10 Mapping the Himalaya

10

 

 

Mapping the Himalaya

 

In late 1774, the affable George Bogle was at Tashilhunpo monastery in Tibet, pressing the East India Company’s trading interests with the Panchen Lama. Suspicion about his intentions and those of governor Warren Hastings, his master in Calcutta, ran deep. An unofficial envoy, a man Bogle called Chauduri, came to visit him, sent from Lhasa by the eighth Dalai Lama’s regent. Bogle didn’t like Chauduri much, commenting on the man’s ‘cringing humility’, which he compared unfavourably with the ‘plain and honest manners of the Tibetans’. Chauduri was not himself Tibetan but from Palpa, on the other side of the mountains, at that time one of the small independent hill-states yet to be absorbed into the Gorkha kingdom of Nepal. While he promised Bogle more than the Company desired, ultimately he delivered nothing; Bogle speculated that Chauduri was either a chancer out to gain advantage for himself or more probably someone sent to gather intelligence whom the regent in Lhasa could deny knowing, which he promptly did.

Whatever Chauduri’s motives, his presence in Tibet is a reminder that far

from being a blank on the map, southern Tibet was part of a Himalayan network of cultures linking two of the most populous regions on earth, India and China. The regent had in this instance used a ‘Hindustani’ to deflect British interest; at other times Tibetan officials relied on the presence of the Manchu ambans, ambassadors stationed in Lhasa to maintain the Qing Empire’s influence on its western borders. We’ve already seen the value the Panchen Lama placed on trade and information, and his reliance on the gosain merchant Purangir as an intermediary. Bogle himself attested to the wealth of trade passing through the hands of Kashmiri merchants and Kalmuks from Siberia.

But Tibet’s experience of the world extended far beyond its immediate

neighbours. Although Bogle was the first European whom Lobsang Palden Yeshe, the sixth Panchen Lama, had met, the lama had a wide range of European objects in his possession: a French pocket compass and a camera obscura with scenes of London, for example. When the lama pointed out a similarity between the facial features of figures painted on a piece of Chinese porcelain and those of his Scottish guest, Bogle explained that the images of shepherdesses had in fact been copied by Chinese craftsmen from European art. This exchange of knowledge flowed both ways. Bogle was given instruction in Tibetan history and law, as well as more arcane subjects like cosmography. He was also presented with a map, a gift from the Panchen Lama himself; it was an almost casual offer but one resonant with significance. It also challenges western assumptions about what remote Tibet knew of the world beyond the mountains.

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Bogle had crosed the Himalaya armed with the best knowledge then available to the East India Company about Tibet’s geography, politics and culture, drawn from the work of Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, and accompanied by the Nouvel atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise et du Thibet, published in 1737, the work of French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville. Neither man had even been to China, let alone Tibet: they drew on the researches of Jesuit missionaries trained as surveyors, who maintained the confidence of the otherwise anti-Christian Qing Kangxi emperor. The Jesuits were able to fix positions of longitude and latitude using astronomical measurements, a significant advance on Chinese techniques. The Kangxi emperor commissioned from them an atlas, a flowering of the French Académie Royale des Sciences in China. Though he restricted its use within his own kingdom to court officials, a copy was sent back to Europe, where it transformed western attitudes to China and the regions around it, including Korea, another kingdom ‘forbidden’ to Europeans.

Surveying for these Jesuit maps began in 1708 and the first of them were

published in 1718, after a decade of surveying work. China’s western tributary states were to be included but Tibet, then under the direct control of the Khoshut Khanate, was not part of the original project. The Kangxi emperor soon corrected the omission. In 1709 a Qing diplomatic official called Ho-shou, newly appointed to Lhasa, was given the extra responsibility of surveying Tibet. He took with him to his new posting some Chinese cartographers, according to Du Halde, ‘to make a map of all the territories immediately subject to the Great Lama’. These territories were of political significance to the Kangxi emperor: this was during the period of rival Dalai Lamas, with a pretender under the control of the Khoshut leader Lajang Khan in Lhasa, while the seventh Dalai Lama Kelzang Gyatso, whom the Kangxi emperor, as well as most Tibetans, preferred, was based in Litang. Two years later their work was handed to the Jesuit cartographer Jean-Baptiste Régis in Beijing, but he thought it of poor quality and while it was used for early versions of the Chinese maps, the Jesuits lobbied for a better survey, one that relied on their more exact techniques. In 1717, the emperor finally gave permission for more work to be done.

Two Tibetan lamas educated in geometry and receiving instruction from

the Jesuit Pierre Jartoux were despatched to do the job properly. With them travelled an official called Sengju from the Lifanyuan, or ‘Court of Colonial Affairs’, which mostly took care of matters related to Mongolia and Tibet. The survey team took compass bearings, measured distances and established their latitude using gnomons (shadow-casting devices), adding a scientific basis to long-established Chinese traditions in map making. They also collected coordinates of significant mountains and, the sources suggest, measured their altitude: all this a century before the great colonial project, the Survey of India, began its precise cartographic work in the Himalaya and overturned the widespread European belief that the Andes were the highest mountains on earth.

For the Qing Empire, cartographic information was strategically useful.

At the end of the seventeenth century, in the north-east corner of the Tibetan plateau, the Kokonor, or ‘blue sea’, region (known afterwards as Qinghai) had come under Beijing’s direct control. The route from the Qinghai city of Xining to Lhasa, some two thousand kilometres to the south, was well known to merchants and pilgrims, including the Armenian community then living in Tibet. Now the Qing armies, the Eight Banners, had a reliable map of the road; Lhasa was calculated to be twelve degrees west of Xining. If the Survey of India was part of a colonial project to strengthen political control by a distant elite, then so was Qing cartography a century before. When the entire project was completed, no country in Europe had better maps than China.

The Tibetan survey team reached as far west as Kailas but the

catastrophic Dzungar Mongol invasion of Tibet in 1717 prompted them to withdraw swiftly and quietly to China, most probably via Sichuan, since the survey provided updated information on the road between Lhasa and the Sichuan town of Kangding, known as Tachienlu in those days or Dartsedu in Tibetan. Their information was passed to their instructor, Pierre Jartoux, and while the maps produced were not as reliable as those to districts under direct Qing control, they were a big improvement.

