by Jan Morris
Earlier generations of imperial soldiers and administrators had grown accustomed to immense journeys as important phases in a man’s life, and sometimes indeed the journey lasted longer than its purpose: Ensign Garnet Wolseley took eight months to reach the second Burmese war, was wounded on his second day in action, and was immediately sent home again. Lasting friendships and enmities were made in the course of the imperial journeys, and prudent men carefully prepared for them. Lord Saltoun, sailing to his command in the China War of 1839, took care to enlist a staff officer who played the cello, Captain Hope Grant of the 9th Lancers, to accompany his own violin on the 164-day voyage to the Yangtze;1 we read often of officers teaching themselves languages en voyage, working out the entire strategy of a forthcoming war, or undertaking some fundamental reform of morals—‘you should endeavour to improve your manners on the passage,’ John Nicholson told his young brother Alexander, whom he was so soon to find castrated in the Khyber, ‘as without good manners you can never advance yourself’. Cadets who embarked as timid youths at Chatham or Portsmouth emerged at the other end, after several months cooped up with their bored and frustrated soldiers, experienced leaders of men.
Steam was to change all this with dramatic suddenness, and radically altered the relationship between Britain and her Empire. Macaulay, who returned from Calcutta just before the first steamships sailed on the India run, instantly recognized their ideological power—the truncation of distance, he thought, was one of the greatest of civilizing forces. By 1840 the Cunard steamer Unicorn was sailing to Halifax in sixteen days from Liverpool, by 1843 Miss Eden was receiving her instalments of Pickwick in six weeks from London, by 1850 passengers were travelling from London to Holyhead in a day and a night. Now men were able to take home leave several times in their imperial careers, or go home for medical treatment or convalescence. Wives and families went out to the imperial possessions, totally altering the flavour of eastern empire. Administrators or commanders were transferred easily from one colony to another, and the writing of dispatches became a rather less entertaining process, when one could expect a tart response from the Secretary of State within a matter of weeks. In Canada the first paddle-steamers penetrated the rivers of the west, often finding it so difficult to cross their uncharted sandbars that they had to be jerked over by winches mounted on spars—‘grass-hopping’, the river-men called it. In India a pressure group called the New Bengal Steamer Fund pressed for better steamship services with a poignant list of advantages: ‘The shortening by one half the lengthened and heart-rending distance which separates the Husband, the Wife, the Parent and the Child, thus maintaining in continually renewed vigour the best affections of the Heart, in affording the means for a more rapid inter-change of commercial communications by which the interests of both countries cannot but be greatly promoted, and last things though not least in opening wide the door for the introduction of European Science, Morality and Religion into the heart of India’.
And most of all the railways, those supremely British artifacts, gave to the Empire a new and elevating sense of purpose. Imperial activists well realized their meaning. As early as the 1830s Lord Durham had foreseen that the railway would eventually be the instrument of Canadian unity, and Charles Trevelyan had prophecied that in India it would ‘stimulate the whole machinery of society’. By the 1850s Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of India, envisaged a continent transformed by the railways—politically, by a new fusion of peoples and religions, economically by easy access from the interior to the ports, strategically by a new ability to rush armies from province to province, frontier to frontier. Victoria’s empire, as it evolved in the second half of the century, was essentially an empire of steam: and as the frontier roads were to the Romans, so the extending tracks of the steam railways were to the imperial British.
