A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  The unfortunate Webb finally sent in his completed map on 8 February 1810, together with his apologies:

  The plan sent is certainly, in point of execution, a most wretched daub, for I have lost the Draughtsman who used to assist me, and although I have always acknowledged my incapacity in this way, I think the necessity I have been under to work when fatigued and at night, has either increased my natural want of ability, or that I grow worse and worse. [My italics.]

  With all doubts removed as to which man drew his map first, we can go on to consider the identity of Webb’s lost draughtsman. The meticulous and detailed Survey records show that no qualified draughtsman or assistant was on Webb’s staff during this period. From December 1808 to December 1809 he was surveying the Nepalese frontier of Oude – without assistants. The only man of proven ability as a draughtsman known to have been working in that same remote area is Hyder Jung Hearsey. Thus we have the intriguing possibility that, far from pirating the other’s map, Hearsey not only surveyed, reduced and drew his own map but may even have helped the incapable Webb to draw his, until the latter was transferred in December 1809, so that Webb ‘lost the Draughtsman who used to assist me.’

  Whatever the justice of Hearsey’s case, as soon as Garstin had received Webb’s map he was able to send it on to Rennell and explain that this was the genuine one and the other merely a copy – and Rennell at once informed the Court of Directors:

  A Mr or Major Hearsey thought proper to transmit it to me as his own Production (as he left me to understand), setting forth that the Expedition was undertaken by a Party at their own Expense, and requested that I would endeavour to obtain remuneration for him from the Hon. the Court of Directors. Thus informed I readily undertook what I thought a Meritorious Act; but I have since been informed that the Person who sent it to me only copied another Man’s work, with a view to obtaining something for himself.

  Once the father of Indian geography had spoken, Hearsey’s reputation was damaged beyond recovery. It was an age in which patronage both in Indian and British circles was an essential prerequisite to advancement; those who lacked means or advocates to support their cause, irrespective of its merits, rarely found success. Hearsey was without champions either in Calcutta or in Leadenhall Street, whereas Webb had loyal friends and a Surveyor-General who was quite prepared to blacken another man’s name for the sake of his department.

  Webb himself seems to have had no hand in this character assassination. He remains throughout a curiously silent and uninvolved figure, at the very centre of the controversy yet never committing himself – so far as we know – to any sort of statement on a matter which must have affected him quite as much as it affected Hearsey. What we know of him suggests that he was a weak and unambitious man who could be manipulated, both by Hearsey and Garstin; weak enough, perhaps, to let Hearsey see his documents while he lay sick at Bareilly – and certainly weak enough to go along with Garstin’s claim that his map was copied by Hearsey.

  Webb’s superiors claimed for him the title of ‘discoverer of the Holy Fountain’s Head’, but this too was more than he deserved. For if the Ganga had any recognized head it was at Gaumukh, the source of the Bhagirathi. The first European to get close to it was James Baillie Fraser, a traveller and author who had an influential brother in the Indian Political Service. In June 1815 Fraser reached the shrine of the Mother Goddess, Ganga Mai, at Gangotri. He found a modest little temple, surrounded by tall deodars, which he sketched and embroidered in the Gothic manner. While he was there he asked the temple priest about ‘the old popular idea that the Ganges issues from a rock shaped like a cow’s mouth’. To his surprise the pundit laughed and ‘observed that most of those pilgrims who came from the plains put the same question.’

  Satisfied with this answer, Fraser made no attempt to explore the headstream any further. He retraced his route and at the end of the summer returned to the plains with an attractive set of watercolours that he turned into aquatints. They were later published together with his Journal and became immensely popular.