As far as the British were concerned, however, a serious omission was

the map’s vagueness on the source of the Ganges; the surveying lamas had been forced to rely on oral information from fellow monks about where the river rose. Despite this lacuna, the exchange of knowledge between China and the West was productive. According to the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil, one of the surveying lamas kept a journal of their travels. This was most likely a man called Zangbu Rabjamba, the latter name being an academic title that indicates he must have studied at one of the three main monasteries of central Tibet. We know that the same monk who kept the journal, soon after returning to Beijing, also translated a Chinese work on European astronomy, knowledge brought to the Qing by the Jesuits, into Tibetan. The contribution of Tibetans to the scientific understanding of their own country, the so-called ‘Lama Survey’, has faded from view, just as most of the Indian and Anglo-Indian surveyors working in the Himalaya a century later would also be left in obscurity.

The maps Bogle carried by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde and Jean-Baptiste

Bourguignon d’Anville, based on those of their Jesuit predecessors, were as far as he was aware the most up-to-date of Tibet available, so he must have been surprised when the Panchen Lama casually offered him a better one. It was, Bogle wrote, ‘a splendid Object’, and acquiring it would no doubt earn him praise from his superiors in Calcutta. Yet he hesitated.

I considered that the Company could have no Interest in this Country but that of Commerce; and that to know a number of outlandish Names, or to correct the Geography of Thibet, although a matter of great Curiosity, and extremely interesting to Geographers

and Map-sellers, was of no use to my Constituents, or indeed to mankind in general, and that to this I might be sacrificing Objects of far greater Importance, by encreasing that Jealousy which had hitherto so cruelly thwarted me in all my Negotiations.

And so Bogle, despite the Panchen Lama’s insistence, turned the offer down. When he saw his host’s disappointment, he hastened to explain that he was much more interested in the culture of Tibet than its geography, which pleased the Panchen Lama so much that Bogle offered him an account of Europe, to satisfy the Panchen Lama’s curiosity.

As the weeks passed, Bogle’s affection for Tibet only deepened; he grew

close to the Panchen Lama’s family and began a love affair. The subject of the map was dropped, but there remains a tantalising question. There is no way of knowing what the map was that Bogle was shown, let alone who made it, but nothing available in Europe surpassed the Qing survey until the second half of the nineteenth century. If the Panchen Lama’s map was indeed more comprehensive than the one Bogle had used, who had drawn it?

One of the contenders is the Italian Ippolito Desideri, among the first

missionaries to reach Lhasa, arriving there in 1716, and the first to study properly the Tibetan language and religion. He was allowed a chapel in Sera monastery, where he studied Buddhism, and was still there in late 1717 when the Dzungar Mongols invaded and overthrew the Khoshut leader Lajang Khan. This was despite the arrival of Capuchin missionaries the autumn before, who insisted that the Vatican had made Tibet and Nepal the Capuchins’ to convert and that the Jesuit Desideri should leave. After years of fruitless argument with Rome, Desideri did eventually return to India but there’s no version of the map Bogle might have been shown in Desideri’s papers.

Another possible source of the Panchen Lama’s map is a man called

Samuel van de Putte, whom Desideri encountered on his journey to Pondicherry in southern India, having been appointed to lead the Jesuit mission there. Stopping off at Patna, on the south bank of the Ganges, Desideri and van de Putte had what must have been a remarkable encounter: van de Putte, although born in the Netherlands, was fluent in Italian and had many stories to tell, being several years into an epic journey that would last most of his lifetime, one of the greatest journeys made in Asia by a European, and yet almost unknown.

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Samuel van de Putte came from a family on the rise, his father Carel being a vice-admiral in the navy of Zeeland, a Dutch province predominantly below sea level, from the port of Vlissingen whose prosperity, then fading, had been built during the Netherlands’ golden age of privateering. The epaulettes on his shoulders, won fighting the English in the Four Days’ naval battle of 1666, gave Carel rights to buitengoederen, booty that secured his financial future. Aged fifty, he married Johanna Biscop, from a solid middle-class family. They had five children in quick succession but within ten years both were dead. The young Samuel, born in 1690, moved with his sisters and brothers to live with their uncle, and the family house was sold. He graduated from the famous law school at Leiden and by 1715 was an alderman in his hometown. Inheriting a legacy from his parents, he found sufficient funds to buy back his childhood home. A sober life of prosperous Dutch rectitude awaited him. Perhaps that prospect goaded him to have an adventure; with Egmond van Nijenburg, a wealthy friend from university, Samuel embarked on the early eighteenth-century version of the grand tour.

The friends travelled through France and Venice and settled in Padua,

where Samuel studied medicine, the subject that really inspired him, and learned Italian. In the university library he found a copy of Giro del mondo, the extraordinary travelogue of the Italian lawyer Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, then still living in Naples. Thought by some at the time to be a fraud, it told an astonishing story of independent travel that circled the globe, done for its own sake, in a spirit of simple curiosity. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Jesuit missionaries Careri met in India had thought him a spy sent by the pope. Why else would anyone travel? The reason lay in the thwarting of Gemelli Careri’s career because of his family’s lack of nobility, something that may have resonated with Samuel. While his companion Egmond’s father had been made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire, assuring Egmond’s success, for Samuel, by contrast, a life of legal drudgery lay ahead. Perhaps that didn’t seem as appealing after reading Gemelli Careri.

After Constantinople and a tour through the Holy Land, Egmond and

Samuel reached Aleppo. Here they parted company. Egmond turned for home, slipping back into the privileged life he had left. Samuel joined a merchant’s caravan and set out across the desert, along the Silk Road to Isfahan. He would be travelling with caravans almost constantly for the next three years, his journey pieced together from fragments, occasional obscure references in the official archives of merchants and missionaries. His father had bought shares in the Dutch East India Company (VOC), then the largest company in the world, and his younger brother Constantijn worked for them in Amsterdam; this gave Samuel a global assistance network. But when he passed through the company’s station at Gamron (Bandar Abbas) in the Persian Gulf his request for assistance was refused: a wild, half-starved eccentric two years in the desert dressed like an Arab seemed a poor bet. His appearance at Gamron was reported to Batavia, the centre of VOC operations in Asia, and passed on to the Netherlands, where his brother intervened. An instruction was issued in October 1724 to stations throughout Asia to be prepared to help him. Before then, Samuel van de Putte had reached the VOC station at Cochin in southern India, a year after leaving Gamron, exhausted and riddled with illness.

