The secret, political mission behind a woman pioneer’s exploration of the Himalayas

In November 1869, as the rains ended in Darjeeling, Nina Mazuchelli set out with her husband, a friend she called C and a team of nearly 90 coolies towards the eastern Himalayas, or as she called them, “the Indian Alps”.

It was an arduous journey that took them through steep mountain crossings, narrow gorges and treacherous ravines. Uncertainty could stalk them anytime, anywhere. Halfway through the journey, at a camp close to Yangpoong, at a height of 14,500 feet, their promised food supplies did not turn up. In desperation, C dispatched messengers and began rationing the food they had. In the meantime, their guide – who, it turned out, had deliberately led them astray – disappeared. “Great and hourly increasing depression...reigns in camp,” said Mazuchelli. “The poor coolies have lost all their natural exuberance of spirits.”

Left with few options, the group turned back in the face of a dense mist.

Mazuchelli lived to tell the tale. The Englishwoman’s account of the journey, The Indian Alps and How We Crossed Them, is written in a rapturous style and is illustrated with her sketches. The book was authored under the pseudonym “A Lady Pioneer” – like most women writers of the time, she remained anonymous – but decades after her death, it secured Mazuchelli a place among pioneering women adventurers such as Fanny Workman and Alexandra David-Neel.

From its pages, it is evident that Mazuchelli had a deep fascination with the Himalayas. She says she felt a longing to get closer to the “stupendous amphitheatre of snow-capped mountains” as soon as she moved to Darjeeling in 1868 with her army chaplain husband Felix Francis. But once their friend C got involved, a new purpose got tacked on to the trip.

C is described in Mazuchelli’s book as an important colonial official, a “burra sahib”. She credits him for making all the plans for the journey and engaging the helpers. She says he wanted the Mazuchellis to feel like his “guests” and even carried a map of Sikkim “deep in his portmanteau”. What she does not say explicitly but can be deduced from her words is that C was on a secret, quasi-official mission to find a route to the Tibetan frontier via Sikkim.

So who was this C, the influential companion and fixer? Why was he never named in the book? And did he have a larger role in the geopolitical games playing out in Sikkim, British India and Tibet at the time?

I was so compelled by this mystery that I spent days digging through archival sources to ascertain C’s identity. Cross-referencing Mazuchelli’s book with administrative reports, accounts by peers and newspaper dispatches, I concluded with near certainty that C was Colonel John Colpoys Haughton, the Commissioner of Cooch Behar who held the additional charge of steering British India’s political relations with Sikkim and Bhutan from 1865 to 1873.

The Great Game

Haughton was a distinguished soldier. Before he came to Cooch Behar, he had served in the Chota Nagpur region, the Andamans, Burma, Assam and Afghanistan. In 1841, when he was a young 24-year-old officer in the Gurkha regiment, his forces were besieged by hostile Afghans at Charikar, 40 miles north of Kabul. Desperate, his soldiers parched for water, Haughton decided to move to Kabul, but was attacked by his own Afghan gunners. That he made it out alive was partly thanks to a fellow officer and a Gurkha soldier, although he did suffer severe injuries to the neck and the arm, because of which his right hand had to be amputated.

Mazuchelli describes C as six feet tall and mentions his military bearing. Other sources refer to Haughton’s “wiry and spare frame” and his “great capacity for physical endurance”. Mazuchelli writes that he insisted on riding on a pony on their journey and hiked on foot when required. Meanwhile, she was carried by bearers on a “Bareilly dandy”, an upright chair with poles, except on steep ascents, when she was carried on a helper’s back.

This was the period of the Great Game, a time of intense rivalry between Britain and Czarist Russia for the control of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Persia and Tibet. Haughton had experienced this conflict first-hand during his service in Afghanistan, whose rulers and chieftains frequently sought to play the two big powers against each other. Two decades later, as a colonial official in India’s east, Haughton was aware of British India’s overtures to Tibet and its simultaneous moves to maintain influence in Nepal and Sikkim, which were independent kingdoms with historic links with Tibet.

