A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  Together with Captain Cecil Rawling, Ryder and Bailey made their ‘race against winter’ up the Tsangpo in the last months of 1904, with Captain Ryder and his surveyors using a plane-table to confirm the astonishing accuracy of much of Pundit Nain Singh’s work over the same ground. However, their fears of being cut off in Tibet by winter snow on the Himalayan passes led them to confine their plane-tabling to the highway, and as a result the mapping of the ultimate source of the Brahmaputra was left uncompleted.

  At Manasarovar they found and examined the channel between the two lakes, the wide steam-bed first discovered and explored by the Stracheys more than half a century earlier. It was dry, but they were assured by local Tibetans that it filled up when the snows melted in the summer months. Two days later the officers rode along the western shore of Rakas Tal and finding no outlet other than an old stream bed, also quite dry, concluded that the Sutlej now took its source from one of the tributaries flowing down from the Himalayas and not from the lakes. As soon as they were back in India both Ryder and Bailey began lobbying their respective contacts in Simla. However futile it may have seemed in the wake of the Anglo-Tibetan Convention, both men hoped to win permission to enter the Tsangpo gap.

  It was a long-established feature of Anglo-Indian society that no significant advancement could be secured without the help of powerful allies, and here Ryder had the edge on his rival since he had a friend at court in the person of Sir Louis Dane, the Viceroy’s Foreign Secretary. Yet even the Viceroy had ultimately to defer to the Secretary of State for India in London – who was adamantly opposed to any further interference in Tibet. While Ryder waited and hoped for a change of heart, Bailey was offered the job of Trade Agent in Gyantse, midway between Darjeeling and Lhasa. Here he spent the next four years, learning the language and familiarizing himself with Tibetan ways. In 1908 he went on leave and began to lay plans to approach his objective from China.

  What both Bailey and Ryder, as well as a number of other well qualified contenders, were waiting for was the renewal of the Anglo-Tibetan Convention in August 1910, with the possibility that the ban on exploration would then be lifted. However, it was not to be. Chinese attempts to win control of the Lhasa government provoked widespread disturbances in Tibet and made an easing of restrictions out of the question. These same disturbances also prevented Eric Bailey from reaching his goal. Having crossed the Yangtse, Mekong and Salween rivers, he got within fifty miles of the Tsangpo gorges before being deflected from his course. He was on his way down the Lohit river towards Sadiya and the Assam valley when a runner arrived bearing a message from the British Consul-General in Szechwan. It was a cable from his father in Scotland and it read simply: ‘Warn Bailey Massacre Sadiya.’

  In fact, the massacre had taken place not in Sadiya but again in Abor country, and its chief victim was Jack Needham’s successor, Noel Williamson. Needham had finally retired in 1907 and had gone to live with his wife and family in Shillong, Assam’s hill station in the Khasi hills. His successor evidently shared Needham’s ambitions; he too expressed a desire to be the first sahib to travel up the Dihong into Tibet and in 1909 he actually managed to take a dugout some twenty miles up the river. Instead of an armed escort he took with him a gramophone and a magic lantern, and was received by the villagers of Kebang, in Minyong Abor territory, in a very friendly manner (see inset Map B). Two years later, in March 1911, he set out with the intention of again visiting the Minyong Abors on the right bank of the Dihong. Again he travelled without a military escort but with forty-seven porters bearing gifts and medicines, and a tea garden doctor named Gregorson.

  The massacre was triggered off by the most trivial incident. Some rations and a bottle of whisky were stolen at the village of Rotung, ten miles east of Kebang, and Williamson told the villagers that he would require satisfaction on his return. He and his party then crossed the Dihong into the territory of the Panghi Abors. Here there was some sickness among the coolies and Williamson decided to split up the party. He sent the three worst cases back down the trail with a mail-runner, left Dr Gregorson with other sick porters at Panghi village and set off with the rest of the party for Komsing.

