Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
ical Society in London and awarded a gold watch. A third expedition in
1873-75 took him back to Lhasa by a more northerly route than he had
adopted on his first journey. In 1877 the Royal Geographic Society be-
stowed a medal on him, and the governor of India gave him two villages.
Such rewards were very unusual for the Indian pundits. Usually, their
wages were low, and they received little in the way of recognition for their
accomplishments. Nevertheless, they produced much data that, when
brought back to the survey and correlated, led to accurate maps of a moun-
tainous, inaccessible, and previously uncharted part of the world. To appre-
ciate the daunting nature of their task, consider figure 7.12. As one modern-
day Indian writer has said, ''It is di≈cult to understand what drove them.''
Certainly many died, of disease or privation, or were executed, and yet
many returned with good data describing their assigned routes.
22
22. Quotation from Nagendra (1999, p. 14). The Great Trigonometric Survey and the
exploits of Nain Singh Rawat and the other pundits are well told in many accounts written
over the last 150 years—e.g., Hopkirk (1995), Keay (2000), and Nagendra (1999).
