by Jan Morris
The great machine passes us. The engineer courteously removes his hat. The fireman grins, bows repeatedly and murmurs inaudible respects. The carts and wagons rumble by. The crowded passengers at the back stare down at us expressionless but superior, as though they have been admitted to some higher existence. With a stately hoot of its steam-whistle the Government Steam Train, unquestionably steering a way to Glory, ponderously but imperially disappears.1
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Botany gave style to the empire, too, and was one of the oldest of the imperial enthusiasms. From the earliest days of British expansion navigators, explorers and settlers had been concerned to collect rare plants, transfer cuttings, experiment with the smoking of rolled-up leaves or the eating of hitherto unsuspected tubers. Since 1841 Kew Gardens, Queen Charlotte’s delicious belvedere beside the Thames outside London, had been a State institution, where all available botanical knowledge was considered, sifted and turned into green delight or sustenance; and by the middle of the century Kew had its derivatives or ancillaries in most of the British possessions—part pleasure-places, part scientific laboratories, with their learned keepers and their catalogues, experimenting, classifying, and sending a copious flow of samples, products or memoranda back to the central clearing-house at home. One important outpost in this chain of research was Jamaica, and a visitor to that island making a tour of its botanical gardens might be deluded into supposing that the British Empire was already a cohesive, centralized organization. Each of the three island gardens, each in a different climatic zone, played its own particular part in research, with its own specialities, its own methods, and its own team of diligent scientific gentlemen.
In the old garden at Bath near the northern coast, the second oldest in the western hemisphere, the mid-Victorian visitor would see a collection of plants chosen for their medical value, and for ‘qualities useful of the arts’—jujubes, that is, sago palms, camphor, litchi, tea plants, trees producing dyes, resin, or cabinetwoods. The little dark rectangle of the gardens, all fronds and shadows, was overlooked suitably by a small Anglican church, and contained specimens of the akee plant, first brought to Jamaica in a slave ship and now luxuriant all over the island, and the breadfruit brought from Tahiti by Captain Bligh, now a staple diet of the Jamaicans, and many thriving descendants of a cargo of rare plants captured by Admiral Rodney from a French warship during the wars—mangoes, cinnamon, oriental ebony, pandanus.
On then to Castleton, a far grander institution on the banks of the rushing Wag River, towered over by palms and wooded hills in the centre of the island, and stocked originally with 400 specimens direct from Kew. This was one of the great tropical gardens of the world, a truly Victorian establishment, with no hint of serendipity to its arrangements, but rather an ordered and deliberate magnificence. Here, where the rainfall was 100 inches a year, bananas experimentally thrived, bamboos sprouted by the river, and the visitor could inspect teak trees from the newly acquired regions of Burma, figs and resinous guncardies from India, or mouse palms from British Guiana. Ferns dripped, orchids, climbers and stranglers twined themselves among the wild pines, queer birds croaked, black gardeners padded about with machetes, and in a green clearing among the woods there soared regally above the lily ponds a group of marvellous palms, fit for an imperial greenhouse, or for incarceration within the transept of the Crystal Palace.
And so to Cinchona, Jamaica’s high altitude garden, perched at about 5,000 feet on a ridge in the Blue Mountains—high above the heat haze of the coast, accessible only by rough tracks, with a landscape of stubbly hills and deep ravines stretching all around it, and the rich green of its own presence like an allegory in the wild. This, though one of the loveliest places imaginable, was no frivolous retreat either. It was established originally for the cultivation of quinine, an imperial specific.1 They experimented with Assam tea up there too, and a gardener came out from Kew to plant European vegetables and flowers for the Kingston market, in the hope that one day the entire eastern part of the island might become one huge vegetable garden, revivifying the dying economy of the sugar-cane.