Many of the Empire’s grandest monuments were railway works. There was Robert Stephenson’s tubular Victoria Bridge across the St Lawrence at Montreal, when completed in 1859 one of the great bridges of the world: 24 iron tubes, each 16 feet wide by 20 feet high, linked together to make a passage 1¾ miles long, and supported by 24 piers across the great river—‘one of the chief lions of Montreal’, as Baedeker quaintly described it. There were the immense echoing railway termini which, in every great city of the British Empire, were soon to stand beside the Anglican Cathedrals as outward signs of an inner faith, sometimes like eastern fortresses, sometimes like Gothic palaces, frequently more imposing than the offices of Government and often magnificently embellished with brasswork, symbolic emblems and polished mahogany. There were railways whose very tracks looked like bonds of Empire—the tremendous Canadian Pacific, snaking with trestle bridge and dramatic tunnel from ocean to ocean, or Stephenson’s line across the Suez desert, connecting the steamboats of Red Sea and Mediterranean, or the mountain lines which wound their laborious way, with chuffs and clankings echoing down the wooded valleys, into the frontier hills of the Himalaya. Or, later in the century, there was the grotesque and gigantic Lansdowne Bridge over the Indus River in Sind—which, with its towering complex cantilevers, its dense mesh of pillars, struts and guys, its battlemented gatehouses and its rumbling double track for trains and road traffic, was to remain among the most unforgettable sights of the Raj.1
All over the Empire, in the 1850s, the railway-builders were at work. The first Indian line, from Bombay to Thana, was laid in the year of the Great Exhibition. The line from Dublin to Cork had just been completed. New lines were under way in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and before long the engineers would be laying rails in imperial territories as improbable as Bermuda (20 miles long from tip to tip) or Malta (area 94 square miles). The spectacle of the steam locomotive puffing brass-bound and aglow across steppe, prairie or scorched veld was to remain one of the perennial inspirations of the imperial mission, and was readily adopted by the Church of England too as a figure of salvationary progress:
The line to heaven by Christ was made
With heavenly truth the Rails are laid
From Earth to Heaven the Line extends
To Life Eternal where it ends.
God’s Ward is the first Engineer
It points the way to Heaven so clear,
Through tunnels dark and dreary here
It does the way to Glory steer.1
5
The Empire’s liveliest entrepreneur of progress was Lieutenant Thomas Waghorn of the Overland Route. Waghorn was an impecunious young naval officer who early realized, like Napoleon, that the best way from Europe to India was not via Persia or Afghanistan, but via Egypt. He seized upon the advent of steam to prove the point, and became a kind of familiar of the route to India. Convinced that a practicable overland link could be made across the Isthmus of Suez, to connect steamers in the Mediterranean with steamers in the Red Sea, he argued the case so incessantly, travelled so impetuously from London to Egypt, Egypt to India, to Gibraltar and Malta, Jeddah and Alexandria, Aden and Bombay, that everybody remotely concerned with the India traffic knew of him. In London they thought him half-cracked. In Egypt Ferdinand de Lesseps, the great French engineer, recognized a fellow-spirit in him, and later erected a monument to the man who ‘alone, without any help, by a long series of labours and heroic efforts, demonstrated and determined … the communication between the East and the West’.
Waghorn had been placed on the Navy’s unemployed list at the end of the French wars, had sailed as a merchant officer on the Indian routes, and later became a river pilot on the Hooghly. Accustomed there to piloting sailing ships from England that had taken anything up to a year on the route around the Cape, he threw up his job, like a convert to some sacred cause, to spend all his life agitating for a steamer route via Egypt. Steamers already sailed to Alexandria from London, but the price of coal in the Red Sea was prohibitive, the journey across the Isthmus of Suez was thought to be dangerous, and anyway ships had always gone the other way. Waghorn argued, he pleaded, he wrote memorials, he buttonholed great
men, he even did a demonstration journey for the Government—an experiment incompletely successful, for he was reduced to sailing from Suez to Jeddah in an open boat without a compass and with a crew of mutinous Arabs. Repeatedly rebuffed by authority, Waghorn went on to establish his own unofficial service, in direct competition with the companies on the Cape route. He acted as his own manager, his own constructional engineer, commissariat officer and often courier, and so he brought into being Waghorn’s Overland Route—‘not only without official recommendation’, as he wrote himself, ‘but with a sort of stigma on my sanity’.
