Andrew Davies mapping the mountains
© National Library of Scotland
were published, marking completion of the project. Today, these maps reflect the fact that the surveyors were ill-equipped to map mountains in detail, but at the time the one hundred and eighty sheets of France produced at a scale of 1:86,400, were unrivalled in their completeness and cartographic precision.
Neither was the importance of accurate maps lost on the military. In Britain, the first detailed maps that appeared were not in the metropolitan south, but in the Highlands of Scotland. In 1746, after finally quashing a number of armed rebellions against the British monarchy which had broken out in the mountainous north over preceding decades, it was decided to carry out a detailed survey of the Highlands. The man in charge was a young surveyor called William Roy and with teams of surveyors in the field and cartographic draughtsmen in the office, he succeeded in mapping the whole of Scotland by 1755. 10 years later, William Roy rose to become the Surveyor General of Great Britain and helped found Britain’ s national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey.
By 1800, triangulation had been adopted by most European nations for mapping. Perhaps the most ambitious triangulation project of the era however, was the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, carried out in British-held India. Starting in 1802, over a period of five decades, the project worked its way from the southernmost tip of the sub-continent north to the Himalayas, a distance of over 2,900 kilometres. In 1849, after painstaking measurements from locations in the Himalayan foothills, a mountain labelled Peak XV was calculated as being over 29,000 feet( 8,800 metres) and thus deemed to be the highest peak in the Himalaya. Peak XV was later named in recognition of the head of the Survey, George Everest.
The first maps of the Himalaya appeared in the 1860s, more specifically, in the Karakorum, in the north-western extremity of British-held India, where K2( 8,611m) was identified as the highest
peak. It is worth noting that the heights scaled by the surveyors were at altitudes far in excess of those in the Alps. The British were also eager to map what lay in hostile, forbidden lands beyond the Himalaya, such as Tibet, which was a complete blank on the map. Instead of sending their own surveyors into these uncharted tracts, who would have most probably faced death, they recruited locals who were trained in route surveying. They would travel the unknown byways of Central Asia in disguise, equipped with hidden instrumentation, counting their steps and taking measurements, before eventually coming back with the essential data for mapping: these explorers, known as the‘ Pundits’, were essentially secret agents acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power. Perhaps the most famous of these was Kishen Singh, who between 1878 and 1882, clocked up 4,500 kilometres, mapping huge unknown tracts of land in Tibet, Mongolia and China under the most impoverished conditions. His feats were as creditable, if not more so, than contemporary European explorers who were subject to much less inhospitable circumstances.
Meanwhile, the nascent sport of mountaineering was creating a need for reliable maps of the Alps in the mid-19th century. At the time, high mountain mapping was still an imperfect science, as the deficiencies of the 1770’ s maps of the French Alps had shown. The Carte d’ État Major( 1820-1866) aimed at improving on these and surveyors were sent to the Pyrenees and the Alps to render the mountains more faithfully. When the famous English climber, Edward Whymper, arrived on a peak-bagging mission in the Les Écrins massif in 1861, he was astounded to find a stone shelter on the summit of Mont Pelvoux( 3946m). It had been built by Captain Adrien Durand, a surveyor responsible for carrying out triangulation for the Carte d’ État Major. During his work on the project, it is estimated he climbed no fewer than forty peaks over 2500 metres and five over 3,000 metres and many of them, including his scaling of Mont Pelvoux in 1828, were first ascents, decades before mountaineering became mainstream.
In terms of accuracy, the Carte d’ État Major map of Les Écrins at a scale of 1:80,000( which only appeared in 1866) was matched, even outstripped, by the smaller scale 1:100,000 Dufour map of Switzerland, created between 1845 and 1865. General Henri-Guillaume Dufour, in charge of the project, first established a triangulation network, which for the first time joined areas to the north of the Alps with those to the south and served as the reference system for the‘ Dufour Map’. The resulting map was especially significant for its innovative depiction of mountain relief, using a technique known as oblique-light hachuring, a form of shading which gave the landscape a distinct three-dimensional impression. The Dufour Map became an icon of Swiss ingenuity and in 1863 the Swiss Federal Council rechristened the highest point of Monte Rosa, also the highest point in Switzerland, the Dufourspitze( 4634m).
Even so, contemporary maps, though increasingly accurate, were not always suitable for mountaineering purposes. Not least, the scales were too small and in the latter half of the 19th century, the newly forged Alpine clubs made mapping one of their priorities, producing ad hoc maps of popular mountain ranges, such as Mont Blanc, Les Écrins or the Gross Glockner. The German and Austrian Alpine Clubs, which amalgamated in 1874 were amongst the first to cover a wider range of regions and by the turn of the century they were producing maps of the main mountain ranges in the
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