Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  An amiable, self-effacing man with a talent for mathematics, Lambton had one goal in life: to triangulate. The theory of triangulation is relatively simple: one measures a baseline, ascertains its position by the stars, then takes sightings with a theodolite from either end of the line to a third position, thus creating a triangle whose angles are known and allowing one to calculate the length of its sides by trigonometry. The first triangle having been established, it can be used to create second and third triangles without the need for a new baseline; and from these spring myriad further triangles. The resulting grid provides a framework from which cartographers can produce accurate maps. At the same time, if regular readings have been taken, the grid can also reveal the terrestrial length between astronomical degrees which, when compared with other surveys, can measure the curvature of the planet. With the necessary maths and a set of logarithmic tables, it is a time-consuming but reasonably straightforward business.

  In practice, however, triangulation is beset with difficulties. The baseline has to be measured with impeccable precision, for the smallest error will be repeated and multiplied over succeeding triangles; the theodolite must be on firm, level ground and set to a true vertical; and there must be a clear view from either end of the baseline to the third point of the triangle. If, however, one is in a cold climate where the precalibrated steel chain used for measuring the baseline does not expand and contract, and if one is in a region with high mountains and clear skies, some of these difficulties are diminished. In 1800 Lambton was surveying just such a landscape – New Brunswick – when the call came for him to go to India.

  Lambton arrived in 1802, with all the necessary gear. He had a zenith sector for astronomical observations (so large that it required 14 men to carry it); a precalibrated chain 100 feet long for measuring his baseline; trestles to support his chain, capstans to tension it, wooden boxes to contain it and brass wires to ensure that it remained level. He also had the Great Theodolite, a half-ton contraption of metal, glass and wood that was the largest portable example of its kind in the world. He employed a team of mathematicians to assist in the calculations, a herd of camels, elephants and oxen to carry the supplies, and a small army of porters to manhandle the instruments over the terrain. Thus equipped, Lambton measured two seven-mile baselines at Bangalore and Madras and began to triangulate the subcontinent.

  From the start he was bedevilled by the climate, which caused his chain to expand and contract unpredictably. No sooner had he solved that problem than new ones arose. Working his way north, he battled through forests, jungles and plains, none of which gave him a clear view of his continually desired third point. Trees were felled and houses knocked down to give a path through which he could see the flagmen he sent ahead. All too often, though, it took weeks for the flagmen to reach their position and sometimes they did not reach it at all, having been eaten by tigers. Lambton and his fellow Europeans were crippled by malaria and nameless fevers that forced them repeatedly to cancel operations. And then there was the monsoon, which swelled rivers and sometimes stranded forward elements for weeks on little, foodless hillocks. Even when the weather was good, unforeseen disasters happened. In 1808, in the Kaveri delta, for example, Lambton chose the 217-foot-high Rajarajeshwara temple as a suitable vantage point from which to take his measurements. But as the Great Theodolite was being hauled into position, the pulley slipped and the carefully calibrated instrument smashed into the temple’s 1,000-year-old sandstone flanks. The temple was unscathed, but the theodolite was ruined. Lambton retired to his tent where, over the course of six sweat-soaked weeks, he disassembled his precious instrument, pulled it back into shape and, with the aid of tiny wooden hammers, straightened its bent components. He was pleased with the result, but ordered a replacement nevertheless. It took a year and £650 of Lambton’s own money before it arrived from England.

