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Waugh
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Waugh

took a leading part. The line of the country was along the base of the Himalaya Terai, and proved very deadly to a large proportion of the native establishment and to many of the European officers and assistants (40 out of 150 were buried in and about the swampy forests of Gorukpur). By these operations were fixed the positions and heights of seventy-nine of the highest and grandest of the Himalayan peaks in Nipal and Sikkim, one of which—native name Devidanga—29,002 feet above the sea, was named by Waugh Mount Everest, and was found to be the highest in the world. The series was the longest ever carried between measured bases, being 1690 miles long from Sonakoda to Dehra Dun.

On 3 Dec. 1847 Waugh was given the local rank of lieutenant-colonel. In the south of India, the South Konkan, the Madras coast series, the South Parisnath and South Maluncha series were begun and finished. Waugh was now free to undertake a project originated by himself of forming a system of triangulation to the westward of the great arc series over the east territory, much of it newly acquired, that lay in Sind, the North-West Provinces, and the Punjab. The Khach base, near Attak, was measured in 1851–2, and the north-west Himalayan series, emanating from the Dehra base, extended to it, while from Sironj the Calcutta great longitudinal series was carried westward to Karachi, closing on another base-line at Karachi, measured in 1854–5 under Waugh's immediate supervision. Waugh was promoted to be major in the Bengal engineers on 3 Aug. 1855. In 1856 the great Indus series was commenced, forming the western side of the survey, having the usual north or south supplementary series. The mutiny in 1857–8 delayed this work, which was finally completed in 1860. In 1856 Waugh instituted a series of levelling operations to determine the heights of the base-lines in the interior, commencing in the Indus valley. He was promoted to be regimental lieutenant-colonel on 20 Sept. 1857, and in the same year was awarded the patron's gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. In the following year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Of all the Indian survey work which originated during Waugh's tenure of office, that of Kashmir was perhaps most interesting. Upon this work Waugh employed Colonel Thomas George Montgomerie [q. v.], and the results in 1859 elicited a warm letter of acknowledgment to Waugh from Lord Canning, the governor-general. During Waugh's tenure of office he advanced the triangulation of India by 316,000 square miles, and of this 94,000 were topographically surveyed. He was promoted to be colonel on 18 Feb. 1861, and retired from the service on 12 March following. He received the honorary rank of major-general on 6 Aug. 1861, and in the same year he was knighted. The members of the survey department presented him, on leaving India, with a farewell address and a service of plate. On his retirement he resided in London. He was a deputy-lieutenant of the city of London for many years, a prominent member of the council of the Royal Geographical Society, and its vice-president from 1867 to 1870, honorary associate of the Geographical societies of Berlin and Italy, a fellow of Calcutta University, and an active committee-man of the London Athenæum Club, to which he was elected by the committee for distinguished service. He died at his residence, 7 Petersham Terrace, Queen's Gate, on 21 Feb. 1878.

Waugh married, first, in 1844, Josephine (d. 1866), daughter of Dr. William Graham of Edinburgh, and, secondly, in 1870, Cecilia Eliza Adelaide, daughter of Lieutenant-general Thomas Whitehead, K.C.B., of Uplands Hall, Lancashire.

The results of Waugh's work while surveyor-general are given in some thirteen volumes and reports deposited in the India office, parts of which, originally complete, appear to have been lost. He published in 1861 ‘Instructions for Topographical Surveying.’

[India Office Records; (Sir) Clements Markham's Memoirs of the Indian Surveys; Reports of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, 1834 to 1861; letters in the Friend of India, 17 Feb. 1861; The Hills, 31 Jan. 1861; Royal Engineers Journal, May 1878 (a memoir by Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Godwin Austen); Times obituary notice, 28 Feb. 1878; Geographical Magazine, March 1878; Presidential Address to the Royal Geographical Society by Sir Rutherford Alcock, 1878; Professional Papers on Indian Engineering, vols. ii. and iii.; Vibart's Addiscombe: its Heroes and Men of Note, p. 423; Nature, 28 Feb. and 6 June 1878.]

R. H. V.


WAUGH, EDWIN (1817–1890), Lancashire poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Rochdale on 29 Jan. 1817. His father, a shoemaker at Rochdale, in decent