The Great Arc Read Online Free PDF

recalled John Warren, an old friend. ‘Some peculiarity of manner adhered to him from having lived so long out of the world. His face wanted expression, and the old accident gave a cast to his eye.’ The ‘old accident’ had occurred while observing a solar eclipse in Canada. Omitting the elementary precaution of attaching a smoked glass to his telescope, Lambton had partially lost the use of his left eye. The result was a slightly glazed expression and a heightened concern for any subordinate using such instruments under his direction.
    Despite these peculiarities, Arthur Wellesley was impressed by Lambton’s abilities. He asked others to corroborate them and, when their ship reached Madras, he invited Lambton to share his residence. Whatever thirteen years in the wilderness had done to the man’s social skills, they had not been wasted professionally. Lambton had somehow acquired a familiarity with higher mathematics, mechanics and astronomy which would have been impressive in London, let alone India. On arrival in Calcutta he had contributed a paper, full of the most awesome mathematical equations, to Asiatick Researches , India’s leading academic publication. Invitingly titled ‘Observations on the Theory of Walls’, it demonstrated that for any fortifying wall there was an optimum depth of foundation which it was mathematically pointless to exceed. Such knowledge, although of limited use at a time when the British in India had taken the offensive, convinced Colonel Wellesley that Lambton was far from being the dolt he appeared. Lambton continued to regret that the Colonel never spoke to him. Perhaps Wellesley was anxious not to betray his scientific ignorance. But clearly he valued Lambton’s company and would soon prove a useful patron.
    Lambton’s opportunity came courtesy of the war with Mysore which finally got underway in 1799. At the time the British had been established at Madras for more than 150 years. Merchants of the English East India Company had beenbuying cotton textiles from this part of peninsular India since the early seventeenth century and took great pride in the fort, and now city, which they had founded at Madraspatnam in 1640. But it was not until a century later, when wars in Europe had embroiled them with their French rivals based at nearby Pondicherry, that the British had begun to take an interest in Indian territory as opposed to trade. By then there were numerous other British, or rather East India Company, trading settlements around the coasts of India, and it was in fact from one of these, Calcutta, that the first move towards an Indian dominion had been made.
    Between 1756 and 1766 Company men in Calcutta deployed troops intended for another war with their French rivals to overthrow the local Nawab and establish a claim to the revenues of Bengal. One of the largest and richest provinces in all India, Bengal comprised the modern Bangladesh plus the neighbouring Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It was from northern Bihar’s border with Nepal that British officials first glimpsed the sawtooth profile of the high Himalayas, and it was from this substantial Bengal bridgehead that British forces in northern India would begin their inexorable march up the Gangetic plain towards the old Mughal capital of Delhi.
    Meanwhile Madras in the south and Bombay in the west had remained separately governed ‘Presidencies’ (because each had its own British ‘President’, or Governor). Still dedicated to the ancient imperatives of trade, they were much more vulnerable to attack than Bengal, whose officials increasingly regarded them as political liabilities, a feeling which was intensified when in the 1770s Calcutta was named the capital of British India and its Governor was appointed Governor-General over all the British holdings in India.
    At the time Madras, although relieved of the French challenge from Pondicherry, confronted an Indian challenge from the expansive ambitions