Here one could feel a sense of imperial purpose almost as absolute, if rather less disconcerting, than the furies of those young men in the Punjab. How usefully instructive, to be guided through the Cinchona vegetables by Mr Nock direct from Kew! How truly civilized, to see Mr Fawcett hard at work upon his Flora of Jamaica in his elegant Great House among the buddleias! How gratifying to know, as one looks out through the dark pinewoods to the deep valleys beyond, that one day all this beautiful island, liberated from bondage by British evangelism, will be made green, smiling and content by British science!2
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Quinine they badly needed, for if there was one aspect of applied science that seems, in retrospect, inadequate to the imperial needs, it was medicine. Here is Mr J. J. Cole, a surgeon with the British forces during the Sikh wars, on the recently discovered anaesthetic chloroform: ‘The practical surgeon views it in the hands of the military medical officer as a highly pernicious agent, which unquestionably it is…. In time of war, on the field of battle, on the bloody plain, or in the field hospital, it should not be found…. That it renders the poor patient unconscious cannot be doubted. But what is pain? It is one of the most powerful, one of the most salutary stimulants known’.
In England the principles of hygiene, as of modern surgery, were slowly being grasped, but the British knew hardly anything about the more exotic diseases of their overseas possessions, and often seemed to live as unhealthily as they possibly could. Since they generally believed fervently in the medicinal qualities of claret, they drank it ferociously—not perhaps quite as lavishly as they had in the heyday of John Company, when three bottles a day was normal for a man, and a bottle an evening quite customary for a healthy woman, but only because self-indulgence of that kind had gone out of fashion. The clothes they wore bore no relation to climatic conditions, but merely copied, a year or two late, the current London or Paris fashions. The water they drank was generally untreated, the food they ate was prepared out of sight by unwashed employees.1 The average age of those many Britons already buried in the imperial cemeteries was pitiably young: this was partly because so many died in battle, but chiefly because medical science was not yet geared to the progress of empire.
Nobody knew the origins of malaria, yellow fever, typhus, cholera or typhoid—which was common in London itself, and presently killed the Prince Consort. Nobody indeed could distinguish malaria from yellow fever, and they were lumped together under the generic diagnosis Malignant Fever, and variously thought to be contagious, to be induced by inebriation, to emanate from the effluvia of ships’ bilges, or to strike indiscriminately out of the noxious tropical air.1 One well-known imperial hypochondriac, Judge Roger Yelverton of the Bahamas, insisted that malaria in Nassau was caused by the storage of coal for the Imperial Lighthouse Tender, and when an anonymous modernist called this nonsense in the columns of the Nassau Guardian, he imprisoned the newspaper’s editor for refusing to reveal the writer’s name.2
The treatments proposed for all these complaints ranged from the lunatic to the merely excruciating. Military surgeons were, like Mr Code, often draconian in their mercies, and the fashionable quacks of Calcutta or the Cape shamelessly exploited their patients’ miseries and their own ignorance. Cholera, for instance, which was supposed to come from eating fish and meat at the same time, or from vaporous germ-clouds constantly drifting above the landscape, was often treated by the application of a red-hot ring to the patient’s navel, causing, so the doctors convincingly explained, ‘a revolution in the intestines’. Malaria was often treated by bleeding—if no surgeon was at hand somebody would open a vein with a pocket-knife—and scurvy sores were soothed with poultices made of soggy sea-biscuits. Panaceas of every kind flooded the market. The explorer James Grant’s medicine chest, when he went to Central Africa in the 1860s, contained Brown’s blistering tissue, lunar caustic, citric acid, julap, camomel, rhubarb, colocy
nth, laudanum, Dover’s powders, emetic essence of ginger and something called simply Blue Pill. General Gordon used to swear by Werburgh’s Tincture, which would ‘make a sack of sawdust sweat’. As for seasickness, the basic imperial complaint (after alcoholism, perhaps), a thousand useless remedies were authoritatively prescribed: arrowroot, pork, drinking sea water, opium, plasters on the stomach, ice-bags on the spine, or the use of the Bessemer Saloon, a cabin suspended amidships and intended to ignore the oscillations of the hull—‘there is no reason now,’ declared Messrs Lorimer and Co. of London, advertising their infallible Cocaine Lozenges, ‘why the most timid should not thoroughly enjoy the tossing of the billows like true Britons’.