  The Great Trigonometrical Survey (to give it its official name) ground slowly through India, sprouting branches of triangles as it did so. In the outside world great events came and went: the shelling of Washington, the introduction of gas lighting, Waterloo, the Luddite uprising, the Congress of Vienna, the Peterloo Massacre, the liberation of South America. Members of the Survey came and went too. In 1816 a Lieutenant James Garling took a party west through Hyderabad. One of his assistants died three years later, and Garling himself died in 1820. A man by the name of Conner was sent to replace him, but he had not been in Hyderabad a month before he too died. Conner was succeeded by Young, who lasted only two seasons, dying in July 1823. Crisp took over from Young and then, in 1827, the exhausted Crisp handed the job to Webb. In 1829 Webb returned to England on sick leave. And so it continued. Oblivious to it all, Lambton marched on until, in January 1823, when he was 40 miles south of Nagpur and had just sent a party to triangulate the territory west to Bombay, he too died, aged 70. The Great Trigonometrical Survey continued its juggernaut progress under the leadership of George Everest.

  Lieutenant G. Everest (pronounced Eve-rest, as in Adam and Eve) was a strong-willed and irritable martinet. As Lambton’s second-in-command, he had a full appreciation of the difficulties involved in triangulating India and had come up with several means whereby it could be made easier. He took advantage of the dusk hours, when refraction raised hidden highpoints above the horizon, and he used men with lamps to make those highpoints discernible. Unlike Lambton, who had ‘gone native’ (or at least semi-native), and whose many mixed-blood children had accompanied the survey, Everest intended to finish the job with true, scientific British grit. In the still problematical Hyderabad he lost 15 men in one season. Again and again he had to take a year off in Britain or South Africa to recover from malaria. But he always returned, crushing every impediment underfoot as he drove his mission onwards.

  The Chartists, the 1848 Revolutions and the Crimean War all passed unnoticed as Everest hauled the Great Theodolite northwards. When no highpoints were available he built them – great towers of brick that dominated the Ganges plain. In Calcutta, teams of mathematicians were employed to elucidate his more difficult calculations. Eventually, in 1834, he reached the top of India. From his last vantage point, above the hill station of Dehra Dun, he saw a range of towering peaks – the Himalayas. He went no further, because the mountains lay in Nepal, which was then closed to Britain. And, his task being at an end, he didn’t much care about them.

  But other people did. Various hardy officers sighted a large mountain that they thought might be the highest in the world. They also sighted two other mountains which might be just as high. Uncertain how to name them, and learning that they were part of the Karakorams, they gave them the appellation K. K1 was later discovered to have a name – Kanchenjunga – but K2, which at 28,168 feet was slightly higher than K1, remained just a letter and a number. As for the very highest peak (standing approximately 29,000 feet above sea level) they rejected the Nepali ‘Sagarmatha’, the Tibetan ‘Chomolungma’ and the Chinese ‘Qomolangma’. Instead, one of Everest’s surveyors decided to name it after his employer.

  Everest did not complain. As leader of the 19th century’s greatest cartographical expedition, he maybe felt it was his due. He grew a voluminous beard and moustache, posed grumpily for the photographers who sought to immortalize him and died in 1866, leaving a name that would become associated with some of mountaineering’s greatest feats of endurance and that – perhaps appropriately for such a stickler to detail – has been mispronounced ever since.

  ACROSS THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS

  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1803–6)

  On 4 March 1801 Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States. The country he governed was not populous, containing some 5,300,000 inhabitants (a fifth of them slaves), but it was large, running down the Atlantic seaboard from the Great Lakes almost to the Gulf of Mexico, bounded on the west by the River Mississippi. Jefferson wanted to make it larger still – wanted, in fact, to create a nation that occupied as much of the continent as poss
ible. To the north his plans were blocked by the British, whose Canadian territories already stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To the south and west, however, there was scope for expansion. Acquiring the colony of Louisiana – an ill-defined territory stretching north from the Gulf of Mexico to the watersheds of the Mississippi and Missouri, owned theoretically by France – was a simple matter. Its distance from Europe, at a time when France was already planning further conquests, made its defence impracticable; and Napoleon had no qualms in selling it to the States, which he did in 1803 for the price of 60 million francs. A more difficult question was how to take the west.

