Waters of the World

by Sarah Dry

  The success of the program and its weakness lay in the same fact: Knowing the climates of the earth in this way required an avalanche of data. Climatology, in the sense that Hann and then Köppen practiced it, was a science of the telegraph, the postal system, and the publishing house. It relied on an extensive system of measurements for compiling maps, and just as significantly on a system by which such maps could be printed and distributed. This climatological project motivated and absorbed an incredible amount of energy in the decades following its ripest definition.

  Despite its productivity, Hann was almost aggressive in setting out the limitations of climatology. He was self-consciously anti-theoretical in his claims for what climatology could do. “Climatology,” he cautioned, “is but a part of meteorology when the latter term is used in a broad sense.” Climatology, he clarified, was descriptive, while meteorology, which aimed to “explain the various atmospheric phenomena by known physical laws,” was theoretical. Nevertheless, the two fields were intimately related. Climatology was an essential part of meteorology, and what it lacked in explanatory power it made up for in its breadth. As a primarily visual science, it provided the means to build up a “mosaic-like picture of the different climates of the work.” This was a very orderly patchwork, in which facts were presented systematically. In this way, “order and uniformity are secured, the mutual interactions of the different climates are made clear, and climatology becomes a scientific branch of learning.” As Deborah Coen notes, this made climatology a science (at least potentially) of “complex wholes,” while meteorology concerned itself instead with reducing atmospheric phenomena to “simpler, theoretically tractable elements.”5

  Much was presumed in the elision here between Hann’s admission of the descriptive nature of climatology and his ambitious hope that it could become a true science.6 How exactly it would be possible to get from the compilation of average values of rainfall and temperature to a science of physical laws was left unclear. There was a deep tension in relation to the nature of change buried in the text of Hann’s Handbook. Change was essential to this transformation, but just how much change should be defined or investigated remained unclear. Hann included a final section on “Changes of Climate” in his handbook, in which he considered geological changes in climate, such as the ice ages, and the theories of Croll and others who tried to explain them. He also considered the search for shorter, so-called oscillations of climate that could be linked to sunspots. In both cases, however, Hann revealed his overriding commitment to the method of averaging, with its strong assumption of the explanatory validity of a period of stability. To generate an average, as Hann explained, required identifying a period of time across which the average would apply. Using this method, it was eminently possible to identify oscillations either above or below an average value. Change, in other words, was here understood in relation to some fixed period within which averages could be constructed.7

  Hann’s approach was predicated on a commitment to stability in the form of averages, but in practice it enabled him (and others) to identify climatic anomalies. It did so by establishing a rudimentary form of climate system. The statistical table, in this sense, was an inchoate climate model. By bringing together averaged weather data from distant parts of the planet, the table enabled Hann and others to search more easily for patterns within the numbers. Since those numbers corresponded to average weather values—what Hann had defined as climate—they enabled researchers to find connections between longer-term features of the atmosphere. To be sure, the process of averaging elided the dynamism that it was the business of meteorology to uncover and describe—what Hann called the “causes underlying the succession of atmospheric processes.”8 But Hann urged that attention be paid both to the averages and to the deviations from them. This was, Deborah Coen argues, part of a desire to forge a national Austrian identity out of a range of diverse climate zones. To do so required blending distinctive local settings into a harmonious imperial whole. Statistically speaking, this meant attending both to the deviations and to the average, the local and the global. In a real sense, it was the climate averages that made the deviations—and the dynamism they implied—more visible. As a result, and somewhat counterintuitively, Hann’s approach ultimately paved the way for a new kind of climatology focusing precisely on the variability within a climate system rather than the stability of individual climatological zones.9

  When Walker arrived in Simla to take up the post as Director-General of Indian Meteorological Observatories, he walked into precisely this uncertain space between the stability that averaged climate statistics generated and the variability those data could be used to search for. Whether the climate system was seen as inherently stable or inherently variable depended on the perspective of the person inspecting it. Prerequisite to either approach was the concept of a system itself. That system was a product of the Empire as surely as was Gilbert Walker, or the bales of wheat upon which so many depended for sustenance and for profit.

  * * *

  The challenge that faced India and, in particular, the British in India was really a set of challenges. When Walker arrived in 1903, the summer monsoon rains had failed in India for three of the past seven years, in 1896, 1899, and 1902. The brevity, and simplicity, of such a statement belies the grand scale of human suffering it unleashed.

  Millions had died. Of the things that were countable in the universe, the number of dead was not among them at that time, so it was impossible to know precisely how many. A Lancet article in 1901 put the number who had perished in the past five years at nineteen million, half the total population of the UK at the time and roughly eight percent of that of India.10 Crops had failed completely across areas totaling more than three times the size of the entire UK.

  This was not a natural disaster. The language of “failure” which was (and still is) used to describe the lack of monsoon rainfall in some years implies that the rains were to be expected every year. In fact, variable rainfall—including the complete absence of rain in some years—was a normal, rather than an abnormal, feature of the Indian climate. The monsoons had always come and gone, sometimes providing life-giving moisture, sometimes withholding it. Famines had accompanied such droughts in the past, but the number of deaths from starvation had increased dramatically during British rule. This reached a peak between 1876 and 1878, when some six to ten million had died (across both British and non-British territory).

