Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (56 page)

It was a perfect site for epic. It was so symmetrical, its summit so bare and flat, its wide African prospect so magnificent, that it might have been reserved for a spectacle of war: but just why Colley chose to occupy it as a military objective, nobody really knows. Perhaps he thought the mere presence of the British up there would demoralize the Boers around the pass below. Perhaps he thought vaguely of emulating Wolfe’s coup at Quebec. Some say he was ‘not himself’. He took no guns or rockets with him; he disclosed no plan to his officers; he dug no trenches; he simply took the hill, theatrically, almost as an end in itself.

He was not the apoplectic incompetent later legend would make him. An Anglo-Irishman, he had taught himself Russian, was interested in chemistry, and was widely experienced, having served in the Cape, in China, in the Ashanti war, and as private secretary to the Viceroy of India. But he was also a kind, sensitive and imaginative man, who took his water-colour sketch-book wherever he went, and whose heavily bearded soldier’s face was given grandeur by a dreamy look to the eyes. His approach to war was knightly. ‘Sir,’ he wrote to the Boer commander whose men had lately decimated his own at Laing’s Nek, ‘I … write to offer you medical assistance for your wounded should you not have skilled assistance at hand … I can either send a surgeon to any place you name or, if you will send any bad cases into our hospital here or at Newcastle they will receive the same attention and care as our own wounded.’ To his soldiers, indeed, he sometimes seemed too nice a man for generalship. ‘A more charming and courteous man you could not meet,’ one of them wrote of him, ‘but he ought not to be trusted with the corporal’s guard.’

Colley had a presentiment about Majuba, and perhaps in taking the hill he was pursuing less a tactical than an aesthetic fulfilment.
His little assault force, about 400 strong, climbed the precipitous southern slope of the mountain during the night of February 26, 1881, and when dawn broke on the summit, and veld and mountain, sunshine and cloud were laid in tribute at their feet, so exhilarated were they that they stood silhouetted on the edge of the plateau to jeer at the Boer encampments far below. How right it must have seemed to Colley, with his eye for landscape and occasion! And when, almost effortlessly, the Boers came storming up the northern slope of the mountain, the easy slope, to fall upon the British in broad daylight, how fitting the death of the general himself, a bullet through his head, stretched out there on the mountain grass as though in alabaster!

The scale was very small—the summit plateau of Majuba was perhaps half a mile around. There was no room for manoeuvre, only for advance or retreat. The only cover was provided by shallow folds in the ground and by a slight hollow where the field hospital was established, and where many of the British soldiers, after their exhausting night climb, promptly went to sleep. It was a curious force assembled up there, under the command of that strange and gentle general—who seemed to move, once they were on the summit, in a kind of trance. There was the young Ian Hamilton, a man very much in Colley’s mould, who was to become a general himself, and preside over still sadder sequences of British military history. There was poor Hector Macdonald, ‘Scotland’s Pride’, who was to rise from private to general only to shoot himself in a Paris hotel when accused of homosexuality. There were 170 men of the Gordon Highlanders fresh from victories in Afghanistan, 340 more of the 58th and 60th regiments, and sixty-four bluejackets from the cruiser
Boadicea
—men dressed in all the bright panoply of the imperial wars, the scarlet jackets, the kilts, the white tropical helmets, the blue trousers, the pipe-clayed pouches—splashing the green plateau with colour, while the tall figure of the general wandered immaculate and bemused among them.

‘All I ask of you’, Colley said, ‘is that you hold this hill three days’, but they only held it until half-past one. The Boers came up that morning. Dismounting from their ponies below the crest of the hill, they climbed up undetected and opened fire at point-blank range.
In little more than half an hour the redcoats, so cock-a-hoop that morning, cracked in disorder. The terrified men on the perimeter, retreating across the plateau, infected the men behind with their panic, until the survivors of the little force threw themselves down the mountain again and ran away. One Boer was killed in this brief action, and five were wounded: 280 Britons were killed, wounded or captured. General Colley, slowly turning to follow his soldiers off the hill, was among the last to die.

It was rumoured that he had killed himself, and perhaps he did. Would he have wanted to live, haunted by such ignominy? Would not a shot in the head, as the catastrophe descended, perfectly have fitted the Wagnerian drama he had directed? Majuba was a kind of abdication from the start. It was a flamboyant admission of failure—for possession of the hill without artillery could really achieve nothing—by a commander without the magic gift of victory. ‘Think lovingly and sadly,’ Colley had written to his wife the evening before, ‘but not too sadly or hopelessly of your affectionate husband.’
1

Majuba proved an abdication in a wider sense, too. The news reached London the following day, by a new submarine cable from the Cape, and the War Office at once resolved to send further reinforcements to South Africa from India, Ceylon, Bermuda and Britain, and to appoint Sir Frederick Roberts, one of the Empire’s most successful generals, to succeed Colley. But Gladstone thought otherwise, and in another unpredictable volte-face, he immediately opened peace negotiations with the Boers, to the contempt of the Conservatives and the dismay of the Queen. The first talks were held in O’Neill’s Farm, a small farmstead at the foot of Majuba Hill, and there in the shadow of defeat the war was ended, humiliatingly for the British, who had not won a single engagement, triumphantly for the Boers, who understandably reached the conclusion that the
Empire was much easier to deal with when it had just suffered a bloody nose. It was the only occasion in the history of Victoria’s Empire when the British negotiated a peace settlement from the losers’ side of the table. The Transvaal recovered its independence, subject only to a debatable reservation called ‘the suzerainty of Her Majesty’, and three years later the Transvaal Republic was constituted with Kruger as its President. So the Trekker Boers, who had strived so assiduously for half a century to evade the rule of the red-necks, finally established their independence of the British Empire’s sometimes arrogant, often complacent, but fundamentally humane system of values.

With the Transvaal went the last hope of voluntary confederation in South Africa. If the mixed bag of colonies, protectorates and Boer Republic were ever to be united now, it would only be by
force
majeur
, British or Boer. South Africa lapsed into tawdry opportunism, as the values of the diamond fields, the colonial politicians and the entrepreneurs overwhelmed the ideals of the imperial visionaries: and in 1887 the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand not only set a seal upon this squalor, but also made Kruger’s petty backwoods republic, where the predikants read Ezekiel so gravely on their stoeps, and the President himself was often to be seen sitting on his bench beside the road in Pretoria, one of the most fateful nations on earth.

The story of Britain’s efforts to master South Africa was not ended yet: but a few seers already understood that the ultimate conflict down there, the true meaning of the Great Trek, Ulundi and Majuba Hill alike, was not mere imperialism, but was a more passionate, profound and terrible dispute between the white man and the coloured—the very dispute which, in the long run‚ was to shatter the precarious logic of Empire itself.

E
MPIRE
was
Race. For an illustration of this truth at its cruellest and most poignant, let us see what happened to the aboriginal people of Tasmania, when they fell beneath the aegis of Victoria’s Empire.

For many years after the European discovery of Australia, nobody realized that Tasmania was an island. To the early navigators it seemed only a protrusion from the southeast corner of the continent, and it was assumed that its flora and fauna would be more or less the same as the rest. Yet it was in many ways a particularly insular island, with a character all its own: a hilly island, about the size of Ceylon, covered in dense forests of pine, beech and eucalyptus, sometimes so thickly interwoven with creepers that a man could walk suspended on a web of foliage far above the ground. In the east there was fine rolling downland, in the west impenetrable forests fell away from the central mountains in gorges and fjiords to the sea. The climate was wet but fresh, rather like Britain’s: and there were some corners of the island that looked astonishingly like northern Europe—Ireland especially, in the fertile but somehow melancholy spaces of upland, or the empty coves along the eastern shore.

Most of the weird marsupials of the Australian mainland were present in Tasmania: kangaroos and wallabies in countless herds, duck-billed platypi, the black swans which, loitering strangely in the creeks of the south-east, sometimes gave the landscape an inverted look, like a photographic negative. But there were also creatures found nowhere else. There was the Tasmanian mountain shrimp, which lived only in the high mountain pools of the island, and the huge Tasmanian crayfish, and the minute Tasmanian pigmy
opossum, and the Tasmanian water-hen, and the Tasmanian yellow wattle bird. There was the Tasmanian Devil, which looked like a venomous long-haired bear, and the Tasmanian Tiger, which looked like a great striped dog, walked on its toes, made a noise half-way between a bark and a miaow, carried its babies backwards in a pouch beneath its stomach, and could open its jaws so wide that at full stretch they formed almost a straight line top to bottom.

And strangest of all there existed, shadowy among the ferns and gum-trees, a race of human beings altogether unique, different ethnically and culturally from the aboriginals of the Australian mainland, and living, in their secluded forest encampments, or crouched over wood-fires on shellfish shores, lives unaffected by contact with any other men and women than themselves. From the moment these people first set eyes upon an Englishman, they were doomed.

Natural Selection had been a popular thesis among the English long before Darwin, for the idea of being a superior people was deeply ingrained in their history. Familiarity with the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish had long bolstered their sense of specialness, and their insular status, their religion, their continuity and their success all went to confirm it. As long before as the 1640s, it is said, a New England assembly of overseas Britons had passed the following resolutions: (1) The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.
Voted
. (2) The Lord has given the earth or any part of it to his chosen people.
Voted
. (3) We are his chosen people.
Voted
. By mid-Victorian times these assumptions, warped by the theories of racialists like the Comte de Gobineau, and apparently supported by the hazily understood principles of Darwinism, were most virulently translated into colour prejudice: ‘the contempt and aversion’, as Sir James Stephen had described it, ‘with which the European races everywhere regard the black races’.

At heart, by now, nearly every Briton considered as his organic inferior everyone who was not white—the less white, the more inferior. Even educated people seldom bothered to hide their racial prejudices, and soldiers and working men expressed their views
frankly enough in bawdy song or disrespectful nickname.
1
The British in India scornfully assessed half-castes in monetary terms—eight annas in the rupee, or ten annas in the rupee. The British in Hong Kong talked to all Chinese in a kind of baby-talk—‘Here, boy, take piecey mississy one piecy bag topside’.
2
If a coloured man was ever honoured by the British, or even treated as an equal, it was because he was notorious (like Cetewayo) or very rich (like the Indian maharajahs) or a credit to the Empire (like the black Bishop Crowther of West Africa).

The British were not often physically cruel. They were more generally unsympathetic, or misunderstanding, or contemptuous, while the experience of the Mutiny made them congenitally suspicious.
3
They were also terribly aloof, sometimes deliberately, sometimes through shyness, even those who took a scholarly interest in the subject peoples generally inspecting them with a strictly anthropological detachment.
4
These attitudes were not, it seemed, a matter of personal choice, but of national destiny, to which even other white peoples could not equally aspire. Both the King of Prussia and the King of the Belgians had offered troops to help
suppress the Indian Mutiny, and Napoleon III had suggested that British reinforcements for India might travel through French territory, but all three offers Lord Palmerston had rejected, for he believed it was a British duty, a British privilege perhaps, to settle the account of ‘those dark coloured Miscreants’.

Only the humanitarians of Empire tried to believe that the races were fundamentally equal, and even they had sometimes to admit that, in God’s mysterious way, the evidence was against them. The British were approaching their apogee as a nation—as a Race, they liked to say. They went critical, so to speak: and though the whole world was to sense the fall-out of this event, the heaviest radiation fell upon the black, brown and yellow peoples, who now seemed to the British more than ever humans of the second class.

Nobody knows how many of the original Tasmanians existed when, in 1642, Abel Tasman discovered the island. There were probably not more than a few thousand, and since they were nomadic hunters, there were no permanent settlements at all. The Tasmanians never built a village, let alone a town: generally the only traces they left of themselves were the middens to be found here and there along their hunting-routes.

Equally nobody knows where they had come from in the first place. Victorian anthropologists much enjoyed ‘the Tasman problem’, and spent many happy evenings debating possible migratory routes, or ethnic progenitors. Since the Tasmanians were unquestionably distinct from the mainland natives, it was assumed that they had originated somewhere in the north or central Pacific, and had worked their way southwards over the millennia. They were smallish but long-legged people, red-brown rather than black, with beetle-brows, wide mouths, broad noses, and very deep-set brown eyes. The men had rich beards and whiskers, and the women were hirsute too, often developing incipient moustaches. Many Europeans found them unattractive. Mrs Augustus Prinsep, writing in 1833, thought they all had a ‘most hideous expression of countenance’, and George Lloyd, thirty years later, found the women ‘repulsively
ugly’. To modern tastes, if we are to judge by surviving photographs, they might not seem so disagreeable: they look homely, but oddly wistful, like elves, or perhaps hobbits—there is something very endearing to their squashed-up crinkled faces, which never seem actually to be smiling, but look suggestively amused all the same.

The Tasmanians did not by and large wear any clothes, except for loose cloaks of kangaroo skin, but they smeared their bodies with red ochre, and wore necklaces of shells or human bones. They slept in caves or hollow trees, or beneath rough windbreaks of sticks and fronds, and their staple foods were kangaroos and wallabies, supplemented by shellfish, roots and berries, fungi, lizards, snakes, penguins, herons, parrots and the eggs of ants and emus. Physically they seem to have lacked stamina: their senses were uncannily acute, and they were adept at running on all fours, but they were not very strong, nor very fast, nor even particularly agile. They made crude boats of bark or log, but never ventured far out to sea: instead they roamed incessantly, pursuing the fugitive marsupials, through the dense bush forests of their island, over its wide downlands, or down to the shingle shore to eat oysters.

