Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum

Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum Brian Thompson A true story of empire set in the Crimea, Sudan, Ceylon and Egypt – beautifully written and shot through with real psychological and historical insight.'Victorian Britain, that seemingly most conformist of ages, was in fact teeming with eccentrics. The fabulous Baker Brothers were eccentric in a conformist way for the time: Sir Samuel searched for the source of the Nile; Baker Pasha became leader of the Ottoman army. But it was that epitome of empire, and epitome of the Christian English gentleman, who was the most peculiar of them all: 'Chinese' Gordon is finally depicted as the anarchist he really was as he marched to his death against the Mahdi. It is Thompson's triumph that he gives these characters, straitjacketed first by their time, and then by history, the freedom to dance across the page once more.' JUDITH FLANDERSImperial Vanities is an adventure story in the high tradition, ranging from the Upper Nile, to Ceylon, Egypt and the slave markets of the Balkans. Livingstone, Speke and Burton also make an appearance, with the shadowy and elusive Laurence Oliphant spying from the sidelines. Written with Thompson's masterly touch, this is history at its best.'A tale of Empire at its most eccentric. Part biography, part history, part adventure yarn, Imperial Vanities is an ingeniously enjoyable read.' Fergus Fleming IMPERIAL VANITIES The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum BRIAN THOMPSON Dedication (#u5d66b5c3-dd79-5119-934f-8430d0d377ba) To Elizabeth Contents Cover (#u7a2bae7e-d553-5f31-b800-ad928b4be3ba) Title Page (#u7ddab9ff-f668-5faa-a7e1-e00b381a2a55) Dedication (#ue8ae4831-c9c4-5998-b6fc-497110137b31) List of Maps (#u29619ee3-6828-5e30-913a-9a8ad6a2d2df) Preface (#u9d1de174-331b-50cc-a69c-84ee2dc40614) Prologue (#u4826f121-946c-5231-8f75-2f91e7377f2f) ONE (#uf54c9432-22a1-5f7d-897a-9d4d16e6335a) TWO (#u33ee8403-2a6d-5023-85c0-de14297a387d) THREE (#litres_trial_promo) FOUR (#litres_trial_promo) FIVE (#litres_trial_promo) SIX (#litres_trial_promo) SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo) EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo) NINE (#litres_trial_promo) TEN (#litres_trial_promo) ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo) TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Other Works (#litres_trial_promo) List of Illustrations in Text (#litres_trial_promo) Books Consulted (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) List of Maps (#ulink_a5def890-b613-54c3-9ffd-2ee9643067ea) Old Map of Ceylon from Skinner, T., Fifty Years in Ceylon, 1891. (#litres_trial_promo) Map of Zambesi with annotations by Livingstone © AKGLondon. (#litres_trial_promo) Nile map from Elton, Fifty Years in Ceylon, 1954. (#litres_trial_promo) Livingstone’s real map of watershed from Jeal, T. Livingstone, 1973. (#litres_trial_promo) Preface (#ulink_2eed6565-ee90-58fb-9f86-cd629a008461) This book is the interweaving of three remarkably self-willed lives. The careers of the two Baker brothers and Charles Gordon crossed and recrossed, very seldom in England itself, more usually at the eastern end of the Mediterranean (on occasions even further afield) coming at last to a tragic denouement in Egypt and the Sudan. They were Victorians with a taste for the heroic who made their friends and enemies from among the same restless kind. So, in these pages, we find also the enigmatic traveller, Laurence Oliphant; the explorers James Hanning Speke and Richard Francis Burton; the missionary David Livingstone; and soldiers as wildly unlike as Major-General Sir Garnet Wolseley and the irrepressible Captain Fred Burnaby. There is a common connection, in that all these men were servants of Empire. Even Burton, such an inventively bitter critic of his own country and enemy to most of what we usually label Victorianism, put on his KCMG decoration for the first and last time in June, 1887, and celebrated Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in the grounds of the consulate in Trieste with these ringing words: ‘May God’s choicest blessings crown her good works!’ That particular weekend, toasts like this were uttered in every British embassy and consulate across the globe, as well as all the Queen’s dominions. As the sick and world-weary Burton himself put it, in a sudden and late flowering of imperial sentiment ‘May the loving confidence between her Majesty and all English-speaking-peoples, throughout the world, ever strengthen and endure to all time.’ The God that was invoked was held without question to be an Englishman. God the Englishman had subjugated half the world, bringing the blessings of civilization to heathens considered in desperate need of it. This is the background theme to much of what you are about to read. There could hardly be a greater vanity. Joseph Conrad was enough of a genius to look into its psychological first cause: ‘It is better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective. Nothing humanely great-great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass of lives – has come from reflection. On the other hand you cannot fail to see the power of mere words: such words as Glory, for instance, or Pity … Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction, these two by their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There’s “virtue” for you if you like!’ These words, which were written to preface Conrad’s own experimental autobiography, A Personal Record, published in 1908, put the case admirably for the present book. Under only slightly different circumstances, a different throw of the dice, he might have applied them to the revolutionary politics of his father, Appollonius Korzeniowski. But in 1886, Conrad became a naturalised British citizen and at the time of the Jubilee and all its imperial celebration he was sailing about the Malay Archipelago, his eyes wide open to what brought white men to the ends of the earth – and kept them there. My main intention has been to tease out the connections between three men, their lives and times. But there is also a desire to replicate what was itself a minor Victorian addition to the art of the book, one that has given pleasure right down to the present day. As the story opens out, little by little a seemingly solid picture arises, in which elements that have no clear immediate purpose bend and unfold until, when the covers are finally laid flat, a man in uniform stands at the steps to a Governor’s palace. One hand is drawn across his chest in a gesture of fidelity to God and in the other a revolver dangles. Many intricate pleats and folds of coloured paper have brought him to life. By the strange compulsion we have to know about these things, the moment that is illustrated is also the moment of his death. Nothing can make the little cardboard figure turn away, any more than the rush of all those turbanned men can be halted. The death of General Gordon had, for Victorians, all the elements of terror and pity evoked for us in a later age by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Among Gordon’s contemporaries, for months, then years, the flux of history seemed, as it were, to shudder in its course. And then, inevitably, the story dwindled, along with the vanities that brought it into being. The two Baker brothers and Charles Gordon, who they were to each other and what constituted their life achievements, the joy they had of the world and its sorrows, fell like stones into the waters of the Nile. I should like to thank Yvonne and Anthony Hands for many hours of genial encouragement in the writing of this book; John Crouch and Thomas Howard for some helpful pieces of research; an exemplary literary agent, David Miller, and not least Arabella Pike, an editor whose zestful enthusiasm for a good human interest story never sleeps. Finally, the work is dedicated, not without an element of apprehension, to a writer I have greatly admired for more than thirty years, whose good opinion is always worth having. Prologue (#ulink_9d7a4b07-7774-5717-a7c9-529c6716e58f) In 1815 a specially severe hurricane hit the island of Jamaica, tearing hundreds of houses and shanties from their foundations and dumping them in the sea. Over a thousand people were drowned or simply disappeared from the face of the earth. When the news was carried back to England, the only anxiety raised was what consequences there might be for the sugar plantations, for the Bristol and Liverpool merchants who controlled the trade realised at once that the victims of the hurricane were for the most part black. Jamaica was a slave island – the most ruthless and successful of them all – and the death of so many people was counted simply as additional loss of property. There was a verb much used whenever disaster of this magnitude occurred among the black population: the agents of the great plantations talked calmly about the need to ‘restock’. To be British in Jamaica at that time was to live at the edge of things, almost but not quite beyond the reach of Europe’s civilising virtues. Whatever law that was enacted at Westminster touching the island’s affairs arrived in the Caribbean like ship’s biscuit, in a weevilly condition. For example, when it was seen that Parliament intended, after unrelenting effort by William Wilberforce and his parliamentary supporters, to bring about the abolition of slavery, one response of the planters was to encourage their women slaves to marry and end the common practice of abortion. They were looking ahead. If they could not at some time in the future import slaves, they would need to factory farm them on site. After the Act of 1807 it was a crime for a Briton to buy a slave or transport one on a ship bearing the British flag. Nothing much changed locally. Beautiful though the islands might be, seen as a landfall after a wearisome Atlantic crossing, a miasma of ignorance and stupidity hung over them all. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had already provided the most telling example of how difficult it was to think straight in the West Indies. In slavery’s heyday it was quite usual to brand newly acquired human animals as one would cattle and the SPG asserted its ownership and high purpose at one and the same time. Its slaves were seared across the chest with a white-hot iron bearing the word SOCIETY, without causing the slightest intellectual or moral embarrassment to anyone. For many years those who defended the institution of slavery held to the opinion that its victims were happier and better looked after than the poor of Europe. This point of view was one readily adopted by visitors to the islands, who confined their acquaintanceship to house slaves, whose servitude was – at any rate on the surface – uncomplaining. The irrepressible memoirist William Hickey made a false start on Jamaica when he was a young man. Sent out by his father in 1775 and speedily frustrated in his attempt to be admitted to the Jamaica Bar, he whiled away his time at parties and drinking sessions, making visits to plantations and reporting what he saw with an uncritical eye. On arriving at a Mr Richards’s estate he was greeted by 500 slaves in an apparent ecstasy of happiness. ‘They all looked fat and sleek, seeming as contented a set of mortals as could be,’ he commented. This was something his host ascribed to a particular style of management. ‘He was convinced by his own experience that more was to be effected by moderation and gentleness than ever was accomplished by the whip or punishments of any sort.’ Hickey was easily persuaded but agreed to go with Richards next day to a neighbouring estate nine miles distant. There they found a girl of sixteen tied to a post being whipped half to death by a young manager. She had refused his sexual advances. Mr Richards’s indignation was great. Such brutality was bad for business and it showed in the ledgers. ‘The annual produce until the last five years was five hundred hogsheads of the very best sugar and four hundred puncheons of rum [he explained to Hickey], whereas now it yields not one third of either and is every year becoming worse, the mortality among the slaves being unparalleled, and all this owing to a system of the most dreadful tyranny and severity practised by a scoundrel overseer.’ Though the two unexpected visitors intervened before the girl could be killed and the story ended with the arrest and death of her tormentor (he was shot trying to escape from his soldier escort while on his way to Kingston), it did not occur to Hickey to question, then or ever, whether slavery under any guise, benign or not, was acceptable. This sprang not from ignorance but a socially conditioned indifference. Hickey was no stranger to foreign parts. He had already sailed as a cadet in the East India Company army to Madras, found he did not like it, and came home again via Canton and Macao. Nothing he saw of other countries and peoples made a mark on him. His patriotism was of the hearty, negligent sort common to the age – he was most at his ease with his own kind, which he found in the guise of ships’ captains, bleak old soldiers and the better sort of commercial agent. As for the rest of the world, it was no more than a passingly interesting puppet show; in the end a tedious exhibition of local colour. Here, racketing round Jamaica, the ownership of one human being by another was as unremarkable and obvious as the weather. Only the most incendiary sort of crank would draw attention to it. Very few Europeans had ever seen or could picture a free African. The ones who escaped their bondage on Jamaica and ran away into the mountains were not free, but criminal. Up there the dreaded Maroons held sway, their lives a reversion to their previous existence in Africa – simple and, when necessary, invisible. They lived in lean-to shacks deep in the forest, the sites indicated only by the smoke from their fires rising above the tree canopy and – from time to time – the eerie sound of signal drums. The white planters hired these Maroons to hunt down escaped slaves. When the most persistent of these were caught and executed, it was customary to display the severed heads on pikes set in some prominent place, to discourage crime and reassure the more nervous of the white population. It was just another part of the landscape. There was an echo on the island of better things. Many plantations taught their more biddable house servants music and ate to the wailing of string quartets, or danced to the accompaniment of a black band got up in velvet livery, wearing powdered wigs. Several times a year the great houses would be a blaze of light, with patriotic bonfires and the discharge of fireworks to honour some royal birthday or distant feat of arms. The planters liked to celebrate and raise hell in this way for the same reason they might whistle crossing a graveyard. Death was very near. A major player in the affairs of the islands was yellow fever. In the three-year campaign that began in 1794 to capture Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe, 16,000 European soldiers died of the fever and were buried in the rags of their uniforms. Yellow Jack knew no boundaries. It was swift and remorseless. Seized with a chill, in three days a man would be blowing bloody bubbles from his mouth and nose, unable any longer to speak or sign. The fever had no friends and attacked rich and poor alike. To be posted to the Jamaica garrison was a sentence of death for many a ploughboy who had taken the king’s shilling. The hated Baptist missionaries who stirred up such agitation on the island in the name of love of their fellow man had a life expectancy of three years. The obvious comparison was with the way the East India Company managed its trade. This was a different model of colonialism altogether. Again, William Hickey is a useful witness. Two years after his abortive trip to Jamaica he set sail for India again, this time to Calcutta and the Bengal presidency, armed with a bulging portfolio of introductory