Sir GEORGE EVEREST, CB, FRS, FRAS, FRGS
4th July, 1790
George Everest was born somewhere. Everyone’s born somewhere, but exactly where the man the mountain was named after was born isn’t certain. He was baptized in Greenwich, London in January 1791, so he was either born there, or at the family’s estate in Crickhowell, Brecknockshire, making him, like everyone good in this world, Welsh.
He was a freemason, a Companion of the Order of the Bath (it’s something about ritual cleansing and the monarch, don’t ask), a Fellow of the Royal Society like Newton, Einstein, Rutherford, Hawking and… umm…. Elon Musk, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a bastard.
Or was he?
The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was begun in 1802 under the control of that bastion of colonial jackbootery, The East India Company and Everest joined it in 1818. The plan was to produce an incredibly accurate geographical survey of the entire sub-continent so that the British would have a more accurate representation of everything they had stolen from the locals.
Managing to not die of malaria, Everest worked his way up to becoming the Surveyor General of India, even though the Indians didn’t know they needed anything surveying and had managed just fine for several thousand years without one.
George spent most of the time stuck behind a desk instead of outside manipulating his theodolite and grew increasingly bored and unhappy, especially when the East India Company appointed a chap called Jervis as his successor.
Jervis spent the time before taking over from Everest talking shit about him back in London, prompting Everest to write a series of open letters to Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex and 9th child of George III, the president of the Royal Society, telling them to essentially mind their own fucking business.
In the end, Everest got his way and his protégé Andrew Scott Waugh was appointed in his place. George retired and returned to England where, apart from a trip aboard the maiden voyage of the SS Great Britain, the first ship with a propeller to cross the Atlantic, he kicked about doing whatever it is retired colonial officers do in their spare time. Shoot elephants or something. Assuming there are elephants in Hyde Park in London, where he died in 1863.
It was Andrew Scott Waugh then who made the recorded formal observations of the mountain that the British then knew only as Peak ‘B’ or later Peak XV. To work out how tall it was, he called upon the services of the man who had recently been promoted to the position of Chief Computer (no, really) and a superintendent of the Meteorological Department, a brilliant Indian mathematician by the name of Radhanath Sikdar.
Radhanath Sikdar made six observations of Peak B and measured it to exactly 29,000ft (8839m), to which Waugh added an arbitrary 2ft because he didn’t think anyone would believe that it was exactly 29,000ft.
Waugh announced the findings to the Royal Geographical Society who had decided, largely on the basis that they were British and therefore correct, that they were the arbiter of such things. In doing so, he proposed that the mountain be named after his illustrious predecessor, George Everest, because the mountain appeared to have no local name.
It did, of course, have a local name, although to be fair to Waugh, he wasn’t really to know this. The peak was so deep into the Himalayan range that the Indian population didn’t appear to have any name for it at all and at that time, the British (and indeed, nobody) had any access to Nepal or Tibet to know what they called it.
They called it several things; Sagarmāthā in Sanskrit, meaning ‘goddess of the sky’, or Qomolangma (holy mother). It appeared on a French map of 1733 as Tchoumour Lancma.
Back in Britain, other names were proposed, such as "Deva-dhunga" or "Gaurisankar", before the Royal Geographical Society, after much deliberation it must be said, finally decided on ‘Everest’ because it was easier to spell and, anyway, if the locals didn’t like it, someone could just shoot them until everyone agreed that the British were right all along.
George Everest himself objected to the name, pointing out quite correctly that he had nothing to do with the mountain and had not even seen it. Plus, he was certain that the locals did have a perfectly serviceable name for it, even though they didn’t know what it was. He also reminded them that ‘Everest’ isn’t a local name at all and people wouldn’t have any idea what it meant, and that it was difficult to write the name in Hindi.
So, although the mountain (which has now grown to 29,031.7ft or 8848.86m) is still known as ‘Mount Everest’ in the English-speaking world, the man who it was named after neither wanted it to be named after him, nor ever even saw the bloody thing. A textbook reminder of colonial bastardry.
And, just as an aside, Sir George pronounced his name Eve-rest, so you’ve been saying it wrong all these years, too.