Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It was a Herculean task, the Indian survey. This kind of triangulation is difficult enough
if you're mapping, say, Devonshire. It's almost inconceivable on a subcontinent of dense
monthsatatimeandyouhavetoconstantlyreplacethesurveyorskilledbymalaria.Where
there were no easily visible landmarks to sight to or from, rickety bamboo scaffolds would
be built, and many of the flagmen stationed atop them
fell to their deaths
.
James Rennell
,
the “father of Indian geography,” was almost killed on the Bhutanese border in 1776 when
his small party of sepoys was attacked by hundreds of Sannyassa fakirs, who had been
terrorizing local villages. Armed only with a cutlass, Rennell fought off two lines of the
bandits and crawled back to the British camp, bleeding copiously from at least five sword
wounds, one more than a foot long. The nearest doctor was three hundred miles away, but
Rennell somehow clung to life, though he was never the same after surviving the attack.
Even more remarkable is the story of
Nain Singh
, the Bhotian schoolteacher who spent the
better part of ten years exploring the Himalayan “roof of the world” for the British. Tibet
was closed to Westerners under penalty of death, but Singh was able to smuggle himself
acrosstheborderandcompletethefive-hundred-miletrektoLhasa,wherehemettheDalai
Lama himself. Singh's Buddhist prayer wheel concealed a hidden compartment for notes
and a compass; his rosary had been doctored so he could use the beads to count his paces.
At every place he stopped, he would secretly use his sextant to determine latitude and boil
a pot of water to measure altitude. Though he received only twenty rupees a month for his
pains, his measurements formed the basis for the only maps of Tibet available for the next
fifty years. In 1877, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its prestigious Victoria
Medal “for having added a greater amount to our positive knowledge of the map of Asia
than any individual of our time.”
†
Today, collectors might be the only people who can look at a map and still see the hero-
ism, the sacrifice—sometimes the lifeblood—that went into the drawing of its contours.
There's no better place than the Royal Geographical Society to consider the human face of
mapmaking. As I stand in the society's main hall, John Singer Sargent's portrait of Lord
Curzon, Asian explorer and viceroy of India, considers me coolly from its post above the
great marble fireplace. Behind me is an intricate scale model of the
Discovery,
one of the
last three-masted wooden ships ever built in Britain, which in 1901 took Scott and Shack-
leton to Antarctica, a continent from which, in the end, neither would return alive. To my
right is an odd oil painting of Richard Francis Burton, spotlit in the dark, huddled under a
blanket on a dirt floor. The setting might be a Mecca alley or a prison cell, but either way,
as Burton stares warily out at the viewer, he gives the impression that he'd rather be some-
where else entirely.
There's a funny disconnect between the rugged adventurers painted in oils here and the
meeklittlemenwalkingthroughthehallsandpokingthroughtheirmaps.ButthenIrecon-