letters provided for him by his father’s distinguished London cronies. Though the administration was in temporary financial crisis, Hickey found his place. He was appointed Solicitor, Attorney and Proctor of the Supreme Court and began his new life as he meant to go on, by commissioning a ?1000 refurbishment of a house he selected as appropriate to his station. He purchased a new phaeton to drive about in, laid up the best wines in his cellar, gave extravagant parties – and started to shake the pagoda-tree. Though the glorious profits of the East India Company were tainted by slavery in all but name and the company was hardly there to exercise philanthropy, this was a far nobler occupation than the Atlantic trade could ever be. Hickey scrupulously names all his influential friends, being sure to indicate, wherever appropriate, the aristocratic titles they later inherited. India pleased him. There was honour to be had there, as well as wealth. Who could say that of the Caribbean, for ever tainted by its shameful African connections? To all of which the sugar merchants had a single answer. The value of exports from the Caribbean colonies exceeded by far those from India and all other British possessions put together. By 1815 the West Indies exercised a virtual world monopoly on sugar. As for Africa, over which the abolitionists exercised their bleeding hearts as the true home of the black man, what was it but a trackless desert, without history, unlit by civilisation, contrary and pestilential? Even on the slave coasts, nobody had been more than a few miles inland, gliding along greasy brown rivers into an overwhelming aboriginal silence. Africa was an aside, an irrelevance. People wanted sugar. How it came to the table did not much concern them. Though the storm signals were flying for the Atlantic trade at home and abroad, it took an exceptionally far-sighted man to act on them. In practice, every plantation was a petty kingdom where violence and terror was the norm and compassion as rare as window-glass. To whom did the governor report the abuses of the plantation system and with what consequence? For generations of ministries, Colonies had been bundled up with War – the one a consequence of the other. The loss of the American colonies made the humanitarian argument for an end to slavery very difficult for Britain to endorse. As the home country was forced to admit, in tolerating its calamities in the Caribbean it was also hanging on grimly to – and in the wars against the French doing all it could to increase – what was left of what it once had. Soldiers and sea-captains had given Britain the original imperial advantage. So assiduous was Captain Cook in exploring the South Seas, for example, that the Whig wit Sydney Smith once estimated ruefully that if there was a rock anywhere in the world large enough for a cormorant to perch on, someone would think to make it British. It was a witty exaggeration of a not uncommon point of view, for the chief concern of home government was not the glory of overseas possessions, or the honour of their discovery, but how much it cost to garrison them. A common statistic of the early nineteenth century was that simply having a seaborne empire employed 250,000 men and tied up 250,000 tons of shipping. For many years the expenditure Britain was put to in its geopolitical adventures far exceeded revenue. In this picture, Jamaica was strikingly different, a piratical treasure chest with the lid thrown back. Figures provided to the House of Commons in 1815 showed a value in exports of ?11,169,661. Such public works as existed were maintained by a nugatory tax income of ?1200. This was the plantation system at its apogee. Everything that was so spectacular and fantastical about Jamaica’s wealth derived from the island’s dependence upon slavery. The standard agricultural implement was not the spade or the hoe but the cutlass. The standard punishment for an absconding slave was to lop off both ears. Nobody thought it of any great account. Visitors to Jamaica, who knew very well that fortunes were being made and fine country houses raised by the sugar merchants at home in England, were amazed by the coarseness and vulgarity of the planter society put in place to garner the profits of these great men. Most striking of all, the English men and women who lived on Jamaica and ran it for their absentee landlords affected to need nearly a third of a million slaves to sustain their position. Wellington had commanded an allied force of half that number to make himself master of all Europe. This is how the story begins, on an island remote from Europe by 3000 miles. The word old-fashioned sits well with the Jamaican colonists. At the end of the war with Napoleon Britain controlled almost every Caribbean island – and who had won these great victories if not table-thumping, punch-drinking patriots cut from the old cloth, men William Hickey would be honoured to call his friends? Jamaica in 1815 was in triumphalist mood. It did not need capital – its wealth was in its labour force. It did not need fine gentlemen and, as it was making clear in its own surly and combative way, it did not need evangelical ministrations either. Put simply, Jamaica did not need improvement. This shortsightedness was to be its undoing. Fifteen years later the value of sugar fell from ?70 a ton to ?25. In 1833, a law enacting the complete emancipation of the slaves changed the nature of the trade irrevocably. The unimaginable came to pass. The old planter society, which seemed as permanent and reliable as sunrise, was soon enough nothing but a romantic ruin. The factor in play here was much more important than the price of sugar. The reforming zealotry of a new age turned its mind to overseas possessions and found them wanting. The haphazard collection of islands and factories, plantations and anchorages was, within a generation, transformed. The Empire, which before had hardly merited its capital letter, became a single thing, an idea: in the hearts and minds of this new age, a crusade. The people whose lives make up this book were not law-makers; neither were they in any sense radicals. They were Victorians of a particular stamp – adventurous, at times maddeningly complacent and, as far as feelings for their country were concerned, sentimental to a fault. None of them went to university – two of them were soldiers – and it could be argued that what we see in their experience is merely the exchange of one form of naivety for another. Certainly their patriotism was unquestioning enough to jar a modern sensibility. ‘Hurrah for old England!’ one of them cried as the scarecrow figures of Speke and Grant tottered into Gondokoro on the Nile, after walking from one hemisphere to the other. This is a shout whose echo has died completely, except perhaps on foreign football terraces, where the Union flag is more likely to be worn as a pair of shorts than a banner snatched up in the heat of battle. What distinguishes these men is something new to the history of the nation. To their undoubted bravery was added the utter conviction of being chosen for a purpose even a child could understand. Throughout the nineteenth century there existed the belief that a Briton was the summit of God’s creation and the instrument of His will. This was never so clearly demonstrated as when he was abroad. Once a more or less random collection of properties – in which, for example, it could be contemplated that to exchange the whole of Canada for the strategic anchorage of St Lucia was a sensible trade with France – the Empire became the expression of a divine purpose. Nor was dominion over other people simply for economic advantage. Let us endeavour to strike our roots into their soil, by the gradual introduction and establishment of our own principles and opinions; of our laws, institutions and manners; above all, as the source of every other improvement, of our religion and consequently of our morals. This is Wilberforce, writing about India. The great evangelical Christian is indicating how not just India but the whole world was to be set free – by imposing upon it, however sympathetically expressed, a superior way of being. If in the end breechloading rifles and gunboats were the swifter teachers of this great lesson, it had deeper and, to such as Wilberforce, nobler origins. It started with the determination that nothing should be left undone to help the peoples of the world understand that their own histories, their own cultures and religious beliefs were mere shadows. The men whose story this is were evangelicals like Wilberforce only in this one sense: they took the missionary zealotry implicit in evangelism and expressed it in what seemed to their age heroic action. They were that new thing that animated Britain for a hundred years: they were imperialist romantics. Their virtue was in their character. A young man called Samuel Baker visited Jamaica in the year of the great hurricane to inspect his family estates. They had come down to him through his father, the redoubtable Captain Valentine Baker. Thirty years earlier, while commanding a mere sloop, Captain Baker had engaged a French frigate, forced it to strike its colours and then brought it into Portsmouth in triumph. (The unfortunate French captain, when he realised how small a vessel had overwhelmed him, went below to his cabin and cut his throat.) A French-built frigate was considered the acme of naval architecture and when the news was carried across country to Bristol, the merchants there made haste to present Baker with a handsome silver vase as a mark of their appreciation. The gesture was not entirely patriotic. At the time of this stirring engagement Captain Baker was sailing under letter of marque. A less polite way of describing his activities was to call him a privateer. Baker rose in the estimation of his employers and 1804 found him master of the Fame, as large an armed vessel as ever left Bristol under private commission. With his share of the profits he bought land – Jamaica land, tilled by black slaves. His son Samuel had good reason to thank his father, for had the good captain stayed in the Royal Navy he might have bequeathed the family a modest house in Hampshire, a few medals and the esteem of the service. As a privateer he had done very much better. When Mauritius – in another ocean altogether – was captured from the French in 1810, family money had been swiftly invested in plantations there too. Just as thirty years earlier Captain Baker had seized the chance to invest in sugar and shipping, now his son was positioning himself to exploit that initial advantage. Eighteen fifteen was an excellent year for Samuel to contemplate such good fortune because no sooner had the war with Napoleon ended than the Navy Estimates were ruthlessly pruned and many a captain was cast up on the beach with thirteen shillings a day, never to be employed again. The banks of white sail that indicated the naval squadrons and their enemies disappeared from the Jamaican horizon like snow in May. Now there was no greater redundancy to be had anywhere on earth than to be a military officer marooned in some ruined West Indies fort, looking out on to an empty ocean. The lizards ran across the rusting cannon and a deep, almost druggy somnolence blurred the passage of one day into another. Lucky the man who had a return passage. The youthfully cocky Samuel Baker was just such a person. He was not on Jamaica to settle but to inspect. Rum, sunshine and a superfluity of servants made his Christmas agreeable but when the talk turned to how badly the planters were being treated, he had nothing much to say. His hosts were exactly what they said they were – social pariahs. For all the hearty eating and loyal toasts, the embarrassingly vulgar balls and calamitous routs, Jamaican society always had something about it that was skulking and ill-tempered. It came out over the Christmas churchgoing. Church attendance was encouraged for the ‘good’ blacks – the house servants and the superstitious elderly, anyone who did not walk habitually with a cutlass dangling from one hand. They and their beaux dressed in a mockery of their masters’ clothes and paid each other elaborate address at the lych gate – ‘Howd’di do, Missy?’ ‘Am fine, jes’ fine, tankah, Massa’ – all under the noses of their lobster-red owners. Each set of worshippers thought the other incurably stupid. Baker kept a lock and key on his tongue. His Jamaican hosts saw with approval that he accepted what he found without comment and certainly without any mumping wringing of hands. He was an agreeable young man with a calm mind and a penchant for outdoor activities. He rode well and drank hard. They learned that he had been sent out ‘to improve his health’ and this they easily and cheerfully rephrased. He was there to learn some discipline and discover where his money came from. A secondary reason was undoubtedly to check the accounts – proprietors were commonly robbed blind by their agents. Here too Baker was a quick study. He was polite and non-committal but showed a liking for ledgers. Like his father before him, he had his feet set firmly on the ground. When one day he inherited and became master of the land over which he now rode, things would go on much as before, though perhaps with greater attention to accurate book-keeping. As for his slaves, his attitude to them was hearty and dismissive. Much given to singing, they had recently been taught words to celebrate a distant victory: Ay! Heyday! Waterloo! Waterloo! Ho! Ho! Ho! Only a few months earlier Samuel Baker was a genial and unquestioning young man riding about Bristol with nothing more on his mind than the cut of a boot or a pair of breeches. Now, he was startled to find himself at the rim of civilisation, staring into the dark. He was not in the slightest bit reflective by temperament. All the same, what he was witnessing was life lived at the edge, the junction between everything that was familiar and recoverable; and fathomless ignorance. It was exhilarating to peer into this chasm. When they were in the fields and out of sight of the main house, young Mr Baker’s slaves habitually worked naked. The crop they tended was three times the height of anything he had ever seen in England, just as the spiders their cutlasses disturbed were monsters set beside their English cousins. There was a kind of surrealism about the view from his jalousie window that was Swiftian in its savagery. That sea of black faces and glistening flesh was occasionally traversed by white women in broad hats, on their way by carriage to neighbours in the next parish, there to dawdle the afternoon away in idle conversation. Their speech was heavily inflected by the Creole they used towards their servants. All this was exciting and there was even an element of delirium about such a crudely obvious society. Lady Nugent, who kept a far better diary than Samuel Baker, was astonished at the number of ‘mulatto levees’ she was obliged to attend. It dawned on her at last who these spiteful and fractious hostesses were – ‘they are all daughters of Members of the Assembly’. Baker kept his counsel. There was one aspect of the Jamaica journey that was impossible to ignore. If he raised his eyes a little, away from the sex with slaves and the endless schooners of rum punch, he could see enticingly blue and green waters stretching all the way home to Bristol. For the first time in a generation, they were free of warfare. The whole great ocean – and every other ocean – would be under British dominion for a hundred years, just as men of his own class and wealth would be the envy and despair of the entire world. Victory in Europe and undisputed sea power handed Britain a trading advantage that would last out the century. Baker might listen to old Jamaica hands who prophesied doom for the sugar industry and rebellion among the former slaves – both of which things happened all too soon – but when he looked over the heads of his blacks and the rustling canes in which they worked he could see, for himself