  Yet there was, if not exactly a Cow’s Mouth, certainly a mouth of a kind waiting to be discovered – and the first European to do so, treading in the footsteps of the many thousands of pilgrims who had been there before him, was Captain John Hodgson of the Survey of India, together with his assistant, Captain James Herbert. They came to Gangotri in June 1817 and on the night of their arrival narrowly avoided being crushed to death by falling rocks during an earthquake. Next morning they followed the river eastwards through a narrow gorge and then south-east, climbing until they found themselves at the entrance to a vast cul-de-sac, ringed by snowpeaks. Scrambling over a mass of boulders they at last arrived at the traditional source of the Ganga, the place that they marked on their map as Gaumukh, the cow’s mouth. It was the snout of an enormous glacier, a glistening, hump-backed wedge of ice that ran back into the mountains for a distance of more than twenty miles. ‘A most wonderful scene’, was how Hodgson described it in his report:

  The river here is bounded to the right and left by high snow and rocks; but in front the mass of snow is perfectly perpendicular, and from the bed of the stream to the summit we estimate the thickness at little less than 300 feet of solid frozen snow. The Bhagirathi, or Ganges, issues from under a very low arch at the foot of the grand snow bed!

  Overlooking the glacier were four prominent peaks which Hodgson and Herbert, in a fit of patriotism, named St George, St Andrew, St Patrick and St David. But towering over the mouth of the glacier itself was a far more striking peak. Seen from the north it was shaped like a trident or, with a further stretch of imagination, like a cow’s head with horns, formed by two ridges projecting from either side of the summit. When seen from the east, however, it was gloriously, unmistakably phallic. The British called it Mount Moira, in honour of the new Governor-General, Lord Moira. But to the Indians it was Mahadeo-ka-Linga, now known more simply as the Shivling mountain. It was not the god’s main residence, which stands another hundred and thirty miles away beyond the last of the Himalayan ranges, but it was certainly the most splendid of his lesser abodes.

  4

  ‘A Tour to Eastern Tatary’: the British

  Discovery of Lake Manasarovar

  Although the sources of the Ganga had now been identified, the mystery of what lay beyond the Himalayas in Western Tibet remained. Almost as soon as he had recovered from his sickness William Webb was writing to Garstin in Bengal proposing a second expedition. Webb had talked with an ‘intelligent native’ who had visited the Tibetan borderland and had been told that there were ‘two great lakes, only one of which is laid down in any map extant, viz lake Mansurwar. The other, by far the largest and most important, named Rown Rudh, remains unnoticed. It has several considerable Islands in it, whose lofty Hills are covered with Woods; both lakes are surrounded by Mountains through which several large streams flow.’ Webb declared that it was high time that these lakes and rivers were correctly identified and mapped. His former companion, Felix Raper, was kicking his heels in Delhi, and would be very willing to accompany him.

  Garstin supported the idea and put it up to the Governor-General’s office. But he was now familiar with Webb’s deficiencies as a draughtsman and he proposed a third member for the expedition. He had just returned from the newly-acquired territory of Ludhiana with two new recruits to his department, both of whom were ‘capable of making the drawings that will be required’. One of them was another of Webb’s former brother-officers from the 10th BNI, John Hodgson. The other remains unidentified – but we can be sure it was not Captain H. J. Hearsey.

  As it turned out, Webb’s hopes were dashed by the government’s refusal to allow a second expedition to enter Nepalese territory. In the two years since the Ganga reconnaissance John Company had grown thoroughly disenchanted with its Nepalese neighbours. Having already expanded westwards along the Himalayan foothills through Garhwal and Kumaon the Gurkhas were now encroaching southwards into what the British r
egarded as their territory. The attitude of the Nepalese towards intruders had already been shown to be unfriendly, and a second expedition could only exacerbate an already strained situation.

  No one knew more about the problems of Nepalese incursions than Hyder Jung Hearsey, part of whose property, in the form of a jagir or leased holding from which he could draw rent, bordered on Nepalese territory. Towards the end of 1811 encroachments onto his lands became so serious that Hearsey decided to take drastic action; in January 1812 he was reported to be ‘raising troops and collecting arms with a view to the invasion of Nepalese territories adjacent to his jagir’. This was swiftly followed by an order from the Agent to the Governor-General, in Bareilly, for the immediate confiscation of Hearsey’s jagir, on the grounds that he was ‘conspiring to attack and take possession of the Doon, or vale, lying between the Ganges and the Sutledge, at present in the occupation of the Government of Nepal’.