The following summer he was in Patna, two hundred and fifty kilometres

south of Kathmandu, having travelled overland to Pondicherry before sailing up the coast to Bengal, still under Mughal control. His motivation for travelling to the Himalaya is unclear. Gemelli Careri didn’t go there, so perhaps he was looking to try something more original. Perhaps he had acquired a taste for wilder landscapes. In light of the choices he made later, Samuel van de Putte’s life seems like a voyage of psychological exploration, a faint echo of the tantric mahasiddha who travelled the Himalaya centuries before. It seems unlikely that it was coincidence he met Desideri, who had with him the manuscript about Tibet he had been working on since he returned five years before, the manuscript that would be proscribed and archived on his return. Van de Putte read Desideri’s work and made twenty pages of notes. He also followed Desideri’s advice about travelling through Nepal to reach Tibet, the first Dutchman to do so, and the last for more than two hundred years.

Van de Putte would spend the next five years in Lhasa, staying for at least

some of the time with the Capuchin missionaries still living there. He took a strong interest in Tibetan Buddhism, making friends with lamas. In 1731 he joined a group of them journeying to Beijing via Qinghai, before returning to Lhasa in 1736. This time he travelled through Sichuan and entered Tibet at Kham in the south-east, the first European to visit this part of Tibet. After another short stay, he returned to India through Ladakh. We know the route he took on these travels only because he explained it in a letter to the head of the Capuchin mission at Lhasa, Francesco Orazio della Penna. It’s not that he didn’t keep copious records. He had a perfect command of Tibetan and the knowledge he gathered was preserved in notes, diaries and maps. But when he died in 1745, aged fifty-five, at the Dutch East India Company headquarters of Batavia, he left instructions that everything he had amassed during his travels should be burned. An entire lifetime’s travelling and knowledge went up in smoke: or at least, almost all of it.

It seems a baffling, acutely painful decision, but the man who carried out

his wishes said that van de Putte had reached the conclusion his material wasn’t sufficiently accurate to be worth publishing. A few papers escaped and these were returned to his family in the Netherlands: some notes, fragments of letters and sketch maps, one of which the geographer Clements Markham included in his compendium of early European exploration of Tibet, published in 1876, a sketch-map that subsequently disappeared. The French compass the Panchen Lama showed George Bogle a century before was most probably a relic of the survey carried out in 1708. It’s possible the map he showed him was the work of Samuel van de Putte. Bogle called his predecessor the ‘Marco Polo of the Lowlands’, but though well meant, it’s too glib a comparison. Marco Polo travelled for profit and wrote for profit too. Samuel van de Putte did neither, but his motivation and the true scope of the material he gathered will forever remain obscure.

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Whoever produced the map the Panchen Lama showed George Bogle, it clearly resonated with the Tibetan, not as some foreign curio but as a meaningful document. He was a travel writer himself, at least in the sense that he was writing a kind of cosmological guidebook: The Explanation of Shambhala and Narrative of the Holy Land, the holy land in question being India, the source of Buddhism. Bogle himself would end up as an informant for this book, which was completed in 1775, the year he left Tibet, filling in details about the current rulers of the holy land, who had so recently replaced the Mughals. After centuries of retreat and dislocation, the Panchen Lama must have seen the changing political scene in India as a possible source of optimism for Buddhism in its place of birth.

The treatise was, amongst other things, an attempt to locate tantric

centres of practice, known as pitha in Sanskrit. In the Tibetan imagination, India had become something of a lost world, where sacred places that had witnessed the Buddha’s life were waiting to be rediscovered, as though they remained current, despite the centuries that had passed since Buddhism and its institutions had been razed and swept away. Like other writers in the seventeenth century, the Panchen Lama located Kushinagar, the place were Buddha achieved enlightenment, in the Assam village of Hajo, on the banks not of the Ganges but the Brahmaputra, far from the sites in Bihar and Nepal that we now associate with Buddhism, as though Jerusalem had moved to Cairo. How this happened is an obscure but important story for our understanding of how the lama viewed maps.

A resurgent Hindu Shaivite temple at Hajo began to attract Buddhist

pilgrims in the early seventeenth century, Shaivism being strongly flavoured with tantrism. Assam was accessible to southern Tibet, since the powerful Geluk state then ruling in Lhasa extended its control to the old Monyul kingdom, part of the modern Indian Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, which borders Assam to the north. As more and more pilgrims visited Hajo, mania built. A famous terton, or revealer of secrets, Pagsam Yeshe, visited in the 1680s. When he reached Hajo, thanks to a prophecy of the Guru Rinpoche, he discovered sacred treasures, including part of the bodh tree where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. He brought a branch of it back to Tibet. A few visitors were sceptical, with one ascribing Hajo’s fame to ‘the crafty Indian inhabitants there who live by means of deception’. But mostly the narrative was accepted; here was a vibrant, living religious world located in the mother country that reconnected Tibet to its spiritual origins.

When the Panchen Lama included Hajo in his treatise, its status as the

focus of the holy land was a matter of fact and would remain so deep into the nineteenth century. He was simply following the example of similar works from other respected Buddhist scholars before him. One of them was Sangye Gyatso, the powerful regent who had kept the death of the fifth Dalai Lama in 1682 a secret from his own people and the Chinese emperor. He had a clear motivation to acknowledge the pilgrimage site of Hajo, since the new Dalai Lama was from that part of the world; in doing the same, the Panchen Lama was in good historical company. What he wanted to know now, he told George Bogle, was the location of Shambhala, the fabulous kingdom of purity outlined in the Kalachakra teachings and the Hindu Puranas. Perhaps Bogle would seek out that information from informed pandits when he returned to Bengal?

When we think about maps, we think about useful accurate information

that will take us where we want to go. We sometimes consider them as cultural artefacts, but rarely, in the West, do we see them as spiritually enriching. Yet the story of Hajo tells us a lot about what mattered to Tibetans as they navigated their way through the complex terrain of the Himalaya. Physical landscapes were simply starting points for spiritual exploration, an idea shared by Buddhists across Asia. The first Japanese map to depict the whole world was published at Kyoto in 1710, the work of Buddhist priest Rokashi Hotan. Its central focus is Asia with India, being the holy land, at its centre. Hotan drew on the travels of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang’s travels in the Himalaya and includes motifs typical of Buddhist cosmography. Included on the map is the mythological Lake Anavatapta where the Buddha was conceived, essentially Lake Manasarovar, along with the four great rivers, the Karnali, Indus, Brahmaputra and Sutlej, flowing from their respective heads: of a fox, elephant, lion, and horse.

