A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  From time to time God causes men to be born – and thou art one of them – who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news – today it may be of a far-off thing, tomorrow of some hidden mountains …

  Desideri spent another five years in general mission work in India before he was ordered to return to Rome, where he set to work on his comprehensive study of Tibet’s religion, history, geography and culture. He fully intended this Historical Sketch of Tibet to be published, but on 14 April 1733, at the age of forty-eight, he died suddenly of inflammation of the lungs.

  With his death, all traces of his work were lost. All that was known about his journey was contained in a single letter written to a friend from Lhasa in 1716 – until 1875, when a manuscript copy of Desideri’s Historical Sketch of Tibet was found among the papers of a deceased Italian cavaliere of Pistoia. The find received wide publicity at the time and it was announced that an Italian edition would soon be published. In fact, it was another thirty years before it appeared in print and sixty years before a heavily-edited version was published in English. Emanoel Freyre’s Report on Tibet also vanished: it was only discovered in the Vittorio Emanuele Library in Rome in 1924. By this quirk of fate the unveiling of the many mysteries hidden in Tibet was postponed for another century, and the holy mountain and lake preserved their secrets for an eccentric Englishman and fugitive Anglo-Indian to reveal in 1812.

  3

  ‘A Mighty Maze Without a Plan’:

  Hyder Jung Hearsey and the

  Sources of the Ganga

  Soon after the middle of the eighteenth century the first pink splotches begin to appear on maps of the Indian sub-continent. By the end of the century a great wedge of British territory had been marked out from Bengal deep into Upper India, its thin end tapering to a point just short of the Himalayan foothills north of Delhi and the land of the Punjab.

  For the time being the young thrusters of the British East India Company saw no reason to drive that particular wedge any deeper. The lands beyond were securely held and presented no immediate threat to the commercial interests and sound commercial principles upon which this extraordinary empire was being built. Along the north ran a thick belt of terai jungle and swamp backed by range upon range of seemingly impassable mountains; and west of the river Sutlej the young one-eyed ‘Lion of the Punjab’, Ranjit Singh, was carving out his own little empire that was to hold out against the British for another half century.

  This was the great age of the condottiere, when all the more successful Indian leaders employed European mercenaries. Ever since the modern sepoy armies of Clive and Stringer Lawrence had shown the strength of European-trained militia, the services of such soldiers of fortune had been greatly in demand. One of the most successful of these freebooters was Pierre Cuiller, a deserter from the French navy. As General Perron, he rose to become leader of the confederate forces of the Marathas, the warrior peoples of the Deccan and Western Ghats, whose chiefs were intent on filling the vacuum left by the Moguls in Northern India.

  In 1799 a seventeen-year-old cadet named Hyder Jung Hearsey joined Perron’s army. Hyder Jung’s paternal grandfather had fought on the wrong side at the battle of Culloden and by doing so had forfeited his family estates in Cumberland. His father had been forced to take the course then followed by many younger sons of the manse and joined the East India Company’s Madras Army. In India he had fathered two sets of children: one wholly British and one ‘country-born’, by a ‘Jat lady’. Liaisons between servants of the Company and Indian women were then regarded as perfectly respectable, so this was quite in keeping with the relaxed attitudes of the day, but it did not follow that the fortunes of the two sides of the family remained on a par.

  Hyder Jung’s legitimate half-brother joined the Bengal cavalry and rose to become a fine old sepoy general, one of the few to act decisively in the early days of the 1857 Mutiny. Hyder Jung himself was debarred by the circumstances of his birth from following his father and half-brother into the Company’s service and so became a mercenary. After training with the army of the Nawab of Oude, he signed on with General Perron and the Marathas. When war with France broke out he transferred his allegiance to Perron’s rival, General George Thomas, and when ‘George Bahadur’ was defeated by the Frenchman, Hearsey made off at the head of five thousand men to set himself up as an independent freebooter. Although poorly educated and regarded as a rough diamond by those who knew him only slightly, Hearsey was no fool. He soon learned to look after himself and while he was still a teenager won the affection of a young princess of Cambay, Zuhur-ul-Missa, whom he married. She was the adopted daughter of the Mogul Emperor himself and brought with her a dowry of estates that included property at Bareilly.