  Hearsey did indeed lay claim to the entire Dun valley – but not until after the Nepalese had been cleared out in the wake of the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1815. He did so on the not unreasonable grounds that he had bought this very desirable piece of real estate from its owner, the deposed Rajah of Srinagar. The Company (and later the Crown) took a different view and dismissed his claim, resulting in a lawsuit that was continued by his descendants and fought over for another seventy years before being finally thrown out of the courts.

  In 1812, however, the invasion of the Dun valley would have been quite beyond Hearsey’s resources – but perhaps that was not the point at issue. In the eyes of a government anxious – for the time being – to avoid open conflict with the Nepalese, the removal of a known gadfly like Hearsey from their flanks would have been distinctly convenient. There must, therefore, have been great relief in official circles when it was learned that Hearsey had abandoned all thoughts of offensive action. It seems he had other plans.

  He had applied to the Agent of the Governor-General for permission to accompany the Superintendent of the Company’s Stud, a veterinary surgeon named William Moorcroft, on what he referred to as a ‘Tour of the Hills’. To the distracted Governor-General’s Agent this evidently sounded like an answer to a prayer; it was a way of getting shot of the troublesome Captain Hearsey and another notorious nuisance, Dr Moorcroft, at the same time. He agreed – much to the horror of the authorities in Calcutta who, as soon as they got to hear of his decision, issued an immediate order countermanding it and stating that on no account should Hearsey be allowed to enter Nepalese territory. By that time it was too late, of course: Moorcroft and Hearsey had already disappeared into the foothills of Garhwal. Their precipitate departure also won Hearsey a stay of execution on his eviction from his jagir; the eviction order came through on 22 May, just two weeks after he and Dr Moorcroft had left for the hills.

  *

  Hyder Jung’s partner on this second Himalayan adventure was of a very different calibre from his earlier companions. William Moorcroft was among the first of a new breed of travellers, men whose chief pleasure lay in the journey itself. The only known portrait of him does him scant justice: drawn by an Indian artist, it shows him perched uneasily on a rickety chair, a trim, slight man with the face of a spiv – small eyes, long nose, hairline moustache. It reveals nothing of the eccentric genius, the man possessed by curiosity, whose mania for gathering information made it quite impossible for him to restrict his interests to his own profession.

  Moorcroft had started out to be a doctor, but while studying at Liverpool Infirmary in the 1780s a local outbreak of cattle plague had diverted his attentions towards what was then an entirely new branch of medical science. He decided to become a veterinarian instead, and after studying in France for a number of years set himself up in what soon became an extremely lucrative practice in Oxford Street. Having built up a considerable fortune, he then lost it all in a mad scheme to mass-produce horseshoes. It was at this low point in his life that he heard that the East India Company was looking for a vet; a man was wanted to run its new stud farm at Pusa, a small up-country station not far from Patna, with the aim of improving the quality of the Company’s cavalry chargers.

  Had Dr Moorcroft decided to stay on in England he would have had no difficulty in restoring his fortunes. But India presented new challenges; it was very much England’s new frontier, where restless young men could still go out and risk everything on a venture. Moorcroft was then already over forty but his vigorous approach to life soon singled him out even in a land of young men; contemporary accounts make much of his ‘energetic disposition’ and his often misplaced enthusiasm. He became Veterinary Surgeon to the Government in Bengal and Superintendent of the Company’s Stud in December 1808, and within a short space of time was greatly irritating his employers by putting the broadest possible interpretation on his job. The standard of veterinary care did indeed improve dramatically under his direction, but his search for the ideal horse for breeding purposes soon had him ‘running over the country in quest of phantoms’.

  At the beginning of the cold weather in 1811 Moorcroft was up at Saharanpore, not very far from the Dun country, where he met up with Hyder Jung Hearsey, then preparing – if we are to swallow the official version of events – to invade the Dun. Whether it was Moorcroft or Hearsey who came up with the proposal ‘to penetrate into Tartary’, both quickly perceived that they had common interests. Soon afterwards Moorcroft was badgering the Agent to the Governor-General with innocuous-sounding plans for a ‘journey into the Hills’ to find ‘new blood from the Hill strains’ for his horses as well as ‘goats bred for the sake of their Long Hair’.