One has only to read the memoirs of the Victorian adventurers to realize the horrors of imperial life and travel in those days. The explorer John Speke, in Africa in 1857, suffered from something called Kichyoma-chyoma, ‘the little irons’, which entailed agonizing inner pains, ghastly deliria, epileptic spasms, making a barking noise and moving the mouth ‘in a peculiar chopping motion … with lips protruding’. In the same year the thousand men on board the troopship Transit, stranded on a bare and blazing coral reef in the Java Sea, kept up their strength on a diet of chopped baboons cooked in a stew of salt pork and beans—each hoping, so a survivor recorded, that somebody else was eating the baboons. Time and again we read of imperial travellers amputating their own limbs, or lying blind or paralysed for weeks at a time. In the cantonment at Kabul in 1841 Lieutenant Colin Mackenzie found his right arm gripped by the teeth of a mad bulldog—‘his jaws reeking with blood and foam, his mouth wide open, his tongue swollen and hanging out, and his eyes flashing a sort of lurid fire’. He held the creature at arm’s length and throttled it with his left hand.
Plagued with such discomforts themselves, the British had little time to concern themselves with the ailments of their subject races: not for another fifty years would there be any systematic attempt to distribute the discoveries of medical science throughout the imperial peoples. Survival of the rulers was the first necessity, and just how precarious survival could be was shown by the mortality returns which, from time to time, reached the Colonial Office from its distant stations. There was a terrible death-rate in all the tropical dependencies. In the late 1850s, of every thousand soldiers and their wives stationed in Bengal, sixty-four men and forty-four women died in an average year. During twenty months in Hong Kong, the 59th Regiment buried 180 of its soldiers. As late as 1873, of 130 British soldiers on the Gold Coast, only twenty-two were fit for duty. Many died of tuberculosis, that scourge of the Victorians, many of dysentery, apoplexy, hepatitis or pneumonia. But the most telling statistics were sometimes to be found at the bottom of the list, after the more normal causes of death: Suicide, Suffered the Penalty of the Law, or worst of all, Worn Out &c.
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As the century passed, and the flow of the steamships thickened, and the great railways crossed the continents one by one, so the charisma of technique faded rather, and the British saw their command of steam, iron, steel and electricity less as an instrument of redemption than an engine of command. (So did their subject peoples: the Ashanti of West Africa thought the Empire’s telegraph wires to be an infallible war fetish, and strung their own cords from tree to tree in emulation.) In the 1850s, however, science was still an abstraction of holy beauty, and the Crystal Palace, though of course it was a tacit declaration of British material strength, stood too in the public mind for the universal benevolence of British aims. Whatever made Britain richer or stronger, like the acquisition of Sind, say, or a monopoly of the Canadian fur trade, made the world a happier and Godlier place:1 every new steamship, every additional Government Steam Train transported to some newly-amazed corner of the world, or some hitherto unjustly neglected society, demonstrated the benefits of the British example.
Uplift a thousand voices full and sweet,
In this wide ball with earth’s invention stored,
And praise the invisible universal Lord,
Who lets once more in peace the nations meet,
Where Science, Art and Labour have outpour’d
Their myriad horns of plenty at our feet.
So Tennyson wrote in his Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition, and as this sense of divine potential was the inspiration of the exhibition itself, so it was at that moment the temper of Victoria’s scientifically-developing Empire. The profits of the great show were used to buy eighty-seven acres of land in South Kensington, and upon this estate there arose a complex of scientific and artistic institutions—the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Geological Museum, colleges of science, mining engineering, music, art. And when in later years they erected a memorial to Prince Albert, whose solemn enthusiasm so permeated the Great Exhibition of 1851, they portrayed him holding upon his knee, beneath his high sculptured canopy overlooking Kensington Gore, not as it happened a copy of the Holy Scriptures, but its virtual synonym, an Exhibition Catalogue.1
1 ‘It is sweet and proper to die for science’, an up-dating of Horace’s tag about dying for one’s country.
1 It still stands, among the most important Rennie structures extant, and was to come in useful during the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
1 Grant took a piano, too. He had learnt to play the cello at school in Switzerland, and published some compositions for the instrument. When, some years later, he was posted to Simla, it took ninety-three servants to carry his equipment, military and musical, into the hills.
