Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  In 1817, Sertürner published in the Annalen der Physik that he had identified the active substance Morphium from opium latex.82 He had tested the substance on himself and three volunteers in the laboratory, and within forty-five minutes had almost poisoned all of them. Only the downing of vinegar as an emetic prevented the experiment going badly wrong. But still, Sertürner was now sure he had found the active sleeping agent in opium.

  French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac worked with pharmaceutical chemist Pierre Robiquet on Sertürner’s findings, and declared it the first discovery of an organic base. Sertürner had identified the alkaloid that was morphine. Before 1810, alkaloids were unknown, and in less than fifty years almost eighty had been documented. His work had an almost instant and far-reaching effect, allowing others to rapidly identify such compounds as quinine and strychnine, as well as the other alkaloids present in opium base.

  European commercial competition was by this time fierce, and publications were translated quickly and widely disseminated. In 1821 Thomas Morson, a London apothecary, was manufacturing morphine, and following a decade of research and testing, German pharmacy H. E. Merck, having long outgrown the Engel-Apotheke, began to refine and distribute it in bulk, featuring it in their 1827 brochure of all known alkaloids. It was immediately in demand.

  Sertürner, meanwhile, struggled again at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and had to move to Hamelin. Despite his discovery, and his valuable observations on the Asiatic cholera outbreak in Germany in the early 1830s, he died in obscurity in 1841 and was buried back in Einbeck.

  Morphine heralded a new era in drug manufacture and consumption. A new, clean chemical product, fitting for the age, it produced miraculous results instantly, and appeared to have no side effects. People previously crippled by pain got up and walked from their doctor’s office. Named for a god, it is also a demon, and by the 1840s, Western doctors realized there was a dreadful problem with this wondrous new cure. Sertürner, in the name of science and a good night’s sleep, had unwittingly unleashed a monster, just as, on the other side of the world, the British Empire was engineering one.

  Chapter Five

  THE CHINA CRISIS

  The Indian News and Chronicle of Eastern Affaires

  Although Britain and America continued to obtain their opium mainly from Turkey, Iran and sometimes Egypt and the Levant, as well as the new small-scale home-grown attempts at cultivation, on the other side of the world, an entirely different supply chain had been constructed. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company had consolidated its grip on trade at each of its factories, and finally rid itself of the challenge from the French East India Company in 1763. Government-authorized rogues such as Robert Clive (1725–74), better known as Clive of India, had made massive gains for the British Crown, snatching huge swathes of the country to establish British dominance in Bengal. Clive was an opium addict his entire adult life, having first taken it during a nervous breakdown as a young man, and it is likely he died of an opium overdose at his grand house in Berkeley Square in 1774. During his career, the EIC had changed radically from a band of merchant adventurers into a mighty bureaucratic and military machine that governed millions of people. As it grew, the EIC recruited Indians into the ranks, from all castes, although the British-trained officers who arrived from the company’s own military academy outranked any native soldier.

  Initially focussed on the acquisition of land and trading rights, the EIC had become a quasi-governmental force in a land riven by the infighting of the local rulers and the decline of the Mughal Empire. Once it had consolidated its interests, it looked to its global concerns to facilitate international trade, and by the late eighteenth century, it had a clear solution: tea.

  The British opium trade with China resulted largely from the domestic demand for tea. From the modest imports of the 1660s, when Samuel Pepys had first tried the ‘China drink’, a century later, Britons had become insatiable consumers of tea. Tea exports from Canton had more than quadrupled, with the EIC importing 25.5 million pounds between 1785 and 1787.1 So huge was the appetite for the drink that it, like gin, had become a political issue, with commentators writing on tea’s ever-growing place in the economy.

