Map of a Nation (42 page)

But one particular peak proved too much even for Colby. The Inaccessible Pinnacle that marks the summit of the mountain of Sgurr Dearg in the Cuillins, on the Isle of Skye, is a flat, slippery fin of basalt rock and is only possible for experienced climbers – it presents a notorious challenge for Munro-baggers. Having neglected to bring ladders or ropes, Colby
nevertheless
tried to reach the summit, but was ‘completely foiled in the attempt’.
Indeed, Dawson commented, this was ‘probably the only instance in which Captain Colby was ever so foiled’. We can imagine the map-maker’s compact body making its way a few feet up the rock, before his hand lost its grip and he slithered back down. The surveyors were left ‘admiring for a while the magnificence of the prospect, and the dreary and all but chaotic scene around us’, before returning ‘to our inn, gratified above measure with what we had seen, though disconcerted with our professional failure’.

There were consolations for the interminably hard work of the Ordnance Survey in Scotland. Sometimes the clouds ‘would break away or subside into the valleys, leaving the tips of the mountains clear and bright above an ocean of mist, and the atmosphere calm and steady, so as to admit of the observations for which the party had waited days and weeks’. And working for Colby was an exhilarating and rewarding experience. He took the
engineers
under his command seriously, and spent time and effort imparting ‘a knowledge of Ramsden’s great three-foot theodolite, and of its adjustments, and also of the mode of working and entering the computations; explaining still further the position and names of the principal mountains and
trigonometrical
stations within the range of observation’.

Colby pushed those under his command to their mental and physical limits, and in return they loved him and grew proud of themselves. On the first day of a triangulation excursion, after a thirteen-mile trek on foot in the morning, Colby informed Dawson that ‘Garviemore Inn, distant eighteen miles by the road, was to be our next stage’. ‘I really thought it was more than I could possibly accomplish that day,’ Dawson recalled, ‘but Captain Colby said it was not.’ After persuading Dawson of his own ability, Colby added a deviation to their route, over ‘a rough boggy tract of country’, to build a cairn at the top of a nearby 3500-foot mountain. This extended the thirty-one-mile expedition by another nine miles. The ailing Dawson asked to walk along the road, but Colby refused and Dawson recorded: ‘I had no alternative but to make the attempt, feeling sure that I should eventually be left upon the ground or carried home upon the men’s shoulders.’ But, he concluded happily, Colby ‘was right. I kept pace with him throughout the remainder of the day, and arrived at the inn at half-past eleven o’clock at night, much more fresh than at the end of our first stage the day before.’

Undoubtedly a slave-driver, Thomas Colby also knew when to relent and allow his team to revel in their achievements. At the end of a surveying season of nearly four months’ duration in Scotland, he gave his map-makers ‘
carte blanc
[h
]e
to provide themselves with a farewell feast’. Dawson explained that ‘the chief dish on such occasion was an enormous plum-pudding’. Consisting of one pound each of raisins, currants, suet and flour,

When the giant pudding was ready, ‘a long table was spread in three of the marquees’ with ‘seats being placed also for Colby’. All the map-makers and assistants ‘partook of the pudding, which was excellent’, and toasted ‘
Success
to the Trig
’.

The press enthusiastically followed Colby and his team’s extraordinary endeavour. On 6 July 1815 the
Caledonian
Mercury
explained the function and appearance of trig points to a bewildered readership: ‘In the course of this very important survey, the points from which the different angles are set off, are marked on the tops of the most prominent hills, by the erection of a pillar of loose stones, staves, or other objects, upon their summits, by which their position and distances from each other, and their height above the level of the sea, are ascertained with the greatest precision.’ The journalist sought to persuade his readers of ‘the obvious utility of preserving these marks’ and ‘to intreat that landowners will particularly call the attention of their tenants to the subject, and instruct them to give the necessary orders to their servants’. The Ordnance Survey was gradually being embraced as part of the national heritage.

 

A
FTER THE
O
RDNANCE
S
URVEY’S
meridian arc measurement through Scotland had been completed, William Mudge received a letter from the French Catalan mathematician François Jean Dominique Arago. By the age of thirty-three, Arago had already been elected an astronomer in the Paris Observatory, a member of the Académie des Sciences, a Commissioner on the Bureau des Longitudes (the French counterpart to the Board of Longitude) and the Chair of Analytical Geometry at the École Polytechnique (and he would even become France’s head of state, briefly, in 1848).

