Authors: John Keay
If the Great Arc was the star of this production, all India was its set. Outside of the Survey, Everest had few friends and no interests. A break from fieldwork was just an opportunity for catching up on the backlog of computation and correspondence. His dedication was as absolute and undisputed as he proclaimed it to be, repeatedly. Yet the unreasonable demands, the histrionic outbursts and the deeply offensive language could not but rankle.
‘You are mismanaging sadly,’ he told Henry Keelan, one of his new sub-assistants; ‘when instructed to turn your heliotrope to Bahin, you turned it to Pahera … you might as well turn it to the moon.’ A wilting Keelan proved just as irregular with his night flares. Again he was castigated, but this time he countered by explaining that he did not own a watch. ‘No decent person is ever without a watch,’ thundered Everest. ‘You ought to be ashamed … You might just as well say that you have no coat or no shoes or no hat.’ Still watchless, Keelan continued to get his timings wrong and to drive Everest to despair. ‘You are evidently one of those uncertain persons in whom no sort of confidence ever can be placed. Ask yourself what use a person can be who commits blunders so often … Sometimes you are too lazy to get up in the morning. At other times you make intervals [between flares] of 32 minutes instead
of 16. At other times you break the pole. In short you never succeed except by the merest chance.’
Keelan and another new recruit, Charles Dove (‘where there is a will, there is a way, Mr Dove’), were singled out for particular censure. Both were recalled, Keelan in disgrace, ‘the faint-hearted Dove’ after being struck by a falling mast. More to Everest’s taste were two young Lieutenants who had joined the Survey in 1832. Andrew Scott Waugh and Thomas Renny-Tailyour had received some training with the Irish Survey. They were promising mathematicians and ‘tasty draughtsmen’. Best of all, they were officers and gentlemen, descendants of landed Scots gentry and recipients of a good education. Everest had never approved of Lambton’s ‘mestizos’, and after an uneasy induction with, but not under, William Rossenrode, each of the Lieutenants was promoted above Rossenrode as full assistant, rather than sub-assistant. They were then given command of one of the meridional series running north from Olliver’s Calcutta Longitudinal Series. But as men like Keelan and Dove fell by the wayside, Waugh and Renny would be increasingly summoned to the Great Arc and would perform much of the final triangulation.
With the preliminary triangulation approaching the ancient capital of Delhi, it was Rossenrode who suffered another tumble from grace. The city’s most obvious natural feature was The Ridge. It flanks Old Delhi on the north-west and would become hallowed ground for the British when, twenty-three years later, they there staged a do-or-die struggle against the forces of Indian resurgence in what they called the Indian Mutiny.
Rossenrode had been sent to find a suitable site on The Ridge to serve as the next station. He soon discovered that, then as now, Delhi’s atmosphere was amongst the most polluted in the world. Thirty miles away, Everest, although he himself could make out very little, seemed to imagine that Rossenrode, in the midst of the haze, had only to pick out his
signals and settle on a site. Why was he taking so long? If he could not see the signals, he had only to shift his position. ‘You are wearing me to fiddlestrings about this Delhi ray … If you do not take some pains, you will never succeed and I may be detained here for the next six years. It is pleasant enough for you, I dare say, near a grand cozy city, but for me and all about me it is a great nuisance, I assure you.’
Like Keelan and Dove, Rossenrode was recalled. Immediately, as if by design, the fog cleared enough for the signals to be seen. Crowing over this disgrace of one of his senior sub-assistants, Everest hastened into town. There he quickly discovered that the sightings were worthless and that the buildings on The Ridge were mostly too unstable to serve as a station. He lit upon an old mosque but eventually adopted a domed building which looks to have been that originally chosen by Rossenrode. Known as the shrine of ‘Pir Ghalib’ or ‘Pir Ghyb’, it would later surface in guidebooks as an ‘ancient observatory’. Twentieth-century visitors, oblivious of the Great Arc and all that it involved, had evidently identified as pre-British both the hole drilled by the Survey in the dome and the corresponding hole and marker directly beneath it in the floor of the building. This was the standard method of ensuring that the instrument on the roof was precisely plumbed above the marker. It would be replicated in the custom-built towers whose design Everest already had on the drawing board.
