LITTLEDALE, CAREY, NAIN SINGH, BOWER, AND DEASY.
I will now proceed to consider the last of the three great journeys right across Tibet from north to south, namely that of Littledale and his party. Leaving Tschertschen on 12th April 1895, they reached Srinagar in the middle of November the same year, after having crossed Tibet from north to south and from east to west. As an energetic and hurried »penetration» into one of the most inaccessible and inhospitable mountainous countries on the earth this journey is a wonderful one; but it has very little to do with geographical exploration. In point of results it cannot for one moment compare with the second French expedition with which we have dealt in the preceding chapter. Had Littledale been the first who crossed Tibet from north to south, his journey would have been valuable as proving the practicability of such a journey; but we did already know that it is not impossible to cross the country from East Turkestan to the Tengri-nor. His address to the Royal Geographical Society of London did not contain any strikingly new facts: it gave no general view of the physical geography of the country, but only a brief account of the actual journey itself and of the minor events that happened on the road. The account conveys the impression that the sole object of the journey was the desire to reach Lhasa. The discussion which followed the paper was also more than usually barren of results; but then the address itself did not suggest any interesting topics for discussion. Still we ought to be grateful for even small contributions. Littledale's journey has at any rate the merit of having given us a fairly good map of the region traversed, a region in which he was almost everywhere the first European. True, it shows a lack of practical wisdom to have travelled from Tschertschen to the point where Wellby intersected their route a year later by precisely the same road that Dutreuil de Rhins had already used; for even though the results of the latter's journey were not then published, and consequently were unknown to Littledale, still he might quite easily have learned in Tschertschen which route the French expedition had chosen. But from the point of intersection just mentioned all the way to Goring-la in the Nin-chen-tang-la Littledale broke new ground. His map gives a good idea of the country and is much better than Bonvalot's, although it cannot for one moment be compared with Grenard's.
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