by Jan Morris
The controversy raged on and off for two years, and passions ran high. Families were divided, friendships broken. Charges of hypocrisy, stupidity, racialism and wrong-headedness flew between the partisans. There was a debate in Parliament, funds were raised, pamphlets furiously printed, and in the wider world the charges against Eyre were seen as charges against the Empire itself. ‘What do you say to the Nigger insurrection on Jamaica,’ wrote Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, ‘and the brutalities of the English?’ ‘The Jamaican story,’ Marx replied, ‘is characteristic of the beastliness of the “true Englishman”.’ Motives varied wildly in this protracted controversy, and language was unrestrained: Eyre was ‘the personification of wrong’, ‘the saviour of society in the West Indies’, ‘a murderer whose hands were red with blood’, ‘a brave, gentle, chivalrous and clear man’, ‘The Martyr’, ‘The Monster’, ‘’Angsman Eyre’. Three times it went as far as the courts, but Eyre was cleared each time.
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Through it all the ex-Governor maintained an aloof and dignified silence. Once he appeared at a banquet. Once he defended himself in court—with a single speech four sentences long. For the rest he said nothing, wrote nothing, seldom appearing in public, never arguing his case or answering his detractors. When the affair died at last he was left without a job and with a reputation as equivocal as any in England. The Government of the day gave him a pension in the end, as a retired Colonial Governor, but he never got another appointment, and lived the last years of his life in silent seclusion in Devon.
He seems to have been a passionless sort of man, inaccessible, as self-sufficient in his last years as he was when we first hear of his peculiarly disheartening sort of heroism, labouring across the Australian wastelands in search of nothing whatsoever. He makes a pathetic figure of Empire—so unloved, so intractable, so hemmed in by the restrictions of his age and background, and in the end so self-destructive. In old age he took a lease on Walreddon Manor, some five miles out of Tavistock on the edge of Dartmoor. He chose the house unquestionably for its remoteness. He wanted to be forgotten, and to forget. Walredden was a stern stone manor house, mediaeval in origins, Tudor and Queen Anne in architecture, which lay above sloping lawns near the River Tavy. It was a secretive house. Reached by tortuous high-hedged lanes, sloshed about in winter by running water from over-flowing ditches, it made a perfect last retreat for E. J. Eyre.
He lived there very privately, almost anonymously, with his wife and two of his children. The household staff knew nothing of his tragic and tumultuous past, and called him ‘General Eyre’, perhaps supposing him to be just another of those retired imperial soldiers who abounded in the West Country. A certain stir was caused in Devon when he died, and unsuspecting neighbours realized that the old gentleman of Walredden had been Hangman Eyre of Jamaica: but it was many years since the event, and the passions had long subsided. They buried him in the churchyard at Whitchurch, within sight of the moor, beneath a cross of grey granite. On the plinth it said: ‘Edward John Eyre, Australian Explorer and Governor of Jamaica, He did his duty in that state of life, into which it pleased God to call him’. The cross was tall, but the churchyard was full of high Cornish and Celtic crosses, some slightly toppled with age, and was interspersed with slender trees: and on a winter day all those white and grey verticals, in dense perspective towards the distant moors, looked rather like the sad silver gum-trees of the Outback.
1 He died in his bed in Hanover Square.
1 Morant Bay has scarcely changed, and still has an ominous air on a blazing afternoon, suggesting to me one of those eerily deserted shanty-towns through which the gunfighters of the westerns menacingly approach each other in the silence.
1 It may still be found, well away from the road in the damp forest, and Bogle himself has been half-deified in Jamaica, even his pock-marked face (‘very ferocious looking’, a contemporary reporter thought, ‘the very type of the fiend’) being selectively immortalized upon bank notes. In 19701 met his surviving great-grandson, at Lyssons on the coast, and asked him what kind of person the rebel had been when not on the path of black power—kind, fierce, majestic, simple? ‘He was a lovely man’, the present Mr Bogle said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Ain’t the Pentateuch Queer?’
