject, often with inferior instruments and speculative observations, he felt only contempt.

  Waugh, too, was circumspect on the subject. Although it was obvious that from the North-East Longitudinal series the secrets of the high peaks were within range, there was to be no unseemly rush to plot them. It was the sort of thing to which a surveyor might usefully devote his spare time while, say, waiting for towers to be built or trees cleared. Nor, when the peaks were indeed plotted, would there be any urgency to make public the results. The Survey had its code about publication, and no findings could be announced before exhaustive computation and revision of the data on which they rested.

  The peak to which, almost casually, Waugh directed his theodolite while plotting the connection of the Sonakhoda base-line was Kangchenjunga, now perhaps the most easily observed of all the Himalayan giants and the third highest in the world. At the time Nanda Devi at the other end of the main Himalayan chain, the ‘A2’ of Hodgson and Herbert, was still credited with the greatest elevation yet measured. Webb’s Dhaulagiri also had its champions, although the 28,000 feet once suggested for it by Henry Colebrooke had long since been dismissed as wildly improbable; something rather less than Webb’s own estimate of 26,862 feet was thought more likely. In fact, it looked as if five vertical miles (26,400 feet) might constitute a pre-ordained ceiling above which no part of the earth was meant to protrude.

  Waugh and Kangchenjunga now proved this wrong. But anyone who has seen Kangchenjunga loom from the clammy cloud-cover which envelops most of the eastern Himalayas for most of the year will find Waugh’s encounter deeply unsatisfactory. A skilled and devoted professional, he lacked Everest’s charisma and seemed content to live in his guru’s shadow. Some found him sanctimonious; but if he did not endear himself to his subordinates, neither did he aggressively antagonise them. Fair to his mountains as to his men, Waugh eschewed comment as resolutely as Everest embraced it. Instead of penning narratives, he filed reports.

  From above the hill resort of Darjeeling the dawn observer who is lucky enough, like Waugh, to beat the mist as it wells up from the Rangit valley enjoys one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Forty miles away, across a chasm lined with rhododendrons and bubbling with cloud, the mountain stands detached from the ground and seems not of this world. Rather does it materialise, ghost-like, out of the lightening sky. You look for it on the horizon and find that you have been staring into its navel. The summit, cleft by a wall of granite and defined by its glistening flanks, sails high overhead like a celestial Olympus etched in chill sunlight.

  ‘The western peak of Kangchenjunga attains an elevation of no less than 28,176 feet above the sea, which far exceeds what has hitherto been conjectured,’ wrote Waugh in ink as dry as dust. He and his assistants, including William Rossenrode junior, had observed it from Tiger Hill, Senchal, Tonglu and most of Darjeeling’s other now renowned viewpoints. It was much the highest known mountain in the world, being nearly three thousand feet in excess of Nanda Devi. And since it had been approached more closely than any of its rivals, and from a base-line subject to the rigorous controls of the Survey, the observations could be taken to be unassailably accurate. Though incidental and unexpected, Kangchenjunga’s primacy could be seen as a crowning triumph for the Great Arc.

  Yet Waugh did not announce this discovery until two years later. Even then he did so only in an internal memorandum; for doubts had arisen, not about Kangchenjunga, but about another peak to which, from Darjeeling, he had also taken bearings. The bearings did not include vertical angles because the peak in question was deemed too distant and indistinct. Like other such irregularities on the horizon, its position was plotted, its profile sketched, and it was then given a sequential designation. Waugh used the letters of the Greek alphabet. The distant peak, lying to the left of Kangchenjunga and at least 120 miles away on the Nepal – Tibet border, became ‘gamma’; and although loath to admit it, he already suspected that ‘gamma’ might exceed Kangchenjunga.

  Waugh conducted his Darjeeling observations in November 1847. In the same month, but from the North-East Longitudinal at Muzaffarapur in Bihar, John Armstrong, one of the many assistants recruited by Everest, had taken three sets of horizontal angles and one vertical angle to a shy and partly obscured giant which, as Waugh immediately suspected, proved to be the same mountain as ‘gamma’. Armstrong had listed his peak simply as ‘b’; and from his angles, a height of 28,799 feet seemed to be indicated. But ‘on account of the great distance’, Waugh distrusted Armstrong’s observations as much as his own. He decided to await the outcome of the 1848–9 season. ‘I particularly wish you to verify Mr Armstrong’s peak “b”,’ he told John Peyton, once one of Everest’s prized ‘computers’. ‘His [Armstrong’s] peak “a”,’ Waugh added, ‘also requires to be well verified because the two heights deduced are very discordant.’ Almost certainly, this ‘a’ was Makalu, today reckoned to be 27,805 feet and so the fourth highest in the world. It stands on the Nepal – Tibet frontier just to the east of a cluster of giants including the timid fang which was Armstrong’s ‘b’ and Waugh’s ‘gamma’.