  Jonas Hanway (1712–86), a governor of the Foundling Hospital and founder of the Marine Society, who had opinions on everything (as evidenced by his seventy-four privately published pamphlets), thought tea deleterious to the constitution both of the individual and the economy. His publication of An Essay on Tea, Considered as Pernicious to Health, Obstructing Industry and Impoverishing the Nation; also an Account of its Growth, and great Consumption in these Kingdoms in 1756, attacked tea from every possible angle. Not only was it a luxury that working people should avoid, along with gin, it was damaging to health. On a broader level, it caused hard currency to leave the British Isles to pay for it. Hanway shunned it as a fashionable nonsense and wholeheartedly recommended abstinence, citing ‘parsimony as the best remedy against augmenting the public debt’, which was swelling as the British government took further loans from the increasingly wealthy EIC in return for allowing it to continue trading.2

  Dr Samuel Johnson, who after giving up brandy had become ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant’, wrote a rebuttal in the Literary Magazine, arguing that tea was beneficial to health.3 To Hanway’s impassioned plea that ‘If a quarter the sum, now spent in tea, were laid out, annually, in plantations, in making public gardens, in paving and widening streets, in making roads, in rendering rivers navigable, erecting palaces, building bridges . . . should we not be gainers, and provide more for health, pleasure, and long life, compared with the consequences of the tea-trade?’4 Johnson agreed that ‘Our riches would be much better employed to these purposes; but,’ he objected pragmatically, ‘let us first resolve to save our money, and we shall, afterwards, very easily find ways to spend it.’5

  Hanway was also convinced that while Britain imported 3 million pounds of tea annually, at least 2 million was brought in by smuggling, and where previously it had come in via the Orkneys, much of the trade had now been displaced by the Seven Years War (1754–63) to the Isle of Man, Devon and Cornwall. The only way to estimate the value of the Free Trade at any given time is as a multiple of what is impounded. The EIC held the monopoly on the legal trade of tea into Britain, and after 1724, it was stored in bonded warehouses until duty had been paid. For Devonian and Cornish smugglers, tea was available at the same time for between sixpence and one shilling a pound in France, and when landed at home, it was worth up to seven times as much.6 Along the peninsula, the main industry was smuggling, owing partly to the decline of tin mining after 1700. Tea, like tobacco, was the perfect commodity to smuggle: unlike brandy, it wasn’t heavy and was less prone to spoiling than silk, another contraband favourite.

  Smuggling is, by nature, an opportunist activity, and almost everyone at sea engaged in it. The ships of the West and East India Companies often hovered outside Falmouth or in the Channel so that crews could sell what they had acquired privately on their journeys. In 1763, three EIC ships there were said to have offloaded £20,000 of contraband into the local smuggling population, at a time when Cornish wages struggled to reach £20 a year per working man.7 Offloading in this fashion became so rife that the government began to pilot ships up the Channel and the Thames to stop it happening, reinforcing this after 1718 with a series of Hovering Acts. Yet it was impossible to stop the rife free trading that went on between Britain and the Continent from the south coast. Large, nimble ships began to appear with improved rigging and shallow drafts for entering smaller harbours, capable of carrying up to 10,000 gallons of spirits or twelve tons of tea, indicating the sheer scale of trade. What part, if any significant one, opium played in the British smuggling trade of the eighteenth century is impossible to say, although exhibits in Liverpool’s National Border Force Museum indicate opium was indeed smuggled. H
owever, tea and spirits were the mainstay of the British smuggling trade, and demand was only growing. It was also growing in America, and British Americans relied heavily on the Dutch for cheap, coarse tea, rather than pay the tax on expensive tea from Britain. The refusal of Americans to pay the duty for ‘British’ tea of course culminated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when the protestors, the Sons of Liberty, tipped 342 chests of tea from EIC ships into Boston harbour.