The British geographer John Brian Harley wrote in 1989, in his paper

‘Deconstructing the Map’, how western cartography can dull our responses to the very different sorts of geographical information available to someone like the Panchen Lama. The kind of maps we are accustomed to, depicting in two dimensions a simplified, graphic version of the world from a great height,

tend to ‘desocialise’ the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the [Western-style] map … lessens the burden of conscience about people in the landscape.

Decisions about the exercise of power are removed from the realm of immediate face-to-face contacts.

Thus, when the Survey of India arrived in the late eighteenth century, there was already a great deal of knowledge available to it about Himalayan geography, principally from traders and pilgrims, and a map made using European methods from the early seventeenth century. And yet in the popular European imagination of the time, the geography of the Himalaya was often characterised as blank, somewhere to be filled in by courageous soldiers and explorers writing their own narratives. The reality was more like a palimpsest, somewhere that was scraped clean before a new script could be written. ‘We are about to walk off the map,’ George Mallory would claim in 1921, on his way to Everest. But it wasn’t true.

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Following the Battle of Buxar in 1764 and Robert Clive’s success in prising Bengal from the Mughal emperor, the British were anxious to get a clearer picture of the country they now governed. The artery of the Ganges was of greatest interest: was there a channel navigable for shipping north of Calcutta? To answer that question, the governor Henry Vansittart, despite grappling with a corrupt East India Company and its souring relationship with the nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim, had just enough time before resigning to commission an enterprising young marine surveyor called James Rennell, the first truly great geographer the British produced.

A Devon man, born in December 1742, Rennell was four when his father,

an artillery officer, died fighting France in the Low Countries. His mother had to sell the family home and Rennell was from the age of ten raised by the vicar of Chudleigh, where the boy was already drawing maps for fun. After a few years of grammar school, Rennell, barely thirteen, was commissioned midshipman on the Royal Navy frigate Brilliant and saw active service against the French during the Seven Years’ War. He came out to India in 1760 and was seconded to the East India Company, working for the Scot Alexander Dalrymple as a marine surveyor, drawing charts and harbour plans. With the war over, and without connections, Rennell saw little future in the navy and switched permanently to the Company, where Vansittart found him. Aged just twenty-one, Rennell was put in charge of the survey of Bengal, a cornerstone of the future Survey of India. Knowing the Company’s public reputation, he remained grateful for its investment in science, writing a quarter of a century later:

Whatever charges may be imputable to the Managers for the Company, the neglect of useful Science, however, is not among the number. The employing of Geographers, and Surveying Pilots in India; and the providing of astronomical instruments, and the holding out of encouragement to such as should use them; indicate, at least, a spirit somewhat above the mere consideration of Gain.

To take up his post, Rennell was commissioned as an ensign in the Bengal engineers and in the autumn of 1764 he started work on the course of the Ganges. The manuscript he produced with his geographical and meteorological observations so impressed Vansittart that he got Rennell an income of a thousand pounds a year, a colossal amount compared to his navy salary; Rennell built a house at Dacca, now the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, which became his base, making the first plan of the city. In 1766, he volunteered to accompany an old navy friend, now serving in a sepoy regiment, on a mission to drive out a band of sannyasi, who had looted a town on the borders of Bhutan. Here he first encountered the vast white wall of the Himalaya, which he called the Tartarian Mountains. In a village he called Deehoota, thought to be safe ground, Rennell’s little band of officers was unexpectedly surrounded. The others cut their way to safety but Rennell was trapped, his pistol misfired and his Armenian assistant killed. Armed only with a short sword, Rennell retreated, so peppered with sabre cuts that the sannyasi thought him done for. He stumbled towards a detachment of troops rushing to his aid but collapsed before he reached them. His wounds were packed with crushed onions and he was laid in an open boat, which returned him in six days to Dhaka, more dead than alive. One of the blows left a wound a foot long that had cut his right shoulder blade and several ribs; Rennell never again had full use of his right arm, and lost the use of his left index finger too. Robert Clive, the new governor, recognised his sacrifice by appointing Rennell surveyor general and giving him a detachment of sepoys to protect him as he worked. He also cut Rennell’s salary, under pressure from the Court of Directors to reduce costs.

Rennell spent seven years in the field on four separate, extended

expeditions, his work completed, in the words of one biographer, ‘at the point of a bayonet’. Surveying was and remained formidably dangerous. A leopard once mauled five of his men before he managed to drive a blade down its throat. He also suffered further ambushes. In late 1767, one of his sepoys was killed in an encounter with Bhutanese soldiers. Quite how far Rennell made it into Bhutan is a matter of some conjecture; he wrote home to Devon, shortly before this encounter, that ‘I am now in the midst of my Journey to Thibet being got into a more Northern Climate and in the neighbourhood of the Mountains, I breathe a cool and healthy air.’ It’s certainly likely that he was ahead of Bogle in visiting the country.

In 1772 Rennell married Jane Thackeray, great-aunt of the novelist, and

his long absences became increasingly burdensome. Successive bouts of malaria took their toll on his health and Rennell’s old wounds plagued him. In late 1777, some eighteen years after arriving in India, and with the Bengal Atlas almost ready for publication, the couple embarked for London with a pension of six hundred pounds from a grateful East India Company. James Rennell had just turned thirty-five.

Rennell is remembered not only as one of the great authorities on Indian

geography. He was, as his biographer Clements Markham judged him, ‘an explorer both by sea and land, a map compiler, a physical geographer, a critical and comparative geographer, and a hydrographer’. Elected to the Royal Society in 1781 for his map of Bengal, he became a hub for further research and friends with many of the great scientific explorers of the age, like Sir Joseph Banks. Rennell’s map of India was first published in 1782 and he continued to update it. Awarding him the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1791, Banks said, ‘I should rejoice could I say that Britons, fond as they are of being considered by surrounding nations as taking the lead in scientific improvements, could boast a general map of their island as well executed as Major Rennell’s delineation of Bengal and Bahar [Bihar].’

This was no exaggeration, yet when it came to the Himalaya, on

Rennell’s horizon and in his notes as he worked his way across Bengal, he had no choice but to rely on the earlier work of Jesuit surveyors and mapmakers published in d’Anville’s atlas. Rennell was full of praise for d’Anville. ‘When it is considered that this excellent Geographer had scarcely any materials to work on for the inland parts of India but some vague itineraries, and books of travels, one is really astonished to find them so well described as they are.’ Yet the Himalaya in both maps were necessarily hazy and incomplete. Rennell accurately located Kathmandu and the trading town of Kuti, across the border in Tibet, but the mountains of Nepal appear simply as a jagged crest with the legend: ‘Snowy mountains supposed to be a ridge of the Emmodus of the Ancients’, a name lifted from Ptolemy’s map of the second century.