THE conviction of Empire was increasingly reinforced by a sense of duty, and became heavily veneered with religiosity. The Victorians were believers. They believed in their Christian Master, in their providential destiny, in their servants of steam and steel, in themselves and their systems, and not least in their Empire. As the mysteries of life were unfolded to them, explicitly in the triumphs of applied science, opaquely in intellectual conceptions like the Survival of the Fittest, so their own particular place in the divine scheme seemed ever more specific: they were called to be the great improvers, and the instrument of their mission was empire.
This was a complex illusion. At one level it was purely Christian trust, unquestioning—‘Truly there is a God in Heaven!’ exclaimed the Reverend Richard Taylor when the ship Sobraon, escaping unscathed from Wellington Harbour after the New Zealand earthquake of 1848, immediately ran aground on a rock through an error of navigation, drowning sixty people. The mission stations which, throughout the second half of the century, sprang up throughout the tropical possessions, were manned by and large by militants with no doubts—this was a Christian Empire, and it was the imperial duty to spread the Christian word among its heathen subjects. By 1850 the Christian missionaries could claim to have converted 20,000 Indians, at least 10,000 Africans, almost all the Maoris of New Zealand and virtually the entire population of Fiji. Fighting Christians established the Missionary Road, the chief exploratory route into central Africa from the south, and all over the Empire aggressive scholars were at work translating the sacred texts of Christianity into exotic tongues: the Cree for Jesus was the Fijian Christ was Karisito, and the pygmies were taught to write the holy name, in very large letters, KRISTO YESU.1
The administrators of Empire, too, and very often its conquerors, were generally practising Christians: the new public schools at which so many of them were educated were invariably Church of England foundations, with parson-headmasters. God directed all imperial affairs, as Charles Trevelyan the head of the Treasury realized, when he observed how hard it was for the poor people of Ireland, in their ignorance, to be ‘deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence’. Explorers like Speke or Grant saw themselves as God’s scouts—even Stanley turned evangelist in 1875, and converted the King of Uganda and all his court to Christianity. Generals like Havelock and Nicholson slaughtered their enemies in the absolute certainty of a biblical mandate (though General Hope Grant was horrified, during the Indian Mutiny, to think that the British might be ‘sending their victims into eternity to answer for a life possibly mis-spent’) and most of the imperial heroes were identified in the public mind with the Christianness of Empire—not simply humanitarianism, not Burke’s sense of trusteeship, but a Christian militancy, a ruling faith, whose Defender on earth was the Queen herself, and whose supreme commander needed no identification. Every aspect of Empire was an aspect of Christ: imperial technique would certainly convert the Africans to Christianity in the end, the novelist Trollope assured himself, inspecting a South African mine—‘when I have looked down into the mine and seen three or four thousand of them at work … I have felt that I was looking at three or four thousand growing Christians’.
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Yet the deeper religious convictions of the British Empire were more muddled and ambiguous than they appeared. To the public at home the Christian mission of empire might seem clear-cut and inescapable, but it often looked less evident in the field. Old traditions died hard, in climates less bracing and disciplinary than those of England itself, and the Christian vocation of imperialism was sometimes blurred. The temple-bells rang seductively from the pagodas of Moulmein. There was a gaudy fascination to the rituals of Benares. Among the
miseries of Africa the solace of Islam, faith of the slave-traders, was often more soothing than evangelical pioneers were ready to admit. And not infrequently, pursued in torrid and innocent corners of empire, the Christian faith came to seem less an instrument of salvation than a means of power—in the South Seas, for example, the Reverend Shirley Baker so interpreted his divine mission that he became the virtual dictator of Tonga, devoutly manipulating the revenues of Church and State alike, besides enforcing sumptuary laws so pious that a woman could be fined for failing to wear a pinafore in her own kitchen.
