A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  I never believed that you of all men in the world and when I regarded you as a friend should accuse me in the very days when I return home and when this article of your friend Longstaff was published in all Swedish newspapers. The fact will always remain that the meanest and most envious attacks that have ever been made against me have come from England, the country which refused me every kind of assistance and even made the very best to make the whole journey impossible, England the country to which I have given all my maps!

  If the feelings you express in your last letters to me are the general feelings of the RGS I refuse to appear before you.

  The letter ends abruptly. Part of the last page has been cut out with a pair of scissors, which suggests all sorts of dramatic possibilities but could have been no more than the removal of some indiscreet comment on its contents. It certainly provoked alarm and consternation at the RGS. Hedin’s lecture was due to be given in only three weeks’ time; the Queen’s Hall had been booked for the occasion and invitations sent out. The crisis had to be averted and Hedin mollified. After conferring with the President, Major Leonard Darwin (son of Erasmus), Keltie wrote a soothing letter to Hedin. He hinted that there were certain high honours waiting to be conferred on him and that he could be sure of a most friendly reception: ‘You have pictured to yourself a state of affairs in England which absolutely does not exist.’ Hedin countered by demanding that he be allowed to deliver a second paper in addition to the first, to counter ‘this reaction against me’. It was agreed that this would be read at a special meeting of the Society to be held after the public meeting at the Queen’s Hall.

  In the days leading up to Hedin’s arrival in England the Secretary of the RGS continued to receive a barrage of accusations and taunts from him. ‘We have had a trying time of him,’ Keltie confessed in a letter to another of his correspondents in India, Major C. H. D. Ryder. He also asserted that he himself had been against the publication of Tom Longstaff’s critical letter:

  I considered it premature, and it was quoted in all the German and Swedish papers as indicating that the Council of the Society discredited Hedin’s discoveries. Of course, it was a purely personal matter with Longstaff, but I could not persuade Hedin that it was so.

  This shifting of the blame on to Tom Longstaff was hardly fair. It may have become a personal matter with him but the initiative had come from Keltie. ‘I don’t know what you want this for,’ Longstaff had written when he had first sent his criticisms of Hedin’s claims in to Keltie. ‘In any case not for the GJ [Geographical Journal] unless Hedin persists in his “discovery” claims.’

  It was said of Longstaff in later years that he rather delighted in playing the role of enfant terrible. He was thirty-three at the time of the Sven Hedin dispute, a newly-elected and comparatively youthful Member of Council at the RGS and unquestionably more energetic than most of his fellow-Members. Once he had got the subject of Sven Hedin’s claims between his teeth he found it impossible to let go, and having paid a brief visit to the holy lake after his unsuccessful attempt to climb Gurla Mandhata in 1905 he could speak with more authority than most.

  He began to go back over the records of the Society and wrote to some of its older Fellows. His researches convinced him that the Swede’s claims had to be challenged. ‘How far are you going to let Sven Hedin go?’ he asked Keltie, when the publication of his letter seemed in doubt. The Society had recently suffered a bout of exaggerated claims from returned explorers and it seemed to him that such claims should not be allowed to continue unchecked.

  Longstaff was not the only Fellow to express his doubts publicly. Only two days before Hedin was due to arrive in London, Keltie received another furious tirade from Stockholm. Now Hedin’s wrath was directed against Sir Thomas Holdich, one of the grandest of the grand old men of British – and Indian – geography, and author of Tibet the Mysterious, widely regarded as the most authoritative work on Tibet and its exploration. Holdich had dared to publish an attack on Hedin’s surveying methods, the basis of his criticism being that ‘neither triangulation nor topography formed any part of Sven Hedin’s methods.’ In contrast, a number of British explorers had done the job as it ought to have been done: ‘Bower, Deasy, Rawling, Ryder and Stein (especially Stein) have all affected excellent mapping with the theodolite and plane-table in Tibet, and so far we cannot but regret that no such results are forthcoming from Sven Hedin.’ The criticism was perfectly valid but in view of all the obstacles that the British government had placed in his path, including the last-minute withdrawal of the survey team laid on for him by Lord Curzon, it was also palpably unfair. Hedin was outraged:

  When I returned, not only alive, but with the finest results since Stanley discovered the Northern bend of the Congo, then they begin to ask: why did he not do this and that, it was all known before, why had he not a scientific staff, his results are quite insufficient etc etc. I should not wonder if they begin also to ask why I did not introduce mining companies to the gold fields and build up some cathedrals. I am sorry for Holdich because he has put weapons in my hands by which I can make him perfectly ridiculous.