A month later and now within sight of the mountains, Everest turned on his most senior sub-assistant. Joseph Olliver, one of Lambton’s Madras protégés, had been with the Survey for nearly thirty years. He had accompanied Everest in the jungles of Hyderabad, commanded the Calcutta Series, and had become Everest’s most consistently successful triangulator. He had also, like Rossenrode, been followed into the Survey’s employ by three of his sons. Described as being ‘of a retiring disposition’ – and certainly an uncomplaining one –
he had now served as Everest’s foil for a decade and a half. He deserved better than the outburst which followed an unsuccessful night of flare-burning.
I dare not put a blue light into the hands of any of you. You seem to think they grow like grass, and that all you have to do is put them at the top of the pole and set fire to them, just as you would to a whisp of grass. I suppose the only way is for me to … leave you to recover your senses, for it seems that you will not abide by my orders, but – pell-mell, helter-skelter, foul or fair – away go to damnation and destruction the only means we have of getting through our work.
You all seem to me to be right stark staring mad. Never was a worse evening … I could not see five miles in any direction. The sun was obscured at 4 o’clock, and by 5 there was not a vestige of him, and that is the kind of atmosphere in which you choose to burn blue lights. I have superseded Mr Dove … I have sent out Mr Keelan … and unless I receive some assurance that you will not play the fool in the like manner again, I shall certainly adopt equally strong measures to you.
An unamused Olliver no doubt shuffled away into his retiring disposition.
As the cool dry season gave way to the hot blasts of April, the preliminary triangulation was carried up into the dusty Siwaliks. Hoisting the Arc over these outermost sierras and down into the Dun entailed finding two intervisible stations on the crest of the range. It should have been easy. But following weeks of no hills, now there were too many. Amidst reports of Everest’s men fleeing from tigers and being chased by rogue elephants, six positions were in turn occupied and abandoned. Nor were the seventh and eighth ideal. In a blatant example of surveyors manipulating the geography they were so intent
on measuring, intervisibility was secured by reducing the height of an intervening peak. With crowbars and sledgehammers, twenty feet of rock were pruned from the profile of the Siwaliks.
Everest was in no mood to be troubled by scruple. Cooler climes and clearer vistas beckoned. Hathipaon was now visible across the Dun; respectable peaks, like The Chur, loomed invitingly beyond; and along the furthest horizon marched the serried snow-caps of the Great Himalaya. With the end in sight, he penned a triumphant report in which he announced that there was ‘no instance on record of a symmetrical series of triangles having been carried over a country similarly circumstanced’. Every station for the final triangulation had been selected, the required height for every tower ascertained, and at least two angles of every triangle approximately measured. It was, in short, ‘an unbounded success’. And for it Everest, as usual, took unbounded credit.
Fourteen towers would be needed for the final triangulation, at a cost of about two thousand rupees apiece. Basically each was a very solid rectangular version, in brick or stone, of the mast and scaffolding used for the preliminary observations. Again the instrument table was mounted on a pillar isolated from the observation platform. The table was centred over a shaft down which the plumb-line could pass to the marker stone in the ground below, and the platform was always on the roof of the topmost storey beneath a canvas awning. Heights varied from forty to sixty feet, and so did the architecture. To judge from those which survive, the most popular model owed something to the bell-towers of Tuscany.
Access was by ladder up the outside. Officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey were not accustomed to such luxuries as stairs, says Everest. To haul to the top the half-ton Great Theodolite, now rebuilt and about to re-enter service, a crane was mounted on the topmost platform. Unfortunately it was found to restrict visibility. A lesser derrick had to be
constructed to dismantle the crane, the derrick being of a size to be then manhandled to the ground.
The building work was to be undertaken by different engineers attached to the various British military establishments along the line of the Arc. Plans were sent to them, detailed instructions given, and a lively correspondence was generated. But it would be two years before they were completed. Meanwhile the Arc’s conclusion could be anticipated by measuring the final base-line, selecting terminal stations in the Himalayas, and preparing for the delicious certainties of the final computations. That, after thirty years, the longest and most ambitious meridional arc in the world would be successfully completed was no longer in doubt. Whether Everest would be there to claim the unbounded credit for it was a different matter.