In October 1816 Arago wrote to Mudge to propose that the meridian arc that the French geodesists Méchain and Delambre had measured through France and Spain, as part of the project to devise the ‘metre’ unit of
measurement
, should now be extended into Britain, to Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. ‘This operation,’ he wrote, referring to the metre project, is ‘equally remarkable for its extent, for its object, and for its precision.’ An extension to Great Yarmouth would ‘have the more precious advantage of belonging equally to England as to France, and would become one day perhaps the basis of a uniform system of weights and measures’ throughout the world: the metric system. Within nine months, Arago’s proposition had become even more ambitious. He was excited by the knowledge that the Ordnance Survey had already triangulated to the north of Scotland and eagerly
suggested
extending the French arc all the way to the Shetland Islands. This was a massive two degrees of latitude further north than the triangulation had thus far extended. Arago felt that ‘it was natural to wish that’ the Ordnance Survey’s meridian arc ‘should be joined to that of France’, and he wrote
persuasively
to Mudge that the completion of such a project would contribute ‘all the data required for a correct knowledge of a portion of the earth on which we live. And surely,’ he added meaningfully, ‘to study the earth is far better than to devastate it by conquests, however brilliant and glorious they may appear.’ In the wake of the defeat of Napoleon’s armies at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Arago’s words were highly charged.

In spring 1817 the Shetland Islands extension got under way. But Mudge was daunted and gloomy. ‘I am overwhelmed with business,’ he noted, and described how nevertheless ‘[I am] going again to turn myself to the stars. 26 years ago I commenced my career with a strong constitution, and with a
good supply of bodily health, but I am now perhaps going to close my
campaigning
service with the performance of as arduous a task as can be given to the execution of any man.’ Now fifty-five, Mudge had become depressed by the relentless burden of the Ordnance Survey; after a series of colleagues’ deaths, the grim reaper was on his mind and he wrote: ‘really I think hereafter the Corps of Engineers should be looked upon as belonging to
Undertakers
as well as to Carpenters and Joiners, and have the Death’s Head and bones upon their Buttons by way of a
Memento
Mori
’. He had come to depend on Colby entirely; when Colby was absent from the Ordnance Survey’s
headquarters
at the Tower, Mudge wrote frequent plaintive letters, informing his young assistant that ‘you are very much wanted’ and ‘I beg you will
immediately
close your operations and return to London.’ But despite Mudge’s gloom, newspapers were enthusiastic about the Shetlands extension and
The Times
was overjoyed that ‘these joint [Anglo-French] processes, conducted at so high a latitude, may be expected to throw considerable light upon that curious class of problems which regard the figure of the earth’.

In May the French director of the Shetlands extension arrived in Dover. Jean-Baptiste Biot was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician and even an early balloonatic, with large, kindly eyes and a smile that veered from
hangdog
to playful. Officially exempted from the tedious rigamarole of Customs, Biot was soon in London being wined and dined by the President of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, now seventy-four and wheelchair-bound from gout. ‘No man Could have been more Kindly Received than he was,’ Banks later wrote, ‘nor did any man I Ever saw appear more sensible of & Penetrated by the universal good Reception he met with.’ Mudge, too, appeared to like Biot, although he remained preoccupied by his own health and the risks posed by a surveying season in Britain’s most brutal climate. ‘What may be in the womb of time, who can tell?’ Mudge wrote, pensively. ‘I think this will be the wind up of all my campaigns.’ But, he added
semi-optimistically
, ‘it is a very great pleasure to me to think that the wind up will be respectable’.

Soon after his arrival, Mudge escorted Biot and his wide array of
instruments
and belongings up to Edinburgh by coach. The journey was clearly something of a struggle. ‘I have been travelling in a chaise with M[onsieur]
Biot,’ Mudge recorded, ‘who speaks English as imperfectly as I do French.’ At first Mudge found the excursion a chore. While waiting for his French collaborator to finish some observations at Leith, he wrote to Colby: ‘I am chained up here something like a wild beast against my will.’ Nevertheless, he found Biot ‘a very able man and a very diligent observer’ and he soon cheered up when his own great friend, the mathematician Olinthus Gregory, joined him in Scotland to witness the momentous Shetlands measurement. Mudge had recently been granted an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University and he took the opportunity to collect this accolade, which pleased him greatly. ‘If I choose to sink the Colonel, there will be another Doctor Mudge,’ he quipped, referring to his late father Doctor John Mudge. ‘Joking however on this point out of the question,’ he continued more solemnly, ‘this mark of respect from such a University, is a matter extremely pleasing to my feelings.’ Biot was also happy in Edinburgh. The French geodesist found the Scottish army officers who were assisting his
astronomical
observations helpful and courteous. ‘If my observations were bad, I had no excuse,’ Biot assured his colleagues back home in France.

But soon everything began to go wrong. Before setting foot in the Shetlands, Mudge’s vitality rapidly began to fail, as he had feared. ‘The state of his health made it impossible that he should go further north,’ Biot explained to a colleague. Defeated and dejected, Mudge retreated back to London. To fill his place, Mudge sent his eldest son, Richard Zachariah, a ‘very tall and personable’ 28-year-old army officer who was already working for the Ordnance Survey. Richard Mudge was ‘a very good Frenchman’ (in his proud father’s words) and he proved an instant hit with Biot, who found him to be ‘a young officer full of zeal’. But Richard also brought with him Thomas Colby. From the off, Colby and the French geodesist regarded one another with deep distrust and dislike.