As Rattigan’s cross-examination continued, Hamilton’s case began to unravel slowly. He was forced to admit he had entered into the arrangement having ‘no knowledge of gems’, their quality or value. ‘I never asked Mr Jacob from whom he purchased, or to whom he sold, nor have I ever asked to see his books. I fully trusted him.’16
When Tytler took the stand, it became clear that she had become involved with Jacob because she had fallen on hard times and was looking for the best way to remit money to England without losing on the exchange rate, to support her children there. Like Hamilton, she was mesmerized by the possibilities of reaping huge rewards by selling jewels in London.
During Rattigan’s cross-examination of Tytler and in the letters between her and Hamilton tendered before the court, Jacob came across as both a man to be feared and obeyed. It was obvious that he had played on Tytler’s circumstances as a bereaved widow whose children needed support, as a way of bringing him into her confidence. He had also displayed an uncanny ability to play those around him against each other. Tytler admitted pleading with Hamilton not to tell Jacob that she was in contact with him. When Spitta asked whether she was afraid of the jeweller, the judge disallowed the question. The answer came out anyway. ‘Mr Jacob is a man of peculiar temper,’ she told the court, adding that she did not want there to be any ‘mischief made between her and Mr Jacob’.17
‘There were always rows between Major-General Hamilton and Mr Jacob, and I had to act as peacemaker. The plaintiff used to worry Mr Jacob out of his life. The defendant used to get into a furious rage sometimes, and why should I submit to that sort of thing? I could not break with him because there was so much money at stake.’18
Although she admitted she had been naive to enter into something she knew nothing about, she did not think she was wrong about Jacob. ‘I would trust him now. I am still on good terms with him.’19
Summing up the first three days of the hearing, a correspondent for the Statesman described the contents of her letters to Jacob as ‘sensational’. As for the plaintiff: ‘A more confiding and gullible gentleman than Major-General Hamilton, it has never been my lot to come across.’ It was hoped that Jacob’s cross-examination ‘may throw some light on important points which are yet quite unintelligible; and I imagine that it will be really worth hearing.’20
Until the morning of Monday, October 10, 1881, when Jacob took the witness stand, little was known about the man who, in the space of four short years, had gone from a small-time magician, occasional intelligence agent and amateur trader in gems and jewellery, to being a household name throughout India. Until now, he had never had to reveal publicly his antecedents, his modus operandi or the extent of his contacts.
As he rode on his mountain pony from Belvedere to the court, Jacob knew the case against him was beginning to collapse. Hamilton had been exposed as a greedy, gullible fool, and Tytler had blamed herself, rather than him, for the losses she had made. It irked him to have to appear before a court, but he also saw it as an opportunity to increase his aura and mystique.
A larger than normal crowd had gathered that morning awaiting his appearance. What had been until now a humdrum affair involving a boring old general and a well-meaning though somewhat naive widow, was about to get interesting.
After the judge called the court to order, Jacob walked up to the witness stand, placed his hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth. He began by stating that his full name was Alexander Malcolm Jacob Sabunji. ‘I am the defendant in this action. I am Syrian. I understand English, but not grammatically,’ he added.21
Over the next two days, Jacob entertained the court with snippets of information about his life while brushing off, with an irreverent sense of humour, attempts to cross-examine him. He used the trial to showcase his expertise in grading and pricing precious stones but, at the same time, downplayed his reliance on gems and the jewellery trade as his main source of income. ‘I deal largely in curiosities,’ he said with deliberate understatement. ‘On my jewellery profits, I could not keep my dogs. I have forty dogs. During the winter, I travel all over the country picking up curios, and sell to American, French and German gentlemen, rarely to Englishmen.’22
Asked if he dealt in jewellery and gems, he replied, ‘I deal in everything, even old hats, boots or clothes,’ prompting one journalist to remark: ‘He is a smart man and too old a bird to be caught by chaff.’ Jacob also revealed that he was on the payroll of a number of Indian Princes. ‘I had their cases sent to the Government of India and was to get eleven rupees a day from each. I won one case and got 40,000 rupees for it. I also got 6000 rupees for another.’23
Turning to his early life, Jacob described that he had arrived penniless in Bombay in 1865 and then found work with the firm of Charles, Nephew & Co. He said he was introduced to Tytler by John Day, the manager of Lawries, in July 1877. ‘She came to the hotel to see my room. She met me at the theatre one day after that and bowed to me and the next day I called on her, I took lessons in painting, for four months, from Mrs Tytler, starting on August 1.’24
Over the next two days, Jacob did little to clarify the deliberate opaqueness of this initial statement. He variously portrayed Tytler as one of his closest confidants and valued customer, then turned against her for misleading him as to her motives and failing to show loyalty when he needed it most.