  The Rotung Abors had just been debating how best to respond to Williamson’s demands when his mail-runner arrived. He was carrying three letters from Williamson for posting in Sadiya, which he proceeded to flourish in front of the villagers. These letters were to all intents his death-warrant; they were in white envelopes edged in black as a mark of mourning for the recent death of King Edward VII, and were sealed with red wax. Having no written language the Abors set great store by signs and symbols and they chose to interpret these envelopes in their own terms: the white envelope they saw as representing the white man, the black border was his soldiers and the red seal government anger. In consequence, the mail-runner and the three sick coolies with him got no further than the outskirts of Rotung, where they were surrounded and dispatched. A war party about a hundred strong then descended on Dr Gregorson and his invalids at Panghi and killed them all on the spot.

  The next day warriors from Rotung and Kebang caught up with Noel Williamson just as he and his party entered Komsing. Williamson was hacked to death with daos on the edge of the village while the coolies, gathered in the village long-house, were speared as they tried to escape.

  At first it seemed to the Abors as if they had got away with it yet again; weeks and then months went by without any sign that the British Raj would seek reparation. Then in late September, six months after the massacre, came word that an avenging army was on its way.

  The news caused great excitement in the Abor hills and for the first time all the main villages got together to plan a united defence. The women and children were sent up into the mountains and the warriors gathered and prepared to meet the enemy on their own terms. Cane bridges were cut down and fords demolished; trees were felled and piled into stockades across the valleys; rock-chutes were built overlooking trails, and the trails themselves were further booby-trapped with concealed pits lined with poisoned stakes and ingenious spring-traps that sprayed the track with poisoned arrows. The Abors had shown themselves to be supreme masters of jungle warfare, and they had no reason to suppose that their supremacy was about to be challenged.

  The expeditionary force that landed on the banks of the Dihong in October 1911 was certainly no military sledgehammer. But the bulk of its 725 fighting men were Gurkhas – some from the military police battalions in Assam, others from regular Indian army units, but all hillmen who knew the style of the country and what they were up against. And they were backed by what must surely have been the most warlike bunch of coolies ever assembled – 3500 spear-carrying Naga tribesmen. It was the ideal army for jungle combat.

  In charge of the Abor Field Force was Major-General Hamilton Bower, known as ‘Buddha’ Bower because of his unusually solemn and self-contained manner – and thought by many of his young officers to have been the wrong choice. He was a man who won not by flair or dash but by dogged persistence, and had become famous throughout India for having pursued a murderer the length and breadth of Central Asia. The murder in question took place in 1888 in the High Karakoram when a traveller named Andrew Dalgliesh was killed by a Pathan. Hamilton Bower, then a subaltern in the Bengal Cavalry, was sent after him and after months of inquiry and several false trails he and his agents tracked him down to Samarkand, where the fugitive eventually hanged himself in a Russian jail. This exploit had been followed by a succession of journeys through Chinese Turkestan and Northern Tibet. Cautious Bower may have been, but no one could accuse him of lacking either courage or application.

  Commanding a detachment of the 2nd Goorkhas was a young major called Alec Lindsay, whose letters to his grandmother – herself the widow of an Indian Army general – give a far more honest and livelier account of the Abor campaign than any published version. His early letters overflow with good-humoured optimism:

  Don’t be worried if you read in the papers that the Abors used
poisoned arrows. The poison (aconite) is not usually strong and rarely has ill effects if the wound is treated properly at once. We all carry squirts and an antidote. So there is nothing to worry about – especially with the Vicarage prayers – so don’t worry at the exaggerated stories you see in the Daily Mail.

  You would love to see our daily quinine parade. As the NCO comes along with the quinine tablet each man opens his mouth and the NCO throws it in! We all take 5 grains a day to enable us to defeat the fever in the Abor jungles.

  An object of particular delight to the British officers was the presence of the head-hunting Naga warriors in camp. ‘Our lot are stark,’ wrote Lindsay:

  The others are practically so, having only a 2” excuse for a rag in front of them. All carry long spears. They are quite warlike and are out for heads. In fact there seems some fear that when we are attacked in the jungle they will drop their loads, shout their war-cries, and dash into the jungle after the Abors whom they hate.