and his children, possibilities yet to be articulated, in areas far more demanding and profitable. To seize these chances, a man did not need to be university-educated, or, come to that, the scion of a noble house. Dangerous money, bloodstained money, had its own savour. If Jamaica taught him anything, it taught him this. It happened that the poet Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis had properties adjacent to Baker that he had inherited in 1812. He was visiting Jamaica at exactly the same time. Lewis was a friend of Walter Scott and Byron. He gave his slaves a day’s holiday when he arrived and another when he left. He also declared, to black mystification and the irritation of the overseers, an annual holiday to honour the birthday of the Duchess of York. In Jamaica’s brutal atmosphere Lewis was an effete curiosity. Tainted by his supposed friendship with the abolitionist Wilberforce, ridiculously sentimental in his dealings with his workers, and undermined by his references to friends – mere writers – the planters had never heard of and had no wish to meet, Lewis cut a sorry figure. He rode right round the island and what he saw dismayed him. As soon as he got back to Europe he amended his will, with the intention of ‘protecting’ his black workers. (One of its provisions was that his inheritors should be made to live on Jamaica for three months once every three years, simply to keep abreast of what was happening.) The new will was witnessed one brandy-soaked night in the Villa Diodati by Byron, Shelley and Polidori. True to his intentions, Lewis returned to his properties in 1818. More holidays, more idealistic promises and more contempt from the planters. At the end of this second visit, like many another before him, he contracted yellow fever. He was buried at sea on his way home. He was forty-three. It was a sad story but a predictable one. The ship’s company that saw Lewis over the side were lucky not to have followed him. Even on Jamaica, in country that had been cultivated for 150 years, there was something impermanent about affairs, something of the stage set. Young Sam Baker came to realise that while there might be honest men on the island, there was no one of any great merit. (Monk Lewis was surely the only man ever to have visited Jamaica who had also shaken Goethe by the hand.) Most of the time was taken up with mere survival. Better to be a good shot and a two-bottle man than any learned gentleman. It was an incurably eighteenth-century point of view and – for a young man with eyes in his head – the society that supported it was dangerously moribund. But then, as Sam Baker realised, Jamaican men and manners were not there to please but to make people like himself wealthy. It was this, as much as the thick red rum that lubricated every meeting, that proved so intoxicating. Perhaps, in the very crudity of the island’s leading figures, their brutal jollity along with their lack of principles, there was an additional frisson. He was being given a lesson in ruthlessness. The missionaries could say what they liked about the rights of man but how were empires made unless by some cruder, less reflective set of ideas? Samuel Baker came home and married Miss Dobson, the daughter of another industrious and acquisitive merchant, Thomas Dobson of Enfield in Middlesex. She gave him five children, all named for existing or former members of the family and all raised in a hearty, rumbustious and almost careless way that left them – like their father – not specially well educated but quick. They were also fearless. University, the professions, a parliamentary seat – none of these things was held out to the Baker boys as worthwhile. Samuel Baker intended his sons to be doers, and makers. A generation after he himself stood at his Jamaican windows, looking out on the empty ocean, the world had shrunk, but only a little. The greatest parts of it were still wide open. For a determined and resourceful man there was nothing in it to fear. Life, if it was conducted in the right way, was an adventure. The trick was not to be tied by convention, never to apologise for being rich, always to seize the main chance. The young Bakers knew this by family example. God the Englishman had helped their father do exactly what he wished in life. Samuel Baker, Esq., was the owner of Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire, chairman of his own bank and an honoured member of the board of Great Western Railways. Now it was the children’s turn. ONE (#ulink_07c09e3d-8a5f-5a01-9541-e5f051e35818) On 3 August 1843 the Reverend Charles Martin married two of his daughters, Henrietta and Elizabeth, to the two eldest boys of Samuel Baker. The double wedding took place in the parish church of St Giles, Maisemore, then a small village just outside Gloucester. Across the river was a handsome stone-built property called Highnam Court, formerly the Baker home. After a boisterous reception the two sets of newly-weds were driven away on the road to Bristol, each in their own carriage and four. As he watched them go, Mr Martin could reflect with pleasure on his daughters’ good fortune. John Baker, who had married Elizabeth, was a steady young man and a warm friend to his younger brother Sam. The boys – the entire family – were hearty in an old-fashioned way but that was no bad thing either. If there was a cloud over the day’s proceedings it was that John and Elizabeth, after a honeymoon in Clifton, would take ship the very next month for the island of Mauritius. For them it was an adventure, but for Mr Martin and his wife a considerable wrench. The couple were to sail in one of old Sam Baker’s vessels, the Jack, and it did not seem to bother anyone that this flea of a ship, a mere 100 tons, was to carry them on a passage that commonly lasted three months. John Baker was being sent to Mauritius to manage the family sugar estate there, which was called, encouragingly, Fairfund. Yet who in Maisemore knew much of anything about Mauritius before this happy day? Wedding guests learned there was a newly installed governor, Sir William Maynard Gomm, a Waterloo veteran (it went almost without saying), a man who had been gazetted a lieutenant in the army before he was ten years old. (He ended up a field marshal and died in 1875 at the ripe old age of ninety-one.) Both Sir William and his predecessor on Mauritius, Sir Lionel Smith, had Jamaica connections that Mr Martin might secretly reprehend: it was not exactly a blot on the character of his new in-laws that they were sugar merchants, though recent Jamaican politics did speak of a rough and brutal society such as the rector himself had never met with in the calmer waters of the Bristol diocese. Though the story was hard to follow in detail, the bones of the matter were simple enough: the distant and unlovely Jamaican Assembly had taken the recent law enacting the full emancipation of slaves extremely badly and refused to ratify it until pressed to do so upon pain of dissolution by the mother country. This insult by a gang of ruffians was surely an affront to the new queen’s dignity. Mr Martin did not insist upon the matter – how could he with a man as deeply involved in sugar as old Sam Baker? However, he was gratified to hear that Mauritius was a very different case and Gomm the pleasantest man imaginable. It was also some comfort to Mr and Mrs Martin that their second daughter, Henrietta, would go no further than London after the wedding, where young Sam Baker was to be placed in his father’s office in Fenchurch Street. Of the two brothers, Sam was far the better candidate for a life in the colonies. Not especially tall, he was barrel-chested, muscular and loud. All the Bakers were jolly but, though he was only twenty-two, Sam was the epitome of an old-fashioned squire. He could ride, botanise after a fashion – and he could shoot. He loved shooting. It was the wonder of the family that he had gone to Gibbs of Bristol for a muzzle-loading rifle made to his own design, requiring a massive charge and firing a three-ounce bullet of pure lead. As he pointed out with delight, this whole set-up was ‘preposterous to the professional opinions of the trade’. The great weapon weighed twenty-one pounds and could knock down animals not to be found in the New Forest, or anywhere else in England. Sam was a prime shot, and slaughter, it seemed, was never very far from his mind. His father had lately sent him into Germany to be tutored. It was one of the peculiarities of the family that old Sam Baker distrusted public schools and had raised all his children at the local grammar school and then, as necessary, with the assistance of tutors. As a consequence none of them was markedly bookish. This was not considered a failing. One of the best stories at the wedding breakfast told how Sam had persuaded his brother John to pay court to the Martin girls by sailing across the river that separated the two parishes in a bath tub. These were two self-willed and, to a certain extent, self-educated young men with a fine disregard for convention. John was the more biddable, but the exuberance of his brother Sam was a joy to everyone who met him. It was by no means clear how an office in Fenchurch Street could contain him. It did not. The following year, after presenting the rector and his wife with a grandson and with Henrietta pregnant a second time, Sam set off with his family to join his brother. An important part of his luggage was his collection of guns and sporting rifles. The Portuguese first discovered Mauritius in 1505. Ninety years later the Dutch conquered it without too much trouble and then, when they saw a superior advantage in occupying the Cape of Good Hope, abandoned it just as lightly. In 1715 the arrival of de la Bourdonnais’ fleet made it French. It was swiftly garrisoned and the lowlands cultivated. On its westerly side the island is guarded by steep cliffs leading to mountains the French colons dismissed with a Gallic shrug as being inaccessible. The value of Mauritius was in its handsome anchorage. From Port Louis royal ships and many rapacious privateers harried the lumbering East India trade. Following the capture of one such vessel, the Osterley, bound for Calcutta, the governor emptied the hold of its cargo of blue and yellow cloth and ran up fetching new uniforms for his black garrison. They marched about some impressive fortifications, for Port Louis had anchorage for fifty men-of-war and was comfortably considered impregnable to attack by sea. The French called their island, with justifiable pride, the ?le de France. One of the curiosities of the place was its polyglot population. An eighteenth-century visitor, the novelist Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, was entranced by the hinterland and its well-cultivated estates. What pleasure to see over there the negro from Guinea growing his bananas, there a black from Madagascar gathering in the grain, while in another plantation a girl from Bengal cuts the sugar cane, as a kaffir shepherd leads his flocks out into the forests, singing. Here we may see a Malabar woman spin cotton under the shade of the bananas, there a Bengali weaves and the little valleys resound with the singing of these different nations, repeated in their echoes. Ah, if the concerts of different birds in the forest are so charming, by how much more the voices of different nations in the same countryside! Saint-Pierre may have had a sentimental eye but he was reflecting a general truth about the calm and prosperity of the island. He set the enormously popular novel Paul et Virginie in an enchanted glade overlooking Port Louis. The two lovers grow up in a state of nature – Virginie serves a not very sympathetically drawn de la Bourdonnais at table wearing a skirt made from banana leaves – and are only parted by money and the implacable demands of social position. Saint-Pierre was a gifted disciple of Rousseau. There are slaves in his story but they are benign. Like Paul and Virginie, they too are closer to nature than their masters. Saint-Pierre makes a sly point in depicting how Virginie celebrated her mother’s birthday every year. The night before, she ground and baked wheaten cakes that she sent to the poor white families born on the island, who had never tasted European bread and who without any help from the blacks were reduced to living on manioc in the middle of the forests, having, to support their poverty, neither the stupidity that comes with slavery nor the courage that flows from education. The possession was noted for its tranquillity and the docility and loyalty of its workers. They were relatively well looked after. Governor Dumas reported in 1767: The black here is almost like a Polish peasant in the Russian Pale and is commonly content with his lot. We are speaking generally of a more humane attitude towards the slaves than at St Domingo or Martinique. Every creole thinks of himself as a citizen and is not humiliated by the inferiority of his colour. However, the idyll was not made to last. On 29 November 1810 the British invaded the island with a combined operation mounted from India. Three infantry divisions under General Abercrombie were landed on an open beach and, marching inland to attack on the land side, easily secured the capitulation of Port Louis and its 200 cannons, all of them facing the wrong way. Bottled up in the harbour by Admiral Bertie’s fleet were six frigates and another thirty smaller vessels, while in the arsenals and go-downs below the ramparts the victors discovered a huge quantity of stores. All this had been won for a loss of only twenty-nine lives, as swift and complete a victory as any in the war against the French. There was an unexpected bonus to the victory. As the conquering heroes fanned out into the countryside, they discovered, setting aside an understandable surliness on the part of the conquered French plantation managers, an ambiance as unlike that of the Caribbean slave islands as it was possible to imagine. Governor Dumas had been right. Mauritius was a calm and unbloody model of the plantation system that was – on the part of the whites at any rate – difficult to fault. Under the second British governor, Robert Farquhar, the island began its struggle with the slavery issue. Back in 1807, Farquhar, a devout Christian, had published a pamphlet which suggested ameliorating the effects of abolition in the West Indies plantations by importing indentured Chinese labourers. (When the experiment was tried, it was greeted with dismay. In such a brutal environment the Chinese seemed effete beyond words. Locals took exception to their pattering manner of walking and unconscious air of superiority. Farquhar had asserted that it would not be necessary to import women, since the Chinese did not much care with whom they co-habited. He was wrong about this, too.) Here on Mauritius the governor found, in a different setting, pretty much the policy he had advocated in the West Indies. The island’s principal export was, like Jamaica’s, sugar: though the soil was not specially fertile, the crop did very well. The climate was good and Europeans considered the air particularly healthy. The only real town, Port Louis, had a stock of several thousand stone-built houses. De la Bourdonnais’ residence, built in 1738, filled one side of the tree-lined Place d’Armes and from its windows a gentle succession of British governors looked out on a view that breathed style and sophistication. Altogether, Mauritius was not at all an unpleasant posting, an English possession where the common language was French. Colonel Draper, for example, a lackadaisical adornment to colonial rule, was at one time commissioner of Mauritius police. He had got himself into no end of trouble in Trinidad in the bad old days but on Mauritius things went better. He married a Creole beauty and contributed to the island’s amenities by inaugurating horse-racing. Left alone – and the home government’s hold on affairs was tenuous – the British might have succumbed completely to the island’s charms. An instance