He also used his testimony to reveal some tantalizing facts. The first came in a letter from Tytler dated December 14, 1877, in which he said she had ‘expressed her pleasure that he was not going to Cabul; congratulated me on the prospect of going to Turkey and hoped that I would return from Turkey a great man, whom even Her Majesty would honour’. As Jacob explained to a dumbstruck courtroom who had not heard about the offer, Lord Lytton wanted to send him to Kabul as an attaché. ‘I said I would not go to Afghanistan, but offered to go to Turkey,’ he told the court, adding that he had a letter from the Foreign Department proving the matter had been discussed.25
Lytton’s offer proved that Jacob’s network of contacts extended beyond the Khyber Pass and that his intelligence -gathering activities were not confined to picking out the best bargains in the court of Kabul. It also betrayed the affinity between the two men. The hearing had already been told that Lytton frequented Jacob’s shop. Now it was clear there was a much deeper connection.
Jacob also let slip another unknown fact—that he had a brother who was a Roman Catholic bishop in London, John Louis Sabunji, whom he had not seen since he was a boy. After discovering that Sabunji was living in London, he told the court he had started sending him gems which he sold at a profit. It would be another decade before they met.
Jacob did not elaborate further on his relationship with Tytler, preferring that her letters speak for themselves. But it was clear from their tone that she was spellbound by the handsome and mysterious figure who was equally at ease in the corridors of the Viceregal Lodge as he was in the crowded lanes of Chandni Chowk. Initially, at least, she had been prepared to do anything to help him.
As Spitta’s cross-examination continued into a second day, Jacob went into detail on everything, from the price of emeralds on the Calcutta market to the right way to cut a ruby. He ran rings around the prosecution as he explained profit margins and how the war in Afghanistan had depressed local markets because so many officers were sent to the front.
He also did his best to portray Hamilton as a rapacious man who never settled for anything less than a massive profit even when told that such returns were impossible. Reading between the lines of Jacob’s testimony it was clear that he had been egging Hamilton on by claiming to have an insider’s knowledge of the market. Signing himself as ‘Jeweller to H.H. the Nawab of Rampore’, the presiding judge noted, was ‘a little bit of personal vanity which, though not true, could not harm him, and might give him a little importance in the eyes of others, especially the plaintiff’s’.26
Only let his guard down once when he admitted to possessing a thorough knowledge of the v
alue of gems and jewellery in the Indian market, but not in London. But that was enough to give Spitta some ammunition to discredit him. ‘Here they had a man who dealt extensively in large sums of money, and yet professed to keep no books of any sort whatsoever,’ Spitta said in his summing up. Here was a man who ‘threw all his bad purchases on others and whenever a profit was to be made said he had bought it for himself’.
Spitta implored the court to look at the position of the two parties. ‘The one was an old retired General utterly unacquainted with jewels; the other was a thorough expert who had been making good bargains for years. The plaintiff took no independent advice from anyone but trusted implicitly the defendant’s assurances and knowledge.’27
Rattigan began his summing up by calling into question the General’s motives for bringing the suit. ‘It must have struck everyone that a man should have such extraordinary simplicity, or judging from what had subsequently developed, such cupidity as to bring a suit for 46,000 rupees on the ground that he had not made the profit he anticipated; and this, too, came from an old General who was quite prepared to make no less than 600 per cent from the outside public.’