S
lumped on the grass outside Hathipaon, watching the mist scud over the ridge, I had got to thinking about the extraordinary irony of it all. How had something as rigorous and predictable as the Great Arc had such unforeseen consequences? It was as if scientific endeavour were subject to a law of
karma
which ordained that every experiment must be productive of its antithesis. Thus a sweat-soaked odyssey conducted across the burning plains of India would uncover the frozen secrets of the highest Himalayas; a measurement intended to discover the curvature of the globe would reveal its greatest irregularity; and a man who dealt in decimals to the sixth place and degrees to a hundredth of a second would find his name attached to the most colossal of mountains.
More extraordinary still, what was by common consent one of the greatest scientific achievements of a science-mad century would go practically uncelebrated. It was very strange. Was science always so capricious, invention ever so perverse? As John Hodgson had noted, it was when the pioneer was apparently confounded that he stood on the threshold of a discovery.
Getting up, I had wandered towards the abyss beyond the terrace on which Hathipaon stands. Four thousand feet below lay spread the Dun. A broad and now open expanse of farmland about thirty miles long by ten wide, it separates the Ganges and Jumna rivers as they emerge from the mountains. Beyond it to the south, the crumbling hill profile was that of the Siwaliks – less a twenty-foot pinnacle; and beyond the Siwaliks
stretched interminably the north Indian plain. From the ridge of Hathipaon the great plain was just discernible as a bilious haze pulsing with heat. There lay Delhi and Agra, their minarets and tower-blocks hidden at this range even to the telescope of a thirty-six-inch theodolite.
In contrast, the Dun in the foreground was clear in every detail. It was laid out, indeed, like a map. Immediately below the ridge, Dehra Dun, the main town, sprawled uncertainly outwards from a core of corrugated roofs to the parks, parade-grounds and arboreta of its prestigious academies, fee-paying colleges and government institutions. Amongst the latter I thought I could identify the headquarters of the Survey of India, the organisation over which Everest had presided in his role as Surveyor-General. In the Survey’s offices, alongside portraits of all the other Surveyors-General, hangs that leonine likeness taken long after his retirement. There, if you mispronounce his name, they still actually correct you. ‘Oh, you must be meaning EVE-rest.’ It is more than fifty years since the British left India but at the Survey he is yet remembered, his outbursts fondly quoted and his instruments proudly displayed. Quite apart from his scientific achievements, he is recalled with affection as the man who was responsible for first locating the Survey in the salubrious township of Dehra Dun.
In 1833, soon after Everest’s office and instruments had been so laboriously shipped upriver from Calcutta to Hathipaon, the government had begun raising objections. Its Surveyor-General, his staff, and the whole map-making directorate had no business relocating themselves in such a remote and inaccessible eyrie. The Survey’s headquarters were supposed to be in Calcutta. There, in the capital, fretting officials and idle presses awaited the surveys and charts which Everest’s department was supposed to be churning out. Throughout India new roads were being planned, irrigation canals laid out, and the first railways projected. There were new districts to be pacified, frontiers to be drawn and, most important of all,
whole territories to be ‘settled’ (this being a euphemism for assessing and allocating the agricultural taxes which made India such an attractive country to rule). For all these activities maps were essential, and the Survey of India was there to provide them. It was quite unacceptable that it had decamped to a Himalayan retreat where it could barely be contacted, let alone supervised.
Everest, of course, protested. If he was to perform his dual duties, his headquarters as Surveyor-General would have to be handy for his fieldwork as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. That meant being near the Great Arc. Additionally, given the health hazards to which his men were exposed, headquarters needed to be located somewhere with recuperative potential plus a good monsoon climate, that being the only season when he could devote himself to administrative duties. Hathipaon, he insisted, was both. But the government remained unimpressed, and it was only reluctantly that a final compromise was accepted. While the computational, graphic and administrative core of the Survey of India was to remain in Calcutta under Joshua de Penning, the headquarters staff need only move down from the heights of Hathipaon to offices in the more accessible Dehra Dun. There they have been ever since.