  Peyton had no joy in 1848–9. The peaks were visible only in the early mornings and only during November and December. Of a morning, by the time his instrument had been trained on them, they had disappeared; and of a season, by the time his survey towers had been built, the peaks had gone into hibernation behind a veil of cloud which lifted not even at daybreak. Primarily concerned with contributing his section to the North-East Longitudinal, Peyton found it impossible to have towers ready early enough in the season for mountain triangulation.

  A year later, with more encouragement from Waugh, James Nicholson succeeded Peyton and resumed the quest. Edging east, the North-East Longitudinal took Nicholson slightly closer to the target. His ‘sharp peak “h”’ was clearly Armstrong’s ‘b’ and Waugh’s ‘gamma’, and he concentrated his attentions on it. Numerous angles, both vertical and horizontal, were taken, six of which were used in the final computations. But although Nicholson himself must have known the outcome by early in 1850, Waugh was in no hurry to proclaim it.

  All the Himalayan peaks were first given new designations, this time in Roman numerals from I
to LXXX. ‘Gamma’/‘b’/‘h’ now became Peak XV. Waugh then, in the words of Reginald Phillimore, the Survey’s historian, ‘asked the Chief Computer in Calcutta to revise the form [formulae?] for computing geographical positions of snow peaks at distances of over 100 miles’. The Chief Computer was Radhanath Sickdhar, the Bengali genius whose arithmetical wizardry had so impressed Everest. A later tradition, dismissed by Phillimore although accepted by many Indian historians, that it was in fact Sickdhar who first realised that XV was the world’s highest presumably stems from this reference. The popular account of the excited Bengali rushing into Waugh’s office exclaiming that he had ‘discovered the world’s highest mountain’ is obviously rubbish. Waugh’s office was in Dehra Dun while Sickdhar was now in Calcutta. But it is quite probable that Sickdhar’s computations provided the first clear proof of XV’s superiority.

  ‘For the next four years,’ continues Phillimore, ‘[Waugh] was discussing refraction coefficients and the datum zero height which had to await tidal observations at Karachi.’ Then ‘as a final check he wrote for the old records of Charles Crawford and William Webb.’ It was not, therefore, until March 1856 that Waugh at last took up his pen and, in a letter consisting of fourteen numbered and neatly written paragraphs, summarised his findings.

  The letter, ‘No 29B’, might be ‘made use of’ but it was not for publication. The results were still provisional; there was much revision yet to be undertaken. It was addressed simply to Captain Thuillier, his Deputy Surveyor-General in Calcutta. But its contents were such that they quickly became common knowledge. For after a four-paragraph preamble, Waugh at last directed his attention to Peak XV.

  5. We have for some years known that this mountain is higher than any hitherto measured in India and most probably it is the highest in the whole world.

  6. I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor Colonel Sir Geo. Everest to assign to every geographical object its true local or native appellation. I have always scrupulously adhered to this rule as I have in fact to all other principles laid down by that eminent geodesist.

  7. But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, whose native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal and to approach close to this stupendous snowy mass.

  8. In the meantime the privilege as well as the duty devolves on me to assign to this lofty pinnacle of our globe a name whereby it may be known among geographers and become a household word among civilized nations.

  9. In virtue of this privilege, in testimony of my affectionate respect for a revered chief, in conformity with what I believe to be the wish of all the members of the scientific department over which I have the honour to preside, and to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of accurate geographical research, I have determined to name this noble peak of the Himalayas Mont [sic] Everest.

  10. The final values of the co-ordinates of geographical position for this mountain are as follows, viz –

  MONT EVEREST OR HIMALAYA PEAK XV

  As intended, Thuillier duly conveyed this information to members of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. They approved Waugh’s findings although not the new name. The latter, which Waugh himself quickly changed from ‘Mont Everest’ to ‘Mount Everest’, was however endorsed in London by the Secretary of State for India and by the Royal Geographical Society.

  Doubts, though, remained. For one thing, it was not certain that the new peak was in fact the highest. By the time Waugh composed his letter, British India had devoured the lands which today comprise Pakistan. Leafy branches of triangulation were spreading rapidly west and north-west, particularly into the newly created state of Kashmir, whose uncertain mountain borders marched with those of China and several central Asian kingdoms. The latter were rapidly succumbing to Russian influence, and with the British paranoid about Tsarist designs on their Indian empire, the mapping of Kashmir had been given the highest priority. In 1856, even as Thuillier was conveying Waugh’s news of Mount Everest to the Asiatic Society, a party of shivering surveyors was encamped on Haramukh, the mountain which presides over the Kashmir valley. From there they were taking angles to a new cluster of peaks, distant 140 miles and evidently of exceptional magnitude.

  The range in question, detached from the chain of the Great Himalaya and just to the north of its western bastion (the 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat), was said to be called the Karakoram. Captain Montgomerie, the man in charge of the Kashmir survey, therefore numbered its peaks with the prefix ‘K’ and, in a small sketch, clearly delineated the first two in the new series. For his ‘K1’ a local name was later found – Masherbrum. ‘K2’, a sharper and more elusive peak, remained anonymous although not ignored. The possibility that it might exceed Mount Everest was clear in 1856 and led to a succession of observations in 1857, then some hasty computation in 1858. Montgomerie, unlike Waugh, was keen to dispose of the matter, although probably disappointed by the result. At 28,287 feet (later revised to 28,168), K2 was slightly higher than Kangchenjunga but well short of Mount Everest.

