Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (22 page)

The island seemed doomed, governed by rulers who despised it, and plagued too by self-doubt and even self-contempt. In the years immediately after the Great Famine about a million Irish people decided to start again elsewhere, or were shipped off by landlords only anxious to be rid of them (‘I have got rid of crime and distress,’ said Mr Spaight of Derry Castle, Tipperary, ‘for
£
3 10s a head,’ while Sir Robert Gore Booth, whose family was so numbly prayed for by their tenants in County Sligo, responded by shovelling three shiploads of them off to America). Most of them wanted to go to the United States, the old enemy of the British Empire, where hearts beat, they had been told, to an Irish rhythm. ‘The Irishman looks on America,’ wrote the litterateur Colley Grattan, ‘as the refuge of his race…. The shores of England are farther off in his heart’s geography than those of Massachusetts or New York.’ In those days, though, America did not offer unlimited immigration, so most of the refugees went first to Canada.

The journey there was only an extension of the Irish nightmare: first the long trudge across Ireland to the sea, in parties often of five or six hundred half-starved travellers, to board steamers in Sligo or Cork, or to be crammed on to schooners and sloops in lesser havens like Ballina, Killala or Tralee: then the miseries of the passage, often
via
Liverpool, in conditions akin to those on the Middle Passage of the slavers, in ships often unsound, with heartless and frequently incompetent crews, packed aboard without enough food or water, sometimes without any lavatories at all, and often infected with typhus: and finally the landing on the other side, unwanted still as they all too often discovered, and greeted only by overworked health officers and resentful immigration men.

Let us end this, the saddest chapter of the whole imperial story, with a glimpse of the arrival of the Irish in their New World, at the quarantine station of Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence river below Quebec. The river there is very beautiful, about a mile wide, streaked with long low islands, and backed by the genial elevation of the Laurentian hills—in summer as green and inviting as Burgundy, in winter all white. The colours are bright and clear, and the farms of the French Canadians are speckled prosperously along both banks of the river. To the east the stream broadens majestically towards the open sea, and in the early morning sun the islands are inverted in mirage, and seem to hang there suspended between sky and water. The air is very still, and life on the river banks moves gently and simply

But Grosse Isle is tragically busy. It is a longish humped island almost in midstream, thinly wooded, and littered with the huts of the quarantine station. For several weeks the Irish immigrant ships have been arriving infected with fever, and ship after ship has been detained below Grosse Isle. Far down towards the sea the vessels are waiting, thirty or forty of them, shabby battered ships for the most part, lying there lifeless in the stream. The air is foul about them. All around their moorings, and around the island too, the water is thick with scum, floating rubbish, barrels and old rags: and
through this muck a stream of small boats passes from ship to shore, loaded with scarecrow complements of men and women, some dying, some already dead. Some boats are loaded only with corpses, wrapped in canvas or nailed in crude coffins: on the island people can be seen painfully stumbling, even crawling, towards the huts. Some feebly call for help, food or water. Some cannot move or speak at all, and when they are lifted out of the boats, simply lie there on the beach.

This is the landfall of the promised land. Through the scummy water, in and among the anchored ships, one small steamer industriously chugs, picking up those immigrants who have been passed as healthy by the doctors, and are being allowed up to Montreal and a new life. The passengers who crowd its rails look almost as ill as those feebly lying on the island shore, or watching from the decks of the anchored ships: but on the prow of this small vessel, as she navigates a course through the sickness and the despair, an Irish fiddler merrily plays an Irish tune, and a few dancers foot a jig in the sunshine.
1

N
EVER again would the British shirk their imperial duties so shamefully as they did in Ireland, but even so empire remained largely a matter of impulse. The ideas and initiatives of men in the field governed its growth as potently as did the policies of Governments or the theories of economists, and many a stroke of imperial history depended originally upon a quirk of individual character, or the mood of a moment In the Far East the adventurer James Brooke, son of an East India Company civil servant, had intervened so effectively in the affairs of Sarawak that he was now Rajah of the island. In the Indian Ocean the Scottish entrepreneur John Clunies-Ross morosely ruled the Cocos Islands, living (so Darwin reported) in ‘a large barn-like house open at both ends’, and hoping (so he said himself) that his exertions ‘may in time become productive of some considerable accession to the commerce of the British Empire, and contribute to the extension of her population, her language, and her true glory and grandeur’.