Everest himself resisted even this short removal. As Surveyor-General he was expected to follow his office down to the town, but as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey he stayed put at Hathipaon. The workshops on the ridge continued to echo to the sound of hammers and grinders; and whenever operations in the plains were suspended, Logarithm Lodge and Bachelors’ Hall overflowed with his henpecked assistants. Everest would continue to run the Great Trigonometrical Survey, if not the Survey of India, as an extension of his domestic arrangements, and in the absence of a family he rejoiced in playing the awesome patriarch to his staff. Government might whinge about overdue maps and critics
whisper about the neglect of surveys other than the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Everest knew better; his grid-iron of triangles must come first.
Scanning the Dun westwards, I strained for signs of a place called Arcadia. It should have been four or five miles to the right of the town and on the far side of the Asan rivulet. But with no idea what to look for, I saw only villages and denuded fields, many now fringed with eucalyptus in a pallid apology for the great woods of
sal
and pine which once gave this landscape an elysian appeal. Everest, no doubt, would have been able to direct his gaze straight to the spot. It had been his main reason for buying Hathipaon in the first place. On the strength of Hodgson’s observations, he knew that the 78-degree meridian passed through the Dun, and on the strength of Herbert’s experience, he knew that only in the Dun was he likely to find the six to seven miles of tolerably level ground necessary for his Himalayan base-line. From the ridge, Hathipaon was sure to command the site, and in 1833, soon after his arrival, he had ‘had the good fortune to pitch exactly on the tract which proved in the end to be the most favourable’.
It was not the site used by Herbert. That lay on the other side of Dehra Dun. Everest needed a base-line whose terminal stations would connect with the two trig stations he had established on the Siwaliks and with The Chur, on whose summit he had already established another station. With the heavy compensation bars to position and with ample staff to assist, he planned something much more elaborate than Herbert’s base. Extensive clearance was undertaken, bridges were built where the terrain fell away, and stone markers were sunk in the ground at either end. These markers were then enshrined in tumuli and eventually topped with towers. In addition to the measurement of the base, the compensation bars themselves were compared against a brass standard before, during and after the measurement in order to detect any inconsistency. Following several hundred such comparisons, Everest
pounced on a possible error which, compounded over the seven miles of the line, might come to 1.6 inches. He was disgusted; it was nearly double the margin of error found on the Calcutta base. In a rare criticism of his beloved bars he queried whether their accuracy was ‘commensurate with the increase of complication in the machinery and the expense incurred’. The bars, as he would discover, were nevertheless a lot more reliable than a chain.
The whole Dun base-line operation took from October 1834 till February 1835. It involved nearly all Everest’s assistants and sub-assistants – Waugh and Renny, Olliver and Rossenrode, plus three promising newcomers, Peyton, Logan and Armstrong, who between them would later explore the Himalayan potential of the Great Arc. Even the watchless Keelan, now reinstated, was allocated to one of the microscopes on the bars. Beside him worked Radhanath Sickdhar, a twenty-year-old Bengali recruited by de Penning for computational work in Calcutta and since poached by Everest as his number-crunching genius. As well as being the first Indian of rank in the employ of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and its undoubted mathematical star, Sickdhar too would be credited with Himalayan discoveries.
No conclusions could be drawn from the new base-line until it had been connected up by primary triangulation with that at Sironj. This work still awaited the completion of the masonry towers. Meantime instruments were readied and Everest switched his fire from his subordinates to his neighbours. In one of the more bizarre rows to rock British India the original culprit was a bored mule which, escaping one afternoon from the Survey’s Dehra Dun compound, entered a neighbouring garden in search of a herbaceous bite. The neighbour, a Lieutenant Henry Kirke who was also the town’s Staff Officer, demanded satisfaction. When none was offered, Kirke retaliated: a herd of cattle appeared in the Survey’s compound. Some fouling of equipment resulted and several straw-thatch
houses were eaten while their inhabitants, Survey employees, were out clearing the base-line. Everest, lately promoted to Major, promptly impounded the cattle, and Kirke demanded their release. When his demand was a second time ignored Kirke had recourse to arms. In an unseemly fracas, a Sergeant and four Privates with fixed bayonets routed the ‘compass-wallahs’ and reclaimed their herd.
