Journeying into the great unknown

Modest areas of terra incognita could still be found on the world map only a century ago and a host of gentleman explorers had a ball filling in the blanks

- Robin Ashcroft

BY THE early years of the 20th century much of the world had been explored but there remained places on the map where 'unmapped' appeared and, while terra incognita was reducing, there were still geographical mysteries. None of these quandaries were more present than in the Himalaya. Britain had an interest in the geography of the Greater Ranges, just beyond British India. Frederick Bailey was one of the last Great Gamers and this soldier turned intelligence-officer-cum-explorer was keen to resolve one of the unknowns: the source of the Brahmaputra. In 1913, he invited Henry Morshead, a young Royal Engineers officer and cartographer, to help clarify this quandary on an unauthorised expedition.

The Brahmaputra is one of the great rivers of the Indian subcontinent and the world. It emerges from the southern slopes of the Himalaya but from where it came nobody had a clue until the end of the 19th century. Even then it was thought to be the lower Yarlung Tsangpo but it still had to be walked, never mind mapped. What was especially confusing was how quickly it dropped, from an altitude of 9,000 feet to 1,000 feet in a space of 100 miles.

Covering somewhere in the region of 1,700 miles over six months, and despite losing key equipment for the plane-table survey [see box, page 88], with Morshead 'swearing gently each time he remembered the loss of his sight-rule', they were conclusively able to prove that it was the Tsangpo that became the Brahmaputra. In doing so, the pair also discovered the world's deepest gorge, which accommodates the river's massive height loss.