  It now looked very much as if what should have been no more than a reasoned and reasonable academic dispute was about to become an ugly – and public – brawl. The President, Secretary and Members of Council, as well as those Fellows of the RGS who were in the know, awaited Hedin’s arrival with foreboding, fearing the worst.

  Sven Hedin’s first engagement in London was on the Saturday evening, two days before his Queen’s Hall lecture. Dining as a guest of honour of the Savage Club he produced a witty, uncontroversial speech that amused and disarmed his audience. ‘My geographical moral (sic) is quite different from my ordinary moral,’ he declared, to laughter and applause. ‘When it comes to geographical matters my moral is very very bad!’ His reception helped to bolster Hedin’s confidence, and when he finally came to face his audience at the Queen’s Hall on the evening of 8 February 1909 he knew he would meet the same uncritical response.

  Hedin entered the Queen’s Hall to a storm of applause and cheering that lasted for several minutes, and continued to punctuate his lecture at appropriate moments. According to the report of the Hedin lecture carried by The Times, it was a capacity audience made up of ‘many hundreds of male and female geographers’ who reacted to what turned out to be a rather leaden account of Hedin’s Tibetan travels with wild enthusiasm. For Sven Hedin it was to be ‘the most precious recollection I have of the Royal Geographical Society’, an unqualified triumph made all the sweeter by the fact that the person whose task it was to propose the vote of thanks after his lecture was none other than Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, the very man who had closed the door to Tibet in Hedin’s face three years earlier. It was not something that Hedin allowed him to forget, as The Times report noted:

  He did not love Lord Morley three years ago, when he refused him permission to enter Tibet from the Indian side (laughter). But really he had every reason to be grateful to Lord Morley for his action, for by closing the frontier on the Indian side he had kept all other explorers out of Tibet (laughter and cheers). The result was that he had been free of even the shadow of competition as an explorer of Tibet and was left quite alone with his great white patches.

  Grasping Lord Morley by the hand, Sven Hedin swore eternal friendship. His audience stood and roared its approval.

  It had originally been intended that the special meeting of the Society asked for by Hedin should follow straight on from the Queen’s Hall lecture, but as this proved to be impractical it was arranged that the discreetly phrased ‘Discussion of Geographical Problems concerning Tibet’ should be held two weeks later. In the meantime, Hedin visited Oxford and Cambridge, where he received honorary doctorates from both universities.

  On the evening of 23 February there assembled in the lecture room at 1 Savile Row a small but distinguished group of geographers. There were some notable absentees, including the man who in private at least
had shown himself to be Hedin’s chief ally, Lord Curzon, as well as the most distinguished of Hedin’s critics, Sir Thomas Holdich. Having been warned of the Swede’s threat to make him look ‘perfectly ridiculous’, Holdich may well have thought it wise to avoid a face-to-face confrontation. Instead, he sent in a short note to be read on his behalf and held his fire for a second attack on Hedin’s mapping to be published in the April edition of the Geographical Journal.

  By now Hedin had gathered enough from informal meetings and talks to know that his critics were concentrating the main force of their attacks on his ‘Trans-Himalaya’. His answer was to deliver a pre-emptive strike of such strength and depth that it all but silenced the opposition. Never was his remarkable capacity for research and the marshalling of facts to support his case better shown than in his presentation of his defence. It was a virtuoso performance – and a very lengthy one – and its effect was to diminish the arguments of nearly everybody who spoke after him. He made extensive use of extracts from the writings of those who sat listening to him, finding much to agree with in what they had said and acknowledging their work in uncharacteristically generous terms. Only once, in disparaging the professional skill of a group of men who were not there to defend themselves, the Pundits, did he put a foot badly wrong.

