1110 REPORT—1880. 
Lord Macartney’s Embassy to the Emperor of China, as gifts for presentation to 
that potentate, who unfortunately did not appreciate their value and declined to 
accept them; they were then made over to Dr. Dinwiddie, the astronomer to the 
embassy, who took them to India for sale. The theodolite was constructed in 
England for Lambton, on the medel of one in use on the Ordnance Survey; on its 
passage to India it was captured by the French frigate, the Piemontaise, and 
landed at Mauritius, but eventually it was forwarded to its destination by the 
chivalrous French Governor, De Caen, with a complimentary letter to the Governor 
of Madras. 
Lambton was assisted for a short time by Captain Kater, whose name is now 
best known in connection with pendulum experiments and the employment of the 
seconds’ pendulum as a standard of length; but for many years afterwards he had 
no officer to assist him. At first he met with much opposition from advocates of 
the discarded astronomical method, who insisted on its being sufficiently accurate 
and more economical than the trigonometrical. But he was warmly supported by 
Maskelyne, the Astronomer-Royal in England ; and he soon had an opportunity of 
demonstrating the astronomical method to be fallacious, for its determination of the: 
breadth of the peninsula in the latitude of Madras was proved by the triangulation 
to be forty miles in error. Still, for several years he never received a word of 
sympathy, encouragement, or advice either from the Government or from the Royal 
Society. A foreign nation was the first to recognise the importance of his services 
to science, the French Institute electing him a corresponding member in 1817. 
After this, honours and applause quickly followed from his own countrymen. In 
1818 the then Governor-General of India—the Marquis of Hastings—decided that 
the survey should be withdrawn from the supervision of a local government and 
placed under the Supreme Government, with a view to its extension over all 
India, remarking at the same time that he was ‘not unaware that with minds. 
of a certain order he might lay himself open to the idle imputation of vainly 
seeking to partake the gale of public favour and applause which the labours of 
Colonel Lambton had recently attracted;’ but as the survey had reached the 
northern limits of the Madras Presidency, its transfer to the Supreme Government, 
if it was to be further extended, had become a necessity. He directed the transfer to 
be made, and the survey to be called in future the Great Trigonometrical Survey of 
India. Noticing that the intense mental and bodily labour of conducting it was being 
performed by Lambton alone, that his rank and advancing age demanded some 
relief from such severe fatigue, and farther, that it was not right that an undertaking 
of such importance should hang on the life of a single individual, the Goyernor- 
General appointed two officers to assist him—Captain Everest, as chief assistant in 
the geodetic operations; and Dr. Voysey, as surgeon and geologist. Five years 
afterwards Lambton died, at the age of 70. The happy possessor of an unusually 
robust and energetic constitution and a genial temperament, he seems to have 
scarcely known a day's illness, though he never spared himself nor shrank from 
subjecting himself to privations and exposure which even Everest thought reckless: 
and unjustifiable. These he accepted as a matter of course, saying little about 
them, and devoting his life calmly and unostentatiously to the interests of science 
and the service of his country. 
Everest’s career in the survey commenced disastrously. He was deputed by 
Lambton to carry a triangulation from Hydrabad, in the Nizam’s territory, eas‘— 
wards to the coast, crossing the forest-clad and fever-haunted basin of the Godavery 
river, a region which he described as ‘a dreadful wilderness, than which no part 
of the earth was more dreary, desolate, and fatal.’ Indignant at being taken there, 
his escort, a detachment of the Nizam’s troops, mutinied, and soon afterwards he 
and his assistants, and almost all the men of his native establishment, were stricken 
down by a malignant fever; many died on the spot, and the survivors had to be 
carried into Hydrabad, whence litters and vehicles of all descriptions, and the 
whole of the public elephants, were despatched to their succour. To recover his 
health Everest was compelled to leave India for a while and proceed to the Cape 
of Good Hope, where he remained for three years. He availed himself of the 
opportunity to inspect Lacaille’s meridional arc, which, when compared with the 
