Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/18

x such imperfect criticism of fragmentary sources as we have indicated. Almost the only scientific inroad on this immense territory, and that but trifling in its extent though high indeed in interest, was the excursion of Lieut. John Wood of the Indian Navy to the Great Pamir, in the winter of 1838. The scientific exploration and surveys of the Russians were indeed slowly though surely advancing the march of accurate knowledge from the north; but it was confined within the limits, vast indeed, of their own territory, and touched the Thian Shan only near the western extremity of that mountain region.

With ourselves, exploration, in any extensive sense, beyond our Indian frontier had almost ceased for a great many years after the calamities of Kabul; the only notable exceptions that I can call to mind being the advance of that accomplished botanist Dr. T. Thomson to the Karakorum Pass, and the journey of his colleague Capt. Henry Strachey, of the Bengal Army, across the western angle of Tibet Proper, from Ladak to Kumaon, in 1846. But like the Russians on their side, our survey officers had been gradually mastering the ground up to the limits of the states actually held by our feudatory the Maharaja of Jamu and Kashmir, and to those of the small Tibetan provinces near the Sutlej which fell to us as part of the Sikh dominions at the end of the first Punjab war. And so on both sides a base was secured for ulterior raids upon the Terra Incognita.

This Incognita was not indeed unknown in the sense in which Southern Central Africa was unknown before David Livingstone's first journey; such sources as those to which we have referred above gave some general idea of what the region contained. But even where the Jesuit surveyors left maps, they had left, so far as we know, no narrative or description of the regions in question. And of Tibet in particular we had so little accurate knowledge that the latitude of its capital, the 'Eternal Sanctuary,' the Vatican and holy city of half Asia, was uncertain almost to the extent of sixty minutes.