A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  So that was that. They had reached the fabulous lake of the Puranas and had found – to their own complete satisfaction – that the ancients had got it wrong. When the old pundit Harballabh was questioned further he admitted that his information was out of date: the river he had spoken of had issued from lake Manasarovar some sixteen years earlier and since then the bed of the channel from the lake had dried up.

  Next morning Hearsey cut their names and the date into a stone and set it up ‘in a proper place’. He had a last bathe in the lake and then they were off, though Moorcroft was still suffering from the effects of his over-exertion two days before. They made their way past lake Rakas Tal and followed the course of the Sutlej down to a point some ten miles above Daba, where they met up again with their influential friends from Niti, Deb Singh and Bir Singh Rawat. Together they recrossed the pass and on 3 September they were back in Niti.

  For the next month all went well as the travellers shepherded their flocks slowly and sometimes precariously back down the Dauli and Alaknanda gorges. On 8 October they passed through the village of Karnaprayag, where the Pindar river flows in from the east to join the Alaknanda. Here they diverged from the pilgrim trail and began to follow a route up the Pindar valley that would take them more directly to the plains. It was a repetition of the mistake that Hearsey had made four years earlier when he was with Webb and Raper, and it provoked exactly the same disquiet among the Nepalese rulers of Kumaon. They were met and questioned by a Gurkha official, but their answers evidently failed to satisfy him; as each day passed harassment by Gurkha sepoys steadily increased.

  By 12 October the situation had become serious enough for Dr Moorcroft to consider abandoning the livestock and making a dash for it to the plains. On that day he was forced to cock and aim his gun at a Gurkha officer who had placed himself ‘in a menacing position’ on the road ahead of him. The Gurkha retreated, but three days later, as they crossed out of the Ganga’s river system and descended towards the Ramganga river, they found more soldiers waiting for them. Moorcroft took up a firing position at the head of the party, while Hyder Jung drew up a rearguard into two ranks at the back. Again it was the Gurkhas who had to give way; after a few tense minutes they pulled back and the travellers were allowed to camp without being molested further.

  At dawn on 16 October Moorcroft and Hearsey woke to find Gurkhas swarming through the camp. ‘Many jemadars and havildars [senior non-commissioned officers] came round to Mr H.’s tent and the soldiers closed,’ wrote Moorcroft later, ‘I had my breakfast placed on a stone and ate it with my gun in my hand.’ Yet there was still a reluctance on the part of the Nepalese to initiate hostilities: ‘Several of the officers came, offered their necks, and desired me to take off their heads, as, if they did not stop us, that would be their fate.’ Witnessing the same bizarre ritual, Hearsey took a more jaundiced view of it: ‘The treacherous Scoundrels exposed their bare necks to us saying we might as well cut off their Heads as proceed.’

  Finally, it was Dr Moorcroft who precipitated the action. He marched over to a large body of soldiers formed up in a semicircle across the trail and ordered them to stand clear:

  The main body opened a little, and I independently advanced with too much impetuosity. My gun had in an instant as many hands upon it as could find room to touch it, but they could not wrest it from me. I had at least seventeen or twenty upon me, but this rather prolonged than shortened the contest, as they pulled in opposite directions. It would have been maintained for even a longer time, had not one man got upon my neck and stuck his knees into my loins, endeavouring to strangle me with my handkerchief, whilst another fastened a rope round my left leg and pulled it backwards from under me. Supported only by one leg and almost fainting from the hand around my neck, I lost my hold on the gun, and was instantly thrown to the ground. Here I was dragged by the legs until my arms were pinioned.

  Hearsey, meanwhile, had been cleaning his teeth on the other side of the camp and had not heard his companion’s warning shout. Much to his indignation he was jumped upon and seized before he had a chance to put up much of a fight: ‘The first object I beheld was a drawn sword and a cluster round – as I supposed – the body of Mr M. whom I concluded they had killed – this idea made me prepare for my own Death and I looked for the means of dying revenged!’