  With the exception of California, the region between the Pacific and the Mississippi was virtually unexplored. Nobody knew who lived there, what the terrain was like, or how one might best approach it. Had the States been a developed nation, the problem might have been simpler. As it was, communications were poor even within the settled areas. Many rivers had neither bridges nor ferries. Roads were appalling, limited in number – there were only four across the whole range of the Appalachian Mountains – and in many places nonexistent. It took six weeks for a letter to make its way from the Mississippi to the Atlantic; for anything larger the journey was two months or more. Just traversing the known territory was so troublesome that one can only admire Jefferson’s foresight in insisting that the unknown areas west of the Mississippi be brought under US control.

  Central to his ambition – as with so many grand geographic plans of the time – was the prospect of finding a short-cut to the Far East. For centuries Europe had sent explorers in search of the North-West Passage, a seaway that was supposed to run through the Arctic. Jefferson, however, envisaged a freshwater solution. His inspiration came from the deeds of the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who had followed the river that now bears his name from Canada’s Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean, and in 1793 had found a pass through the Rockies that might serve as a trade route between east and west. Jefferson’s hope was that a waterway could be discovered between the Mississippi and the Rockies south of Canada, from where, if a portage like Mackenzie’s could be found, the US would have its own passage to the Pacific. In 1803 he sent his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to find it.

  For a president’s secretary Lewis was remarkably untutored. Born in 1774, he knew nothing about most branches of science and had to endure an apprenticeship with the Philosophical Society of America before he learned how to handle a sextant or make a map. Scholarship, however, was not high on Jefferson’s list of priorities. He needed a man with wilderness skills and the natural authority to take a party of adventurers safely to the coast and back. Lewis, who had military experience, possessed in Jefferson’s opinion ‘the firmness of constitution & character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods, & a familiarity with the Indian manners & character, requisite for this undertaking’. For his second-in-command Lewis chose an ex-army officer and friend named William Clark (accompanied by his black slave, York), and together the two men picked a select band of nine volunteers who were sworn into the army, two being given the rank of sergeant. The expedition would swell in number to 45, but these 12 men (including Lewis, Clark and York) were at its heart. The only ones considered worthy of trust, and the only ones allowed to carry firearms, they were dubbed the ‘Corps of Discovery’.

  The Corps left Clarksville on the Ohio River on 26 October 1803 aboard two pirogues, flat-bottomed but sturdy vessels that could sail into the wind, accompanied by a number of smaller canoes. They carried a swivel cannon, the latest US issue flintlock rifles – .54 calibre, muzzle-loading, with a 33-inch barrel, accurate to 100 yards, and capable of two shots per minute – plus numerous trade goods that included beads, knives, fishing gear and three dozen tomahawks made to Lewis’s specification by blacksmiths at the military depot of Harper’s Ferry. The same blacksmiths also constructed – again to Lewis’s design – the iron frame of a collapsible boat, nicknamed the Experiment, that he intended for use should they encounter a portage that was too great for the pirogues. Food was limited, for they expected to be able to collect provisions during the early stages and then shoot game as they went, but they took a good stock of medicines and all the surveying equipment necessary for charting their position in the wilderness. They also carried a list of queries from the American Philosophical Society regarding the Indians beyond the Mississippi. Some were sensible, some were not. What time did they get up? How fast were their pulses in the morning, midday and evening? Did they bathe, did they drink and did they sacrifice animals? Were they the lost tribe of Israel? (Lewis thought this far-fetched, favouring with Jefferson the theory that they were a lost tribe of Welshmen.)

  From Clarksville the expedition went down the Ohio to the Mississippi, where they travelled upstream and spent their first winter at Camp Wood, just north of St Louis at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri. From here, when the weather improved the following spring, they intended to follow the Missouri west to its source in the Rockies. They began their long journey on 21 May, their vessels laden with men, equipment, food (mostly flour, salt pork and corn), 120 gallons of whisky and the skeleton of Lewis’s boat, the Experiment. Four days later they passed La Charette, the last white settlement on the river, and thereafter they were on their own.