  The Commutation Act of 1784 attempted to regulate the EIC’s monopoly, and also the tea trade between China and Britain. This resulted in the company buying up most of the available stocks of Canton and also from the Continent, which helped reduce smuggling. But it also had the effect of driving up the price of tea in Canton, and thus in Britain. It did not slow down demand, though, but seemed rather to have the opposite effect. From 1783 to 1792, Canton exported 285 million pounds of tea, which was over 100 million more than the previous decade, with nearly 60 per cent of that arriving in London through the EIC, in which time the company made £5 million profit from its monopoly on the trade.8 Favourite black varieties were bohea, congou and souchong, and singlo and hyson in green. Many Chinese tea dealers were unable to meet the demand, and tales of trunks packed with rubbish instead of tea, or poor quality, adulterated product were soon rife. Still, demand throughout Britain grew, and by the end of the century it was a staple in every grocer in the land. The British were, by far, the biggest consumers in the West, and the trade was of immense value to the economy.

  Attempts were made to cultivate Chinese tea in British India, to supply the demand. Indians already drank tea, as the German writer John Mandelslo had remarked on his visit there in the 1630s, but it wasn’t until 1780 that Governor General Warren Hastings acquired tea plants for Bhutan and Bengal. In 1788 the naturalist Joseph Banks corresponded with the Botanical Gardens of Calcutta to try and establish a crop there. The EIC naturally opposed anything that might compromise their hold in the Chinese tea market, but others could see the potential for an Indian tea industry to rival that of China, although it was not until the 1830s that an organized effort was made to create it.

  In this period, a complex culture evolved around the preparation and consumption of tea: the heating of the cup, the addition of milk and sugar, and when it should be consumed. Anna, Duchess of Bedford (1788–1861), is credited with introducing the ritual of afternoon tea, to be taken between 4 and 4.30, and not lasting more than one hour. The addition of West Indian sugar was, in itself, a complex political and social subject. Abolitionists refused sugar pointedly, and poet William Cowper even wrote a colourful storybook for children on the human evils of sugar, entitled The Negro’s Complaint. Yet soon, tea was the staple of both polite society and the working people.

  The struggle was to keep this market afloat on a complicated system of credits, cash payments and the EIC working ‘in hand’ across thousands of miles of ocean. Currency had always been in relatively short supply in Britain, so continuing to export the massive amounts of bullion required to exchange for such a quantity of tea was soon not even an option. And as British goods were of no interest in China, the shortfall had to be met somehow. British India, rapidly on the rise, did however have goods to trade. Indian cotton and opium were both in high demand in China, and so in Canton the EIC established an equitable trade exchange. It was the beginning of a trade exchange that had disastrous results for China.

  The Seven Years War saw Britain ally itself with Prussia and Portugal against France and Austria, and later, Spain. In Europe, it was a tedious, slow-moving land war, but in the colonies things happened much more rapidly and there were fortunes to be seized. At the beginning of the war, the old European powers were still making a play for the new worlds across the seas, but by the end of it, Britain dominated the eastern seaboard of North America, India and the Caribbean. Young men such as Robert Clive had followed in the footsteps of the first clerks, and used the EIC’s mandate to make war in the name of trade to their own and Britain’s advantage.

  Robert Clive was, by any measure, an extraordinary man. Born in 1725 into the Shropshire gentry, he had shown his colours early, when his uncle declared, ‘I am satisfied that his fighting (to which he is out of measure addicted) gives his temper a fierceness and imperiousness, that he flies out upon every trifling occasion: for this reason I do what I can to suppress the hero, that I may forward the more valuable qualities of meekness, benevolence, and patience.’9 Suffice to say, his uncle failed: Clive was a tearaway who ran protection rackets in the local market town and once climbed the church steeple, to the alarm of onlookers. Unsurprisingly, his father shipped him off to Madras as an EIC clerk, aged eighteen. Clive was part of a British contingent who went out as clerks and became co-opted into the military mentality of the EIC as it expanded across India. In Madras, he worked in the factories, but became depressed and isolated in his new circumstances, trying and failing to commit suicide twice. In 1746, when fighting broke out between the British and French forces in India once more, Clive gave up his desk job and became a soldier. Few can claim to have changed history with a single decision. Robert Clive is one.