  FIG. 4.3. An American tourist and an unidentified woman pose with a famine victim, India, 1900. Credit: John D. Whiting Collection/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.

  The British Empire was largely at fault for this harvest of death. In the process of imposing a cash economy on India, the British had dismantled traditional systems of mutual relief and grain storage that had allowed farmers to build up grain reserves during “fat” harvest years that could be drawn upon to make it through the lean years.11 In the name of productivity, the British had encouraged the destruction of countless individual safety nets. In their place, they had offered ready cash for this year’s crop and little else.

  In the midst of the famine, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Imperial pomp was blind to the suffering, willfully, even righteously so. Lord Lytton, poet and viceroy of India, proudly wore the mantle of Adam Smith, who had claimed, in relation to the Bengal famine of 1770, that famines were worsened by “improper” and violent government interventions. According to Smith, so-called “humanitarian hysterics” who insisted on sending money for famine relief were in fact contributing dangerously to the possible bankruptcy of India. The best thing to do was nothing. By letting the famine run its “natural” course as quickly as possible, a natural correction in the economic cycle would be effected and, like a series of frequent brushfires that prevent a catastrophic blaze, thereby limit the potential for the worst losses. Famines were in this sense natural events, in social and economic terms, a kind of built-in mechanis
m to keep the population of India in balance with its size, and, not incidentally, to keep grain prices high. Any attempt to limit the effects of famine, claimed Lytton to the Legislative Council in 1877, only added to the problems of overpopulation.12 In a brutal bit of human calculus, Lytton pointed out that since the overwhelming majority of those who died in the famines were poor, any policies that had the effect of saving their lives only increased the proportion of the population living in poverty. It might be better that the poor should die, was the unstated conclusion, than left to live lives which were subhuman.

  As visible as this failure of government was, British rulers went to great lengths to fail to see what was happening around them. In a state where ten percent of the population had perished from starvation, a glance from the window of the vice-regal train was sufficient to reassure Lord Elgin of the “prosperous appearance of the country even with the small amount of rain that has come lately.”13 Notwithstanding such heroic acts of self-deception, death on such a biblical scale demanded a response. Following the catastrophic loss of life in the so-called Great Famine of 1876–1878, a commission had been established to determine what steps could be taken to avoid such a disaster in the future. Experts in fields such as medicine, economics, and agriculture were consulted, and special regional famine laws, or codes, were written to ensure that aid would be delivered locally in a timely manner. The famine commissioners lamented the inadequacy of meteorology to the task at hand. Whatever clarity the future might bring about the “true periodical fluctuation” in the rainfall, it was painfully clear that contemporary scientific knowledge was sorely lacking as a basis for forecasting. Though famines were inevitable, the depressing truth was that “they will come upon us with very little warning and at very irregular intervals.”14 Forecasts had been issued for monsoons since the 1880s, but the decision was made to cancel them following their failure to predict the absent monsoon in 1901–1902. This decision disappointed many who felt the forecasts were useful even if they were not always accurate. One commentator in the Times of India argued that “in a country so essentially agricultural as India the myriad cultivators may not unreasonably ask why such help as the Meteorological Department may be capable of rendering to them . . . is suddenly to be denied.”15 Such requests fell on deaf ears, and instead the commissioners expressed the hope that other technologies of distance that had served the empire would now serve the people. The railroads and telegraph system that were normally used to regulate the flow of commerce—specifically the grain which was the greatest export crop of the Indian empire—would be used, in the case of future droughts, to deliver relief food where it was needed and, by evening out supply and demand, ensure that grain prices did not spike, as they had during the last famine.

  In the event, precisely the opposite happened. Trains were used to transport grain not to where it was needed by hungry people, but to where it could be sold for profit. Telegraphic news enabled speculators to corner the grain markets. Local charity was grossly inadequate to the task of caring for large populations of starving people. Desperate parents, unable to feed their children, sold them for pennies each, or, failing that, tried to give them away. One correspondent reported visiting an orphanage where he encountered children whose arms were no bigger than his thumb, and whose ribs showed through their skin “like a wire cage.”16

  * * *

  Such horrors formed the backdrop against which Walker took up his post on the first day of 1904. As desperate, and even absurd, as it may have seemed to recruit someone like Walker to achieve the seemingly hopeless, there were several reasons to think that Walker was in a better position than anyone ever had been to study and eventually be able to predict the rhythm of the monsoons. He’d been living with high expectations for most of his life. Prognostications of his promise dated back to a mythic mistake he’d made in school, when he’d bungled the declination of a Latin verb. The mathematics teacher who took him in after his subsequent banishment from the classics could not stop marveling at what Walker was able to do, mathematically speaking, with very little effort.

