brought in from London, and Everest pressed on with his life’s work.
Ill-health, the bane of many a Briton in India, eventually caught up with Everest, and so Andrew Waugh had to finish off the job. Interestingly, he re-measured the Bidar baseline with the special Colby compensating bars. The error after 425 miles and 85 triangles was only 4 inches in a line length of 41,578ft.
What is not generally acknowledged is that the surveyors often became rich. Knowledge of the terrain was clearly useful. The Chamrette dynasty of surveyors – grandfather, father and son – owned over 1,800 acres, and George Everest bought 600 acres of land near Dehra Dun. The British Empire became wealthy, too, with the possession of this fabulous land. If I were an Indian citizen reading this now I would be feeling fairly angry. The only (poor) defence is that other nations were also playing the Great Game in the region, and partly what drove the British Empire to survey its borders was fear of invasion from the Russian Empire.
Eventually this great endeavour reached the border with Nepal, a land that was forbidden to the British. The surveyors focused their instruments on the far Himalayas, drew their triangles and measured 79 of the highest mountains, including K2 and Kangchenjunga. Eventually they computed in 1854 that the most lofty was a mountain on the remote border between Nepal and Tibet. They had to allow for the gravitational pull of the Himalayan range (which will even distort the surface of a puddle), the refraction of the atmosphere and a number of other variables, and it is a wonder to me that they got the height so close: 29,002ft. It took over 150 years to pin down a more accurate result, although still no one agrees on exactly how high the mountain is. All measurements are now made in metric units, and China insists that the measurement should be made up to the topmost rock, at 8,844m (29,015ft), whereas Nepal measures to the top of the overlying snow-cap, at 8,848m (29,028ft). The US National Geographic Society measurement using satellites came to 8,850m (29,035ft) – a difference of 33ft from the original Great Trigonometrical Survey result, or around 0.1 per cent error. Not bad, considering the pioneers were using telescopes and brass theodolites, aimed from across the border.
The first scrawl on the map announcing Mount Everest styled it as ‘Peak B’, then ‘Peak XV’, somewhat in the manner of K2 in the Karakorum, which after a brief existence as Mount Godwin-Austen reverted to its surveyor’s notation. There has been much debate about the name of Mount Everest. Traditionally, British surveyors always tried to use the local name for geographical features. This was an honourable intention, as otherwise the world’s maps would be plastered with the names of British dignitaries. In Mount Everest’s case, however, they found that there were several possible local names. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin claimed that it was called Tchoumou Lancma, and said that the name had been recorded by French Jesuit priests who had been in China in the 18th century. When spelled as Chomolungma, the name has been fancifully translated by imaginative writers as ‘Goddess Mother of the World’, but this has little connection with the truth. Charles Bell, who knew a thing or two about Tibetan culture, insisted that the local name was Chamalung. David Macdonald, the trade agent who dealt with the early Everest expeditions, claimed the mountain was called Miti Guti Chapu Longnga, which translates rather more convincingly as ‘the mountain whose summit no one can see from close-up [true only from the south], but can be seen from the far distance, and which is so high that birds go blind when they fly over the summit’. I rather like this name, except that my companion on the summit in 1993 saw an alpine chough fly right over us. It didn’t appear to go blind. This name would also make all the innumerable books about the mountain even longer. In the end, though, the British chose the name of the former Surveyor-General Sir George Everest.
It is unlikely that Everest himself ever laid his eyes on the mountain that bears his name, but Andrew Waugh, Everest’s successor as Surveyor-General in India, wrote: ‘… here is a mountain most probably the highest in the world without any local name that I can discover …’, so he proposed ‘to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of geographical research … Everest’.
This went completely against contemporary cartological practice, and it was the start of the long story of the mountain being hijacked for ulterior motives. Everest himself said his name could not be written in either Hindi or Persian, and nor could the local people pronounce it. Nor can we. He pronounced his name Eeev-rest, as in Adam and Eve, while the rest of us happily mispronounce it as Ever-rest, as in double-glazing.
At the beginning of the 19th century the British wanted to know how the Russian Empire might plan to invade India, and they were not going to be deterred by forbidden frontiers. Geographical knowledge was power. Heights of mountains were important, and even more important was the accessibility of the passes between them. In 1800 the Surveyor-General of Bengal permitted British officers to enter and survey any country they chose. Unfortunately, some were caught in Afghanistan and murdered, but not before some spectacular heights were reported among the Himalayan giants. It was clearly unwise to send blue-eyed, fair-haired young men into these parts, and Captain Montgomerie of the Survey (who surveyed and named K2) soon realised it would be better to employ local men from the Indian Border States as surveyors. They were given two years of training in the use of the instruments and were then sent over the border disguised as holy men or traders. They were known as pandits, Hindi for ‘learned man’. We derive our word ‘pundit’ from these remarkable men.
Perhaps the most remarkable was Pandit 001, Nain Singh, a Bhotian school teacher. He left Dehra Dun in 1865 and entered Nepal, travelling through the country into Tibet, where he reached Lhasa and met the Panchen Lama. Using a sextant (I wondered where he hid it) and a boiling-point thermometer he calculated the location and the altitude of the forbidden city.
I used the boiling-point technique to determine altitude at Base Camp on Mount Everest in 2007 while filming a science programme for the BBC. The first thing we did was to get a big pan of water to a good rolling boil, as Mrs Beeton would call it (she was writing her cookbook just as the pundits were setting off in the 1860s). I then stuck the big glass thermometer into the water and got a reading of only 85°C. Water boils at 100°C at sea level. This meant the altitude was around 4,600m (15,000ft). The reason that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitude is that water is trying to turn into a gas (steam) when it boils, and it is easier for the steam to push against the air molecules when there are fewer of them (lower pressure). Bubbles – or boiling – are the result. When I got frostbitten fingers on the summit in 1993 I was able to dangle them in a pan of boiling water at Camp II. It only felt hot, rather than painfully hot.
If someone were to boil up a kettle for tea on the summit of Mount Everest – and I’m sure they will sooner or later – it would start boiling at only 68°C. And it wouldn’t make very good tea. Incidentally, it was hard to keep the long glass thermometer unbroken on our journey into Base Camp in 2007. Pundit Nain Singh concealed his in a walking-staff, but how he didn’t break it is beyond me.
The map-makers of British India now had a mystery on their hands. As well as locating the city of Lhasa, Nain Singh had also mapped a large section of a huge river in Tibet, the Tsangpo, which plunged into a gorge and disappeared. Hundreds of miles away the sacred river Brahmaputra issued from the Himalayas, but there were thousands of feet of height between them. Were they the same river? Nain Singh thought they were. So was there an undiscovered giant waterfall, many times higher than the Victoria Falls? That was the riddle of the Tsangpo.
It was partly solved by another pundit, Kinthup, in a truly amazing journey. In 1880 he was sent into Tibet in the company of a Chinese lama, to whom he would act a servant. They were to throw marked logs into the Tsangpo and surveyors on the Brahmaputra would wait to see if any logs came through. Unfortunately, the lama was a less than ideal master. He womanised and drank, then sold Kinthup into slavery. The pundit eventually escaped, but was captured and resold to another lama.
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