James Rennell had no compelling reason to be concerned with surveying

the mountains to the north: Kinloch had led his nightmarish expedition into Nepal, to help Jaya Prakash Malla, raja of Kathmandu, to resist Prithvi Narayan Shah’s forces, in the year Vansittart commissioned Rennell, but British entanglement with Nepal still lay decades in the future. So did the Sublime and later Romanticism, and the passion for mountain landscapes they both inspired. ‘These are among the highest of the mountains of the old hemisphere,’ he wrote in a footnote to his account of Indian geography.

I was not able to determine their height, but it may in some measure be guessed by the circumstance of their rising considerably above the horizon, when viewed from the plains of Bengal, at the distance of 150 miles.

That these were the tallest mountains in the ‘old hemisphere’ was not much of a boast: science had hitherto considered El Teide, the peak of Tenerife, the likeliest contender. It was calculated to be around 4,500 metres at the time, almost one thousand metres higher than its true altitude, an indication of the technical challenges surveyors then faced. And El Teide was relatively easy to measure, being visible from busy shipping lanes and, therefore, sea level. Remote mountains far from the ocean were a much greater challenge.

Another man who grasped the implication that the Himalaya were visible

from such vast distances was the orientalist and philologist Sir William Jones. Regarded in Europe as one of the greatest minds of his age, he was called by Goethe ‘a far-seeing man who seeks to connect the unknown to the known’. His father, also William, had been a talented mathematician from Anglesey, dubbed ‘Longitude’ Jones for his knowledge of navigation: he died aged sixty-nine when William was three. His mother, the remarkable Mary Nix Jones, poured everything into her son, taking work as a seamstress to pay his school fees at Harrow. Her sacrifice worked. Despite a radical political edge, by the autumn of 1784 William Jones was, like his father, a member of the Royal Society as well as being a judge at the High Court of Calcutta; earlier that year he had founded the Asiatic Society. On 5 October, Jones was at Bhagalpur on the Ganges, almost due south of Mount Everest. To the north-east, just after sunset, he saw the alpen-glow of a peak to the north-east he identified as ‘Chumalary peak’, Chomolhari or Jomolhari as it’s spelled now. This mountain was well known on the plains, a familiar landmark dominating the ancient trade route between Sikkim and Tibet above the Chumbi valley. It is sacred too, particularly to the Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism, being associated with the Tsering-ma: the five ‘sisters of long life’. The Tsering-ma feature in myths surrounding the eleventh-century poet and yogi Milarepa and are protectors of the dharma; one of them, Miyo Langsangma, yellow in colour with a bowl of food in one hand and a mongoose in the other, rides a tigress. She has also been associated with another mountain: Chomolungma, or Mount Everest.

Jones was never afraid to speculate, and his vision of Jomolhari inspired

his curiosity. His father had written a famous instruction manual on navigation, so while Jones was famous as a philologist and linguist rather than a surveyor or cartographer, the subject was both familiar and congenial to him. Jones had known both George Bogle and Samuel Turner in Calcutta; their information had given him a good idea of how wide the mountain range was. And thanks to the work of Rennell and others, he guessed Jomolhari ‘must be at least 244 British miles’ away from his position. In fact, as the crow flies, it is 228 miles (367 kilometres), but even so, that kind of distance had an obvious implication for Jones: these mountains were not only exceptionally high, there was ‘abundant reason to think that we saw from Bhagilpoor the highest mountains in the world, without excepting the Andes’.

It was natural for Jones to think of the Andes. In the late 1730s, France’s

Académie des Sciences had launched an expedition to calculate the length of a single degree of longitude at the equator, with a view to solving the conundrum posed by Isaac Newton: whether the circumference of the earth was greatest at the equator or around the poles; in essence, do we live on a grapefruit or an egg? The measurements for this calculation were taken in the modern state of Ecuador, work that eventually led to the metric system. The scientists, who included two Spaniards, also measured the altitude of a huge volcano called Chimborazo in the Andes, close to the city of Quito and just south of the equator. The French mathematican Charles-Marie de La Condamine arrived at an altitude of 6,274 metres; his Spanish counterpart Jorge Juan y Santacilia came up with 6,586 metres, a considerable difference. Later in the century, a five-year exploratory expedition led by Alessandro Malaspina calculated Chimborazo’s altitude at 6,352 metres. Alexander von Humboldt, having measured the peak himself at 6,544 metres and attempted to climb it in 1802, spent a lot of time trying to unpick the reasons for this disparity: differences in calculating barometric pressure and the refraction of light through the atmosphere were among the culprits. (The true figure is actually 6,263 metres.) In other words, some of the best minds of the eighteenth century had invested a lot of time thinking about the Andes, and educated opinion accepted Chimborazo as the highest mountain in the world. As it turns out, because the earth bulges at the equator, Chimborazo’s summit is indeed the furthest point from the planet’s centre, Everest being more than 3,100 kilometres further north at a latitude of almost 30° N. Yet in terms of its height above sea level Chimborazo is pretty average fare by Himalayan standards. Jomolhari, the peak Jones was looking at, is more than a kilometre higher.

Toppling the Andes would take decades, despite the gathering weight of

evidence. Sir William Jones died in 1794 and was buried in the same Calcutta cemetery as George Bogle. At the time of his death, he had been working on a monumental translation of Hindu law, a task taken over by Henry Colebrooke, a civil servant and noted Sanskrit scholar. In the mid 1790s, Colebrooke was an assistant revenue collector at Purnia in northern Bihar. Like Jones, he made observations of the mountains to the north, but from a position some 140 kilometres closer, calculating an approximate altitude of twenty-six thousand feet, or around eight thousand metres. This was of great interest to his cousin Robert Colebrooke, who had just been appointed surveyor general of Bengal, but was also a matter of frustration. The Himalaya were still at a great distance and any measurement made from the plains was burdened with conjecture and doubt.