  Other challengers would also be seen off. The altitude of Mount Everest has since been often adjusted but seldom to below 29,000 feet. At either 29,028 or 29,141, it reigns supreme. But this supremacy only fuelled another debate: why should it be called ‘Mount Everest’? ‘K2’, for instance, remains ‘K2’. Names likes ‘Keychu’ and ‘Keytu’ would be exposed as no more than local renderings of Montgomerie’s designation; other names, including ‘Mount Waugh’ (after the Surveyor-General), ‘Mount Albert’ (after Queen Victoria’s consort), ‘Mount Montgomerie’ (after its ‘discoverer’) and ‘Mount Godwin-Austen’ (after the surveyor who first actually penetrated the Karakoram), have failed to win acceptance. No doubt the government of India or that of Pakistan would happily adopt a new name for the peak but, while control of Kashmir continues to be disputed, K2 is likely to remain a nameless orphan.

  The case for scrapping ‘Mount Everest’ rested on the suspicion, anticipated by Waugh, that there might be a local name for it which access to Nepal would reveal. Brian Hodgson, an eminent Buddhist scholar who had resided at Kathmandu for some years, immediately came up with ‘Devadhanga’ as the Nepali designation. The Asiatic Society, deferring to Hodgson’s scholarship and reflecting the hostility which many in British India still felt for George Everest, agreed. But Waugh objected. He convened a committee which declared Devadhanga ‘indefinite and unacceptable’. Although enshrined in Nepali legend, it apparently applied to several peaks. In the past such imprecision had scarcely deterred adoption of a name; but the fact that XV was the world’s highest, that Waugh had already named it, and that ‘Mount Everest’ was indeed rapidly becoming ‘a household word among civilized nations’ militated against change.

  So did the turmoil which swept northern India in 1857. Within a year of Waugh’s announcement, the British were fighting for the existence of their Raj. In the context of what they insisted was just an ‘Indian Mutiny’ but which Indians regard as a great national rebellion, the quibbling over the name of a mountain abruptly ceased.

  The Great Rebellion, though sparked by a mutiny of Indian troops, spread across a national landscape parched by years of withering contempt for the sensibilities and customs of India’s people. It would be unfair to claim that the Rebellion, like the measurement of Mount Everest, stemmed from the activities of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. But surveyors had undoubtedly fuelled both the British sense of superiority and the Indian sense of grievance. ‘Bars’ and ‘chains’ of invisible triangulation looked and sounded a lot like political strangulation. Not unwittingly the Survey had furnished the paradigm and encouraged the mind-set of an autocratic and unresponsive imperialism. Additionally, by razing whole villages, appropriating sacred hills, exhausting local supplies, antagonising protective husbands and facilitating the assessment of the dreaded land revenue, the surveyors had probably done as much to advertise the reali
ties of British rule and so alienate grassroots opinion as had any branch of the administration. Back in the early 1800s, men like Mackenzie and Lambton had respected and even admired India’s rich cultural traditions. But to Everest and his generation devotional customs and immemorial lore were just evidence of ‘the suspicious native mind’. Tiptoeing round local sensibilities, whether Indian or British, was not an art which George Everest had ever recognised.

  With the British in India otherwise engaged, ‘Mount Everest’ won international recognition. When the name was again questioned, the logic of sticking with it was stronger than ever. In the early twentieth century the great Swedish explorer Sven Hedin had come up with a long Tibetan name for the mountain. Rendered in various different spellings, ‘Cha-mo-lung-ma’ was also, like Devadhanga, rejected on the grounds that it was applicable to the whole Everest region rather than to a particular peak. Still longer Tibetan names like Mi-thik Dgu-thik Bya-phur Long-nga (which one writer translates as ‘You cannot see the summit from near it, but you can see the summit from nine directions, and a bird which flies as high as the summit goes blind’) are undoubtedly more specific. But they scarcely trip off the tongue, nor do they endear themselves to cartographers working within the cramped confines of a small-scale map. ‘Mount Everest’, on the other hand, universally mispronounced and long since disassociated from its contentious namesake, has a ring of permanence, an aura of assurance.

  Strangely, the one person who might have entered into this debate with intriguing effect held his peace. It was not out of modesty. George Everest, after declining one order of knighthood because he thought it not grand enough, had in 1861 become Sir George Everest, Companion of the Bath. In a typically overblown disclaimer he had once confessed to being ‘by no means disposed to be very humble, or to play the courtier, or to kiss the rod that chastises me’. Yet of his reaction to having the world’s highest mountain named in his honour there is no record at all. Perhaps he rightly judged that any intervention on his part might be counter-productive.