  The replies to Hedin’s speech followed an unspoken but well understood order of precedence. First there was a written communication from Sir Clements Markham, an illustrious past President of the RGS who had been closely associated with the Survey of India. To the discomfiture of many of those present he described Hedin as the ‘beau idéal of a Victoria Medallist’, hailed him as the discoverer of the Trans-Himalayan range and declared it to be the best and most convenient name that could be adopted. This was followed by Holdich’s short message, beginning bluntly, ‘I do not like the name Trans-Himalaya,’ and giving his reasons why.

  The first speaker from the floor was Colonel Godwin-Austen, who had made his name a full half-century earlier with his surveys in the Karakoram. He too was full of praise for Sven Hedin’s work. But as for Hedin’s remarks about the Manasarovar outlet, he reminded the meeting of the work of the Strachey brothers in the 1840s: Richard had died a year ago but Henry, aged ninety-three, was still alive although too frail to be able to attend the meeting in person. Godwin-Austen also expressed doubts about the name ‘Trans-Himalaya’, which had been used loosely in a number of different ways by earlier geographers.

  He was followed by another ex-Survey of India officer, Sir Henry Trotter, the man who had succeeded Montgomerie as the chief controller of the Pundits and their surveys. He took strong exception to Hedin’s remarks about their journeys being ‘useless for scientific purposes’, and felt bound to vindicate their reputation for accurate and valuable work. He conceded that Hedin’s discovery of the Brahmaputra source was ‘a great triumph’ but he, too, disliked the name Hedin had given to the great mountain range north of the river.

  The next two speakers were both distinguished mountaineers: Sir Martin Conway had climbed in the Karakoram in the 1890s and Douglas Freshfield had explored in the Causasus and in the Kangchenjunga region of the Eastern Himalaya. Conway was prepared to credit Hedin as the man who had reduced the Trans-Himalayan range to some sort of geographical order, rather than actually discovering it. Freshfield, for some curious reason, used the opportunity to expound a theory that Tibet could be used by a hostile power as a possible launching-pad for the invasion of India.

  Finally it was the turn of the younger men. First Captain Cecil Rawling, whose chief concern was to defend the survey work that Ryder and his team had accomplished during their joint Lhasa-Gartok journey of 1904. He was full of praise for Hedin’s extensive exploration of the upper and northern watershed of the Brahmaputra, but wished it to be understood that Sven Hedin’s ‘Trans-Himalaya’ was ‘the range surveyed by Ryder’ and ‘what I will call at the present moment Ryder’s mountains’. He thought Hedin’s term for this range inappropriate, since ‘by rights this belongs to the range lying immediately to the north of the Himalayas and between that range and the Brahmaputra.’ As regards the Brahmaputra, he showed that Hedin had taken a ‘too literal reading’ of Ryder’s and his own remarks about the Maryum La being the source, and he was able to quote chapter and verse to support his claim. He felt the whole question of Hedin’s achievement here could be summed up in one sentence: ‘that the principal sources of the Brahmaputra were known to lie in the Indo-Tibet borderline glaciers but it has remained for Dr Sven Hedin to survey and locate, more definitely than has ever been done before, the headwaters of the river.’

  Finally Rawling touched upon the one issue which still, after half a century of dispute, had no firm definition. What exactly constituted a source? He himself defined it as ‘the longest visible branch of a river system and, if there are two branches of equal length, then that which carries most water at its greatest flood’. With that definition in mind he disagreed with Hedin on his siting of the Sutlej source and supported Ryder in placing its modern source in one of the southern tributaries west of Rakas Tal, the Darma Yankti. But, as he had said, ‘the whole question appears to turn on the definition of the word “source”.’