  In spite of their hurried departure Moorcroft and Hearsey had gone to a lot of trouble in their preparations. They had decided that the safest course was to go disguised as Hindu pilgrims, so they set off wearing turbans and white linen robes and calling themselves Mayapori and Haragiri. Both men were anxious – for rather different reasons – to bring back as accurate a record of their journey as possible. Hearsey’s role was that of map-maker: he lacked a theodolite but he had a compass and a thermometer with him and kept a survey notebook, and he was assisted by two Indian surveyors, Harballabh, whom Moorcroft refers to in his journel as the ‘old pundit’ and who may well have been Hearsey’s munshi – the ‘intelligent native’ who went on to Gaumukh on the first expedition – and a younger pundit named Hurruck Dao, his nephew. A measuring perambulator would have been too conspicuous, so Hurruck Dao was given the unpleasant duty of keeping a tally of the number of steps he took, being ‘directed to stride the whole of the road at paces equal to 4 feet each’. This last phrase of Moorcroft’s led to some confusion when reports of the expedition were later published in Henry Colebrooke’s Asiatick Researches, but in fact Moorcroft’s direction was quite correct, since the Indian pace is recorded each time the left foot touches the ground – in other words every two steps. In addition to the pundits there was an Afghan warrior named Gholam Hyder Khan, who had been with Hearsey since his days as a soldier of fortune, as well as some fifty servants and coolies to carry the baggage and supplies, which included goods that they hoped to trade or sell in Tibet.

  For the first two weeks of their journey the travellers were crossing old ground that Hearsey had covered either while escorting Colonel Colebrooke or with Webb and Raper. But on 24 May 1812 they came to the junction of the Alaknanda and Dauli rivers (see Map A), where they left the pilgrim route to Badrinath and began to make their way eastwards into unknown country. ‘Here the horrors of the road were very great,’ Dr Moorcroft was to write later. At one point Hearsey narrowly avoided being swept into the river by a rock avalanche set off by a family of bears crossing the hillside above them, and elsewhere there were many sections of the trail that had been torn away by landslides, forcing them into an unattractive choice between a long detour or a hair-raising traverse across cliffs that fell away steeply down to the river below.

  The worst moment of all came when they found their way blocked by a huge ro
ck that ‘overhung the river at a great height’. William Moorcroft watched the leading members of the party inch their way out onto this horribly exposed rock face and decided to force a path for himself through the thick undergrowth above:

  By clinging with their hands to the stones on the face of the mountains, Mr Hearsey and a large portion of the carriers went over the rock without accident, but at one point the courage of my khansama [cook] failed; on missing his footing with one leg he shrieked violently and shrank down almost senseless with one leg hanging over the abyss, calling out that he was lost. Mr Hearsey was at hand and assisted him most opportunely, along with the pundit.

  The porters now included a number of hill-women drawn from the surrounding Bhotia villages, one of whom shamed her more faint-hearted male colleagues by making several journeys across the exposed rock face, carrying not only her own load but theirs as well.

  Despite their usefulness Hearsey had a low opinion of these open and generous-minded hill-people, part Indian and part Tibetan in their antecedents and their culture. However, he managed to spare a few kind words in his journal for the younger women on the expedition; they had ‘some claims to beauty, but credit must be allowed to their Chastity, as offers were made very liberally, which either want of language or management on our part prevented having the desired effect.’ Hearsey returns to this theme later in his journal with the remark that ‘although tempted very much [they] would not swerve from their Duty to their Husbands – from being constantly employed, their inclinations to venery are much curbed.’ Hearsey’s partner also seems to have had a healthy regard for the opposite sex. He was to gain a widespread – and not entirely unearned – reputation as a ladies’ man thanks to the French traveller Victor Jacquement, who wrote that ‘Moorcroft’s principal occupation was making love’. But on this journey neither Moorcroft nor Hearsey appears to have made many conquests.