  From the age of seventeen, there is evidence that he loved anything that was spinning or turning. A gyroscope he made with his own hands won him a prize in school, and more notice. At Cambridge, he studied applied mathematics with the leaders in the field, J. J. Thomson and G. H. Darwin. In his spare time, he threw a boomerang on the wide green lawns that rolled down to the river from the backs of the great colleges. “Boomerang” Walker could make the curved piece of wood fly far away before it made an improbable, arcing turn and came to roost once more in his hands. It was a noticeable eccentricity at a time when most young men put their bodies to the test in the mosquito-thin rowing boats on the Cam.

  Mostly, he devoted himself to mathematics, and in particular to mathematical physics—the study of how objects (those boomerangs) moved through abstract, geometrical space—which formed the backbone of the Cambridge program. In a sense, he pulled it off. At the end of three years of study, he’d not only taken the notoriously difficult Mathematical Tripos exams but come first, living up to the promise that so many—his schoolteachers, his tutors, his coaches, and his parents—had laid a claim to. But the achievement had taken a serious toll on him. He had what was delicately referred to as a “breakdown” in his health, necessitating removal from the location where he’d reached debilitating heights. Three winters at a sanatorium in Switzerland were required to smooth out the mental kinks, the places deep inside him where tension, a necessary quality if one was to marshal numbers at the heights he’d scaled, had become crippling.17

  John Hopkinson, a fellow Cambridge mathematician turned engineer, had once said that “Mathematics is a very good tool but a very bad master.”18 By the time Walker arrived in India, he’d learned for himself what that meant. Mathematics alone was unwieldy, dangerously consuming, while being simultaneously useless. Boomerangs and their reassuring returns were not enough to salve the hurts that mathematical intensity inflicted on him. In Switzerland, he found succor in ice-skating. The lack of friction, the cold air, and the clear skies rinsed his mind. The arcing boomerang found its echo in the curve of his skates on the ice. Inside his mind, some reciprocal curve began to grow, rebuilding the parts of him that had been broken by too much study, too much mental tension. He skated his way through, and eventually out of, his breakdown. He spent several years back in Cambridge as a college lecturer, seeking suitable material with which to ballast his flightier tendencies, something weighty enough to keep him from flying off into a mathematical abyss. Electrodynamics, and a problem suggested to him by a senior mathematician, kept him tethered for a while.

  That time ended when, aged just thirty-five, he was recruited to be the new head of meteorological observatories in India and to join the cadre of scientific professionals who populated a thin but growing strata in the great laminated system that was the British Raj. Those who had come before him in the meteorological field had tried, in their way, to master the weather from the ground up, with maps of storm systems and theories about the effect of snowfall in the Himalayas on next year’s monsoon. But the conclusion to which they’d come was that the connections between aspects of the weather that mattered most to India were too complex to reveal themselves to even the most intuitive and insightful of scientists. In the past, the basis of meteorology had always been physical. Scientists had always tried to picture things visually, to imagine the way different masses of air might interact to push and pull each other around the ocean of air that was the atmosphere (to say nothing of the masses of moving energy in the ocean itself). They had failed, and now they hoped that someone like Walker, for whom numbers acted like a lever with which to pry open otherwise closed systems, could do the same for India. On hearing news of Walker’s appointment, Cleveland Abbe wrote to congratulate him and expressed his hope that “by suggesting a new class of problems, your thoughts may be centred on dynamic meteorology, to the great advantage of this d
ifficult branch of science.”19

  As it happened, opening up India to Walker’s penetrating gaze was no different than offering him the world.

  * * *

  By 1904, both the British Empire and the discipline of meteorology were edging toward the farthest boundaries of the planet—they were nearly, if not yet completely, global in extent. The British Empire was close to its peak of influence and power, when it encompassed nearly a quarter of the earth’s landmass and a fifth of her population. In India, its largest colony by far, the British controlled an area of some 1.5 million square miles, ten times the size of Britain itself. This kind of lopsided rule was inherently precarious, as the bloody Mutiny of 1857 had shown.

  The challenges the Empire and meteorology faced were remarkably similar. Both sought to understand and control a set of unruly phenomena unfolding in locations that were often remote from the offices where calculation and coordination occurred. The notion of imperial meteorology, championed by Nature editor Norman Lockyer, was, therefore, something of a redundancy. Empire was meteorology, and meteorology was empire. To put it more practically, as India’s finance minister Guy Fleetwood Wilson memorably did in 1909, the “budget of India is a gamble in rain.”

  Only with the leveraging power of certain technologies was British rule in India even thinkable. Much has been made of the importance of railways, telegraphs, and steamships in drawing the Empire together across time and space. Just as essential but often overlooked were the tools of bureaucracy itself. These took the form of central offices where information could be gathered, sorted, and acted upon. Such offices were the nodes of the great imperial network. They reached their apotheosis in London, but were necessarily to be found also in Calcutta, in Simla, and in remote field stations from which telegraphic messages were sent and received. In these small and well-organized spaces, a few workers with the ability to move information around with as little friction as possible could contribute to the governing of millions of subjects of the crown.