An opportunity to take a closer look arrived in April 1802, when a young

surveyor arrived in Kathmandu with the trade mission of Captain William Knox, sent under the terms of the 1801 treaty at Danapur. Captain Charles Crawford, the man who actually signed the document, commanded the military escort that travelled with Knox and the botanist-surgeon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton. During the eleven months the mission spent in Kathmandu, Crawford set about making a map of the Kathmandu valley. Drawn to a scale of one inch to a furlong (an eighth of a mile; so approximately 2.5 cm to just over 200 metres), the map not only offered an impressively accurate interpretation of the valley’s geography, it was also a thing of beauty. Buchanan-Hamilton included a copy with his collection of herbarium specimens, elegant coloured illustrations and manuscripts that he gave to James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnaean Society: the root of botanical studies in Nepal. The map was sensitive military information but the botanist’s patron was the governor general Richard Wellesley, who allowed Crawford to pass it on to Smith. Robert Colebrooke was also impressed with Crawford’s work, finding it ‘executed with particular neatness’; Crawford was promoted and given the job of surveying Bengal’s northern frontier.

Crawford hadn’t just surveyed the valley while he was in Kathmandu. He

had taken a good look at the mountains to the north and was convinced they were of ‘vast height’. He took bearings on all the most obvious peaks visible from more than one position, presumably Langtang Lirung and Dorje Lhakpa among them. Having ascertained his approximate altitude, taken bearings, allowed for refraction, computed distance and applied trigonometry, Crawford calculated the mountains to the north were between eleven and twenty thousand feet (3,350 to 6,100 metres) above his ‘stations of observation’. Annoyingly, for Crawford and for us, he didn’t forward his homework to Calcutta: the drawings and journal of his survey. Crawford later told Henry Colebrooke that his data were in England, but the documents have never surfaced and are often assumed to have been lost. There’s no way to address the various questions his work raises. How did he know how far away the mountains were? How did he calculate his altitude in the valley? There were certainly techniques available to do this. The scientist Jean-André Deluc had calculated altitude from the boiling point of water in 1762. But there’s no evidence Crawford did the same.

Even so, the young officer’s story made an impact. The East India

Company’s rapid expansion at this time was bringing more and more territory within its orbit. The governor general Richard Wellesley, his commander-in-chief General Gerard Lake, and Wellesley’s brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington, prospered against the Maratha Empire during the first years of the nineteenth century, bringing the upper portion of the Ganges within reach of British exploration for the first time. This provided a tantalising opportunity for Robert Colebrooke. James Rennell’s map of the upper Ganges had been speculative, since the Tibetan surveyors working for the Jesuits hadn’t gone there, simply passing on stories they heard. The river, Rennell wrote, was ‘well known to derive’ its source ‘from the vast mountains of Thibet’. He showed it arriving in India via a subterranean tunnel and repeated the Hindu legend that the river emerged from a great rock called the ‘cow’s mouth’. Rennell and Colebrooke had clashed subsequently over Colebrooke’s idea of building a canal in the lower reaches of the Ganges to solve the problem of its regularly shifting course; Rennell thought the plan unworkable and had warned the Company to leave well alone. Now there was an opportunity for Colebrooke to burnish his reputation as surveyor general and solve the puzzle of the source of the Ganges, something unknown to Rennell. ‘An actual survey,’ his cousin Henry wrote in the Asiatic Journal, in a sly dig at Colebrooke’s predecessor,

of the Ganges above Haridwar (where it enters the British territories,) to the farthest point to which it had been traced by Hindu pilgrims, and to its remotest accessible source, was an undertaking worthy of British enterprise.

Robert Colbrooke began his last journey in the autumn of 1807, taking with him his wife and the two eldest of their nine children, drifting up the Ganges in a country boat towards Kanpur. At night the family listened to the roar of tigers and by day they drew crowds of onlookers, who, in the words of historian John Keay, ‘had not previously come across a European – let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring’. On the way to Kanpur they explored the Rapti river and the town of Gorakhpur, which is almost due south of the Annapurna range in Nepal. Here, surrounded by curious locals, Colebrooke took bearings on two peaks to the north, quite probably Annapurna itself and the other peak over eight thousand metres: Dhaulagiri. He calculated that each was ‘more than five miles in perpendicular height above the level of the plain on which I stood’.

Having spent Christmas in Lucknow, Colebrooke’s wife and children

headed home and the surveyor spent the rest of the cold season in the jungles of Kumaon. This country was more hostile and so at Kanpur he had picked up a detachment of sepoys under the command of Lieutenant William Webb, only twenty-two but with some training in survey work. Then Colebrooke fell ill: malaria and dysentery. Like so many of the surveyors that came later to the fringes of the Himalaya, the jungle of the terai had undone him. At a place called Pilibhit, about fifty kilometres north-east of Bareilly and just off the south-west tip of modern Nepal, Colebrooke took another series of observations of the mountains but could no longer continue overland. He returned to Bareilly, charging Webb to continue his mission to find the source of the Ganges. By August, weakening fast, he was on board a boat to Bengal; he died a month later at Bhagalpur, where William Jones had years before observed Jomolhari, glowing in the evening light.

Webb was not alone in his mission to the source of the Ganges. Captain

Felix Raper, a friend from his regiment, the 10th Bengal Native Infantry, came too, keeping a lively journal of their adventure. The third member of their party was very different, a near-mythical Anglo-Indian called Hyder Jung Hearsey. At just twenty-five he was already a hardened soldier, a mercenary named after the emperor Hyder Ali of Mysore, whom his father Andrew had been fighting shortly before Hyder was born in 1782. (His name is sometimes written as Hyder Young Hearsey.) The boy’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been on the losing side at the Battle of Culloden, when the Jacobite rebellion was finally crushed, thereby forfeiting the family estates in Cumberland; something of the rebel stuck to Hyder too. His mother was Andrew Hearsey’s Indian common-law wife, whose name is unknown. Andrew later married an Englishwoman, Charlotte Crane, while he was in Britain pursuing a legal case. While her children were able to find employment in the East India Company – Hyder’s half-brother John had a distinguished military career, reaching the rank of general and fighting in the rebellion of 1857 – Hyder Hearsey, as an Anglo-Indian, was excluded. He got a little education at school in Woolwich but otherwise had to take his chances.