  Now at last it was Tom Longstaff’s turn to speak. As Hedin had expected, he concentrated the main force of his attack on the ‘Trans-Himalaya’, opposing both Hedin’s claim to its discovery and his name for it. A number of geographers from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards had described such a range north of the upper Brahmaputra or had shown it on their maps. In particular, Longstaff supported the prior claims of Pundit Nain Singh, who had discovered such a range in 1874 and whose work formed the basis of a map published in 1889, on which it appeared as the Kangri range. He drew attention to Saunders’ Memoir accompanying the map, in which it was stated that ‘the northern side of the great Tibetan trough culminates in a range that, for extent, importance and altitude may well stand alongside of the parallel ranges of the Himalaya.’ As to the name, ‘Trans-Himalaya’ was already associated with the Ladakh range lying between the Indus and the Sutlej.

  As far as Hedin’s claims to have discovered the sources of the Indus, Sutlej and Brahmaputra were concerned, Longstaff was prepared only to allow Hedin ‘the distinction of being the first traveller to reach the ultimate source of the Indus’. Having visited the upper Sutlej himself after his attempt on Gurla Mandhata he supported Henry Strachey’s contention that the main source of the Sutlej would have to be sought at the head of the Darma Yankti, and as for the Brahmaputra, it was his contention that a ‘party of British sportsmen’ should be given the credit instead of Dr Sven Hedin.

  This unexpected revelation by Longstaff provided the one dramatic moment of the evening. It was a very bold assertion to make because it struck at the heart of what Hedin regarded as his strongest claim, but Longstaff could speak with some confidence because he had among his notes a letter that confirmed the bizarre account given by Thomas Webber in his memoirs. The letter was from the elusive Edmund Smyth himself, and it told how that extraordinary shooting party had made its way over an unusually high pass to reach ‘a country swarming with wild yaks, mostly cows’ east of Gurla Mandhata:

  The pass we crossed over the Gurla Mandhata must have been about 19,000 ft, and some of our party went 1,000 ft further up to explore, & looked down upon a lake covered with ice & snow. This was in the middle of July.

  Edmund Smyth’s letter had been written to Longstaff in September 1908 from his home in Haslemere, soon after Longstaff had begun to make his inquiries into Hedin’s claims. Smyth was eighty-five but ‘still going strong’, and his brief account of the hunting party’s three-week excursion was proof that Webber’s story was true. What it could not show, as Longstaff had undoubtedly hoped it would, was whether or not the shikaris had ventured up Hedin’s Kubi-Tsangpo as well as the Chemayungdung valley. Smyth himself could not provide the answer because soon after crossing the high pass he had left the main party:

 
As my object was to secure some Hodsonian antellope [sic] I parted from my companions & joined them again in 8 or 10 days, & I went in the direction of the Mansorovar, but agreable [sic] to our arrangement I did not go within 6 miles of the lake & I did not attempt to cross the Marium La to the head waters of the Brahmaputra. We all returned together at the end of our 21 days to Taklahar & met with quite a friendly reception from the Tibetans.

  It was Mr Robert Drummond who in company with a friend of his about 15 years before this had reached the Mansorovar & launched an India rubber boat on it, to the great indignation of Hindus & Tibetans alike.

  With this tantalizing footnote, which tells us where he did not go but not where he went, and of the others tell us nothing, the enigmatic Edmund Smyth finally fades out of geographical history, his death passing unnoted in the pages of the Geographical Journal.

  When it came to Hedin’s turn to answer his critics he reserved most of his attention and his sarcasm for Tom Longstaff. He began by challenging him directly: ‘It is very comfortable and easy to sit down in your study at home and write down a lot of hypotheses; go out and try to observe the facts; it was open to everybody as well as me.’ All Longstaff’s arguments, he declared, were built on a foundation of useless theories put forward by different people at different times, none of whom were genuine explorers. Those who were not familiar with Tibetan exploration might be taken in by all the names, dates and figures that Longstaff had cited, but the real experts in the room would know better:

  Dr Longstaff has never touched the country of which I am speaking now, that is why he has been obliged to quote half a dozen travellers and geographers who have never been in the country either. They have probably collected their information from native explorers who have never been in the country either, and who have got their wisdom from natives. Is it surprising, I ask you, that the result of this uncritical criticism is a hopeless confusion?