of the ambling pace of life was the introduction of Indian convicts to build the roads and connect the scattered hamlets. They lived in unsupervised camps and no power on earth could prevent them from co-habiting with the Indian women they found in the plantations. Though they were prevented by law from owning property, many of them found work in the evening and at the weekends. These convicts joined a rainbow of races – to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s euphoric picture of the concert of voices in the forest could now be added Tamil, Chinese, French and hallooing English. Officially there was a strict separation of races and classes. Unofficially things muddled along. The only fly in the ointment was the falling price of sugar and the fate of the former slaves, now converted to indentured labourers and what were euphemistically designated ‘apprentices’. Mauritius had a taste of how difficult this last issue was in the appointment of John Jeremie as procureur-g?n?ral in 1832. Jeremie had previously been chief justice on the West Indies island of St Lucia, where his high moral tone and pronounced abolitionist views incensed the local planters and led to his resignation. When he brought the same opinions to Mauritius, he found his reputation had preceded him. Colonel Draper was one among many who found him objectionably narrow-minded on the troubled subject of total emancipation. In his capacity as chief of police, Draper prepared the new chief justice less than a hero’s welcome. Jeremie’s ship made its gun salute to the governor and dropped anchor. Fussing with his baggage, anxious to go ashore and make his first good impression, Jeremie ran slap into farce. For two days he was prevented by the chief of police from landing at all, despite furious representations. This was done, Draper explained suavely, out of consideration for his personal safety. Poor Jeremie. He rightly concluded that he did not have a friend on the island. He was finally taken ashore with a file of marines to protect him and marched – a terrible moment, this – past shuttered houses through the empty streets of Port Louis. A fortnight later he presented himself for his swearing-in. Not one of the judges on the island would come forward to conduct the ceremony. Stoned by the mob and without a friend to help his cause, Jeremie was advised by the governor to go back home. After a twelve-week passage, he arrived in England and posted at once to London. If he was looking for sympathy, he got none. An infuriated Secretary for War and the Colonies ordered him to turn round and go straight back. This time, as soon as he was successfully sworn in, he set about his fellow judges, accusing them of complicity in illegal slave dealings and of irregularities in sentencing. This proved too much for the governor. Mauritius was not to be dictated to by some blue-light double-shotted canting lawyer, nor was a veteran of Waterloo and a god-damned general to be told how to run his administration. After less than a year in office Jeremie quit. With a gallows sense of humour, London first knighted him and then posted him to Sierra Leone to reflect on slavery at its source. The fever took him off in 1841. (By coincidence, his arch-enemy, Colonel Draper, had died in post on Mauritius the previous night.) The Baker brothers arrived in more peaceable times, John in 1843, Sam a year later. Sir William and Lady Sophia Gomm were every bit as pleasant as they had been advertised. Now that the threat of war, or war on the scale the world had known it, had receded, the more ferocious military cast of mind had gone, too. There were schools and colleges for the white population, a Protestant cemetery, excellent Botanical Gardens; and a large theatre building, open every night for balls and other recreations. French bakers and p?tissiers, milliners and seamstresses added to the little elegances of life. There was talk of an observatory and Lady Gomm, with a delicate touch, had put herself at the head of a subscription list to build a statue and memorial to one of her husband’s French predecessors. There was certainly a problem with emancipated slaves, who showed not the slightest wish to continue in the cane fields as wage labourers, but this was offset by the importation, just at the time the Bakers arrived, of 45,000 indentured Indians. As a consequence sugar production jumped by a third in a single year. (In the three years from 1843 to 1846 it more than doubled.) On the Baker estate at Fairfund the refinery was working flat out and for the youthful managers everything about the colony had the attraction of the new. The same was not quite so true for the wives, the rector’s girls. Mauritius was after all an island – or, as these young women might have thought of it, only an island. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 to bring the blessings of Christianity to the world at large, had been dismayed – and perhaps disappointed – by the religious fervour it discovered already pre-existing in this tight little community of Catholics, Hindus and Muslims. It withdrew in 1833 and there remained only two Anglican clergymen in the whole colony, both comfortably situated in Port Louis. One of the most agreeable companions to be had nowadays was the indefatigable surveyor-general, John Lloyd. He was a man after Sam Baker’s heart. When he arrived in 1831 the Pieter Boitte Mountain was pointed out to him, the one the French colons considered unscalable. Lloyd cut his way through the jungle approaches and – aided by ladders – made the first ascent, which he celebrated by planting a Union Jack on the summit. The Victorians held this to be the origin of British rock-climbing. (One of the people to leave an impression of Lloyd’s affability is Charles Darwin, who called at Mauritius on the way home from his epic voyage in HMS Beagle. Lloyd had an elephant he let the delighted naturalist ride.) For Sam Baker, the place had only one drawback: there was nothing worthwhile to shoot. He might have overcome this disappointment but there were also family problems to contend with. His sister-in-law Elizabeth miscarried twice after arriving on Mauritius and was unhappy. She was almost certainly homesick. Baker was acute enough to have noticed an essential difference between the French on the island and themselves. You cannot convince an English settler that he will be abroad for an indefinite number of years [he wrote]. With his mind ever fixed upon his return, he does little for prosperity in the colony. He rarely even plants a fruit tree, hoping that his stay will not allow him to gather from it. The remark might have been directed without rancour at Elizabeth Baker. By comparison, he noted, the French planter came to stay. The word ‘Adieu’ once spoken, he sighs an eternal farewell to ‘La Belle France’ and, with the natural lightheartedness of the nation, he settles cheerfully in a colony as his adopted country. He lays out his grounds with taste, and plants groves of exquisite fruit trees, whose produce will, he hopes, be tasted by his children and grandchildren. Accordingly, in a French colony there is a tropical beauty in the cultivated trees and flowers which is seldom seen in our own possessions. Sam soon came to believe that, pretty though the island was, the women were right and there was something of the second division about it. After a visit to R?union did nothing to calm his wanderlust, he set off in 1847 for Ceylon, travelling alone, having awarded himself a year’s shooting. He was going to the right place: recent report was that three gentlemen had killed 104 elephants there in three days of slaughter. The trusty Gibbs rifle was at his side when he landed at Colombo and hastened to introduce himself to two of the locals in the modest comforts of Seager’s Hotel. He explained that he was there for the sport. The reaction was totally unexpected. ‘Sport?’ one of them cried incredulously. When Sam mentioned elephants his companion was even more scathing. ‘There are no elephants in Ceylon. Maybe there used to be, but I have lived here years and never seen one.’ These two were what he called ‘Galle Face planters’ – men who hung around Colombo and the racecourse, whose land was farmed for them by managers in the hinterland. They must have been exceptionally stupid (or delivering a colossal snub) for there was an established trade in elephants, captured and trained in Ceylon and then exported to the mainland as draught animals. It seemed to Sam they took their cue for a life of ignorance and indolence from the governor himself. ‘The movements of the Governor cannot carry much weight,’ he commented acidly, ‘as he does not move at all, with the exception of an occasional drive from Colombo to Kandy. His knowledge of the Colony and its wants and resources must therefore, from his personal experience, be limited to the Kandy road.’ Though Colombo had a small harbour, the East Indiamen and those ships bound for China, including all Royal Navy vessels, were of too deep a draught to enter it and instead rode at anchor out beyond the surf. It was both commentary and metaphor for the faintly makeshift and dilatory atmosphere Baker thought he could discern. The sleepy and peaceable town, still with much of the Dutch influence about it, including its mouldering and unimproved fortifications, did nothing to rouse his spirits. Instead of the bustling activity of the Port Louis harbour in Mauritius, there were a few vessels rolling about in the road-stead, and some forty or fifty fishing canoes hauled up on the sandy beach. There was a peculiar dullness throughout the town – a sort of something which seemed to say ‘coffee does not pay’. There was a want of spirit in everything. The ill-conditioned guns upon the fort looked as though intended not to defend it; the sentinels looked parboiled; the very natives sauntered rather than walked; the bullocks crawled along in the mid-day sun, listlessly dragging the native carts. These observations left Sam Baker with the idea that Ceylon was a hundred years behind Mauritius in development. The island traded in palm-oil, cinnamon and tobacco as well as coffee, yet all with the same want of energy he found so offensive. Much larger than Mauritius in surface area and with a population estimated at a million and a half, its interior, with its dizzying gorges and granite peaks, was, he soon discovered, largely unexplored. Trade and government rested chiefly at sea-level. The Cinnamon Gardens, which suggested at the very least something worthwhile to inspect, turned out to be an untended forest of low scrub. The dense groves of palms stretching back from the shoreline were hardly more alluring. There were scarcely more than 25,000 Europeans in the whole colony: Ceylon was asleep and, as it seemed to this hyperactive and boisterous young man, it begged to be awakened. His own movements were soon settled. Quite by chance he fell in with ‘an old Gloucester friend’, Captain Palliser of the 15th Foot, a regiment then stationed on the island. Palliser, who had something of Sam’s own tastes and energy, took him up-country and there the Gibbs soon came out of its case. The jungle ravines were teeming with game and there were elephants to be had in plenty. The newcomer blazed away and plunged enthusiastically into the greeny dark for days and sometimes weeks on end. At the same time he began to demonstrate his innate intellectual curiosity, for the loud and hearty sportsman he loved to personate was also a keen naturalist and, perhaps even more unusually for the British on Ceylon, a patient and thoughtful explorer. Baker had a very sharp eye for landscape and was impressed with the ruins of an extensive civilisation buried beneath the lianas. In particular, he saw how water had once been gathered and stored. This led him to estimate the amount of land that had once been under cultivation and the size of the population it had supported. The tone in which he reported these reflections was robust – few other Europeans on the island at that time could have written this: The ancient history of Ceylon is involved in much obscurity; but, nevertheless, we have sufficient data in the existing traces of its former population to form our opinions of the position and power which Ceylon occupied in the Eastern Hemisphere, when England was in a state of barbarism. The wonderful remains of ancient cities, tanks, and watercourses throughout the island all prove that the now desolate regions were tenanted by a multitude – not of savages, but of a race long since passed away, full of industry and intelligence. A partial description of Ceylon had been published in 1821. The author was a credulous Dutchman called Haafner and the information contained in his Travels on Foot Through the Island of Ceylon was already twenty years out of date when it was finally translated into English. Haafner came to the island at the turn of the century as an escaped prisoner of war from Madras; his travels, which were more like aimless wanderings, emphasised the awesome nature of the mountains Sam Baker was now exploring. Everything bad that could happen to the unwary white man happened to Haafner, sometimes to comic effect. In one incident, he set his lonely camp fire under a sheltering tree and was rewarded by a drenching shower of tiny frogs that tumbled out of the branches. Leaping up in disgust, he retreated to ground where he felt safer, only to sink in it past his ankles. He returned to his fire and built it up to a mighty blaze, with the intention of bringing down every last frog in the tree. They continued to fall, plopping into his food and making his life a misery. The few other Europeans in Haafner’s story are, like him, overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of nature in the raw, so much so that they come to believe that no place in the interior is safe and no stick or stone is what it seems. Snakes, spiders, every kind of charging animal, including the rampaging elephant, are greeted for the most part with blind panic. As for the natives – the ‘koolies’ who carried Haafner’s kit and led him about in his wanderings – they are beings without personalities, human mud. When it became necessary to bring water for preparing our supper, the Koolies were so terrified at the idea of being attacked by the crocodiles, that they with one voice refused to approach the river, though we offered to accompany them with torches and our pistols in our hands. What surprised us most, was that their obstinate and determined refusal inspired us with the same terror, so that instead of a supper, we were under the necessity of contenting ourselves with a glass of liquor and some biscuits. Haafner’s sensibilities were essentially eighteenth century: what he could not name left him in superstitious dread. For him the world was huge and had no edges, the dark led into the dark; and only among other white men was there any sense of place or purpose. Adrift in the Ceylon jungle, Haafner always looked to a town as his ideal destination – somewhere furnishing lights, recognisable and familiar cuts of meat, wine and white men’s conversation. His feeble explorations had taken him to the foothills of what was later called the Great Wilderness of the Peak – that is, Adam’s Peak, the highest point on the island, where a rock was said to bear the imprint of the first man. Even in Sam Baker’s time, the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, founded in 1827, had in print a map of Ceylon in which the site of the supposed biblical Paradise was indicated, regretfully, as ‘unknown mountainous region’. Having arrived to shoot big game, Sam found himself instead exploring the empty spaces of a map. It suited his personality to be first, to set his foot where no white man had been before. The Great Wilderness (which, after all, existed on an island only 280 miles long) held no fears for him but, rather, encouraged a native obstinacy. His explorations also cocked a snook at received opinion on the island. He had a young man’s pride of life, which included in his case a marked anti-authoritarianism; but there was more to him than this. Haafner could never have sat in patience beside a jungle track and let his mind wander as fruitfully as these words indicate: How little can the inhabitant of a cold or temperate climate appreciate the vast amount of ‘life’ in a tropical country! The combined action of light, heat, and moisture calls into existence myriads of creeping things, the offspring of the decay in vegetation. ‘Life’ appears to emanate from ‘death’ – the destruction of one material seems to multiply the existence of another – the whole surface of the earth seems busied in one vast system of giving birth. With the placing of those fastidious inverted commas, the big-game hunter and accidental explorer gives way to someone Huxley or Darwin could have understood and commended. Baker, though he did not yet know it, would find enemies enough in Victorian England, who mistook his unrepentant love of slaughter for a sign of the old brutalism that had animated their fathers. The thoughtful and enquiring side of him comes into view almost apologetically and at times is hidden by a lifetime penchant for schoolboy humour, as in this extract about the activities of a naturalist troubled by midges. A cigar is a specific against these small plagues, and we will allow that the patient entomologist has just succeeded in putting them to flight, and has resumed the occupation of setting out his specimen. Ha! See him spring out of his chair as though electrified. Watch how, regardless of the laws of buttons, he frantically tears his trowsers from his limbs – he has him – no he hasn’t – yes he has – no, no, positively he cannot get him off. It is a tick, no bigger than a grain of sand, but his bite is like a redhot needle boring into the skin. If all the royal family had been present, he could not have refrained from tearing off his trowsers. Sam roamed the high places for months on end, with no one but a Muslim bearer, Tamby, for company. It was an unusual and unpopular thing to do. To spend so much time in the unwelcoming and fever-ridden mountains – more baldly, to fail to ingratiate oneself with the society that clung to the littoral – was looked at askance in Colombo. Nobody likes a loner. In the colonial nineteenth century, standing apart from the rest was a particularly grievous social crime. Moreover, the administration of Ceylon, which Sam so cheerfully disparaged, was especially nervy, for it knew itself to be making a sorry contribution to trade statistics. It was not a very achieving sort of place at all. The new seriousness that flowed down from the queen and her prosy little husband had spread into a lake that soon enough became a general style, extending to the furthest colony. It became the strident conventional wisdom that man and society could and must be improved. In 1845, for example, Ceylon installed its first bishop: he was not there to strike an amiable interdenominational balance, much less to dispense tea and sympathy, but rather to insist on the role of the church as evangelical crusader, the powerful auxiliary engine of change. Trade might follow the flag but it needed gingering. The scourge of colonial administration for many years was the permanent under-secretary for the colonies, James Stephen. His clerks referred to him fearfully as ‘King Stephen’, for he more than any political appointee ran the colonies. The verb is not excessive. Stephen’s wife was Harriet Venn, whose father was a leading member of the Clapham Sect, that group of evangelical Christians who gathered round Wilberforce. No colonial bishop – come to that no governor – could ignore this connection. Sam Baker was never a reformer in this sense. Bishops bored him. He distrusted missionaries with a vengeance and parliamentary and church politics passed clean over his head. All he knew was what he saw for himself. As the weeks turned into months and he tramped the high jungles he realised he had found somewhere to challenge his restlessness. What was more, he had arrived just at the moment when there was a drive to attract settlers. Land was being offered by the government at ?1 an acre. Nevertheless, he might never have thought seriously about staying on in Ceylon but for the accident of falling ill from what he calls ‘jungle fever’ after an orgy of shooting. He had probably contracted malaria. Weak and wasted, he took himself off to recuperate on a plateau called Newera Eliya, 6500 feet above sea-level and overlooked by Ceylon’s third highest peak. Immediately, he fell in love with the place. It was not entirely virgin land. A former governor, the bullish Sir Edward Barnes, a Peninsular and Waterloo veteran, had built himself a stone house on the plain reputed to have cost ?8000 and there was also a ruined sanatorium for the island’s troops. More romantically, the landscape was pitted with diggings, sometimes holes, sometimes deeper shafts, where the ancient kings of Kandy had searched for rubies. The place-names were evocative. The road up from Badulla was called the Valley of a Thousand Princes and the plateau itself was known as the Royal Plains. Barnes may have built his own house and the sanatorium so high up with the intention of replicating Ootacamund in India, the hill station to which the Madras presidency took itself in the summer months. This dream died with him. When Sam Baker first set eyes on it, Newera Eliya was no more than a forlorn relic. He arrived more dead than alive and within a fortnight felt his strength returning. There was nothing under the plough and no stock to be seen. The few whites who lived there permanently ran hotels and rest-houses in a wildly romantic landscape where leopards were bold enough to snatch dogs from the veranda and rats ate any crop that was planted. The full bestiary of Newera was awesome, in fact, though not to a man who had spent a year wandering through ravines and climbing mountains, shooting game too heavy to carry and announcing his kills by tooting on a bugle to attract the indigenous Sinhalese in the rice paddies far below. Sam Baker found himself entranced. He plunged, and bought a thousand acres of this wild and uncultivated upland, jamming his walking stick into the turf at the eastern end of the plain. His scheme, cooked up in a fevered brain, was twice as grandiose as Governor Barnes’s desire to have his own hill station. On this remote plateau Baker intended to settle a model farm in the good old English style, to be staffed by stout-hearted Gloucestershire men and women and grazed by imported sheep and cattle. Coffee would not do: the site was too high for coffee and anyway he wanted nothing to do with the existing planter society. What he had in mind was a piece of the West Country set down in the tropics, with the added attraction of seemingly inexhaustible big-game shooting on the doorstep. This decision, so swiftly arrived at, discussed with no one else, was an act of social rebellion. Newera Eliya was about as remote from the governing class of Ceylon as it was possible to get. To buy land there was almost as exotic as purchasing a desert island, yet Sam Baker was not planning to run away from existence. Instead, he would show the world how a life in action should be lived, on a site the colonial government had practically forgotten. It was a challenge much more appealing than watching sugar cane grow back on Mauritius. The naturally combative side to him was stirred into a fine indignation. Why should this place lie idle? Why should this great tract of country in such a lovely climate be untenanted and uncultivated? How often I have stood upon the hills and asked myself this question when gazing over the wide extent of undulating forest and plain! How often I have thought of the thousands of starving wretches at home who here might earn a comfortable livelihood! He stayed no more than a fortnight before setting out for the coast and a ship to take him home. Once things were under way in London, he easily persuaded John and the womenfolk that their destiny also lay in Ceylon. His son Charles had died an infant’s death on Mauritius; his second child was a girl called Jane who had not taken to a tropical climate. There was another new-born son who was the apple of his eye. His brother’s wife was still childless: maybe the miraculously invigorating air would do for everyone else what it had done for him. It seems they thought so too. A jubilant Sam went down to Lypiatt Park and communicated the same torrential enthusiasm to his younger brother, Valentine, a stocky and rather gloomy boy of nineteen. Then he looked around him for servants to the enterprise. His first hiring – and he was to rue the day he made it – was a one-eyed groom from his father’s estate called Henry Perkes. Perkes had the unfailing confidence that came from being a pub wit. Sam may not have noticed at first that he was more often drunk than sober. As bailiff Baker chose another West Country man, a tenant farmer called Fowler, who came with a homely wife and a beautiful daughter. He found a local blacksmith willing to follow him. This man had as his wife ‘a cheerful knockabout woman’ perfect for the job in hand – she could swing an eighteen-pound hammer as powerfully as her husband. Since the whole of the Gloucestershire countryside was talking about the repeal of the Corn Laws and the coming ruination of agriculture, Baker had arrived at an opportune moment. Altogether, excluding family members, Sam persuaded nine others to join him. We can get some idea of what was in play from Charles Kingsley’s novel, Yeast. The story commenced publication in serial form in 1846 and has the distinction to be among the worst constructed novels of any century; all the same it has strong resonance with the scheme Sam Baker had taken into his head. What Kingsley was trying to dramatise was the disaffection and intellectual confusion of the governing class – or at least their young – set beside the sharply observed miseries of the rural population in a time of agricultural slump. Kingsley’s hero, Lancelot Smith, learns from the honest poor how to be a man. He has a university education and ?2000 a year at his disposal but no purpose. Love is not the answer to his problems, nor is rick-burning or radical politics. The true path lies in the search for the Kingdom of God. His first steps are guided by the giant gamekeeper and hedge philosopher, Tregarva. Then, towards the end of the book, he meets the mysterious Barnakill, who proposes the two of them desert England altogether and retire to some utopian community ‘in the land of Prester John’. (Barnakill does not mean Ethiopia but Russia. In a very necessary epilogue Kingsley modifies this startling proposal further by suggesting that the location of this earthly paradise is more metaphorical than geographical.) Educated at Cambridge, Kingsley was deeply influenced by the Christian socialism of F. D. Maurice and a great admirer of Carlyle. Yeast, as it unfolded, suggested to some people a dangerous radicalism. It was published in book form in the revolutionary year of 1848 and its author attracted some passing notoriety. However, Kingsley was no more a firebrand than his fictional hero. He was in fact a country parson of donnish tastes who saw nothing noble in the lives of his own parishioners and made no great inroads towards their well-being. By 1860 he was appointed professor of Modern History at his old university and was for a brief time tutor to the Prince of Wales. Even a modest amount of bourgeois comfort was enough to placate the Lancelot Smith in him. In the last fifteen years of his life he became an ardent naturalist and reconciler of faith with science: he became, in short, a representative Victorian, genial, a little muddled and, when called upon, a friend to the established order. Sam Baker needed no Barnakill to show him the way out and, unlike Kingsley, he was first and foremost a man of action. To go and settle halfway up a mountain on an island very few of his followers could have found on a map was a colossal undertaking for such a young man, given that he was remembered in his home county as nothing more than a jolly young giant with a passion for shooting. Moreover, as everyone knew, he had recently inherited a small fortune from his grandmother and could if he chose buy almost any property in the west of England. From there he could indulge his taste for adventure by expedition. That would have been his father’s advice, for old Sam Baker risked very little in his life and was perfectly aware that the honours and dignity he sought in his old age had to be purchased. He was, when it came down to it, only a merchant – a rich and generous one, but famous only in Gloucestershire and among other London merchants. It was true the family had Tudor courtiers in its background, but in early Victorian England such an ancestry needed to be refurbished with sons who had been to university and made political connections that would last them through life. Sam Baker’s indifference to such a world and such a career is marked. His father’s ramshackle way of educating him aggravated this but it was not the cause – he was an outsider by temperament. In later life, when he had proved himself a great explorer, he was fond of defending his eminence in stiff little sentences like this: ‘I do not love to dwell upon geographical theories, as I believe in nothing but actual observation.’ This is a vain man speaking. It was soon clear to the farm workers he recruited that he had very great organising abilities. The colonists were to take ship in the Earl of Hardwicke with many tons of equipment, including a newfangled power saw and a patented compost-maker. There was a small ark of animals to be stowed before the mast. If he minimised the element of risk – and he had already discovered several different ways of suffering injury and sudden death on the Royal Plains – that was only in his nature. As the plans went forward, he paid a visit to Beattie’s, the gunsmiths in Regent Street, and ordered from the firm not one but four double-barrelled rifles. From there he walked down to Paget’s of Piccadilly and bought an impressive knife. ‘The blade is one foot in length and two inches broad at its widest point and slightly concave in the middle. The steel is of the most exquisite quality and the knife weighs three pounds.’ In due course, Baker used it to dispatch at a single blow a charging wild boar weighing 300 pounds. The knife split the animal open from the spine to its pizzle. In the book he wrote about the Ceylon venture, Eight Years in Ceylon, Sam Baker says he did all this merely to have the pleasures of a country estate without the harassment of his neighbours’ gamekeepers, which may have been the echo of a jocular family accusation. Young though he was, he had a very clear view of what he must do to get what he wanted – and the wit to set out in advance of his little band of colonists to prepare for their arrival. He built them all handsome little cottages with wood cut from the enclosing jungle and began the laborious business of clearing his land. He was wide-eyed about this, too. Every root, every stump was dug out. He knew that the soil, which looked so promising on the surface, would never amount to anything without manure. It lay on a bed of pure white clay. Baker was undeterred. He was prepared to add another ?10 an acre in costs to clear and sweeten his land. Such long-sightedness was rare in Ceylon. The elevation of Newera and its exposure to the long months of the monsoon, when the rain and mist seemed to sit on the landscape for ever, made it an unappealing investment for the faint of heart. The real land-rush was lower down the mountain in lush grass country. Characteristically, Baker spent his money and energies on the more difficult option. Things began badly. His daughter Jane died at sea on the passage from Mauritius and the toddler son on whom he doted was poisoned by a servant shortly after he set foot on Ceylon. The argosy from England arrived safely enough but trouble began immediately after debarkation. Among the animals fetched from England was a prize Durham cow, intended to mate with a half-bred Hereford bull. Sam arranged for it to be carried up in all its pomp in a cart that local craftsmen assured him would transport an elephant. The cow promptly fell through the floor. It was accordingly driven on foot and died of exhaustion halfway up the mountain. Perkes, whose official designation was that of groom, ran a brand-new carriage over the cliff. Baker reproduces an approximation of his letter of apology: Honor’d Zurr, I’m sorry to hinform you that the carriage and osses has met with an haccident and is tumbled down a preccipice and its a mussy as I didn’t go too. The preccipice isn’t very deep being not above heighty feet or thereabouts – the hosses is got up but is very bad – the carriage lies on its back and we can’t stir it nohow. Mr—is very kind and has lent above a hundred niggers, but they aint no more use than cats at liftin. Plese Zur come and see whats to be done. He was drunk when the accident happened. One horse had to be destroyed and another died the next day. They had been sent from Australia expressly to weather the climate. Perkes then excelled himself. Sent down the mountain to the accident site with an elephant, he overcame the protests of the mahout and took him off at a fine gallop. Refreshed by brandy and water, and finding his offers of help declined, the groom took off again back up the pass. In his own words, he ‘tooled the old elephant along until he came to a standstill’. Shortly afterwards, the beast keeled over and died. Perkes was, as Baker grimly observed, ‘one of the few men in the world who had ridden an elephant to death’. When he finally caught up with him, the groom was being pushed round the nascent plantation in a wheelbarrow, his mate as drunk as he. There is a clue to Baker’s unique temperament in a couple of lines of Eight Years in Ceylon. Apart from the damage done by Perkes (whom he quixotically describes as ‘honest and industrious’) there was an early mini-revolt of his tiny colony against the authority of the bailiff, Mr Fowler. It reached a climax when the white men refused to obey orders in front of the 150 natives Baker had hired to uproot the trees. ‘I was obliged to send two of them to jail as an example to the others,’ Baker remarks. ‘This produced the desired effect and we soon got regularly to work.’ One can make too much of this incident but it demonstrates Baker’s supreme self-possession. Most of Eight Years in Ceylon was written by palm-oil lamp at the end of Sam Baker’s stay on the island. It is not a blueprint for how to set up and manage a model farm – as with the earlier partnership on Mauritius, John, the older brother, assumed most of the day-today responsibilities. Nevertheless, it was Sam’s energy that transformed the plateau. The soil was bad, the rats ate all his first crops; and his two rams, on which he depended for a flock, fought a bad-tempered duel to the death. The bull, cheated of his Durham mate, was put to serve the puny local cattle and produced a strange hybrid, easily outstripped in strength by the elephants Baker trained to drag a plough or trundle not one but three harrows. However, the crossbred cattle showed some surprising qualities. A leopard got into Fowler’s byre through the thatched roof and the poor man went out by lantern light to evict it armed only with a pistol, to be chased out of the place by an enraged cow well up to the challenge from a mere big cat. Both John and Elizabeth Baker were, years later, buried at Newera Eliya and the Baker family did not sell the prosperous tea estate the original farm finally became until 1947. Even then, the head of the family retained the freehold on the ruined old houses which his grandparents had built. If there is a spirit of the hearth that still dwells there it is assuredly that of Sam Baker. He would not have been human if he had not preened himself a little on his sang-froid. What gave him the calm to face down beasts intent on killing him was indivisible from his general manner. There cannot be a more beautiful sight than the view of the sunrise from the summit of Pedrotallagalla, the highest mountain in Ceylon, which, rising to the height of 8,300 feet, looks down on Newera Ellya some two thousand feet below on one side, and upon the interminable depths of countless ravines and valleys at its base. This is the language of the proprietor, which Baker certainly was. The passage places him alone on his eminence, for though he loved his family, he was still a young man and in the whole of his narrative his wife Henrietta scarcely merits a mention. It continues: There is a feeling approaching the sublime when a solitary man thus stands upon the highest point of earth, before the dawn of day, and waits for the first rising of the sun. Nothing above him but the dusky arch of heaven. Nothing on his level but empty space – all beneath, deep beneath his feet. From childhood he has looked to heaven as the dwelling place of the Almighty, and he now stands upon that lofty summit in the silence of utter solitude: his hand, as he raises it above his head, the highest mark upon the sea-girt land: his form above all mortals upon this land the nearest to his God. The greater part of Eight Years in Ceylon concerns the sport he had set out to find there, but it does include this lyrical passage: Comparatively but a few years ago, Newera Ellia was undiscovered – a secluded plain among the mountain tops, tenanted by the elk and the boar. The wind swept over it, and the mists hung around the mountains, and the bright summer with its spotless sky succeeded, but still it was unknown and unseen except by the native bee-hunter in his rambles for wild honey. How changed! The road encircles the plain, and the carts are busy in removing the produce of the land. Here, where wild forest stood, are gardens teeming with English flowers: rosy faced children and ruddy countrymen are about the cottage doors; equestrians of both sexes are galloping round the plain and the cry of hounds is ringing on the mountain-side. A little over thirty years after his father gazed out on his cane fields in Jamaica, the young Sam Baker had performed a double trick, of creating an Arcadia equal to Saint-Pierre’s in Paul et Virginie, but almost wholly independent of the colony in which it stood. Towards colonial government in general Baker exhibited a fine contempt. Its dilatoriness was exhibited, Baker thought, in such obvious matters as the Botanical Gardens in Colombo, which had been set up as a cultural attraction – the jungle tamed – and which also doubled as a handy site for flirtation and intrigue. Baker pointed out that since most settlers came out to make their fortunes and had no capital to spare for experiment, the government would do much better by using its gardens as a base for scientific investigations. (He was proved right: the introduction of tea to Ceylon eventually came about from crop trials made there.) Very few men inside or out of any of the colonial governments of the day had gathered so comprehensive an understanding of a land, its indigenous inhabitants and its potential. Eight Years in Ceylon is teasingly short on domestic detail but cannot be faulted otherwise. Sam Baker took as his canvas not just his own estate, nor the game he found, but the whole island. He saw everything with an explorer’s eye. Then, in 1854, something truly unexpected happened. Racked with fever, Sam staggered down from the mountains without his horse and having buried his gun-bearer. With as much suddenness as he had shown in his original impulse to buy his thousand acres, he now quit. The little community was astonished to learn that all four of the Bakers, with Sam and Henrietta’s four surviving children, had decided to return to England, leaving Mr Fowler in place as manager. Poor Fowler. His wife had died on the plain and was one of the first tenants in the graveyard of the new church. She joined Sam’s own baby son. There is an old tree standing upon a hill whose gnarled trunk has been twisted by the winter’s wind for many an age, and so screwed is its old stem that the axe has spared it, out of pity, when its companions were all swept away, and the forest felled … The eagle has roosted in its top, the monkeys have gambolled in its branches; and the elephants have rubbed their tough flanks against its stem in times gone by; but it now throws its shade upon a Christian’s grave. This is the only passage in the book when he comes anywhere close to admitting the full price for his adventures in Ceylon. Ill though he was, his wife was being dragged down with him. They had lost two sons and a daughter to the enterprise and the long monsoon months from June to November were hard to bear. Without light – without sun – the transition that took place in Newera just at a time when a distant Gloucestershire was bathed in plenty was hard to bear. Baker concluded his paragraph on the churchyard with this unexpectedly pietistic sentence: ‘The sunbeam has penetrated where the forest threw its dreary shade, and a ray of light has shone through the moral darkness of the spot.’ They took their leave of Fowler and the others and sailed home together. Old Sam Baker had remarried after the death of his first wife and had given up Lypiatt Park: there was nothing left for them in Gloucestershire. John and Elizabeth settled for the time being in Rugby; Valentine and the youngest brother James were in the army encamped before Sebastopol. Sam took his family to a rented house on the Atholl estate in Scotland. Towards Christmas, the weak and listless Henrietta allowed herself to be carted off to the French Pyrenees to get well again. Her husband also had it in mind to hunt the black bear he had heard roamed the winter slopes. The couple took their four children with them. Henrietta Baker died at Bagn?res-de-Bigorre on 29 December 1855. Since her marriage to Sam she had lived almost a third of her life in the tropics. She died in a room where deep snow lay outside the window and melted into the icy black waters of the Adour. One of the unmarried Martin sisters, Charlotte, who was only twenty-two, came out to France to rescue the children. She found her brother-in-law stunned and almost completely helpless. He had arrived at Bagn?res with the utter confidence that being a Baker was of itself a cure against ill. Henrietta would buck up, the children would scratch out a few words of French and in some snowy ravine behind the town the black bear would present a perfect shot. His own animal high spirits would act as tonic and emollient – things would soon be as they should be. But the maire of Bagn?res was also a crack shot and had been into the mountains before him. One of the sights Charlotte Martin winced at seeing was Sam’s gun cases in the hotel bedroom, still buckled, still with the protective tampons of lint tucked into the weapons’ muzzles. Couldn’t it be said that he had dragged the family south to Bagn?res simply to satisfy himself? No doctor would have prescribed such a trip to an out-of-season spa. C’?tait tragique, la mort de cette pauvre Anglaise, mais vous savez … The widower who ate alone at his restaurant table was thirty-four years old and a casual eye might have added another ten to that. Something had happened to this man that was as unexpected and humiliating as flinching in the face of danger. The sheer ordinariness of death, its artless sprawl, had tripped him up. Henrietta had died not from the exhaustion that had brought her to this Christmas card spa town, but from typhus, caught from bed lice somewhere along the road. It was an awful outcome and might have ended another man’s career there and then. TWO (#ulink_fa8ba0d7-dbec-5391-b916-cf5a3a0ad107) Valentine Baker, always called Val in the family, was named for his naval grandfather. There is a photograph of him as a young man in Ceylon: he wears a high collar and stock, his hair is long, his arms are folded composedly across his chest. His moustache is in the experimental stage and has yet to find its voluptuous curves. It is the eyes that tell the story. What is most striking about Val’s expression is its calm. If the camera represents the outer, public world, then he is looking into it with an eerie self-possession. That same look in the eye of a wild animal would have sent an instant warning signal to Sam Baker, tightening his finger on the trigger. A boy among men, Val came out to Ceylon on the Earl of Hardwicke with the rest of Sam’s party in 1845. From the beginning he was only ever a lukewarm farm colonist. For example: after a season or two on the plateau Sam Baker invented for himself a sort of woollen suit for his jungle explorations, the fabric dyed a muddy and streaky green by the juice of plants. It was cinched at the waist by the belt that carried the killer knife. He wore this kit without embarrassment and was always eager to press its advantages on others. It is not possible to picture Val ever wearing anything like it, even if it stood between him and sudden death. He was at school in Gloucester during the Mauritius years and still only nineteen when he came to Newera. A windswept plateau halfway up a mountain was never going to satisfy his curiosity about life in the tropics. In any case, Val was only in Ceylon under licence – his father had long wished that he and his youngest brother James should enter the army. The family was rich and had worked its way into becoming part of the landed interest in Gloucestershire; and so, to old Sam Baker, the way forward for his youngest sons pointed to service in the Guards or, better still, a good cavalry regiment. Looked at in this light, Val’s journey to Ceylon was no more than a jaunt. Unfortunately, as his photograph shows, there was very little of the jaunty about him. To have a soldier in the family was a fatherly ambition that could turn out, under the wrong circumstances, to be ruinously expensive. The army offered its officer elite the opportunity of a plural life such as some parsons had enjoyed in the eighteenth century – they were gentlemen first and soldiers only afterwards. In the fashionable regiments no officer, however cautious in his habits, could subsist on his pay alone. His path to senior rank was choked by elderly and often grievously incompetent men who saw the purchase system, by which everything from a cornetcy to a colonelship could be bought and sold, as a guarantee of their pension. The first step in a military career – the right regiment – was the most important one. Thereafter, deep pockets helped – Lord Brudenell raised himself by reckless purchase from cornet to command of his own regiment in just eight years. As Earl of Cardigan he is reputed to have spent a further ?10,000 annually to ensure the 11th Hussars remained among the most fashionable (and reactionary) of British cavalry regiments. Cardigan’s manic personal vanity made him a particularly vivid example of what was, in a dozen or so regiments, the norm. The Guards, the Household Cavalry and certain favoured Hussar regiments had become, in effect, the junior branches of the aristocracy in uniform. If this was old Sam Baker’s ambition for his son Val, it must have caused consternation when news came that he had ridden back down the mountain only a few months after arriving at Newera and purchased an ensignship in that very undistinguished foot regiment, the Ceylon Rifles. Touching the role of a young officer in times of peace, Thackeray wrote woundingly: ‘The professional duties of a footman are quite as difficult and various.’ He had this further to say in his Book of Snobs, published in 1846, the year Val joined the Rifles: When epaulets are not sold; when corporal punishments are abolished and Corporal Smith has a chance to have his gallantry rewarded as well as that of Lieutenant Grig; when there is no such rank as ensign and lieutenant (the existence of which rank is an absurd anomaly, and an insult upon all the rest of the army), and should there be no war, I should not be disinclined to be a major-general myself. Val had joined as modest a regiment as could be found, tucked almost out of sight at the bottom of the Army List. His decision may have seemed inexplicable in Gloucestershire but a motive based on local conditions suggests itself. Up in Newera Sam, in his blustery and good-humoured way, was developing his role as the social outsider, a reputation he enjoyed and did his best to burnish. By joining the Rifles Val indicated an alternative. An ensign’s duties might be mostly comprised of smoking and lounging but what they also offered was the pleasure of belonging. The elements of obedience and submission implied by regimental life were handsomely offset by the sense of fraternity engendered. A man who purchased the queen’s commission anywhere was joining a select, if embattled, club. This desire to conform would become Val’s tragedy. The immediate consequence of his move to the coast was to open a window on to the part of Ceylon his brother had made such a point of ignoring – conventional Colombo society. As Val soon discovered, while the island might be a paradise for big-game hunters, its administration was a mare’s nest. As with every other outpost of Empire, social recognition hung upon favourable notice by the governor or his commander-in-chief. To be invited to this or that ball; there to be presented to a general on his way to a more distant posting, or to a savant of the Royal Society being carried to the ends of the earth – all this gave the appearance of upholding a civility whose wellspring was in London. The spirit of empire was not so sturdy that it did not need continuous reinforcement. When HMS Beagle came to Sydney in 1836, Charles Darwin found it ‘a most magnificent testimony of the power of the British nation. Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America.’ Such generous sentiments were received with gratitude by his hosts, as was the conclusion he drew from them, a desire ‘to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman’. He had not been so kind towards New Zealand, describing the English there as ‘the very refuse of society’, but in Australia, young though he was, he had done the right thing. The colonial enthusiasm that greeted the arrival of every ship flying the British flag and honoured its passenger list down to the least of its officers was demonstrated by people a long way from home, it was true; but that was not the only reason to feast strangers. The governor’s residence, which was always the distinguished visitor’s first port of call – in Colombo it was called, archaically, the King’s House – was the amplification chamber of a distant murmur. What were they saying in London? The home country’s desires and wishes were not always clear and congratulation was a rare commodity. As a consequence there was no such thing as stale news. Rumour and gossip were quite as closely attended as official dispatches. Such was early Victorian society that well-bred strangers in conversation with each other were seldom at more than two or three degrees of separation from common acquaintances, by marriage, by regiment or by country seat. For the governor and his entourage, this was a second and more anxious reason to flatter the latest new arrival. By indirection, they were trying to find out how they stood personally. Colonial appointments, far from being sinecures, were very much movable feasts. Since 1840 five governors had packed their bags and quit Colombo. Sam Baker pointed out in Eight Years in Ceylon how this constant shifting around of administrators, their secretaries and military advisers did nothing but harm to emerging colonies, denying continuity and cohesion to their governing class. Val was lucky – or circumspect – in his choice of Colombo friends, striking up acquaintance with a young man not entirely unlike himself. The chief justice of Ceylon was a man called Sir Anthony Oliphant, none too happily married to a powerful but neurasthenic woman who spent most of her summer months in a cottage by the lake at Newera. The couple were notorious evangelicals. Their only son Laurence was two years younger than Val and had been raised on the island as something of a wild child. In 1846 Sir Anthony and his family went home to England on a two-year leave, with the intention of leaving Laurence to study at university. Instead, the boy threw over his place at Cambridge to follow his father and mother back out to Ceylon. Ceylon as it was in Skinner’s day. When he and his mother pitched up at Newera, he found the Bakers in the full flood of setting up the model farm. Sam, in his breezy and open-handed way, took Laurence shooting. They camped together deep in the forest and the older man taught Oliphant, among other things, how to catch and dispatch a crocodile: you tied a live puppy to a wooden crucifix and, when the predator’s jaws were jammed wide open by the indigestible element of the bait, you hauled him in and took a sporting shot through the eye. Oliphant was completely sanguine about butchery of this kind; nor was he fazed by the other privations of a Baker jungle expedition. Courageous and resourceful, very quick-witted, he would later be one of the most enigmatic figures of the nineteenth century. His mother, whose address at Newera was ‘The Turtle Dovery’, was twenty years younger than her husband and liked nothing more than to be congratulated on her youthful appearance – and, on occasion, to be mistaken for her son’s sister. She clung to Laurence with almost a lover’s tenacity. The two young men – Oliphant and Val Baker – were at first glance very alike. They were good looking, athletic, perhaps a little too sketchily educated, but obedient to the usual conventions of society. Each had an interesting background. Strangers who had heard something of the Oliphant family and came looking for a mummy’s boy in Laurence were surprised to meet a blond but already balding giant, energetic and voluble. Those Colombo planters who felt themselves snubbed by the maverick Bakers up in Newera discovered in Val not an unhappy deserter, but a family member with the same trademark self-possession. An astute observer might have found more intriguing shadows in Laurence Oliphant. He was one of those men made to be a secret agent – spontaneous and effusive on the outside, but inwardly tortured. Born at the Cape in 1829, brought up haphazardly in Ceylon by a succession of private tutors, he nevertheless – to the surprise of his father’s distinguished dinner guests – spoke five languages. Dissembling his feelings in order to accommodate the war between his parents had made him a master of disguise. Never the milksop his mother seemed to want to cherish, and certainly not the evangelical saint of his father’s imagination, Oliphant was a complicated young man. On his way out to Ceylon in 1848 to join his family, he found himself in Naples in the middle of the Italian uprising. I shall never forget joining a roaring mob one evening, bent upon I knew not what errand, and getting forward by the pressure of the crowd and my own eagerness into the front rank just as we reached the Austrian Legation, and seeing ladders passed to the front and placed against the wall, and the arms torn down. He helped drag the hated emblem of foreign occupation to the Piazza del Populo and assisted in its burning. This is worthy of Byron or Shelley. At Messina his hotel was bombarded by the king of Naples’s fleet and when he came back up to Naples he was in the square in front of the palace when King Bomba ordered his troops to fire into the crowd. Laurence escaped injury by crouching behind an arch. He was nineteen years old. Val Baker’s life to date had been a great deal less exciting. He had manners, he was dutiful, yet he was to others merely an officer in an undistinguished rifle regiment, a young infantry subaltern who knew a great deal about horses. His military duties were almost ludicrously undemanding. The faintly effeminate nature of the indigenous population that made it so difficult to recruit also made the island easy to govern. There was, as it happened, an outburst of civil unrest just at the time Val came down to the coast. Everyone knew that, in the event of a serious threat, the place would be flooded with troops from India. In the ordinary course of things, soldiering in Ceylon was about as taxing as taking up watercolours, or butterfly-hunting; and it had been this way since the brief Kandyan wars of 1817–18. There was one Ceylon Rifle officer known by name at least to everyone on the island. Thomas Skinner joined as an ensign in 1819 when he was fifteen years old. To great amusement, he attended his first parade in civilian clothes, no uniform being found small enough to fit him. Skinner proved to have a genius for road-building and, by teaching himself the use of the theodolite, went on to produce the first accurate survey of the island’s interior. (Little monuments to him are scattered along the roads of Ceylon to the present day.) His career is an example of how the purchase system worked. After he had spent some years as a lieutenant, Skinner’s fellow officers clubbed together to provide the purchase price of a vacant captaincy, an exceptional mark of respect for his talents. Out of pride (both his father and father-in-law were colonels) Skinner declined the money and so lost eleven long years of seniority. His promotion eventually came about in a particularly grotesque way. There was in the Rifles a Captain Fretz. One afternoon Fretz levelled his musket at an elephant and had the block blow back in his face. A chunk of metal over three inches long and weighing nearly four ounces entered his nasal cavity and lodged against his palate. Incredibly, Fretz survived another eight years of service with this horrific alteration to his appearance, astonishing his colleagues when drunk by absently twiddling a screw that poked from what was left of his nostril. This was the captaincy Skinner waited for so patiently, while at the same time receiving fulsome commendations from the governor’s office for his industry and ingenuity as road-builder and surveyor. They were getting him on the cheap. In the end he gave the island fifty years of service without ever rising beyond the rank of major. The man who benefited from Lieutenant Skinner’s original fit of pride and made captain in his place was called Rogers. He was struck by lightning at Badulla, on the road to Newera, shortly after Val joined the Rifles. Skinner observes without comment that Captain Rogers was credited with killing 1500 elephants during his military service on the island. Since 1840 members of the administration had been encouraged to purchase land and take up coffee-farming, as an inducement to remain in post. This was soon extended to the public at large – Sam Baker was a beneficiary of the policy when buying his thousand acres at Newera. The short-lived land-boom attracted every kind of investor and speculator. For as long as Ceylon coffee was protected by tariff all went well. However, when the tariff was abolished by Whitehall, the price of coffee beans fell from 100 shillings a hundredweight to 45 shillings, or the cost of growing the crop in the first place. Many of the investors were ruined. It became clear the government had raised huge sums on the sale of land that could not be easily cultivated and for which there was no crop. At the same time the land-grab had brought into the colony men of a very different stamp to Sam Baker. A scramble started for permits to produce arrack, the fiery liquor made from palm-sap. The so-called ‘arrack farms’ provided a quick return on capital: those who could not afford them bought government licences to open taverns, which soon proliferated in their hundreds. The government derived ?60,000 a year from the sale of such permits and licences but it was revenue disastrously acquired. Arrack turned a peaceable, if indolent, native population into a society of drunks. The old trust between the governors and the governed began to collapse. What Skinner identified as ‘the native gentleman’, that is the native of high caste on whose loyalty and respect for the white man everything depended, now began to be sidelined. There was no question who would win in such a situation. Native Sinhalese society began to disintegrate. It is a story of greed and opportunism that Val witnessed at first hand, one that goes unreported in Eight Years in Ceylon. Skinner, who should have been a hero to Sam Baker, is never mentioned by him – any more than is Val himself. In 1849 there was a tax revolt that led to the arrest and summary execution of hundreds of native protestors. Oliphant’s father was kept busy trying some defendants by legal process while others were shot out of hand in batches of four. Colombo panicked. The bishop of Ceylon fell out with his clergy. The governor, Lord Torrington, was hastily recalled and replaced, not by another soldier but by a senior Indian civil servant brought out of retirement and given the sweetener of a KCB to clean up the mess. Laurence Oliphant could not be held by the island: in 1851, though he had been admitted to the colonial Bar, he went to Kathmandu on the sort of sudden whim to which Sam Baker was prone. In April 1852 Val too made his break with Ceylon. He sold his commission and purchased one in the 10th Hussars, then stationed in Kirkee (Poona) on the plains above Bombay. The army, with which he had toyed in the Ceylon Rifles, now claimed him completely. Belonging, which was the choice Val made in life, was given a sudden and even brutal codification. He began to follow a path that diverged from all others in the nineteenth century; and if as a consequence his portrait seems to us unfocused, to his age he was a familiar type. That belligerent stare, the capacity to stay silent when nothing needed to be said, a quasi-aristocratic contempt for outsiders, was the mark of a Victorian army officer. He already had the temperament. The cavalry turned it into a style. The 10th Hussars had something of a royal connection. The Prince Regent had taken a strong personal interest in the regiment named for him and had once tried to persuade Wellington that he had commanded it at Waterloo. He certainly designed its uniform and bullied Beau Brummell to join. (The Beau resigned after three years when the regiment was posted to Manchester, giving as his reason his unwillingness to go on foreign service.) Money got Val into the 10th. His cornetcy cost ?800 to purchase at the official rate, though he probably paid considerably over the odds to acquire it; now only money or war would advance him higher. At Kirkee, high up on the basalt plains of the Deccan, he could covertly study middle-aged captains who, socially eligible though they might be, were too poor to purchase their way and, like the long-suffering Lieutenant Skinner, waited on luck or seniority to bring them to the top of the pile. The posts they were after could quite as easily be snatched from them by an outsider, a system of arbitrary cruelty but one fiercely defended by the only authority that really mattered. In 1833 the Duke of Wellington had advised the House of Commons: It is the promotion by purchase which brings into the service men of fortune and education, men who have some connection with the interests and fortunes of the country, besides the Commissions which they hold from His Majesty. It is this circumstance which exempts the British Army from the character of being a ‘mercenary army’, and has rendered its employment for nearly a century and a half not only inconsistent with the constitutional privileges of the country, but safe and beneficial. The 10th Hussars had already been in India for nine years when Val joined them. The officers and men of a European regiment posted abroad were the lords of creation to those around them. With nothing very onerous to do, regiments like the 10th Hussars developed to a fine point the esprit de corps on which their identity depended. The regiment was everything. In