It was a tour de force of free enterprise. Like so many other worthies of Empire, Waghorn stood 6' 2" in his socks, and had a frank, appealing face, tinged with an understandable tristesse. He may not have been able to impress Authority in Britain, but he was very persuasive elsewhere, and he presently won over to his cause the formidable Mohammed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt under the firman of the Sultan of Turkey. A picture by David Roberts shows him modestly sitting, between the British Consul and the artist, on a divan in the Viceroy’s palace at Alexandria, while the Pasha smokes a hookah and listens to his plans, a secretary sits cross-legged on the floor taking notes, and in the harbour behind a solitary small steamer, almost lost among the heavy riggings and huge drooping ensigns of the three-masters, subtly suggests developments to come. By 1839 Waghorn had won over the East India Company, too, and had become their deputy agent in Egypt, and finally, when the British Government extended its own mail service from Falmouth to Alexandria, Waghorn became the official enterpreneur of express mails between England and Egypt—‘care of Mr Waghorn’, said the superscription on letters sent via the Suez route.
To achieve all this he organized an elaborate transit service between Alexandria and Suez. In the earlier years of the Overland Route passengers travelled by horse-drawn barge down a canal, dug by Mohammed Ali’s forced labour, from Alexandria to the Nile. There they transferred ten at a time to a tiny steamboat, the Jack o’Lantern, which paddled spasmodically upriver to Cairo, sometimes breaking down, frequently running aground, and infested with cockroaches, rats, flies and fleas. At Cairo the travellers waited at Shepheard’s Hotel, recently founded to cater for the Overland Route, until a semaphore signal relayed across the desert announced the arrival of the India steamer at Suez: they were then jolted and sweated at breakneck speed in specially designed closed vans to the Red Sea, stopping on the way at a series of fly-blown but tolerably well-equipped rest houses. It was not a pleasant journey, but it was worth while, for it cut the journey to India by several weeks. By 1847, when it had passed out of Waghorn’s hands into the control of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company, some 3,000 people crossed the Isthmus annually, and the organization maintained 4 canal steamers, 46 desert carriages, 440 horses and 3,500 camels (many of them employed in carrying coal from the Mediterranean, where it was relatively cheap, to the Red Sea, where it was still ruinously expensive).
Waghorn’s official reward was a small pension and a grant of £1,500 which went instantly to his creditors. He died in 1850, protesting to the end, but his vision was its own fulfilment: he had seen what technique could do for empire. By the 1840s the fortnightly group of British travellers had become a regular part of the Cairo scene, with their little pale babies, their ayahs, their attendant dragomans and their turbanned retainers. ‘O my country,’ cried Thackeray in admiration, having seen Waghorn in action during an eastern journey of his own, ‘O Waghorn! Hae tibi erunt artes.1 When I go to the Pyramids I will sacrifice in your name, and pour out libations of bitter ale and Harvey Sauce in your honour.’2
6
There was a marked difference in taste between the engineering exhibits at the Crystal Palace and the lapis-lazuli trays, the pearl-studded vases and the imitation Gothic sofas. The trains, bridges and ships of the day, like the Crystal Palace itself, were nobly clean of line—decorated often with gilding, figureheads or flourish, but still functional in a convinced and stylish way. In the overseas empire, too, now presenting in some of its aspects a blurred mirror-image of Britain herself, new means of communication were the most stylish emblems of the imperial purpose.
Let us look, for example, at an imperial road. Along the southern coast of Africa, between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, the British had by now thickly settled in the rocky coastal plain since called the Garden Route, east and west of Knysna. This was a delectable country, its plains lying complacently between a glorious surf-washed shore and the mountain barrier of the Little Karroo. It was frequented by no ferocious tribes or dogmatic Boers, plagued by no extremes of heat, cold, drought or flood, and was watered by rivers which, rushing out of the iron-flecked uplands, streamed towards the sea the colour of white wine. But until the middle of the century it was exceedingly difficult to reach by land. Wagons simply pushed a way through thick and tangled foliage, or were heaved agonizingly over wild rocky passes, just as they had been pushed and heaved since the Europeans had first passed that way at the end of the previous century.