  Like his more famous fellow-mercenaries, James Skinner and William Linnaeus Gardner, Hearsey placed his Irregular Horse at the disposal of General Lake when the Company finally went to war against the Marathas in 1803. He had a good war, led his light cavalry with distinction and survived a severe wound to the head. His only reward from an ungrateful and suspicious Governor-General was to have his body of irregulars called in and discharged. So it was that in 1807 this seasoned young veteran of nine years of war found himself without employment.

  Unwelcome though it may have been for freebooters like Hearsey, the ending of the Maratha war allowed the military engineers and draughtsmen who made up the Company’s mapping department, the Survey of India, to begin mapping the conquered and ceded provinces of Upper Hindustan. The first surveys of the Company’s Bengal Province had been started by Major James Rennell, appointed Surveyor-General at the age of twenty-four by Lord Clive. Under his painstaking direction a small band of surveyors and draughtsmen had started to assemble the first accurate and detailed maps of the subcontinent. Although he left India in 1777, worn down by malaria and the enervating climate of Bengal, he continued to play a leading role in its geographical affairs for another forty years, fully justifying the title of ‘father of Indian geography’ that was later bestowed on him.

  Rennell had been greatly impressed by his first sight of the Himalayan ranges and was the first European geographer to recognize their importance. ‘I was not able to determine their height,’ he wrote in 1788, ‘but it may in some measure be guessed by the circumstance of their rising considerably above the horizon when viewed in the plains of Bengal, at a distance of 150 miles.’ As to the upper courses of the three great Indian rivers – the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra – that disappeared into this mountain barrier so many hundreds of miles apart, Rennell could only admit to ‘our ignorance’.

  Rennell’s first map of Hindustan, published in 1782, contains a striking innovation in the way that the ‘Burrum-pooter’ of Assam is linked for the first time with the Tsangpo of Tibet, but as far as the Ganga was concerned he was content to follow the Hindu belief that it had its fountain-head beyond the Himalayas at the sacred lake of Manasarovar. He was even prepared to interpret rather than dismiss out of hand the old story that it flowed out of the mouth of a cow. His theory was that the Ganga flowed south from the lake until it came to the Himalayas:

  When meeting the great chain of mount Himmaleh this great body of water now forces a passage through the ridge of Mount Himmaleh and, sapping its very foundations, rushes through a cavern and precipitates itself into a vast basin which it has worn in the rock, at the hither foot of the mountains. The Ganges thus appears to incurious spectators to derive its original springs from this chain of mountains. And the mind of superstition has given to the mouth of the cavern the form of the head of a cow, an animal held by the Hindus in a degree of veneration almost equal to that in which the Egyptians of old held their god Apis.

  Absurd as this notion of a trans-Himalayan tunnel now appears, Rennell’s theories were no more fanciful than others of the time: a contemporary French map places lake Manasarovar in Kashmir and at the head of the Indus; another, apparently drawing its inspiration from the Hindu Puranas, provides the holy lake w
ith three separate outlets. The fact was that as late as the start of the nineteenth century European geographers and cartographers simply had no clear idea where any of the larger South Asian rivers came from. The mystery was as great as it had ever been.

  In 1807 the challenge was taken up by two cousins, Henry and Robert Colebrooke. Henry, the older of the two, was the son of a former Chairman of the East India Company. He had joined the Bengal Civil Service in 1780 and while acting as Assistant Commissioner in Purnea in the 1790s had come up with the first rough calculations of the height of the distant Himalayan range. His figure of 26,000 feet above sea level for one of the higher peaks was long regarded as quite absurdly exaggerated. Besides being an administrator, he was also a Sanskrit scholar and in 1807 became the first President of the Bengal Asiatic Society, assembling a wide range of material for the Society’s journal. Asiatick Researches. It was this journal that provided the main notice-board for a great deal of the geographical exploration and research into India’s past that took place during the next three decades. One of its principal contributors was Robert Colebrooke, appointed Surveyor-General of Bengal in 1794.