In Sikkim, the British had achieved a degree of success. Sikkim aided them in the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1816 and its ruler, called the Chogyal, gave Darjeeling to them in 1835. This acquiescence rankled many in the Sikkim court who retained familial links with Tibet and resented British interference of any kind.

In 1849, the diwan of Sikkim, Tokhang Donyer Namgyal, triggered a face-off with the British when he imprisoned Darjeeling’s medical superintendent and an English explorer. The British won that confrontation and wrested various concessions from Sikkim. A second standoff between them in 1861 went the same way, with the two sides signing the Treaty of Tomlung that gave the British even more advantages, including the permission to secure a route to Tibet via Sikkim. This was vital for the British since ongoing attempts to find a route to Tibet from Ladakh remained, at this stage, uncertain and perilous: anyone suspected by Tibetans of spying was arrested or, worse, killed.

The Treaty of Tomlung deepened the simmering resentment in Sikkim. The diwan went into exile in Tibet even though he continued to enjoy visible support, something the Mazuchellis and C witnessed during their journey.

Mission unaccomplished

To Haughton, the journey had one overarching purpose: to find a route to facilitate trade to Tibet through Sikkim, especially in tea. The very year he had taken charge in Cooch Behar, British India had won a battle against Bhutan, seizing territory and privileges related to trade and tea cultivation.

Haughton had shared his idea with his superiors, but they were circumspect, advising him instead to relay it to Tibet via the Chogyal of Sikkim and the British minister at Peking. Other administrators were wary that his plan might antagonise powerful people in Nepal, which had controlled Sikkim till 1816 and still wielded considerable influence there.

Knowing that his superiors would not give official permission for his mission, Haughton tagged along with the Mazuchellis. Their expedition was an ideal cover for him. It saved him from antagonising his bosses and, besides, he was deeply aware of Tibet’s insistence on isolation and its suspicion of outsiders. An attempt by the explorer Thomas Thornville Cooper to seek a route to Tibet via Sadiya and Tawang had ignominiously failed after Cooper was turned back soon after crossing into Tibet territory at Rima.

The initial weeks of C and Mazuchellis’ journey were delightful. The travelling party crossed the Dumgongla Pass, camped in pine forests and dined in style. Soon enough, though, problems started arising.

On their journey, Mazuchelli could not help but notice the suspicious looks she got. Whenever she went on a sketching sojourn, some of her helpers assumed she was surveying the land for “possible annexation”. As the large group moved northward along the Singalila Range toward Kanglanamo Pass, the Kazi of Yamting reneged on his promise to deliver supplies and the guide led them off track, making the group go back. Mazuchelli suggests in her book that the Kazi was the exiled diwan himself, but it is more likely that he was a sympathiser of the diwan, just like the guide.

Despite his aborted trip, Haughton continued his efforts to open up Sikkim, and to increase British influence in the kingdom. He retired in 1873 and spent his last years in Ramsgate, Kent. Of his four children, one was a tea planter in the Duars and another, his namesake John, served in Afghanistan.

The Mazuchellis returned to England in 1874. In the late 1870s, they made a journey to the Carpathian mountains in eastern Europe and Mazuchelli wrote about this visit in a book published in 1881. Bram Stoker, the writer of Count Dracula, is believed to have drawn on her work, among others, when creating the mysterious region of Transylvania.

Mazuchelli justifiably won acclaim in later decades for her books. Peter Bishop, in The Myth of Shangri-La (1989), described her “as the first western woman to have glimpsed Mt. Everest”, a mountain she wrote about evocatively, and that she preferred calling by its Tibetan name, Deodunga, the Abode of God.

“Beneath, at my very feet, lies a valley of desolation, hemmed in by a wall of micaceous and tempest-shattered peaks, and beetling crags, and above these an undulating sweep of crystal -the snowy range of Nepaul, looking marvellously near, and with that terrible beauty of death- like repose, which precedes sunrise, as it follows upon sunset. Whilst I stand alone amidst this infinitude of Nature, the sun, beginning to ascend on his triumphal car of crimson cloud, tips the highest pinnacle with an aerial glory. In an instant it dawned upon me that I was at last gazing on Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. I could not be mistaken. There it stood, like a stupendous barrier, shutting out the west, with austere sublimity, till the glorious sun arises.”