  The Mughal Empire was a spent force by the time Clive arrived in Madras. They had not sustained the glory of their earlier rulers, and their lack of infrastructure had ultimately left them weak and vulnerable. Harried by independent leaders, the nawabs, and Hindu warrior tribes such as the Marathas, they had lost Delhi in 1739, a terrible blow to their power. Britain and France, seeing their chance to take power, were soon engaged in the Second Carnatic War, beginning in 1748, giving Clive his opportunity to shine. But a health breakdown occurred, allegedly from gallstones, and in 1750, he was sent to Bengal to recover as the war continued without him. There he became a regular opium user, something that would continue for the rest of his life.

  Then, in 1751, Clive achieved a feat of arms that changed the balance of imperial power in Britain’s favour for almost two centuries. The Siege of Arcot, outside Madras, fought against Chanda Sahib, the nawab of the Carnatic who was assisted by the French, saw the British troops of the EIC who were holding the small city facing numbers that have been estimated to have been as high as fifty to one. Embattled by the nawab’s men, the French, and fighting elephants in armour, Clive took charge and rallied the artillery. After an ugly battle, lasting only an hour, it was over. The reputation of the English forces was assured, and Clive’s career was transformed.

  After Calcutta was captured by the Bengali army in 1756, the infamous Black Hole incident, in which 123 out of 146 British, Anglo-Indian and Indian prisoners died, created anti-Indian feeling. At the Battle of Plassey, Clive, by this time a colonel, was given the opportunity to be successful once more. Having bribed various members of the nawab of Bengal’s army to opt out of fighting, Colonel Clive engaged some 50,000 soldiers and a brigade of war elephants with only 3,000 men, and won. Critics remain sharply divided on just how competent Clive was as a military commander, but nevertheless it was an act of theatre, a political coup, and a victory on an enormous scale, and one that allowed Britain to establish its dominance in India, rapidly pushing out the French and Dutch.

  In 1762, Clive was created Baron Clive of Plassey and knighted in 1764. He reaped vast wealth in diamonds, emeralds and gemstones, and Britain now controlled the most productive opium-growing areas of India. Nabobs, as they were known, such as Robert Clive had no real interest in staying in India and establishing a new infrastructure. In the Caribbean, land was key, and people arrived with a view to becoming planters, but in India the British speculated in diamonds and other precious stones. After Plassey, Clive had walked amongst ‘heaps of gold and silver’ as the treasury of the Bengal and the Mughal princes ‘was thrown open to him’, free to help himself to whatever he pleased.10 He used some of this new wealth to transact EIC business and for bribing the local nawabs, but he and others also grabbed great swathes of it for themselves. The British nabobs of this period in India were little more than looters,
and even lowly clerks were sending diamonds home to their loved ones. By the 1760s, Clive held huge sway with the EIC, and thus with the British government itself, his father acting as a go-between. Sarcastic man of letters Horace Walpole noted ‘General Clive’s father has been with Mr Pitt, to notify, that if the government will send his son £400,000 and a certain number of ships, the heaven-born general knows of a part of India where such treasures are buried that he will engage to send over enough to pay the national debt.’11

  The sheer amounts of money involved in the two decades from Plassey onwards were gargantuan, so much so that, in 1772, Parliament opened an inquiry into Clive and the EIC’s actions in India. When questioned on the money he had received in India, Clive famously replied, ‘Mr Chairman, I stand astonished at my own moderation.’12 In the end, the wealth counted for little: Clive became increasingly ill and depressed at the vicious attacks on his character in the British press, and ever more dependent upon laudanum. The general feeling was against the nabobs and their diamonds, and people worried not only about corruption in India, but also how this new wealth might affect national policy if used to corrupt effect at home. All of this put paid to Clive’s political aspirations. On 22 November 1774, he was playing cards at his house in Berkeley Square when he excused himself from the party and went to his study. There, he took a substantial dose of laudanum, and is alleged to have opened his own throat with a penknife, although there was no inquest. The papers, so unforgiving of his actions in India for over a decade, were suddenly silent, and the body was interred in a church in Shropshire, near his birthplace. His tombstone bears only the indisputable legend: Clive, Primus in India.