  If Henry was the scholar and the intellectual, it was his cousin Robert who did much of the fieldwork and provided the more practical side of the partnership. He also came from a less privileged side of the Colebrooke family, as the eldest of three illegitimate brothers then soldiering with the Company’s armies. They were part of what was accurately described by a contemporary historian, James Mill, as ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes’, whereby India serves as a dumping-ground for British gentlemen who were either without means or without recognized parentage. In the case of Robert Colebrooke this system most decidedly worked to India’s advantage.

  The two cousins had a common interest in the Ganga: while Henry devoted many hours of his leisure time to studying the river’s place in Hindu culture and the myths surrounding it, Robert spent most of his working life either on the river itself or by its banks. After more than twenty years of survey work along its lower courses and channels, no European and few Indians could claim to know the river and its ways better than he – and none had a better reason for wishing to explore it to its source. Encouraged by his cousin, Robert Colebrooke applied for permission to extend his survey upstream:

  Having long doubted the account which is given by Major Rennell of the origin of the Ganges at Munsaroar Lake, I determined; as soon as the opportunity should be afforded to me, to attempt myself to proceed to the celebrated spot where the Ganges is said to force a passage through the Hymalia Mountains.

  The opportunity came in the spring of 1807, when the Governor-General authorized the Survey of India to start work upriver. Robert Colebrooke immediately set sail up the Ganga in a country boat, leaving the Survey offices in Calcutta in the charge of his subordinate, John Garstin, another close relative and soon to be his successor. There was nothing particularly unusual about a Surveyor-General doing his own fieldwork. His department was desperately understaffed and underpaid; the sickness and mortality rate was probably higher in the Survey of India than in any other government department and it was always a struggle to get hold of good officers. None could be spared to accompany Colebrooke, so he sailed without an assistant.

  The country boat took him as far as Cawnpore, bordering on the domains of the Nawab of Oude to the east and the newly-won British territories to the north. Here he disembarked and strengthened his little party with an escort of fifty sepoys under the command of Lieutenant Webb of the 10th Bengal Native Infantry (BNI). William Webb was then a comparatively inexperienced young officer of twenty-two, but he had picked up some surveying skills while on the line of march with his regiment during the Maratha wars and this made him particularly useful to Colebrooke.

  The escort, however, proved to be inadequate and, ‘as a necessary precaution to avoid being attacked and plundered by the Rebels’, Robert Colebrooke secured the services of a local man who knew the style of the country better than any European and could supply his own arms: Captain Hyder Jung Hearsey.

  Protected by Hearsey and some of his mounted irregulars, Colebrooke and Webb spent the cold weather of 1807–8 surveying the notoriously unhealthy terai jungle bordering on Nepalese Kumaon. Here the Surveyor-General contracted an intermittent fever that eventually forced him to revise his plans. He himself could not go on but he was determined that the survey should be continued to its goal. He gave Webb instructions that he was to explore the Ganga ‘from Hurdwar to Gungoutri (or the Cow’s Mouth), where the river is stated by Major Rennell to force its way through the Hymalaia Mountains by a Subterraneous passage’ and determine ‘whether this (should there be such a place) be actually the Source of the Ganges, or whether, as Major Rennell has stated in his memoir, it rises from the Lake of Munsaroar.’

  Leaving the Surveyor-General camped in the terai, Webb and Hearsey set out for the foothills in mid-March 1808, taking with them a reduced escort and a considerable number of servants and baggage-carriers. While on the march they were joined by a friend of Webb’s from his old regiment, Captain Felix Raper. Of the three officers, only Webb had a formal position on the expedition. Nevertheless, Raper made it his business to keep the official log, which was later forwarded to Henry Colebrooke and published by him in his Asiatick Researches.