  Lindsay appreciated the irony of putting the Nagas up against the Abors: ‘It is amusing having to fight savages with savages. That is the way we make an Empire!’

  The Nagas very definitely had style. When they were on the march, in columns six abreast, they employed a peculiar two-note chant – He-hah! He-hoh! – that could be heard at a great distance through the jungle and was rightly calculated to put the fear of God into all who heard it. They had come in high hopes of taking a few heads from the Abors and there was a marked drop in morale when General Bower announced that head-hunting would not be countenanced and that the fighting was to be left to the militia. Acting as official interpreter to the Nagas was a young Anglo-Miri policeman named Jack Needham, son of the former Assistant Political Officer. He was briefly accompanied by his sixty-nine-year-old father, who had come up with him to Pasighat in the hopes of being allowed to join the Abor column but was ordered to leave. He returned to Shillong where he died in 1925, disappointed and embittered.

  Another frustrated visitor to headquarters was Eric Bailey; he too was out of luck. His first action on returning to Indian soil had been to race across to Simla, where he now had a powerful patron in the person of the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Henry McMahon. Bailey’s journey from China to Assam was held to be a success and the Viceroy was persuaded to overlook any breaches of regulations that might have occurred. A position on the Abor Field Force was fixed for him and Bailey was back in Sadiya in time for the start of the push into Abor country. But here he was not made welcome; the local commander did not look kindly on those who were known to have pulled strings to get on the column. Bailey was ‘that damn fellow from Simla’, and for some weeks was forced to kick his heels in camp.

  Bower’s conduct of the campaign very soon began to exasperate both the Abors and his own officers. He moved forward with snail-like caution, clearing the surrounding jungle and road-building before every advance, and after a month in the field he had progressed only twenty-three miles. Lindsay’s Gurkhas had been allowed to scout ahead on the left flank of the main force but they too had been kept severely in check. ‘War by this method I don’t understand,’ he wrote in early November. ‘The General’s slowness is painful and we fret at his inaction. Given a free hand I would have cleared the country and taken Kebang 10 days ago.’ Soon the unhealthy climate began to take its toll of the troops:

  The rain has continued incessantly since 9th – ie. for 14 days – and this is their dry month here! It is too awful for words. Every-one is going down with fever and five out of our 11 officers with this column are in bed taking 40 to 60 quinine grains a day. It is inconceivable that any general should let his troops rot in these malarial jungles and not push forward.

  However, once the position of the troops had been well and truly consolidated Bower finally allowed Lindsay to give his men a taste of Abor warfare:

  After marching for 6 hours we found the path blocked with fallen trees and poisoned bamboo stakes. Soon afterwards the enemy, who were in a stockade above us, fired off two stone chutes towards us. I glued myself to the khud [steep hillside] hoping the horrid rocks would miss me and was lucky to escape with only a bruise above the knee from a smaller stone which knocked me down, while the Adjutant and men near me were swept off the path. Capt. Nicholson and I and the five leading scouts then ran forward and scrambled up the stockade walls helping each other up and shooting down on the men inside who were firing arrows at us. Fortunately for us they ran away.

  By this time Bower’s slow, inexorable advance had begun to wear down the resistance of the Abors. The combination of the hard wedge at the centre and the fast moving column on its left allowed them little opportunity to follow their traditional tactics of withdrawal and ambush. One carefully prepared defensive position after another was abandoned, often without a fight, until eventually the united Abor front collapsed. One after another of the headmen from the Abor villages on the left bank of the Dihong began to come in with offers of assistance, until only those villages who had been directly involved in the Williamson massacre were left to fight on.

  The Abor war came to a spectacular conclusion on a cliff above Rotung village, where some six hundred warriors were holding out in what appeared to be an impregnable position, a natural fortress of rock crowned with a stockade and ringed by some fifty rock-chutes. Here the two columns came together for the final attack: under covering fire from their five Maxims, assault parties worked their way up on both flanks and stormed the position. A few days later the two columns advanced on Kebang, the Minyong Abor stronghold, which was deserted and in flames. All the surrounding villages were razed and all the stockades and defences dismantled, and one by one the hostile chiefs came in waving newspapers as flags of truce. By Christmas the little war was over.