  On 26 June they arrived at the mouth of the Kansas, where they spent four days on the site of present-day Kansas City. Clark, even less tutored than Lewis, described the area as ‘verry fine’, albeit ‘the waters of the Kansas is verry disigreeably tasted to me’. Only 400 miles into their journey they were already suffering the effects of a poor, vegetable-free diet. On 17 June Clark had written, ‘The party is much afflicted with Boils and Several have the Decissentary, which I contribute to the water which is muddy’. On the 18th he added that several more ‘had the Disentary, and two thirds of them with ulsers or Boils, Some with 8 or 10 of those Turners’. The party was also showing signs of indiscipline. Two men were accused of stealing whisky, and another committed the crime of falling asleep on night watch. Lewis and Clark responded with severity: the drunkards received 100 and 50 lashes respectively; the lax sentinel got 100 lashes each day for four days.

  There was one overriding reason why keeping watch was so important: the expedition’s arsenal. If it should fall into the hands of the Indians it would disrupt the local balance of power and hinder the States’ future control of the region. But their precautions were wasted: the Indians were hunting buffalo on the plains, and it was not until 2 August that the expedition met the first of them. Lewis delivered a long speech, explaining that the French and the Spanish would soon be gone and that henceforth their ‘only father’ was the President of the United States. His harangue mixed promises of trade if they were good with threats of fire and brimstone if they were bad, and was followed by the distribution of one bottle of whisky, a few odds and ends, and medals bearing either the likeness of their new father or, more prosaically, the image of a comb. The gifts did not match Lewis’s description of the bounties that his country had to offer; nevertheless, as Clark noted, ‘These people express great Satisfaction at the Speech Delivered’.

  Less satisfactory, during the following weeks, was the state of the Corps. One man deserted on 4 August and was only brought back after a fortnight, whereupon he was stripped of his right to hold a firearm and was demoted to the status of hired help. He was also given a punishment of some 500 lashes, being forced to run the gauntlet four times, each member of the company giving him nine blows as he passed. Hardly had the deserter received his dues than a sergeant died of what Clark called ‘Bilose Chorlick’ but was probably a ruptured appendix. In the democratic spirit of their new country, Lewis did not appoint a replacement but invited the Corps to elect one. This they did on 22 August. Four days later another man vanished on a hunting expedition, not to be found, near starving, until 11 September. He had walked up the Missouri in search of the boats that were, in fact, downriver. His ammunition exhausted, he ha
d lived the last two weeks on a diet of grapes and plums.

  On 2 August they saw their first coyote; on the 23rd they killed their first buffalo; and on the 27th they met their first Sioux, a powerful Indian tribe that controlled the river and were notorious for barring access to white traders. Despite their warlike reputation, Lewis and Clark found the Sioux to be a fine, well-built people who were very happy to accept their medals and be presented with a US flag. That they were a particularly peaceful branch of the Sioux they did not know; nor did the Sioux realize that their acceptance of the flag implied some fealty to the distant white father whose face appeared on the medals. The two sides parted, content in their ignorance.

  By 16 September Lewis and Clark had discovered a number of animals new to science and were in an area of the plains where game abounded in quantities beyond their imagination. ‘This scenery already rich and pleasing’, Lewis wrote, ‘was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe deer Elk an antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exaggerate when I estimated the number of Buffaloes which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3000.’ Further on, the idyll disintegrated when they met a new tribe of Sioux whose temperament was not as placid as the first. When the expedition’s gifts proved insufficient they became threatening and tried to haul one of the pirogues ashore. Lewis loaded the cannon and was prepared to fire. The crisis was dispelled when the Sioux chieftain ordered his warriors away; but for the next two days relations between the two sides were uneasy. They parted on 29 September, after yet another stand-off involving the cannon and the pirogue, tempers hot but no blood having been shed.