  Their party arrived at Hardwar, on the edge of the plains, just as the great religious gathering known as the Kumbh Mela was getting under way. Every year a spring festival or Mela is celebrated in Hardwar by the banks of the Ganga, and every twelfth year a vast multitude of pilgrims gathers for the Kumbh (Aquarius) Mela, all attempting to bathe during the course of a single day at one small ghat, a tier of steps leading down into the water. Today over ten million people attend these Kumbh Melas, and even in the early nineteenth century the numbers must have been considerable; at the festival in 1820, over four hundred pilgrims and countless sepoys were reported to have been drowned or trampled to death as the pilgrims struggled down to the water’s edge.

  By a great stroke of luck Webb and his expedition encountered among the pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela of 1808 a party of Gurkhas from Srinagar. These invaders from neighbouring Nepal had overrun the former territories of the Rajahs of Srinagar a decade earlier and were the new rulers of the hills. At the head of their party was the Gurkha Governor of Srinagar himself, whose permission was required before they could enter the hills. He professed at first to be extremely unwilling to allow any foreigners other than genuine pilgrims into his province, let alone map-makers from a foreign power, but finally, with the right sort of inducements, allowed himself to be won over. Indeed, once he had accepted the idea he went on to offer a guide, an escort of twelve Nepalese sepoys and a large number of coolies to carry their tents and baggage. Scarcely able to believe their luck, the travellers made their way through the Gangadwara gorge into the hills. It was the start of what a later recruit to the Survey of India, John Hodgson, was to call ‘a mighty maze without a plan’, a vast, formless jumble of sharp ridges, often snow-topped, intercut by deep, shadowed valleys – all of it terra incognita.

  They avoided the pilgrim trail, which leads northwards alongside the river through the first ranges to the confluence of the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers, where the two major tributaries of the Ganga come together below the cliffs of Deoprayag. Instead, they took a short-cut that led them northwest across the fertile valley of the Dun and over the site of the future cantonments of Dehra Dun. Then they climbed out of the vale some miles to the east of what would in another twenty years become the hill station of Mussoorie – and from a knoll on the Landour ridge they had their first uninterrupted view of the giants of the Garhwal Himalayas: an awesome, jagged banner of rock and ice that the eye could follow for well over a hundred miles to left and right.

  Directly in front was the solid cluster of peaks that made up the Gangotri-Kedarnath-Badrinath group – and somewhere in its centre a sacred mountain that the traveller
s knew only as Mahadeo-ka-Linga, the lingam of the great god (Shiva). For Raper it was ‘a sight the most sublime and aweful that can be pictured to the imagination’. From where they stood they could see seven or eight successive ranges, one rising above another, until the view was finally cut off by the snows:

  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.

  Hyder Jung Hearsey took a less romantic view of the scene. ‘We had a good and extensive view of the Himalea Mountains,’ he noted in his own journal. ‘The most remarkable peaks I delineated and took correct bearings of them with a theodolite.’ A prosaic response, perhaps, but one that provides firm evidence of Hearsey’s technical expertise, and gives the lie to later charges that he was no surveyor.

  After two days of travelling through hills and valleys abundantly stocked with forests of deodar, oak and rhododendron they dropped down into the Bhagirathi and rejoined the pilgrim trail as it followed this western tributary of the Ganga to its source. It was this branch, named after the sage whose meditation brought the goddess Ganga Mai down to earth, that was popularly acknowledged to be the Ganga’s true source. For several more days they were able to follow the river as it curved round to the north into an ever-deepening gorge, past fields where ‘the rich flourishing crops seemed to exhult in the advantage of their situation.’ Raper noted that here both the hill-men and hill-women shared the labour: