The Holder of the World (8 page)

2

GABRIEL LEGGE
decided to join the Honourable East India Company at a time of its greatest upheaval. The Royal Charter guaranteeing a monopoly had been granted by James II in 1686. With the Glorious Revolution two years later, the Protestant William had abrogated it. And so for the decade of the 1690s the East India Company was, to use our term, effectively deregulated. Import values as registered in London sagged from eight hundred thousand pounds in 1684 to thirty thousand pounds in 1695—the year of Gabriel’s arrival—due not to a sudden lack of profitability but to a sharp increase in the number of free-lancers, like Gabriel.

(The chaos became exponential—a kind of late-stage capitalism such as America saw in the 1890s, or the 1920s, or, I hesitate to suggest, the late 1980s—until finally all parties had to sue for a kind of peace, new ground rules so as not to exhaust the golden goose. In 1698, William Pitt—known as Diamond Pitt, the grandfather of the great parliamentarian—by force of his personality and his experience as both an interloper in India and a member of Parliament in London, was able to reunify all factions in Fort St. George. The rival East India trading corporations were not merged until the Instrument of Unification was passed in 1701.)

So in the Legges’ day, the Coromandel was like Manhattan in the mid-eighties, like Bugs Kilken’s Bel Air. Every interloper set himself up as an independent factor and became the equivalent of a real estate agent, stockbroker, art dealer, corporate lawyer and investment banker. The value of every commodity was suddenly reassessed with an eye to its resale potential, a meter was put on everyone’s time, and all the factors and interlopers were down in the pit shouting up, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”

The chain of multinational factories stretched up and down the Coromandel like condos on the Florida coast. And the wealth they generated! Even with the Europeans’ enfeebled head for business, as the nawabs charged (so enamored were the liquor-swilling
firangi
with legalisms and bookkeeping, being apparently incapable of keeping accounts in their heads or of acting decisively in obvious self-interest), they could hardly go wrong. Everyone grew rich—the shareholders back in London, the sharp-trading, black-marketing factors, the various local nawabs and, finally, the Great Mughal himself, old Emperor Aurangzeb in his Deccan war tents.

I think of those years as being like the last frenzied decade in the Hong Kong money pits; I think of the factors as the buccaneers of their day, the arbitrageurs, leveragers, junk-bonders. The New World was for losers, laborers and farmers who would never prosper and might lose their scalps in the bargain. England was dead, finished, washed up, effete and retentive. Ah, but India! The India trade. An immediate profit of twenty to one, England to India, and a hundred to one, a thousand to one, on the way back. And all the women, all the luxury and adventure, all the hunting, killing, debauchery a man could dream about.

Money:
hand-over-fist money, sweat-of-brow money, burnout money, finger-to-the-bone money, under-the-table money, black money, dirty money, filthy lucre, money-changing-in-the-temple, thirty-pieces-of-silver money, blasphemous, usurious, treacherous money; profits, taxes, bribes, licenses, fees, levies, octrois, tariffs; middlemen, policemen, watchmen; painters, carpenters, dyers, writers, weavers; doctors, teachers, preachers, judges, accountants, barristers; wives, widows, cooks, servants, slaves, prostitutes, concubines; lewd men, austere men, gamblers, hoarders; Catholics, Roundheads, conformists, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Armenians; black men, brown men, yellow men, white; reformers, saviors, visionaries, criminals: all in pursuit of
money, money, money
.

WHAT MIGHT
they have seen, that misty January morning three hundred years ago? With no cyclones, although the season was less than a month past, the high surf would have been crashing against the sandbars far out to sea. When Hannah first sighted Fort St. Sebastian from the
Fortune’
s poop, what she saw was an exposed roadstead, a long sand reef, a surf-whipped beach, and dunes no bigger than the humps on camels. She thought herself, after two years in Stepney, a city woman and, thanks to Salem, a townswoman as well.

What must Hannah, a child totally of the North Atlantic, have thought? She had been eight months aboard a medium-sized cargo ship, around the Cape, dodging pirates, weathering storms, eating third mate’s rations leavened by Gabriel’s light fingers and occasional bribes to the Captain’s steward. Any land, even if she’d had to swim to it, would have looked good. Any new human form, after half a year in close quarters with the same scarred, dismembered, begrimed, foulmouthed crew, would have looked comparatively well favored. Even small but well-formed men, like Indians.

The four hundred tons would have to be off-loaded in flat-bottomed masoola boats by local laborers. This was Hannah’s first vision of what she was to call the “perfected human form,” angelic faces and straight, small-scaled, dignified bodies “as God had draughted Adam, but dipp’d in ebon-ink in place of gilt or blush.” She knew she’d been transported to the other side of the world, but the transportation was more than mere “conveyancing,” as it was for Gabriel and the others. Many years later she called the trip, and her long residence in India, her “translation.”

Of all the qualities I admire in Hannah Easton that make her entirely our contemporary in mood and sensibility, none is more touching to me than the sheer pleasure she took in the world’s variety.

The word did not yet exist (“traveler” was in common usage), but if it had, she might have used it: she was, in some original sense of the word (as a linguist is to language), a tourist. She was alert to novelty, but her voyage was mental, interior. Getting there was important, but savoring the comparison with London or Salem, and watching her life being transformed, that was the pleasure. She did not hold India up to inspection by the lamp of England, or of Christianity, nor did she aspire to return to England upon the completion of Gabriel’s tour.

If she judged the world from a single, unassailable place, it might have been from a forest in Brookfield, before the expulsion from that New World Eden. Hannah was still alert to the power of the jungle. She did not fear the unknown or the unexplored. Her character was shaped on romps with Rebecca in the woods around Brookfield. And she needed time to sort out her errands—oh, so many errands!—in this vast new jungle.

3

ONCE UPON
a time—in 1639, to be precise—today’s chapati-flat metropolis, Madras, was a hazardous stretch of beach with a straggly settlement of fishermen’s huts. If an East India Company agent named Francis Day had not been in love with an Indo-Portuguese woman living in San Thomé, the Portuguese fort town three miles south, the Company might have situated its factory on a more sheltered dimple farther up the coastline.

Fort St. George, Fort St. Sebastian, Fort St. Joseph, Fort St. Luke: they are monuments to stern-souled, gouty-toed and chilblained Englishmen’s sudden submission to the flame-tipped arrows of a dark-skinned Eros. Love dictates the pattern of streets and walls; its aftermath invites demographic upheaval. White Town, where the factors had their dwellings and the Company had erected its headquarters and church, was a town laid out on the confusing Latin plan, or, worse, followed imperatives known only to a Catholic or Hindu heart.

Like the story of Fort St. George’s origin, that of Fort St. Sebastian is apocryphal. In 1684, Clarence Clitherow, a dignified gentleman from Liverpool, while working as a factor in Fort St. George, was discovered to have defrauded a powerful local merchant on a private sale of diamonds. This practice—having been abused by earlier factors and governors, like my relative Streynsham Master, had brought the Company loss of profit as well as embarrassment—was prohibited by the Directors in London. The dignified gentleman, thinking it best to flee corporate reprimand and corporal retribution as swiftly and secretively as possible, disguised himself in clothes borrowed from a Chulia Muslim boatman and sailed two miles southward to the boatman’s home. There he stayed while he appealed for reconsideration of his case by the Council.

The Council, prizing knaves above fools and Englishmen over Muslims and Hindus, concluded that the blame was entirely with the plaintiff. The Fort St. George consultation-book entry on “this businesse” and the “accommodation” reached indicates that Clitherow was readmitted to the Company’s service at a salary of one hundred pounds and that the diamonds were returned to him. But while awaiting the Council’s deliberations, Clitherow, “disordered with country liquor and unnatural potions,” had fallen in love with the youngest of the boatman’s beautiful daughters, a child of five. He, therefore, asked the Council leave to set up a factory in the very square mile that had provided him love as well as refuge. And when that leave was given, he arranged with the local ruler, Nawab Hasan Beg, to lease and refurbish a broken-down fort, a factory building and a warehouse abandoned by a Portuguese adventurer who had lost a fortune before moving on to Porto-Novo.

What we’re seeing is progressive derangement. God-fearing, land-starved, profit-seeking Welsh and English and Scottish and Irish second sons, jilted by primogeniture, sexually repressed, passion denying, furtively engaging the favors of native women, girls and boys, all unfolding in the midst of septic heat, rain, disease, squalor and savage beasts, while being waited on, cooked for, fanned, massaged by servants a thousand times more loyal, submissive and poorly paid than any in the world, in the middle of the biggest real estate boom, jewel auction and drug emporium of the past five hundred years. No wonder they went a little crazy.

Eleven years later, when Hannah and Gabriel arrived, Fort St. Sebastian had drawn, as a magnet might, satellite villages of weavers, dyers, washermen, artisans necessary for the Company station to carry on its export of textiles to England and its import of woolens, tin, bullion and brimstone. The new Nawab, liege of Aurangzeb, was the son of old Hasan Beg, known as Haider Beg.

THAT HANNAH
was not as malleable as an English factor’s wife had to be and that the curbing of her spirit would require diligence and planning must have been clear to Cephus Prynne from the moment she, ignoring his steadying hand, stepped out of the boat that had ferried her—together with her husband, two junior clerks (known in colonial parlance as writers), sea chests, cases of liquor, and livestock—from the
Fortune
across the roadstead to the sandy strip that passed for a beach. An East Indiaman of the
Fortune’s
tonnage was obliged to anchor in the open roadstead. For the Company, the hauling of cargo to and from anchored ships was a burdensome expense. But for Cephus Prynne, the Chief Factor, the scary trip in a fast, open
kuttamaram
, a simple local canoe with logs tied at a distance to each side, over choppy waves and around sandbars, was nature’s test to see which spongy-souled novice would die or go crazy within weeks.

Cephus Prynne must have seemed to Hannah a man of disquieting miscegenation. Of their first meeting she recorded:

This morneing wee went on shoare, Mr. Prynne, Chief Factor, receiving us with civillity but without Kindnesse. “Praised be God, you did not over shoot the Port,” Mr. Prynne opined, “but this is the most incommodious place you will ever see.” He spared a hand to assist me off the country boate, which hand I shunned. Also present were Mr. Higginbottham, second factor, and Mr. Ruxton, Chyrurgeon. Reverend Colbourn, Chaplaine, sent his excuse, severall Soldyers being sick of feaver
.

Venn leans into my shoulder to read Hannah’s entry for himself. I smell cloves on his breath. He chews whole cloves and cardamoms the way we chew gum. “
This is the most incommodious place you will ever see
.…” He snickers. He assumes the haughty gait of a British East India Company chief factor and offers me a scornful hand. Like Hannah, instinctively, I back away.

The Chief Factor was probably no more than thirty when he entered Hannah’s life on that January morning of 1695, but we know from Hannah’s responses that his body was so emaciated and his features so stern that he had the look of a man possessed with the vanity of self-privation. His clothes were from London, Hannah observed, but carelessly preserved through many moldy monsoon seasons. His skin, his hair hanging lank from a receding hairline, his uneven mustache, all were the color of the snuff that dear Hubert had, in another lifetime … no, she would not allow herself to grieve for what might have been. Past events surfaced only in images of pale dreary colors. The sounds, shapes and hues swirling around her—the yellowness of the sand, for instance, the hollering of laborers—had a vibrancy that sucked all breath out of her chest.

She moved to where Tamil boatmen and peons were piling up unloaded cargo. The beach was strewn with chests, bales, bleating and neighing animals. Bullion was being inspected by sharp-eyed customs officials in the service of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Casks of wine were being seized as bribes or gifts of homage. The Company’s factors and cash keepers were driving belligerent bargains with local merchants. She heard Gabriel raise his voice against traders, dyers, weavers, as though he had been with the Company at St. Sebastian as long as had Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham. She strolled away, toward clots of fishermen’s children, who watched the spectacle of disembarkation from a cautious distance.

I need to believe that if Higginbottham had not hurried after her with courteous admonitions, Hannah would have kept on strolling, that on her very first morning on the Coromandel she would have made good her escape into the “forest,” as had her mother years before in Massachusetts. The second factor coaxed and pleaded with her. “Dear lady, do not stray,” he panted. “Dear lady, I commend you to the protection of your countrymen, whom in turn I commend to the protection of the Almighty.” Behind the wheezing Higginbottham slid and stumbled his rickety-legged umbrella bearer. The children relished the spectacle; they laughed and clapped each time the Englishman mopped his sun-ruddied face or the umbrella bearer dropped the heavy shade. Hannah might have ignored Higginbottham. She might even have contributed, however circumspectly, to the children’s entertainment, had the Chief Factor himself not intervened.

Prynne’s intervention involved no clownish movements. His address was laconic and indirect. His gloomy voice reached Hannah all the way from the wharf. “It is not consistent with our interest,” the voice rebuked, “to let the people of the land see our countrywomen yield to self-indulgence.”

Hannah expected Prynne to come after her as Higginbottham had. She waited for a harsh confrontation of wills. She had intended rebellion, not an accidental breach of Company etiquette. But the Chief Factor expended no further rage on her. The would-be rebel was dismissed. Prynne resumed issuing instructions to boatmen, laborers, scribes and apprentices. His gibes he reserved for the Mughal Emperor’s and the Roopconda Governor’s officious bureaucrats.

Hannah turned her back on the fishermen’s children, startled at her own compliance.

Not far from the wharf, a hound she had grown fond of on the long, sickly trip out to the Coromandel lay stretched at the foot of a dune. The hound, named Tobias, had amused her with its antics of snapping up fish that flew onto the decks of the
Fortune
. Now its eyes were dulled in near death, its flanks twitchy in hyperventilation. Hunched over the hound was its master, Thomas Tringham, a red-haired boy with a sun-blistered face and a high-bridged nose who cursed the unholy heat of the New Year’s week in an unalloyed Yorkshire accent. The Yorkshire youth, sent by the Company as a writer, was to be its youngest employee at Fort St. Sebastian.

