CHENNAI: From a spot on top of St Thomas Mount on April 10 began an epic 2,400 km journey that mapped the ends of the country. An expedition that criss-crossed hill and vale, traversed forest and harsh terrain, from Kanyakumari in the South to the Himalayas in the North. A journey that found that Peak XV with no known local name was the tallest in world, which earned them the right to name it after the the previous leader of the expedition, George Everest.
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And the Great Trigonometric Survey, that began in 1802, started right here in Chennai. The Great Arc, as it is called, is considered one of the greatest scientific achievements ever. Using a technique called triangulation, Colonel William Lambton embarked on what is arguably the largest exercise of manual land survey. Using just standard 100-metre metal chains, he fixed the first baseline of 7.5 miles (12.1 km) between St Thomas Mount and the Madras Observatory.
Using a third point (which point this was is a matter of debate even now), they determined the distances from both the baseline points to the third point, thereby forming a triangle. Then with one of the sides as the next baseline, he proceeded to map the next triangle, and so on.
Sir George Everest, who took over after Lambton in 1823, continued the journey, improvised on techniques, and pushed the expedition far north, all the way up to what we now know as Mount Everest. Setting up camp in obscurity, lugging around kilograms of equipment with natives, mulecarts and pack bulls and braving tough weather, the survey was a task that is mindboggling to historians and surveyors even today. “It is considered one of the six greatest achievements of that period,” says Madras chronicler S Muthaiah. “There were no roads, hardly any towns. The survey meant living away from civilisation for months on end.” The group travelled around, many with families, and the deaths on the path were said to have surpassed wars of 19th century India.
“The entire survey could have involved up to 40,000 people and the work claimed many lives,” says S S Ramakrishnan, Director, Institute of Remote Sensing, Anna University. He adds that the manpower for the survey came from students of the Survey School in Fort St George.
The life of the people at this time though, is largely left to our imagination. “An artist would often accompany the British for their expeditions, and would document the life at this time. But for this survey, we have no such visuals,” says D Hemachandra Rao, veteran civil engineer and Madras history enthusiast. They were believed to even take monkeys along in order to follow the paths the monkeys took, says Ramakrishnan.
After covering various districts of the south until 1823, Lambton died at the age of 70 in Hinganghat, Wardha when his dream was yet unfulfilled. Lambton’s task was taken over by Everest, who went at it for 23 years and became Surveyor General of India.
It’s unknown if Everest ever saw the peak that bears his name, but building on his techniques, his successor Andrew Waugh named ‘Peak XV’ in the Himalayas range. According to a research paper, Waugh is said to have written, “...here is a mountain most probably the highest in the world without any local name that I can discover...” and hence, he proposed “...to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of geographical research... Everest.”
(Inputs from Aditi R)