Especially did character count in India, the most dazzling and extraordinary of the imperial possessions, where old habits died hard. The sense of Christian mission, as we have seen, was now having its impact upon the Raj, but generally through the agency of individual consciences—without a Sleeman the Thugs would still have been at large, without a Bentinck
suttee
might still be legal. There was still room in British India for grand characters and impetuous decisions: and nowhere was the power of individualism more decisive than in the warlike expansions by which the British, in the late 1840s, extended their sovereignty into the independent territories of the north-west—first Sind, then the Punjab. The whole style of these adventures was set by the personalities of individual
Britons, of whom one of their own number observed with characteristic frankness, when asked to account for the success of their system, ‘it is not our system, it is our men’: so before the Indian Empire reaches its institutional maturity later in the century, let us introduce ourselves to a few of the more remarkable Anglo-Indian imperialists of the time—bearing in mind that if they had ever heard of such a category of person, they would certainly be astonished to find it applied to themselves.

First Charles Napier, the conqueror of Sind. We see him in his late prime, for this, his first and only major command in war, came to him late in life—at 60, when he had almost given up hope of generalship in battle, and was resigned to an unexciting retirement. He is not an easy person to miss. A man of middle height, he has a most peculiar face: hook-nosed, glaring-eyed, with long white side-whiskers and small steel-rimmed spectacles of his own design—‘a beak like an eagle’, Thackerary thought, ‘a beard like a Cashmere goat’. He wears a queer helmet, also self-devised, with a long flap hanging down behind; and though he is scarcely a stalwart figure, looking a little scrunched or scrawny, still his bearing is imposing and his eye strangely commanding. He is an odd spectacle indeed, and his oddity is calculated: he used to say his enemies never harmed him because they were too taken aback by his strangeness, and he once appeared at an enormously ceremonial dinner in his honour wearing a frock-coat, buff corduroy breeches, and an English hunting-cap peaked in front, swathed in white cotton behind—when he sat down at the end of his speech the band struck up ‘The King of the Cannibal Islands’.

Napier came of a brilliant Scots family whose name is inescapable in the annals of the Victorian empire. His father was a famously handsome and exceptionally cultivated soldier; his mother was said by Horace Walpole to be ‘more beautiful than you can conceive’; his three brothers all achieved eminence; his cousins, forebears and descendants commanded armies, ships, garrisons or colonies from one end of the empire to the other. But his immediate family was not
rich, and though he grew up among the opulent Anglo-Irish of County Kildare, and was the grandson of a Duke, and a first cousin of Charles James Fox, still he went to the local village school, and never forgot the meaning of poverty. ‘The poor are like slow sailing vessels,’ he wrote in middle age, ‘they are deeply laden with the heavy cargo of poverty.’ In 1839, when he was already a general, he was living with his wife and daughter above a butcher’s shop in Nottingham, having nothing but his pay. When he arrived in India to command a division, he claimed, all he possessed in the world was
£
2.

Though he was a soldier from the start, being commissioned at the age of eleven, a bluff empathy endeared him to people far outside the normal military range of acquaintance. He was a kind man. When, in 1839, he found himself defending northern England against the threat of a Chartist rebellion, his sympathies were largely with the poor victims of industrialization—‘God forgive me’, he said of the employers, ‘but sometimes they tempt me to wish that they and their mills were burnt together’. He gave up blood sports because he found ‘no pleasure in killing little animals’, and when after his death they erected a statue of him in Trafalgar Square ‘the most numerous contributors’, as its inscription said, were private soldiers.