  Since the means to avenge his friend’s death were beyond reach and his friend turned out to be trussed but still alive, Hearsey had to content himself – some hours later, when he found himself a prisoner in his own tent – with giving vent to his anger on paper. His log for that eventful day opens with a crude sketch of himself and Dr Moorcroft with their arms tied behind their backs and the words: ‘Vile Cords our Arms do bind by Villains great and Cowards greater.’ Much of the entry that follows is taken up with various arguments as to why it would be madness for the Nepalese to kill them – a very reasonable preoccupation in the circumstances.

  In fact, Hearsey’s reasoning was sound. For all their truculence, the Nepalese had no wish to provoke the British into open war and they had nothing to gain by killing two feringhis. Furthermore, it soon became apparent to them that the feringhis had powerful local connections; Deb Singh Rawat, the Bhotia trader from Johar, had come to hear of the arrests and brought his considerable influence to bear on the Gurkha military commander at Almora. Nor did John Company – in the shape of its nearest representative in the plains – turn a deaf ear to the pleas for help that were smuggled out of the hills. There was now a new Agent to the Governor-General at Bareilly and by a great stroke of luck he happened to be a Colebrooke – not Henry Colebrooke but an elder brother, Sir James Edward Colebrooke, Bart. He acted promptly to intercede on Moorcroft’s and Hearsey’s behalf and after sixteen days of captivity they were set free, along with their sheep and goats.

  They can hardly have expected a friendly reception from the powers that be in India. They had left the plains under the most dubious circumstances and had returned after their Government’s representatives had been forced to beg a favour of a rival power. But the Honourable Company was a curious institution and one of its most powerful axioms was that commercial ends often justified the means. Those who broke the rules and lost could expect no mercy but those who took the chance and came through nearly always found that the light of John Company’s countenance shone brightly upon them.

  Moorcroft’s and Hearsey’s journey provides a fine example of the Company’s pragmatism. It had, after all, laid the foundations for a profitable trans-Himalayan trade in shawl wool, uncovered several new and potentially exploitable trade routes and put a useful portion of Western Tibet on the map. And that map, on which he had set to work as soon as he and Dr Moorcroft had reached Bareilly, was unquestionably Hyder Jung Hearsey’s; this time, the achievement could not be denied him. It was presented to the Court of Directors and earned Hearsey the very handsome donation of six thousand rupees from the Government. In addition, his jagir in the terai was restored to him and it was officially noted that the arms and forces that he had earlier been reported to have been gathering for his intended invasion of the Dun were, after all, ‘insignificant in number and value’.

  For Hearsey this marked the end of his exploring days. He devoted his energies, instead, to the forthcoming conflict with Nepal – and no one can have looked forward to the prospect of British military intervention more eagerly. Towards the end of 1813 he drew up plans for the invasion of Kumaon at the request of Lord Moira, the Governor-General designate, and when the war started in earnest in the following year supplied the army with maps of much of the country in which they were to fight. In due course he and his brother-in-law, William Linnaeus Gardner, were allowed to raise their own levies of irregulars and take them into Kumaon. Their advance went well until March 1815, when a large army of Gurkhas arrived unexpectedly from Nepal and fell upon Hearsey’s still raw force of irregulars. His men dropped their arms and fled, leaving Hearsey severely wounded in the thigh. He would have been beheaded on t
he spot but for the personal intervention of the Gurkha commander, who recognized him as the feringhi he had held captive near Almora three years earlier.

  Fortunately for Hearsey there were no more Gurkha victories. The treaty of Segauli, by which the Nepalese agreed to stay east of the river Kali and the British to keep out of Nepal proper, was signed soon afterwards and, for the third time, Hearsey was released from Nepalese captivity.