A touching sadness surrounds them, from our distance of time. They seem an insubstantial people, Polygamous by custom, they were affectionate by disposition, and merry, singing in a sweet Doric harmony, and dancing strenuous, hilarious and frequently lascivious animal dances. But living down there on the edge of the world, they seem to have been on the edge of reality too. Their small tribal bands seldom strayed outside their own hunting circuits, and they inhabited a little inconstant world of a few families. If they met another tribe they generally fought it, but the moment a man on either side was killed, the battle ended. If they had a religion at all, it was concerned only with local sprites and goblins: few had any conception of an after-life. Some were apparently able to count up to five, others never went further than two. Their only system of government seems to have been a patriarchal authority tacitly invested in the head of a family, or the bravest hunter of a tribe. Their only visual art consisted of rings chipped out of boulders, and striped patterns in red ochre. Even their language was rudimentary, being a series of disconnected words with no grammar.
This is one of their dancing-songs, in a Victorian missionary translation: 

Luggarato,
Luggarato,
Luggarato!
There was a haunting naivety to the Tasmanians. They lived all by themselves, like children in the woods, and they seem to have thought of life as essentially provisional. The old and the sick they often abandoned, when they moved on to new hunting grounds. When somebody died he was usually cremated without ceremony, the tribe seldom staying to watch him burn: or he was placed upright inside a hollow tree, with a spear through his neck to keep him there.

And when a man was gone, he was gone. His name was never mentioned again. It was as though, having lived his short hard life of wandering, having fathered his sons and eaten his feasts of parrot or emu egg—having appeared briefly upon the foreshore of the world, his life had been expunged retrospectively, and he had never existed at all.

Once it was realized that Tasmania was an island, it acquired a peculiar usefulness to the British. It would form a convenient outstation, they thought, to their penal settlements on the Australian mainland, so sending a group of convicts and soldiers to the south-east corner of the island, in 1803 they had claimed it all for the Crown. By the 1820s there were European settlements at both ends of the island, called in those days Van Diemen’s Land, and by 1840 there were more free settlers than convicts. A fine road connected Cornwall in the north with Buckingham in the south, by way of Melton Mowbray, Bagdad and Mangalore, and many free settlers were living in distinctly gentlemanly style in those substantial country houses we have already visited. Yet the basis of its society was punitive: this was a place of exile, a criminal island, and its life was organized around the fulcrum of its penal purpose. In a suggestive way it remained so throughout the century. Though transportation to Tasmania ended in 1853, much the most compelling sight in the island remained the celebrated penal settlement of Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula in the south.

This had never been the severest of the several prisons. The worst, abandoned in 1832, had been at Macquarie Harbour, on the inaccessible west coast, where the prison buildings stood on a reef unapproachable by land except at low tide, and recalcitrant convicts were sometimes confined alone for weeks at a time on uninhabited rocks in the estuary: the hinterland there was so terrible that of the 112 prisoners who ever escaped from Macquarie Harbour, 62 died of starvation in the bush and nine were eaten by their comrades. Port Arthur, though, was much larger and better-known, and was a famous sight almost from the start—a railway used to take official visitors part of the way down the peninsula from Hobart, the capital, its trucks being pushed along by manacled convicts.

The first thing one saw was the square English tower of the inter-denominational church, looking rooky and rural, surrounded by English elms and oaks, and by the neat verandahed houses of the Governor and his assistants. Just around the corner, however, beyond
a discreet stretch of green with an ornamental fountain, the granite buildings of the prison were grouped with a terrible dignity beside their harbour. Here was the watchtower, around whose ramparts the sentries perpetually tramped, and here the flogging-wall, and here the lunatic asylum. In the building called the Model Prison were practised the latest techniques of criminal reform, imported direct from Pentonville: notably the silence system—a system so absolute that the warders wore felt slippers, and prisoners were held in such utter lonely silence that even in church they wore masks to preserve their isolation from humankind, and worshipped in single shuttered cubicles. All the buildings were grey, and a grey suspense hung over the scene like a vapour, even on a bright summer morning, when the visitors walked bonneted and cotton-frocked from block to block, led by an attentive officer.