Aged sixteen, the year his father died, he had entered the service of

Saadat Ali Khan, nawab of Oudh, but moved swiftly on to be a cadet in the army of the outlandish French mercenary Pierre Cuillier-Perron, the former sailor leading the charge for the Maratha confederacy that dominated much of India in the late eighteenth century. Aged just seventeen, Hyder distinguished himself in the siege of Agra, earning Perron’s gratitude, but when the Frenchman began to see a chance to re-establish French power in India, many of his British and Anglo-Indian officers left him, Hyder Hearsey among them. Soon thereafter he found himself fighting his old commander in the service of the Irish mercenary George Thomas and, after Thomas’ death, starting his own army, which Hearsey led in the service of the East India Company. He also married Zuhur-ul-Nissa, adopted daughter of the Mughal emperor Akbar II, an illustration of his upward mobility. His new bride had estates near Bareilly, recently ceded to the Company by the nawab of Oudh, which is where Colebrooke found this fiercely self-reliant ‘rough diamond’. Needless to say, Webb and Raper didn’t like him.

This trio arrived in Haridwar during the spring fair, which coincided in

1808 with the Kumbh Mela, the ‘pitcher gathering’, not the immense event it is today but still significant. Held every dozen years, this vast, broiling assembly of pilgrims rarely passed without violence or mishap. Many of the pilgrims were gosain, there to do business as well as bathe in the Ganges. The fair was an opportunity for darker habits too: hundreds of slaves were for sale, ‘of both sexes, from three to thirty years of ages’, forced down from the hills. By chance, the expedition met there the Gorkhali governor of Srinagar, Hasti Dal Chautariya, a corpulent, jovial man who had come down for the festival. (Hyder Hearsey and Hasti Dal would meet again a few years later on opposite sides in the Company’s war with Gorkha: Hearsey led irregulars that would later become Gurkha regiments.) Hasti Dal was content for the British to continue upstream but soon afterwards he was replaced, and the new governor, Bhairav Thapa, wasn’t so congenial: the British were forced to pay a vastly inflated price for porters to continue their journey, entering the rugged valley systems of the middle hills, ‘a mighty maze without a plan’, as the surveyor general of India John Hodgson termed it.

Raper’s account of their journey is full of interest.

It is necessary for a person to place himself in our situation, before he can form a just conception of the scene. The depth of the valley below, the progressive elevation of the intermediate hills, and the majestic splendor of the ‘cloud-capt’ Himalaya, formed so grand a picture that the mind was impressed with a sensation of dread rather than of pleasure.

It was, Raper wrote, ‘a sight the most sublime and awful that can be pictured to the imagination’. He was even more interested in people, paying close attention to the social differences between the people of the mountains and the plains.

We perceived a great difference in the manners of the people. They appeared to be much more civilized, and so far from exhibiting any signs of apprehension, they came running towards the road, to see us pass. The women even, did not shew that bashfulness and reserve, which females in Hindostan in general exhibit; but, mixing with the crowd, they made their comments with the greatest freedom…. Their garments are made of coarse cloth; whereas those of the men are of thick blanket, manufactured from the wool and hair of the sheep and goats, which are of kinds peculiar to the hills. We could not help remarking, that, even in these unfrequented regions, the female mountaineers exhibited the general failing of the sex, having their necks, ears and noses, ornamented with rings and beads. When these are beyond their means, they substitute a wreath or bunch of flowers; for which purpose the white rose is chosen, both for its beauty and scent.

The trio did not make it quite to the source of the Ganges, reaching the confluence of the Bhagirathi with the Jadh Ganga, which rises in Tibet. By then they had done a lot more walking than they’d expected and the path ahead seemed even harder. Webb decided to send a local to scout out the terrain ahead and then report back. ‘Captain Hearsay’s moonshee [munshi, meaning ‘translator’ and ‘secretary’], a very intelligent man, was selected for that undertaking,’ Raper wrote. ‘To render his observations more correct, he was provided with, and instructed in the use of his compass.’ Raper made careful notes of what he saw of the Bhagirathi.

From the appearance of the river itself, which becomes contracted in its stream, and from the stupendous height of the Himálaya mountains, whence it flows; there can be no doubt but its source is situated in the snow range; and any other hypothesis can scarcely be reconciled to hydrostatical principles. The pilgrims, and those people in the vicinity of this place, who gain a livelihood by bringing water from the spot, say that the road beyond Gangotrí is passable only for a few miles, when the current is entirely concealed under heaps of snow, which no traveller ever has or can surmount. With respect to the Cow’s Mouth, we had the most convincing

testimony to confirm us in the idea that its existence is entirely fabulous, and that it is found only in the Hindù book of faith.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Webb or to Henry Colebrooke that Gaumukh, ‘the cow’s mouth’, might be of ice rather than rock; it’s also possible the mythological name for the source of the Ganges was simply stuck to the actual place. The first Briton to reach Gangotri was James Baillie Fraser, a Scottish travel writer who visited the Gorkhali-built temple in June 1815, soon after the East India Company’s war with Nepal. He asked the temple priest about the cow’s mouth but the priest just laughed and said that ‘most of those pilgrims who came from the plains asked the same question.’

Webb and the others continued on to the Alaknanda valley and the temple

at Badrinath, then to the Tibetan village of Mana, where the missionaries Andrade and Marques had hired guides to reach Tsaparang some two centuries earlier. Webb was satisfied this river was greater and reached deeper into the mountains than the Bhagirathi and was consequently the true source of the Ganges. Relieved that his assignment was a success, Webb turned for home. Robert Colebrooke’s cousin Henry was now president of the Asiatic Society and it fell to him to prepare Raper’s account for publication in its journal of 1812. The report is remarkable for several reasons, not least the near-absence of Hyder Jung Hearsey. It seems safe to assume that his deep experience of the region and overall toughness could only have been an asset to the party; of that we hear almost nothing. The stony silence masked a bitter and convoluted dispute over the origin of a map Hearsey sent to James Rennell in late 1808. Hearsey was hoping it would prompt some compensation for him, given that Gorkhali soldiers had robbed the expedition on its way out of the mountains. He was instead accused of stealing the map from Webb and, given his reputation and skin colour, the allegation was believed. Hearsey had kept his own journal, which records the surveying work he did, and the map William Webb eventually sent to his superiors two years later wasn’t remotely to the same standard as Hearsey’s.

Henry Colebrooke was careful in his preface to Raper’s article not to be

too hasty in his judgment about the height of the Himalaya.

Without however supposing the Himálaya to exceed the Andes, there is still room to argue, that an extensive range of mountains, which rears, high above the line of perpetual snow, in an almost tropical latitude, an uninterrupted chain of lofty peaks, is neither surpassed nor rivalled by any other chain of mountains but the Cordillera of the Andes.