To the mid-Victorians the greatest of Christian heroes was Livingstone, who had once said that if his explorations led to the ending of the slave trade in Africa, ‘I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the sources of the Nile put together’. Livingstone gave coherence to the notion of Christianity and Commerce in partnership, and his sometimes wild ideas about Christian colonization in Africa powerfully inflamed the later course of empire. He was a true believer, and when he died his own black servants, recognizing the power of his character, themselves brought his body home to that shrine of all things grand and good, the imperial capital. Through 1,500 miles of bush those simple Africans carried him, strapped in a cylinder of bark and calico within a sailcloth hammock—Susi, Chuma, Amoda and some sixty others, from Chitambo’s village near Bangweolo in nearly a year’s laborious travel to the coast opposite Zanzibar. The Royal Navy took the embalmed body home to England, a special train met the ship at Southampton, and to the mourning of the nation the hero was buried in the supreme imperial sanctuary, Westminster Abbey, in the centre of the nave before the choir. ‘Brought by faithful hands over land and sea,’ read the inscription they placed upon his tomb, ‘here rests David Livingstone, missionary, traveller, philanthropist … for 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, to abolish the desolating slave trade, of Central Africa….’
Could anyone personify more exactly the assurance of the imperial mission? Yet here is a conversation between this towering Christian and his absolute antithesis in the imperial hierarchy, a befeathered pagan rain-doctor of the Bakwain tribe in central Africa—the very class of man, one might suppose, for whose enlightenment Victoria’s Empire existed. Did the rain-doctor really believe, asked Livingstone, that he could command the clouds to drop rain? Christians believed that only God could do that.
Rain-doctor: ‘We both believe the very same thing. It is God that makes the rain, but I pray to him by means of these medicines.’
Livingstone: ‘But we are distinctly told in the parting words of our Saviour that we can pray to God acceptably in his name alone, and not by means of medicines.’
Rain-doctor: ‘Truly! but God told us differently. He made black men first, and he did not love us, as he did the white men. He made you beautiful, and he gave you clothing, and guns, and gunpowder … towards us he had no heart … (but) God has given us one little thing, which you know nothing of. He has given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can make rain. We do not dispute those things which you possess, though we are ignorant of them. You ought not to despise our little knowledge, which you are ignorant of.’
Livingstone: ‘I don’t despise what I am ignorant of; I only think you are mistaken in saying that you have medicines which can influence the rain at all.’
Rain-doctor: ‘That’s just the way people speak when they talk on a subject of which they have no knowledge.’
Livingstone: ‘God alone can command the clouds. Only try and wait patiently: God will give us rain without your medicines.’
Rain-doctor: ‘Well, I always thought white men were wise until this morning. Whoever thought of making trial of starvation? Is death pleasant, then?’
This dialogue was recorded by Livingstone himself, and it does not appear to indicate any absolute conviction of Christian superiority—the pagan seems to have won the exchange, if not in theology at least in logic The truth was that the Christian mission of Empire was often blunted at the tip. The Godhead that seemed so choate at home burgeoned into disquieting patterns, doubts and distortions among the alien subject cultures, and while some of these manifestations were patently misguided, and could never stand up to the scrutiny of an Oxford mind, others remained to nag at the convictions of the imperialists, and sometimes confuse the imperial issues.
In particular the issue of an official religion confused both the rulers and the subjects of the British Empire, and even engaged the anxieties of the Queen herself. Nobody was sure whether there was such a thing, whether this was truly a Christian empire, or merely an empire mostly run by Christians. There was certainly a State church at home, but this did not necessarily mean that the Anglican Church was the established religion of the Empire too, and out of the consequent perplexity there swirled a seminal imperial controversy.