  *

  And what of Hyder Jung’s fellow-pilgrim and friend, the irrepressible Superintendent of the Company’s Stud? No sooner had Moorcroft returned to Pusa than he began making it known that he had set his sights on Bokhara, that legendary and impenetrable city set deep in Western Turkestan. The next seven years were spent badgering the government with schemes and appeals for this latest folly. The original plan was that he and Hearsey would travel back over the Niti pass, make a slight diversion to Lhasa and then join the Silk Road at Yarkand, to follow the golden road that led to Bokhara as well as Samarkand. They would return not only with perfect horseflesh with which to strengthen the chargers of John Company’s cavalry but also with new markets for British trade. Hyder Jung was all for going to Bokhara but he lacked the sweep of Moorcroft’s imagination; he had his own ‘safe, easy and extensive’ plan by which they would have travelled by sea to the Persian Gulf and then followed the more orthodox route across Persia. When it came down to going along with Dr Moorcroft’s plan or not going at all, he opted out.

  By the time approval for his venture had finally been wrung from the government, William Moorcroft was nearly fifty-five, the age at which most Company officials began to draw their pensions. He knew this was to be his last great enterprise. He packed a second family that he had started in India off home to England and in October 1819 brought his expedition together under Hearsey’s roof at Bareilly. He had three sahibs with him; an Anglo-Indian surgeon named Guthrie, a geologist whom he soon sacked for maltreating the porters, and Hearsey’s replacement as his lieutenant, a young Englishman named Trebeck. As well as two pundit surveyors they took with them Hearsey’s man, Gholam Hyder Khan – a professional survivor, if ever there was one, for he was the only one to last the course. After seven years he returned alone to Bareilly to recount his version of the events that had overtaken Dr Moorcroft and his companions.

  They had indeed reached Bokhara, that most deadly of cities, but Moorcroft, with his insatiable wanderlust, had wanted to go on further:

  Before I leave Turkestan I mean to penetrate into that tract that contains perhaps the finest horses in the world, but with which all intercourse has been suspended during the last five years. The expedition is full of hazard but ‘le jeu vaut bien la chandelle’ [the game is well worth the candle].

  A few weeks later he and his two English companions were dead. For many years conflicting reports about the manner of their deaths continued to be picked up by travellers in different parts of central Asia. Some said that Moorcroft had been poisoned, others that he had been robbed and shot. There was even a report that he had been seen alive and well in Lhasa. Various papers and diaries of his continued to turn up over the years in all sorts of odd places, helping to sustain the Moorcroft legend. Yet as this legend grew so his reputation as a traveller and explorer diminished, partly because no one knew exactly where he had been but chiefly because he was overshadowed by Alexander Burnes, who followed him to Bokhara seven years later. ‘Bokhara’ Burnes had style; he matched the romantic image of the traveller to foreign parts and played the part accordingly, whereas Dr Moorcroft was too complex a character to fit any sort of mould. Like many of his kind, he suffered the cruellest fate that posterity can bestow, which is to be forgotten while lesser men are remembered.

  *

  Hyder Jung Hearsey went on no more expeditions into the hills but he returned occasionally to arms. In 1826 he was in Rajasthan taking part in the siege and storming of Bharatpore, and his death of apoplexy in August 1840 came as he was on the road to join a military column as its prize agent. As well as his unpublished ‘Tour to Eastern Tatary’ (which remains in the Hearsey family) he left a daughter and three sons who joined the service of the Nawab of Oude, as he himself had done in his youth. The eldest of his sons, born at about the time of Dr Moorcroft’s departure from Bareilly, was named William Moorcroft Hearsey. He spent a number of exciting years in the Oude terai putting down thugee, the secret religious cult that murdered by strangulation, before being caught up in the famous siege of Lucknow, which he survived. By tradition, a number of his male descendants served in Gardner’s Horse; one of their number travelled halfway across India to horsewhip the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore after that worthy had written an editorial questioning the propriety of ‘half-castes’ serving in such a distinguished regiment.

  The story would not be complete without a postscript on Hearsey’s rival from earlier days, William Webb. By the terms of the Anglo-Nepalese treaty of 1815 Garhwal and Kumaon were thrown open to British surveyors. His two junior colleagues, John Hodgson and James Herbert, mapped Garhwal – newly divided into British Garhwal and the native state of Tehri-Garhwal – while Webb spent five lonely years completing a survey of Kumaon, much of his work concentrated on the border areas.