In 1816 he revisited the subject in another article for the Asiatic Journal. By then William Webb had taken his own reading of Dhaulagiri and learned its name, something Robert Colebrooke had not managed, giving it a height of 26,862 feet (8,188 metres), only twenty metres off its current measured altitude. Meanwhile, two other surveyors, John Hodgson and James Herbert, had reached Gaumukh itself and seen the soaring spire of Shivling. Reviewing all the evidence gathered so far, Henry Colebrooke was much more definitive:

I consider the evidence to be now sufficient to authorize an unreserved declaration of the opinion, that the Himálaya is the loftiest range of Alpine mountains which has been yet noticed, its most elevated peaks greatly exceeding the highest of the Andes.

Colebrooke’s claim was sensational but met with a faint raspberry: this was another tall tale from the subcontinent. How could he be so sure? The anonymous author of a long and expert article in the influential Quarterly Review was deeply sceptical:

we cannot help thinking that he has come to this conclusion rather hastily. We have not one word to offer against his calculations nor his formula: we have such an opinion of his accuracy, that we are willing to take the results on trust. All we mean to protest against is the insufficiency of his facts to authorize the conclusion which he has drawn from them.

The reviewer zeroed in on Webb’s measurement of Dhaulagiri as the most convincing of his evidence and then argued just as convincingly that given the distance from which his observations were taken the possibility they were grossly inaccurate was too great to ignore. In a nutshell, the science behind the measurements of the Andes was a lot more convincing than Colebrooke’s. Interest in funding further work in measuring the Himalaya quickly faded after this sigh of indifference. William Webb, who in a harsh light appears something of a duffer, had been close to the height of Dhaulagiri, but as much by luck as by judgment. Passed over for promotion he quit the Company’s service. Budget cuts paused the Survey of India’s work in the Himalaya for a decade or so, and although the Anglo-Burmese war of 1824 allowed the Company access to the north-eastern parts of the Himalaya – Richard Wilcox and James Burlton explored Assam and the Brahmaputra valley in the late 1820s – surveyors didn’t yet have either the instruments or the mathematics to measure accurately the height of the Himalaya.

Until the late eighteenth century, the precise altitude of where you were

standing hadn’t worried anyone unduly. In 1818, two Scottish brothers, Alexander and James Gerard, reached the upper slopes of a mountain near the Shipki La, in the district of Kinnaur near where the Sutlej emerges from Tibet, simply ‘to see the barometer below fifteen inches’, thus setting what they believed was a world altitude record. They suffered horribly from altitude sickness, comparing it to ‘the sedative effect of intoxication’. The brothers told the world they had gone higher than Alexander von Humboldt had on Chimborazo in 1802, but the man himself was unimpressed: ‘these mountain ascents, however they engage the curiosity of the public, are of very little scientific utility’. The relevance of altitude, on the other hand, was increasingly important, thanks in part to von Humboldt’s own scientific vision. Wherever you were in the world, altitude affected the distribution of plants, just as latitude did: a compelling scientific reason for accurately measuring the height of mountains. As the botanist William Griffith, who went to Bhutan in 1837, pointed out: ‘the Botanist who travels without the means of determining these points, destroys half the value of his collections’.

In a neat irony, the paper that followed Colebrooke’s in the Asiatic

Journal of 1816 was by a man whose work would ultimately provide the platform for accurately measuring the height of the Himalaya. For more than a decade William Lambton had been gradually travelling up the length of India from south to north, working in near-obscurity, triangulating a masterfully accurate sequence of positions: the ‘Great Indian Arc of the Meridian’. A protégé of Arthur Wellesley, Lambton wasn’t just a surveyor: he was a geodesist, measuring accurately the geometric shape of the earth, taking as his inspiration the Scottish surveyor William Roy, whose innovative spherical trigonometry proved the pivot between the approximate maps of the past and modern cartography. From 1818 onwards, the slow but steady continuation of Lambton’s work, stetching over the next five decades, was known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, or simply the Great Survey. It’s hard now to appreciate the scale of what it achieved and at what human cost, like judging the miracle of an analogue telephone from the age of Google, but adding in the likely prospect of death. The geographer Clements Markham calculated that in the worst seasons of surveying along the frontier of Nepal, the number of dead, British and Indian, reached three figures. In the diagram of fixed positions that eventually emerged from the Great Survey in 1870, it is as if India has grown a spine of scaffolding with arms extended outwards to either side; it was from these arms that the true height of the Himalaya were finally measured. But no sooner had the survey been completed and marvelled at, than technology moved on and the scale of its enterprise was forgotten.

Lambton himself would die in the field, aged seventy, his more famous

successor being George Everest, irascible where Lambton was self-effacing, but no less determined. His family came from Greenwich in east London, home of the prime meridian, and they pronounced their name Eve-rest; George would sharply correct anyone saying Ever-est. He was followed as surveyor general by Andrew Waugh, who, against protocol, appended his mentor’s name to a mountain he himself observed in 1847, a mountain that had by 1850 been calculated as the highest yet measured, higher even than Kangchenjunga, so clearly seen from Darjeeling. It did not happen the way it is sometimes reported: of a computer (meaning in those days a person who computes) rushing into Waugh’s office claiming he had discovered the highest point on earth. The work was a process of slow accretion, its conclusion not made public until 1856. Even then there was speculation that a new contender discovered in the neighbouring mountains of the Karakoram range, labelled K2 in the surveyor’s scheme, might be bigger. Everest himself never saw his mountain; his interest in the Himalaya was largely confined to enjoying the fresh air at his home near the new hill station of Mussoorie. He also stuck to the Survey of India’s rule of finding local names for whatever they measured. What he made of his name being applied to the world’s highest mountain is not recorded.

At the time of Waugh’s observation, Everest was back in England,

hunting foxes in Leicestershire. Later in life he settled permanently in London, by then the imperial city of Victorian England. At the time of his birth in 1790 the Himalaya had been on the fringes of the East India Company’s sphere of influence; Britain had been one among several competing powers. Now in Everest’s old age the mountains were the northern limit of the British Raj, in its philosophy and culture a very different enterprise. As British India evolved, reflecting the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution, so the purposes of Himalayan geography shifted with it, becoming a finely calibrated tool of, as William Webb termed it, ‘great practical utility’. And by then the political map of the Himalaya had been torn up and wholly redrawn.

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