Everest was by now beside himself. Long-winded letters stuttering with rage and innuendo were fired off to the town’s commanding officer and to the Adjutant-General in Calcutta. But Kirke gave as good as he got, and with the affair getting out of control it was referred to the Commander-in-Chief.
There, mercifully, the correspondence ends; who came off best is not known. But as a result of this and other run-ins with the civil authorities, Everest’s standing suffered. No one questioned his competence or dedication, but his arrogance was cordially detested and his outbursts openly ridiculed. Not all India would remember him fondly, and his achievements would be tarnished in consequence. When the later naming of a peak in his honour proved so controversial, it looks to have had as much to do with the man as with the mountain.
The reputation of his office also suffered. Indeed the Survey was so ‘hated’, according to one contemporary, that its unpopularity discouraged promising recruits. On the other hand, the sequel to this affair of the mule is also revealing. Just as the saga mysteriously vanishes from the records, so the hatchet seems to have been quietly buried in the Dun. Kirke and Everest subsequently got on well. It was Kirke who would purchase the ground across which Everest had laid out his base-line and, planting it up as a tea garden, would call it Arcadia. The name, reported a gleeful Everest, was ‘in commemoration of, and compliment to, the Great Arc!!!’, a handsome gesture which he handsomely acknowledged with congratulations to Kirke on his tea bushes as well as those three unwonted exclamation marks. Clearly, those who fell
foul of the fiery Major, whether subordinates or colleagues, were not left to nurse their grievances.
Everest’s irascibility, like that of generations of other choleric Englishmen in the East, may charitably be explained by his recurrent ill-health. Rebellious bowels lent an urgency to the working day, and malarial rheumatics made nocturnal observations an agony. From England, as earlier from the Cape of Good Hope, he had returned to India convalesced but far from cured. During base-line operations in the Dun he again experienced great pain in his joints. A course of drastic treatment included the ‘phlogistic diet’, which may have killed Lambton, and much bleeding with leeches and ‘cups’ (the cup, or glass, was pressed against an area of scraped skin after being heated so as to suck out ‘bad’ blood).
Somewhat recovered, in March 1835 Everest completed the connection of his Dun base-line to neighbouring stations. Then he again took to his sickbed. Four successive attacks of fever kept him there for the next six months, ‘during which time I was once bled to fainting, had upwards of 1000 leeches, 30–40 cupping glasses, 3 or 4 blisters … besides daily doses of nauseous medicine, all of which produced such a degree of debility as to make it of small apparent moment whether I lived or died’.
His fate was, though, of increasing moment to his employers. There was now serious concern about whether he would ever be able to finish the Arc. ‘I have survived the storm,’ he announced in October 1835. But his recovery did not stop him reminding all and sundry that he was living on borrowed time, and lest he succumb again, he insisted on having Waugh by his side for the final triangulation. Meanwhile the government was sufficiently alarmed to start casting about for a possible successor.
News of this development, which Everest chose to interpret as an attempt to supersede him, would prove a greater restorative than any number of leeches. To scupper the appointment
of Thomas Jervis, a man whom he deemed hostile to his achievements and scientifically unworthy of his post, Everest would pen and then publish his most vitriolic series of letters. If Jervis still fancied his chances, Everest would also demonstrate that rumours of his retirement were premature. To spite the wretched Jervis, he gritted his teeth and decided to soldier on, regardless of the consequences, until the Arc was finished.
By late 1835 the towers were ready. At the head of another large cavalcade Everest crossed the Siwaliks to begin the final triangulation between the Dun and Sironj. Needless to say, he found that the towers did not always conform to specifications. Those constructed by engineers from Delhi had been built of ‘inadhesive materials’, while instructions to isolate the pillar (for the instrument) from the gallery (for the observer) had been ‘entirely lost sight of’. Agra’s engineers had done much better, one of their towers being ‘a perfect model of symmetry and elegance’.