  In the summer of 1816 he explored the sources of the river Kali and met the Tibetan governor of Purang on the Lipu Lekh pass in an attempt to gain permission to visit lake Manasarovar. Permission was refused, but he had the consolation of being allowed to look down into Tibet from the summit of the pass, seeing the upper valley of the Karnali, the Peacock river, stretched out before him with the Gurla Mandhata massif beyond. On this same survey Webb also climbed up to the 18,500-foot Darma La. On the northern slopes of this high pass two streams run down into Tibet. One forms the main branch of the Darma Yankti, the main feeder of the Sutlej or Lanchen Khambab. The other is the main feeder of the Karnali or Mapchu Khambab. We have no evidence to suggest that Webb crossed the pass and saw either of these sources – but it would be nice to think that he did.

  At the end of the year the report of his survey work in Kumaon was read before a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. Webb had computed the heights of nearly all the highest peaks in his area and when these were given there were exclamations of disbelief. He had provided the first scientifically-based evidence to support Henry Colebrooke’s claim, made twenty years earlier, that some of the Himalayan peaks could be as high as 26,000 feet above sea level. Among the 130 heights that he gave was one for Peak XIV, now better known as Nanda Devi. Webb reckoned it to be 25,669 feet high, which is just twenty-four feet higher than today’s estimate.

  Three years later he completed his survey of the Kumaon frontier by making his way past Niti village to the head of the Niti pass – but no further. It must have been a sad moment for him. For most of those five years he had worked without the assistance or companionship of another survey officer. ‘I am absolutely in a state of banishment,’ he wrote plaintively in one of his letters. ‘It is now half a year and upwards since I have seen a European face, and but for correspondence I should run no small risk of forgetting my own language.’

  In 1821 the Surveyor-General retired and the selection of his successor began. William Webb believed himself to be a strong contender for the post, but to his great dismay the appointment went to John Hodgson, his junior by several years. For Webb this was ‘the total destruction of my hopes’. Declaring that the promotion of Hodgson over his head appeared to ‘attach some stigma to my professional character’, he sent in his resignation, which was accepted.

  In January 1822 William Webb handed over his maps and the held books of the Kumaon survey to the new Surveyor-General and sailed for England and retirement.

  5

  Up the ‘Burrumpooter’: the Opening

  of the Upper Assam Valley

  Throughout the period of British rule, India’s North-East Frontier, the province of Assam bordering on Tibet and Burma, was regarded by those who served
there as the forgotten frontier. It was known for its tea gardens and for very little else. In 1865 one of India’s leading newspapers summed up the conventional view of the province as a wild country inhabited by ‘savage tribes, whose bloody raids and thieving forays threatened serious danger to the cause of tea’. For all its exotic hill-tribes, jungles and teeming wildlife, Assam could never hope to match that other – far more glamorous – frontier province on the other side of India, the North-West Frontier. A distinguished Governor-General pronounced it to be a bore.

  Until the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1824 this beautiful and fertile corner of the subcontinent had been ignored by the East India Company and allowed to ‘lie profitless in impenetrable jungle’. So it might have remained but for the expansionist policies of the Burmese royal house of Ava, which were very similar to those employed by the Nepalese a quarter of a century earlier. Had they contented themselves with invading Assam the Company would not have been greatly alarmed, but by pushing into Cachar and East Bengal the Burmese forced the issue. The conflict that followed has some claims to being the worst managed war in British history.

  More than a third of the British troops lost their lives, in most cases dying not from wounds but from dysentery and jungle fever. While the main thrust of the British advance on Burma was from the south, along the coast of Arakan and through the Irrawaddy delta to Rangoon, a smaller force of three thousand men was sent up the Brahmaputra river to Goalpara, which then marked the limits of British territory. From there they began to move into the Assam valley, the alluvial plain laid out by the Brahmaputra river between the Himalayan foothills to the north and a succession of lesser mountain ranges running in an arc to the south: the Patkai, Naga, Jaintia, Khasi and Garo hills (see Map B).