Napier’s early career was one of breathless hazard. He was wounded six times and had two horses killed under him in the Peninsular war, commanded the attack on Little Hampton in Virgina in the war of 1812, stormed Cambrai during the 100 Days, was shipwrecked in Ostend Harbour in 1815, and in 1822, scarred all over and precociously experienced, became Resident of Cephalonia in the Ionian Islands, then under British sovereignty. Almost at once he acquired his own philosophy of empire, which he succinctly defined as ‘a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards’.

His attitudes to subject peoples were conditioned first to last by his memories of Ireland, and all his life we find him using Irish images and comparisons. ‘Look at unhappy Ireland!’ he cried from the other end of Europe, ‘How feeble is a system of iniquity! How weak is injustice!’ He had a soft spot for the anomalies, castaways and crooked corners of Irishness: soon after he had been awarded the Order of the
Bath, a general campaign medal was issued to the army he commanded—‘
Now
,’ he wrote to the Governor-General of India, ‘
I
can
meet
Corporal
Tim
Kelly
and
Delaney
without
a
blush
!’ It was he who, in 1845, commissioned the young Richard Burton to investigate the homosexual bordels of Karachi: not only was he interested professionally, because of the bearing of pederasty upon the British catastrophe in Kabul three years before, but he also had, as Burton phrased it admiringly in a footnote to his
Arabian
Nights
, ‘a curiosity as to their workings’.

In the imperial context all this added up to a quixotic but generally benevolent bloody-mindedness. Napier was congenitally opposed to higher authority, to orthodoxy, and to anyone who ventured to disagree with him: on the other hand he was unshakeably addicted to commonsense, to fairness, to unquestioning responsibility and to anyone who helped him. He was a prickly, gesticulative, arrogant man, full of acidulous wit—‘if it had no vent’, he once told his mother, ‘my death would ensue from undelivered jokes’—and he identified himself emotionally with his simpler subjects, be they Greeks, Irishmen or Baluchis. He had two children by a Greek mistress in the Ionians, and named one of them Cephalonia after his island ward—when he sailed for home their mother first decided to keep them, then changed her mind and pushed them in a small boat towards his departing ship: Napier, though he later married two virtuous English widows in succession, cherished them lovingly all his life.

He believed strongly in the merits of British power. When an apparently respectable foreigner once arrived illegally in Cephalonia, Napier breezily swept aside the immigration laws and stood guarantor for the stranger himself. It was unlikely, he said, that the man would misbehave himself in an island policed by 500 Connaught Rangers. To make the point clear, Napier pointed out the magnificent colonel of the Connaughts, striding by outside his window, and observed that one would be foolish indeed to provoke the wrath of such a soldier. ‘By the lord, yes,’ said the foreigner, ‘you speak truly. I would not like to be in his way if he was angry: what a fine man!’

This was the essence of Napier’s imperialism: a bold disrespect for unnecessary fuss, a staunch faith in the effect of British authority, a robust belief in force of character. All these principles he took with him to India for the great triumph of his life, the conquest of Sind in 1843.

It was not altogether apparent that Sind, a barren brown territory straddling the central reaches of the Indus, ought properly to be conquered; but its potential importance was obvious, and once the British had navigated the river, as a local sage once remarked, ‘Sind has gone’. So it proved. The British first undertook to protect the Amirs of Sind, not a very estimable collection of princes, against the Sikhs to the north—‘the two contracting parties bind themselves never to look with the eye of covetousness upon the possessions of each other’: but later George Auckland’s successor Lord Ellenborough, wishing to expunge the memory of the Afghan War with a touch of glory on the plains, decided that whatever the treaty said, Sind must be annexed—‘like a bully’, it was said at the time, ‘who has been kicked in the streets and goes home to beat his wife in revenge’.