The insinuation that Hamilton ‘was decoyed’ into Tytler’s house ‘in order to be plucked’, that she had induced him to meet with Jacob who, by some preconcerted plan, showed him some jewels and said they would make a 50 per cent profit in London, was ‘the most improbable story he had ever heard in his life.’ If Hamilton knew that Jacob had never been to England, why did he trust him to get an absolute guarantee of the value of the jewels in London? ‘Anything more preposterous to ask the court to believe he could hardly imagine.’28
Rattigan’s speech went into the night and it was with some relief that Justice Hutchinson declared the case closed and advised that he would present his verdict in a fortnight.
In the event, Hutchinson took just one week to summon the parties back to the court to deliver a verdict that most had seen as a foregone conclusion. From the moment Hutchinson began reading out his judgment, it was clear that Hamilton had lost. The magistrate sided with Tytler and Jacob’s version of his first meeting with them and dismissed the assertion that it was a premeditated trap. He then questioned the General’s common sense.
‘It does not seem to have ever occurred to the plaintiff that if such enormous profits were to be made there was no reason whatever why defendant should not make them himself, and that he would certainly never have willingly given them to him (the plaintiff). I have not any doubt at all that defendant did induce plaintiff to buy the gems and jewellery; it was to the defendant’s advantage to sell his things, and there was a man ready to purchase anything he saw.’29
Instead of simply asking Jacob to return the unsold jewels together with whatever balance was owing, Hamilton had made an ‘abrupt and absurd claim for his counsel of 46,000 rupees which was, of course, refused.’ Hutchinson ordered Hamilton to pay Jacob’s costs and the pleader’s fee of 610 rupees. Jacob declined to accept any part of the 4000 rupee costs awarded to him by court, saying that ‘the General’s money would be sure to stick in my throat’.30
For now, Jacob could afford such luxuries. He was vindicated and the case had enhanced his reputation. He would go on making bigger and bigger deals until exactly ten years later, when he would be calling on Rattigan again. This time, the stakes would be many times higher. The plaintiff would not be a lowly servant of the Raj, but India’s richest Prince. And instead of arguing over a few thousand rupees’ worth of precious stones, the item in question would be the largest and most valuable cut diamond in the world.
CHAPTER SIX
ALL THE POWERS OF MOSES—
AND MORE
IN India, stoppages or strikes are called bandhs. This one lasted twenty-four hours and covered all of the north-east state of Assam. The date was December 1979 and the newly formed United Liberation Front of Assam wanted the government to expel illegal Bangladeshi migrants who were taking jobs and land away from the Assamese. I was headed for Guwahati, but my train had been forced to stop at Alipurduar, the last station in West Bengal before the Assam border.
Bored with waiting in my third-class carriage, I decided to take a look at what was a typical provincial Indian town. In the square in front of the station, a large crowd had gathered around an old man and a boy whom I presumed to be his son. Street performers are common in India, every market has its juggler, bard or troupe of singing beggars. Foreigners were still a rarity in this part of India and I was ushered to the front of the crowd. At first I thought I was watching a snake charmer as the old man’s only prop was a large overturned basket. In fact, I had stumbled upon a magic show as old as India itself.
The performance began with the boy crawling under the basket while the man chanted incantations that grew louder and more urgent. As the boy squeezed underneath, the man placed a heavy brown cloth over the top. Slowly working himself into a frenzy, he suddenly picked up a large steel sword. He then lifted the cloth and plunged the sword into the basket. The boy screamed as the man pulled out the sword which was dripping with what looked like blood. He plunged the sword into the basket again and again, each time in a different place and each time accompanied by the horrible screams of the boy inside.
There appeared to be no way the boy could have escaped being injured or killed by a cubit-long blade being thrust into the basket so many times. Then, the boy, the magician and the onlookers all fell silent. Sensing that the climax of the performance was near, many of those around me started to shift uneasily on their feet. The man slowly lifted the heavy cloth and drove the bloody sword into the basket one last time.
