George Everest had no direct connection with the mountain that bears his name, which he never saw. He was, however, responsible for hiring Andrew Scott Waugh, who made the first formal observations of the mountain, and Radhanath Sikdar, who calculated its height. Before its significance was realised, Mount Everest was originally known as Peak B and later as Peak XV. In March 1856, Waugh wrote to the Royal Geographical Society to announce that the mountain was believed to be the highest in the world, and proposed that it be named after my illustrious predecessor, as it was without any local name that we can discover - the native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal. There were in fact several native names among the Nepalese and Tibetans, but those areas were closed off to the British at the time and people living further to the south of the Himalayas did not have a specific name for the peak. In the decade after 1856, Waugh's proposal was widely debated by the Royal Geographical Society and similar bodies. Other scholars of India put forward native names that they believed to be correct, such as Brian Houghton Hodgson's Deva-dhunga and Hermann Schlagintweit's Gaurisankar. Everest himself objected to his name being used, as the native of India could not pronounce it and it could not be written in Hindi. Nonetheless, in 1865 the society officially settled on Mount Everest as the name.