Nearly everybody disapproved of this venture, from Peel, Wellington and Gladstone in England to most of the British administrators on the spot. Charles Napier, the general appointed to command it, did not care a rap. He felt only a vehement contempt for most politicians, most civil servants, most bigwigs of the East India Company and all the Amirs of Sind. He had no difficulty in taking the country, once the Amirs had been provoked into war, and his brother William, the distinguished historian of the Peninsular campaigns, left a celebrated description of his principal battle: ‘Guarding their heads with large dark shields [the Sind troops] shook their sharp swords, gleaming in the sun, and their shouts rolled like peals of thunder as with frantic might and gestures they dashed against the front of the 22nd. But, with shrieks as wild and fierce, and hearts as big and strong, the British soldiers met them with the queen of weapons, and laid their foremost warriors wallowing in blood….’ Briskly exiling the aggrieved potentates, relieved of poverty at last
by picking up prize money of
£
60,000, setting up his headquarters in the walled city of Hyderabad upon the Indus, Napier proceeded to rule the country absolutely by his own lights, and at a salary of
£
15,000 a year.
Punch
suggested that he had reported the conquest in one wry pun—‘
Peccavi!
’
1
—assuming that the old swashbuckler, with his principles of human liberty, might feel some pang of remorse. But it was not so. The annexation was characteristically defined by Napier, in advance, as ‘a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality’. He allowed that it was a consequence of the British aggression in Afghanistan, but then someone always suffered from injustice in the end. In this case it would be the Amirs of Sind, ‘and on a crew more deserving to bear it hardly could it alight’. The Amirs were, he concluded, tyrannical, drunken, debauched, cheating, intriguing and altogether contemptible.

But he was concerned as always for the welfare of the common people of the country, and considered himself the sole judge of their needs. Suttee, pleaded the Brahmans of Sind, now faced for the first time with reform, was an immemorial custom. ‘
My
nation
also
has
a
custom.
When
men
burn
women
alive,
we
bang
them.
Let
us
all
act
accord
ing
to
national
customs
!
’
Wife-killing was perfectly legitimate, it was pleaded for a convicted murderer, if the wife had angered the husband. ‘
Well,
I
’
m
angry.
Why
s
houldn’t
I
kill
him?’ By such abrupt and soldierly methods Napier established the British province of Sind, and made of it a territory quite different from those governed by the civilians of John Company. He created the port of Karachi, he encouraged navigation on the Indus, he foresaw the possibilities of irrigation in the north. He was at once an early prototype of the paternal autocrat later to become so familiar a figure of the Raj, and a late exponent of eighteenth century idiosyncrasy. It may be said, in feet, that an imperial tradition had been born thirty years before when this good, self-opinionated man, facing the Chartist leaders at a moment when England seemed on the edge of revolution, had declared his principles to the angry working-men before him. He supported sympathetically, he said, everything they stood for: but if they ever provoked riot and disorder in pursuit of those honourable ends, by God, he would shoot them all.

Next the British power, with some false starts and more than one humiliation, pushed northwards up the Indus into the Punjab. This rich and fertile country, ‘the land of the seven rivers’, had been for many years under the domination of the Sikhs—that formidable religio-militarist nation, bound by the seven self-disciplinary rules of their religion, whose most celebrated ruler, Ranjit Singh, we encountered in the first chapter of this book. Having raised the Sikhs to a pinnacle of power, Ranjit had died in 1839, reputedly worth
£
12m, and drunkenly magnificent to the last. His successors were less masterful, squabbled dangerously among themselves, and in 1845 conveniently gave the British a pretext for intervention by sending an army across the imperial frontier. War followed, the British suffering some ignominious reverses, and enjoying some knockabout affrays, before their inevitable final victory (‘a stand-up gentlemanlike battle’, is how General Sir Harry Smith described the battle of Aliwal in 1846). After a period of indirect rule, and some further bouts of fighting, the Empire annexed the Punjab in 1849.