  Now that the Abors had been subjugated it was at last possible for the long and eagerly awaited exploration of their country to begin. Several survey columns were sent out, one of which explored to the head of the Shimang river, running northwest off the Dihong into the Himalayan ranges. Here, from an 11,000-foot survey point, its officers caught a first glimpse of one of the twin guardians of the Tsangpo gorge, the 25,500-foot snowpeak of Namche Barwa. Among them was the younger Jack Needham; it was the closest that a Needham ever came to the missing link.

  Alec Lindsay led a survey party up the Yamne river, on the left bank of the Dihong. After marching north for several days his party crossed an intervening ridge and arrived back at the main river at the village of Geku. Without venturing further they returned to their base at Rotung, since the job of exploring the Dihong itself had been set aside for the main survey column.

  The prospect of solving the mysteries of the Tsangpo river had now at last become a reality, but it called for a leader with the single-mindedness of a Needham or a Wilcox – and no such man was present or available. Eric Bailey had been sent off to Mishmi country as the political officer of a military column, and the other main contender, the unlucky Major Ryder, was surveying on the North-West Frontier and was about to be sent off to Persia to join the boundary commission. Lacking the right sort of charged and committed leader the Dihong survey party advanced no more than thirty miles beyond Geku. It stopped at the last of the Abor villages and went no further upriver. The country of Pemako, which Kinthup had crossed nearly three decades earlier, lay close at hand. There was nothing to prevent the survey column from going on, but its political officer preferred to concentrate on forcing the local Abors to eat Government salt, as a gesture of allegiance, while its military officers evidently felt that exploration was not soldiers’ work.

  Major Lindsay had also decided that he was not ‘cut out’ to be an explorer:

  I loathe walking day after day for miles … and climbing up and down hills over impossible paths. One is bored with sleeping on the ground and getting wet for the sake of geographical additions to a map.

  Early in March 1912 he was playing rounders with his Gurkhas at headquarters when a telegram came through ordering him to proce
ed to Simla. ‘It was a sorrowful parting in many ways,’ he wrote. ‘I shall probably not return to the Regiment. I shall be a Lieut. Colonel before my billet expires. However – that is a long way off. The German war and conflagration in Europe comes first.’ But Lindsay died before the outbreak of war; the strains of the Abor Campaign had fatally weakened his heart.

  It was left to Eric Bailey to close what was left of Montgomerie’s ‘missing link’. In October 1912 he secured a place for himself on a second mission that was being sent into Mishmi country, with specific instructions from on high that he was to be allowed as much scope for the exercising of his initiative as he required. After spending the winter months surveying in the Chulikutta Mishmi territory east of the Dibang, he and Captain Henry Morshead of the Survey of India set off northwards into Tibet. When they re-emerged six months later onto the Assam plains south of Bhutan they looked more like tramps than British officers, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that they were able to borrow money to travel second class by rail and steamer down to Calcutta. There they once more resumed the conventional garb of sahibs and proceeded to Simla, believing that ‘it was a 50-50 chance whether we would be congratulated or hauled over the coals.’ Needless to say, the old criterion still applied, and Sir Henry McMahon offered only his warmest congratulations.

  It was generally accepted that with their journey Bailey and Morshead brought the mystery of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra connection to an end. They had established that between the peaks of Namche Barwa and Gyala Peri the river Tsangpo cut through the main Himalayan range in one of the deepest, longest and most spectacular gorges on earth, and that it then turned back on itself in what Bailey called a great ‘knee-bend’ to run parallel – but in an opposite direction – with its upper course for sixty miles before again turning south and into Abor country. They had found no great waterfalls but were able to confirm many of the details left by an earlier traveller, the Sikkimese Kinthup.