“ ’Tis January!” Hannah kept hearing Thomas Tringham mumble at the hound. She could make out only isolated phrases from his grief’s inchoate fullness. “ ’Tis January! God ne’er intended it so!”

She tried to comfort young Tringham, but he shook off the sweaty-gloved hand she’d laid on his arm. She didn’t misconstrue the rejection. He was wrapped in the surly loneliness of his private sorrow. A stranger’s sympathy was intrusive. All the same, she couldn’t abandon Tringham. She looked for help from Gabriel, who was surrounded by laborers stacking chests and trunks painted prominently with the Legge name. She called his name twice, halfheartedly, knowing that Gabriel would not come to a dying dog’s aid. He was engaged in the cantankerous supervision of bookkeepers who were recording the customs fees assessed on his private goods by the Emperor’s and the Governor’s men. Boldly, she beckoned Dr. Ruxton. A “chyrurgeon” might still save the hound.

It was Cephus Prynne, however, who responded to her desperate wave. Chief Factor Prynne was lither, swifter, than the portly Dr. Ruxton. He was at her side, his bleak stare fastened on Tringham and the dying hound. “Hyenas love nothing more than tender English cur,” he said. He did not hide from Hannah his pale, malicious smile. To Tringham, he said, “Better bury it under a rock.”

Hannah understood Prynne’s words for what they were: an order, not consolatory counsel. Poor Tringham did not.

“Eight months aboard the
Fortune
, only to die here?” Tringham wept. “Is this land not cursed?”

“Aye, cursed,” agreed Cephus Prynne, and scuffed some sand on the hound’s flank.

Glittery grains of sand came to rest on Hannah’s gloved hands. “Tobias weathered the voyage!” Hannah protested. “So why not the cursed land?”

Prynne’s rejoinder shocked Hannah. He said, looking in the direction of Gabriel and the customs officials, “Mistresses Higginbottham and Ruxton devote themselves to the well-being of their husbands, the keeping of their tables and the education of their children in the Protestant religion.”

Just then Gabriel signaled Cephus over. Gabriel seemed to be losing an argument with the chief customs officer. One of the chests had been overturned. Cheese, rum, gloves, watches, spyglasses—valuables he had brought with him for private trade—littered the beach. Hannah had never seen her husband so angry; with his words muffled by the surf, he seemed to be a comedian miming rage. She smiled, then caught Cephus Prynne’s cynical stare. He was watching her watching Gabriel. She backed away.

“Mind my words,” Prynne said to Tringham before ambling off to Gabriel’s aid. “Three feet deep, under a rock.”

Higginbottham, Ruxton, soldiers, servants, followed the Chief Factor in showy procession.

“He had no warrant to disrespect his suffering,” Tringham moaned. He swiped at the sand with a snap of his hat. Hannah lifted the dog’s head for a final view of the sea and three masts that had brought it to St. Sebastian.

WHEN
G
ABRIEL
, Prynne, Higginbottham and Ruxton finally returned to where Hannah was cradling Tobias’s head, Gabriel was still seething, but this time his rage was focused on “thieving infidels.” A porter or boatman, he accused, had stolen one of his chests.

At a deferential distance from the English stood three traders, each with his own retinue. At the edge of the group hovered Kashi Chetty, a small, dark, smiling man in a broad-brimmed, English-style hat. He had dismissed his umbrella bearer, who was left squatting on his haunches near his master’s feet. The other two traders sat high aloft in their litter chairs, obliging their umbrella bearers to stand on ornate wooden stools. The lightest-skinned of the traders, the only one not in Indian garments, was an Armenian by the name of Catchick Sookian. If anything, his linen was starchier, his velvet coat more carefully brushed, than the ship’s captain’s had been at Sabbath dinner table. The third man, Pedda Timanna, was plump, with a plumed and aigretted headgear on his disproportionately small head. He seemed to Hannah to be richer than the others, or perhaps had a stronger sense of his place in a hierarchy she didn’t yet comprehend. He sat on a fancifully carved chair and was carried from spot to spot by four emaciated servants. Another servant stood at the ready with a silver spittoon, yet another waved off flies. The lesser traders made do with fanners but no spittoon bearers, and at the edge of the bizarre congregation stood the three decorated hackeries, the hobbled horses and the idle horsemen who had borne the gentlemen to the beach from whencesoever they had come.

Hannah counted twenty-five men in service and a swirling mass of hangers-on, all vying for fanning, swatting and spittle-swabbing duties. Each of the local dignitaries seemed to derive from a different universe of blood, language and sensibility. Each seemed to her, in separate ways, a voluptuary, with bloodshot eyes, a surplus of jewelry, under a cloud of complicated fragrance. It was as though eight months at sea had deposited her on a different plane of existence, a moon, an undersea world in which the last familiar creature, a dog, had just died.