In 1849 they opened a new road to circumvent the worst of these hazards, naming it after John Montagu, the Colonial Secretary in Cape Town. This was a most accomplished artifact of empire. It was a toll road, and dues were paid at a polygonal toll-house of beautifully dressed granite, standing on the edge of an uninhabited escarpment, but fit for a nobleman’s lodge. The road wound carefully through the foothills by exquisitely calculated gradients, its bends never abrupt, its camber always gentle. Fine stone walls protected its curves, its stone culverts were meticulously mortared, and now and then it crossed, by way of a strong unobtrusive bridge, one of those rushing torrents of hock. Through that untamed landscape it ran like a coiling thread of rational judgement: and at the far end of the escarpment, easing itself past the second toll-house into a direct conclusion, it deposited the imperial traveller in the oak-lined village of George, where English inns awaited him with chops and ale, and Archdeacon Welby’s rectory might have been transported, roses, chintz and all, from some well-heeled parish of the shires.1
Or take the Rideau Canal at Ottawa. This was an ambitious imperial venture of the 1830s, built at the expense of the imperial Government to provide a new water-route to the West, by-passing the rapids of the St Lawrence River. It was a demanding project. Between Kingston and Ottawa there stood a ridge of high ground, and it was necessary to build thirty-three locks to take vessels up it, and another fourteen to take them down to Lake Ontario on the other side. The work was supervised by a colonel of the Royal Engineers, the principal distributors of technique throughout the Empire (though only their officers were called Engineers, the other ranks being Sappers and Miners still). It took five years to build, and for the rest of the century was to take a steady flow of steamboats and barges between the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence.
Nine of its locks were built adjacent to one another in a ladder immediately above the Ottawa River—in the very centre of the new capital, and beside the wooded bluff upon which they would presently erect the Parliament building of Canada. This was a splendid sight—a grand solution to an engineering problem, and a handsome object in itself. The river widened there into a basin, and upon it, between its thickly wooded banks, steamboats busily chugged and huge rafts of tree trunks, loosely lashed together, came floating down from the forest country to the west. There were mills on the southern shore, and all around them huge masses of timber untidily floated, prodded here and there by men with poles, or nudged about by boats. It was a very Canadian scene, suggestive of wild black woods not so far away, trappers and voyageurs and Indian paramours: but in regimental contrast the locks of the canal marched uniformly up the hill above the river. They looked at once disciplined and urbane, even perhaps a little snobbish, as they carried their little steamboats stage by stage away from that brash colonial tumble at the bottom. The Rideau Canal was specifically an imperial project, conceived it is said by the Duke of Wellington himself, intended largely for imperial military traffic: an
d its address was distinctly imperial too, as though it would never allow a steamboat in its charge to go native.1
Here is another memorable product of the imperial technology. We stand upon the Grand Trunk Road in India, the principal strategic highway of the sub-continent, which runs direct from Calcutta, through Delhi and Lahore, to Peshawar in the Punjab; and along its dusty tree-lined length, hovered over by crows, rutted by wagons, supervised by guard towers like a Roman way, we hear above the distant chatter of women at their washing, and the laughter of children playing in the stream, muffled upon the air a noble snorting. The labourers pause upon their hoes. The women suspend their scrubs. The naked children scramble up the bank to the road. The passing ox-wagons hastily swerve aside, and even the spanking tonga of the passing memsahib, trotting down to cantonment in Rawalpindi, apprehensively hesitates. Stand back. Adjust your dust-veils. It is time for the passage of the Government Steam Train, on its way to Attock on the Indus.
With smoke and sparks streaming from its bulbous funnel, here it comes at ten miles an hour along the wide straight road. On the driving platform of its three-wheeled traction engine, surrounded mysteriously by wheels, valves and levers, sit the European engineer and his assistant, one in a topee, one in a soft black cap, with bright kerchiefs around their necks, and expressions of resolute professionalism. There is a cyclopean light on the front of the engine, and its wheels are vast, solid and clad in rubber. Majestically clanking and puffing it approaches us, and now we see the turbanned Sikh fireman sitting with his piles of logs in the tender, and behind him the long line of the train—two-wheeled carts alternating with high four-wheeled wagons, like English hay-wains, and far at the back, wobbling slightly on its passage and raising a cloud of dust, a closed passenger carriage thickly covered, inside and out, with white robed travellers—standing on the couplings, hanging to the doors, crouched precarious upon the roof.