1 Most of the great lines and stations remain as busy as ever, though often shabbier. The Montreal Bridge was replaced in 1898, only its piers surviving; the Lansdowne Bridge still stands, though the North Western Railway now crosses the river by a new steel arch bridge a few hundred feet downstream.
1 Passengers wishing to study this prospectus more closely may do so on a tombstone in the south porch of Ely Cathedral—‘if you’ll repent and turn from sin, the Train will stop and take you in’.
1 ‘Let these be thine arts’, from Virgil’s invocation to Rome to ‘bear dominion over the nations and impose the law of peace.’
2 The scheduled steamship services from England to India, begun thanks largely to Waghorn in 1842, ended in 1970, when the P and O liner Cbusan (24,000 tons) made the last run to Bombay—
But still the wild wind wakes off Gardafui,
And hearts turn eastward with the P and O.
1 Though it has been supplanted by a bigger road, one may still drive the length of the Montagu Pass, from Oudtshoorn to George) and the shade of those old culverts provides some of the pleasantest picnic sites in Africa. George itself was described by Trollope as ‘the prettiest village in the world’, and it is still very agreeable.
1 The Rideau Canal still functions, though only for pleasure craft nowadays, and the Bytown Museum beside its locks in Ottawa, one of the oldest buildings in the capital, is the original storehouse of the canal-builders.
1 Its creator was R. E. B. Crompton, then an ensign in the Royal Engineers, who went on to become a celebrated electrical engineer and an originator of the tank, while its engine was designed by R. W. Thomson, later to invent the pneumatic tyre.
1 Hence its name. The Countess of Cinchon was a seventeenth century Spanish lady of Peru who was cured of an ailment by an alkaloid medicine derived from the bark of an Andean tree. The tree took her name and was anglicized as quinine.
2 The economic ambitions of Cinchona were never quite fulfilled, but all three gardens thrive to this day—if not as scientific enterprises, at least as public parks. Cinchona is still accessible only by foot, Castleton’s splendours now have a decayed allure, and at Bath Lord Rodney’s original pandanus is still alive.
1 Though the Anglo-Indian nickname for the staple of their cuisine, ‘Sudden Death’, referred not to the consumer but to the chicken, usually killed a few minutes before dinner.
1 Hence the name mal aria, first adopted by Britons o
n the Grand Tour in Italy.
2 This preposterous case went to the Privy Council, and became an important precedent in disputes concerning the freedom of the colonial press.
1 Palmerston said of Hudson’s Bay Company that its functions should be to strip the local quadrupeds of their furs, and keep the local bipeds off their liquor.
1 Several other relics of the Exhibition survive in 1973. The Crystal Palace itself, transferred in enlarged form to Sydenham in 1852, was burnt to the ground in 1936, an event which, though I had never been within a hundred miles of the building, and had no very clear idea what it was, mysteriously impressed my childish imagination. However the wrought iron gates which divided the north transept of the original structure now divide Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park, to the east of the Albert Memorial, while the Model Dwelling House for Working People erected under the Prince Consort’s supervision near Knightsbridge Barracks is still in use as a park superintendent’s office in Kennington Park, near the Oval. The Royal Commission for the 1851 Exhibition still exists, and by prudent husbandry of its 1851 surplus has been financing scholarships in the arts and sciences ever since.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Epic of the Race
HIGH above the Jumna River at Delhi, towering over the bazaars and alleys of the walled city, there stood the fortress-palace of the Moghul Emperors. Clad in decorations of gold, silver and precious stones, this had once been the most magnificent palace of the East, the envy of rulers from Persia to China, a mile and a half around, walled in red sandstone, sited with all the expert advice of astrologers, magicians and strategists. This was Qila-i-Mubarak, the Fortunate Citadel, Qila-Mualla, the Exalted Fort, approached through the high vaulted arcade of the Chata Chauk, where the royal bands played five times daily in the Royal Drum House, and the ambassadors of the nations prostrated themselves in the Diwan-i-Am before the Shadow of God.