I will never forget what I saw next. As the old man pulled back the cloth, he lifted the boy by the blade of the sword which had pierced his neck. Grasping the hilt in one hand and the tip of the blade in the other the magician showed off the boy to the now completely astonished crowd.
The boy showed no signs of discomfort, there were no obvious wounds and no trickery involved. There was no hidden brace, this was no life-like dummy. Satisfied with the crowd’s reaction, the man lowered the boy to the ground, covered him with the blanket and withdrew the sword. A few moments later, the boy emerged completely unscathed.
Coming a close second to India’s association with bejewelled princes in their opulent palaces, was its reputation as a land of snake charmers, flying carpets and rope tricks. Readers of publications such as the Illustrated Weekly of London and the Saturday Magazine were treated to stories of fakirs seated cross-legged four feet in the air, yogis coming back to life after being buried in the ground, sword swallowers and snake charmers.
The feats of Indian magicians have been witnessed by travellers since ancient times. Marco Polo spoke of Kashmiri conjurors who could ‘bring on changes of weather and produce darkness, and do a number of things so extraordinary that no one seeing them would believe them’.
The Mughal emperor Jehangir described a magician who produced a chain 50-cubits-long, one end of which he threw into the sky where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. He then summoned a dog that ran up the chain and disappeared into the air followed by a hog, a panther, a lion and a tiger. When the chain was brought down there was no trace of the animals.
Abbé DuBois, in his seminal work, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, published in the early 1800s, took a more sceptical view of magicians: ‘Among the degraded beings who form the dregs of Indian society must be classed the jugglers, charlatans, mountebanks, conjurors, acrobats, rope dancers &c.’ It was no surprise to him that a people as credulous as the Hindus should be duped so easily. But he was forced to admit that Indian conjurors did ‘perform really astonishing feats of legerdemain and agility. European jugglers would certainly have to lower their colours before them.’1
Harry Houdini’s predecessor, Harry Kellar, took a more sophisticated view, dividing Indian magicians into two categories: ‘jugglers’ who could be found almost anywhere and who contented themselves with
such feats as the sword and basket tricks and snake-charming. They tended to travel around in groups of three to six, ‘arrayed in breech clouts and have an air of pitiable poverty and misery’. They happily explained any of their tricks in private for ‘one or two rupees’. At the other end of the hierarchy, were ‘high-caste Indian fakirs’, or professional magicians such as those seen at ‘the coronation of a Prince, the festival of a Maharaja, the coming of age of a Nizam, the grand feast of Mohorrum and such special occasions as the visit of the Prince of Wales’.2
These fakirs were dignified men, with ascetic faces and long grey beards who, after a lifetime of study, often in seclusion, ‘are admitted into the higher circles of the esoteric brotherhood, whose seat is in the monasteries of Tibet and in the mountain recesses of Hindustan’. Despite a thousand years of rumour, they had succeeded in preserving the secret of their powers which Kellar admitted, baffled his ‘deepest scrutiny and remained the inexplicable subject of my lasting wonder and admiration’.3
When Jacob was seen performing sleights of hand at Auckland House in Simla in 1876, he had already been in India for a decade. For much of that time he had travelled from one Princely court to another, witnessing numerous feats of magic, including the most famous of them all—the rope trick—during his stay in Hyderabad. ‘The rope was thrown up and remained stiff, the end hidden thirty feet up,’ he told the American writer Mary Walter Tibbits. ‘Two boys went up and disappeared. Presently, their limbs were thrown down.’ The magician then threw the limbs on a fire, at which point a little girl, their sister, cried out, ‘If my brothers are burnt, I will commit sati,’ and rushed into the flames. ‘All were consumed within a few minutes.’ A boy then walked in from the crowd and asked for his brother who answered from above and slipped down the rope. ‘Then, both asked for the sister who was found under the Nizam’s chair.’4
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 8