The Great Arc Read online

  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 Lambton had withdrawn because the Great Arc was temporarily suspended until those ‘gangs of plunderers’ could be rounded up.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.

  SIX

  Everywhere in Chains

  George 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 instanc
e 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.

  It was the potential of this discovery for nocturnal work which so delighted Everest. While convalescing at the Cape of Good Hope he had investigated, at Lambton’s suggestion, an attempted measurement of a short arc of the meridian by the Abbé De La Caille, a French savant and astronomer, in 1751. The Abbé had chosen the Cape because, being south of the equator, it would provide useful corroboration that the southern hemisphere conformed to the oblate shape of the northern hemisphere. In other words it would show that the two halves of the world’s ‘grapefruit’ were identical. Unfortunately it had done no such thing. Indeed the Abbé’s calculations seemed to suggest that, although the northern hemisphere might have a flattened pole like a grapefruit, the southern pole must be pointed like an egg. This aberration Everest, following Lambton, rightly ascribed to subterranean interference with the Abbé’s plumb-line; but what Everest also noted was that De La Caille had used night-lights for observation. In fact he had found half-burnt timbers within a pile of stones at what he took to have been one of the Frenchman’s stations.

  Bonfires were far too diffuse and unpredictable as sighting objects, although they were useful for indicating the general location of the sighting object. Flares, with which Lambton had already experimented, were better, but difficult to synchronise because they burnt out too quickly; they were also rather costly. Everest sought a cheap compromise which could be produced locally, and he hit on the extremely simple idea of a terracotta lamp. The ‘bulb’ was basically a large cup, filled with cotton seeds steeped in oil and ignited. As a shade, a large earthenware urn, thirty inches deep and with a hole in one side through which the light would shine, was inverted over the cup. Any village potter could throw such vessels; they cost next to nothing; and their light could be seen for up to forty miles. They thus ‘answered exceedingly well in all but windy weather’.