Not only did the British Empire guarantee religious tolerance, within the limits of humanity, to all its millions of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, animist or pagan subjects: it was also schismatical at the top. Its rulers might generally be Christians, but they were Christians of many colours. Bishops indeed followed the flag, and by the middle of the nineteenth-century there were Anglican sees throughout the imperial possessions, but so did all manner of Wesleyan, Baptist, even Roman Catholic ministers of religion. Anomalies abounded. The aborigines of Australia found a Spanish Benedictine monastery implanted at New Norcia as early as 1846, while in Newfoundland, one of the oldest British possessions, local politics were frankly based upon the antipathies between Protestants and Catholics. During the Irish Famine it was an edict from Her Majesty’s Privy Council which proclaimed that the Dearth and Scarcity Prayer should be read after the third collect (‘… and grant that the scarcity and dearth, which we do now most justly suffer for our iniquity, may through thy goodness be mercifully turned into cheapness and plenty….’): yet Maynooth, the greatest of the Irish Catholic seminaries, was founded with British Government funds.1
When the Anglican Bishop of Jamaica visited his flock in the Bahamas, he was habitually greeted at Nassau by a military guard of honour and a salute of nine guns: yet the true imperial status of the Church of England remained uncertain. Were its bishops public servants, like Governors or commanders-in-chief, or were they independent men of God, like Baptist ministers or rain-doctors? Was their church part of the imperial system as a whole, or was it only a series of settler churches? Was Queen Victoria Defender of the Faith only in the United Kingdom, or everywhere in her imperial possessions?
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The central figure of this tortuous controversy became, in the 1860s and 1870s, John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, whom we briefly glimpsed as a distinguished imperial visitor to the British Association meeting at Bath in 1864. Colenso (whose name was Cornish, though his more xenophobic enemies thought it distinctly unsuitable for an Anglican prelate) was an ecclesiastical maverick. He was not at all one of your Trollopian Victorian clergymen, except perhaps in a taste for disputation, having been born the son of a minor civil servant, and started life as an assistant to the Reverend Mr Grubb, who ran a school at Dartmouth in Devon. Clever both at mathematics and logic, he won scholarships to Cambridge, and became in turn a prosperous country vicar, a well-known mathematical author, and finally Bishop of the remote and newly established see of Natal, with his cathedral at Pietermaritzburg on the edge of Zululand—established by the Boers, it will be remembered, as capital of their Natal Republic
There he became a force in the land. The British of Natal, no less than the Boers, profoundly feared and distrusted the formidable Zulus to the north, a people still of military tastes and ferocious tendencies. Colenso, on the other hand, much admired them, and bravely stood up for their interests. The fighting Zulu ethos suited him. Gleaming Zulu princes were his friends, eager Zulu pupils were constantly at his country house, Bishopstowe, where the bush ran away empty and exciting towards the open veld
, and framed between the young trees of his garden stood the flat-topped local Table Mountain, which the bishop liked to call his ‘altar’ (he owned properties on its slopes).1 He compiled a Zulu grammar and a Zulu-English dictionary. He wrote text-books for Zulu youths about geography, history and astronomy. He translated into Zulu the whole of the New Testament and several books of the Old. He loved to be called Sobantu—‘father of the people’.
These sympathies hardly endeared him to British officialdom, still less to the coarser-grained settlers of Natal, and he gained the reputation of a nigger-lover—not of the unctuous evangelical sort, whom the settlers despised, but in a more dangerous kind. Still, he had good friends among the more intelligent Europeans as well as the Africans, was engrossed in his studies of the Zulu culture, and lived comfortably with his view, his garden and his Zulu pupils at Bishopstowe. His name might now be forgotten were it not for a different heresy: his gradually fostered suspicion, while a colonial bishop of the Established Church, that every word of the Bible was not after all literally true. That every word of the Bible was literally true had been one of the expansionist principles of the Empire, and in Africa it had gained added force: for the British increasingly agreed with the Boers that Holy Writ gave them specific authority over the black peoples of the continent—hewers of wood, as Joshua conveniently defined them, and drawers of water.