England it had no particular loyalty to a town or county. At this time there was no fixed brigade or divisional structure. Of the several hundred officers holding general’s rank, only a fraction were on the active list. Those who were in the field considered it none of their business to administer a central policy, even had one existed. They were not managers, nor were they strategists. They were simply senior soldiers, whose job was to bring the troops to battle. The affairs of the army as a whole were conducted between harassed scribblers in thirteen separate departments – there was no general staff and no War Office. The British army, as Prince Albert concluded sourly, was ‘a mere aggregation of regiments’. It was not unusual for units to be posted to India, or elsewhere in the world, for ten or even twenty years. Once there, regimental pride kept the men from going mad or mutinous. Above them was a shadowy and unarticulated concept, ‘the Queen’s Army’. Below them and at their feet were the natives, the savages, the locals. For the officers, the ambience was part club, part country house. At night, dressed for dinner and with the mess silver reflecting back the candlelight, they found that India faded a little into the background and England – a certain old-fashioned and romantic image of England – was recreated. The talk, the food, the taking of wines were all carefully prescribed. Though some wives came out with their husbands – more and more since the introduction of the first steamer services – it was essentially a man’s world. At Kirkee the officers built themselves a racquets court and kept up a dusty and zealously rolled cricket pitch. Every cavalry regiment encouraged racing. Shooting and fishing were a common interest – a man would have his own guns and his favourite rod with him as a matter of course. It was not all an idyll of knightly companionship. Sir Charles Napier had only recently quit India for the second time, such a hero to his age that The Dictionary of National Biography gives his occupation simply as ‘Conqueror of Sind’. Born in 1782, Napier had fought his way into the affections of the British army as a courageous soldier and a supreme strategist. Short-sighted and faintly querulous in appearance – with his silver spectacles and umbrella he resembled a country parson more than anything else – he was religious by temperament and radical in outlook. In a widely unpopular farewell address given in 1850, in place of the usual sentiments he castigated the officer class in India for its fondness for gambling, drinking and running up debts against the locals. Napier had the courage to point out that not every officer was a gentleman. His criticisms were directed against the Indian army but were deprecated by the entire officer caste. This was breaking a deeply cherished code of conduct: the army did not criticise its own. Napier died shortly after in 1853. As can be read on the plinth to the statue by George Canon Adams in Trafalgar Square, the greater part of the subscriptions to erect it came from private soldiers. Val was twenty-three when he joined the 10th Hussars, a little old for such a junior officer. However, the pace of his life soon accelerated. After only a year with the 10th he sold his commission to a man called Carrington and exchanged without purchase to the 12th Lancers, a sister regiment. He went down to Bombay and sailed to join his new colleagues at the Cape. In so doing, he joined the greater, other, world at a time when Sam and John Baker were still living in a dream. Val came to realise years before his brothers that Ceylon – both the romantic landscape and the mess the administration was making of it – was a long way from the heart of the beast. For what they had at the Cape was war. Armchair strategists of the sort that shared their port with elderly generals had long seen the Cape as being the true gateway to India, an opinion derived from their fathers at the time of Nelson. In the years since, a sea-borne threat to the colony had disappeared, possibly for ever. All the trouble came from inland. What was more, the introduction of steam on the Suez – Bombay route had changed even the basic premise of the argument: Aden and its stocks of coal was now quite as important as Cape Town. The new metaphor was not of gateways but of hinges. Right at the other end of the continent, Egypt was gradually acquiring its significance as ‘the hinge of Asia’. The Cape was, like Ceylon, an example of a colony that could neither pay its way nor devise what was called in the language of the day a forward policy. Val’s little war was against the Basuto and was counted the eighth ‘Kaffir War’ to be fought for possession and extension of the colony’s borders. The other seven had been against the implacably hostile Xhosa, who carried in their ranks the ancestors of Nelson Mandela. In April 1853 William Black, assistant surgeon to the forces in South Africa, commented on the nature of the adversary. The Kaffirs evidence very few, if any, moral attributes; their minds are made up of strong animal passions, not under the control of, but ministered to by a stronger intellect than most native tribes in Africa possess. They inherit a national pride from this state of mind, which little adapts them for the reception of the benign influences of Christianity. The Xhosa and the Basuto could be forgiven for taking that to be a description of the whites they had come across. The situation in the Cape was complicated by the Boers, whose Christianity was not exactly benign. The Boers liked the British not much better than the blacks and, in an attempt to find themselves new country, pushed the colony’s borders ever further northwards. The British found it all very exasperating. Another Napier, no relation to the general, had written his suggestions for policing the Cape borders in 1851. Lieutenant-Colonel Napier commanded the irregular cavalry which tried to fight fire with fire by adapting its tactics to those of the enemy. After pointing out how difficult a boundary the Fish river was, he proposed that all Kaffir tribes be driven beyond the Kye [Kei]; that river to be then considered as the boundary of the Eastern Province; that after the expiration of a reasonable period, every male Kaffir above the age of 16, caught within this limit (whether armed or unarmed) be put to death like a beast of prey; or if taken alive that he be removed to the vicinity of Cape Town, there to work as a felon on the public roads. This was the world in which Val and the Lancers found themselves. There were about 2000 troops already engaged in the war and the Lancers had come out with the Rifle Brigade to settle matters. Val was astonished and disgusted by what he found. I remember at the Cape, during the Kaffir War, seeing a regiment march into King William’s town … They were without a vestige of the original uniforms. They had all been torn to pieces, and the men had made coats out of blankets and trousers out of anything they could get. A tight, well fitting jacket is all very well for a dragoon to wear whilst walking about a country town, or making love to nursery-maids, but this is not the purpose for which a soldier is intended … Val’s own troopers wore cavalry overalls so fashionably tight that, once dismounted, they could not get back up into their saddles without help. Soon enough the wait-a-bit thorns and acacias made a mockery of their turnout as well. Campaigning in the Cape was a bad-tempered muddle, from which only a few things emerged as beyond dispute. The Boers were excellent shots, the Basuto incredibly brave. The British marched this way and that, pinched by economies imposed by home government and maddened by the heat, the flies and the heroic obstinacy of their enemy. Scapegoats were found. Sir Harry Smith, the governor-general, was sent home. The army seethed. In its own ranks, the readiest explanation of the trouble the Kaffirs were causing was that they were egged on by the hated missionaries, who would keep telling them they were as one with the white man in the sight of God. ‘We treat the Kaffirs as a power like ourselves to be treated with and to make war against as highly civilized and humane people,’ complained Major Wellesley of the 25th, who though (or perhaps because) he was an Etonian wrote an English all his own. ‘We are taught this by Exeter House and the Aborigines Protection Society, divine laws do not go to this length, and in return for our humanity the Enemy murder us in their old accustomed barbarous manner, and we spend several millions yearly.’ This was written in camp at the Little Caledon river in December 1852. A mile or so away was a mission house and, in the hills to Wellesley’s front, Chief Moshoeshoe’s kraal. It was in this tawny landscape that Val Baker took the first crucial step in his military career. It was the moment of which every subaltern dreamed. At this otherwise nondescript place, called Berea, the Lancers went into action. It was just before Christmas and the engagement was short and, on the Basuto side, bloody. Berea ended the war and was reported in the British papers as a great victory. It did not matter much that the Lancers had been ambushed when they were in the act of driving off 4000 head of cattle that did not belong to them: the black man one had in one’s sights at a moment like that was indisputably from an inferior race and needed to be taught a lesson. Not for another twenty years would Sam Baker turn his rifle against a human being, and then only with the greatest reluctance. Yet as Val discovered, Africa was a far more powerful example of ‘the moral dark’ than Ceylon. The action at Berea, which ended the eighth ‘Kaffir War’, was an unequal contest between men with spears and men with rifles. It was war on the smallest scale – the casualties on the British side were no more than fifty-four killed and wounded – but it was war all the same. Once Moshoeshoe had sued for peace, the 12th Lancers marched south and were placed under orders to proceed to Madras. Val left the Cape with the approbation of his senior commanders, a medal and a locally bred horse, Punch. Exchanging from the Hussars to the Lancers had done him no harm at all and he returned to the languors of barracks life in the green and beautiful city of Bangalore with a story to tell. Never particularly demonstrative, nor the most approachable of mess members, he had all the same made his mark. Less than a year later the colonel himself raced into the officers’ lines waving a sheet of paper that announced a very much greater affair. Fate had dealt Val the high card. The 12th Lancers were ordered to the Crimea. They were already three months behind the game. War was declared by Britain against Russia on 27 March 1854 but, because of the tardiness of communications and the chronic incompetence of military organisation, the regiment did not leave Bangalore until July, marching by slow stages across country to Bombay. Though they chafed at the delays, they were lucky. The regiment missed the horrors of the winter campaign and arrived at Balaclava in April 1855. No sooner had they landed than Val Baker, raised to a captain’s rank, was detached from general duty and sent to serve on Raglan’s staff. The 12th Lancers arrived late at a military and diplomatic debacle that had been years, even decades, in the making. The arthritic deformation of the army that had begun before Val was born was now revealed in all its pathos. Very few general officers were under sixty – the British commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan, was sixty-eight when he took the field. The men responsible for servicing the expeditionary force once it was in the Crimea had forgotten, if they ever knew, how to do their jobs. James Filder was brought unwillingly out of a lengthy retirement to be commissary-general, in charge of the civilian contractors to the war. Like Raglan he was in his late sixties. Assured that all that was being asked of him was to supply something akin to a small colonial engagement, Filder was drawn deeper and deeper into disaster. The clerks who worked under him had no grasp of the practical needs of an army. During the campaign an officer who went down to Balaclava to requisition a couple of sacks of vegetables for his squadron was turned away with the explanation they could only be issued by the ton. A more seasoned soldier who needed a handful of nails to roof a hut was issued with and accepted twenty barrels. Things like clothing, ammunition and, above all, medical supplies were harder to come by. The effects of mismanagement and military incompetence were everywhere. Val could ride out on the ridge that looked down on Balaclava, past thousands of items of familiar kit lying scattered and half-buried, along with bones and the rags of uniforms. The one thing not to be found anywhere was a scrap of wood, or anything else that could be burned. In the winter of 1854 soldiers had stripped the dead of their boots to use as fuel: they even tried to cut their frozen meat ration into strips of kindling. It was said that because Lord Raglan refused to allow starving horses to be withdrawn from the line, the animals ate first their harness, then each other’s tails, until they perished. Men froze to death at their posts. Elizabeth Davis, who had been with Florence Nightingale at Scutari, came up to the General Hospital at Balaclava. The first case she attended was of frostbite – all the patient’s toes came off with the bandages. In a neighbouring bed a comrade’s hands fell off at the wrist. For a cavalryman, the greatest of all the horrors was the destruction of the Light Brigade the previous October. Val’s brother James was a cornet in the 8th Hussars and was snatched from disaster at the very last minute. Just before the charge he was told to report to Raglan’s staff. The order saved his life. Tennyson’s sombre valediction was published only three weeks after the battle, and while the public swallowed whole the idea that something glorious had taken place, something that threw credit on the English character, military judgement differed. A huge blunder had occurred, one that immediately turned Raglan into a lame-duck commander. Though the Prince Consort sent out Roger Fenton to make a photographic record of the campaign, the results were painterly and anodyne group portraits that told people next to nothing. It was William Russell’s dispatches for The Times that satisfied the country’s taste for blood and, along with it, revenge on the senior commanders. The army despised Russell for having committed the gravest offence it knew – ‘croaking’ – yet many officers were not above doing the same thing. Responsible men, driven to it by despair, betrayed their commanders with anonymous press comments or the publication of their private correspondence. The botched campaign led to the fall of a ministry. In January 1855 Lord Aberdeen went out and Palmerston came in. He offered Lord Panmure the post of Secretary at War and he lost no time in shifting the blame from the government to the army itself. Panmure’s society nickname was ‘the Bison’. He put his head down and charged Raglan full on. It brought forth this remarkable reply: My Lord, I have passed a life of honour. I have served the crown for above fifty years; I have for the greater portion of that time been connected with the business of the Army. I have served under the greatest man of the age more than half of my life; have enjoyed his confidence and have, I am proud to say, been regarded by him as a man of truth and some judgement as to the qualification of officers; and yet, having been placed in the most difficult position in which an officer was ever called upon to serve, and having successfully carried out most difficult operations, with the entire approbation of the Queen, which is now my only solace, I am charged with every species of neglect. So comprehensive was the criticism of Raglan and his senior officers, only the young could come out with any credit. Some of the names thrown up from the mud and ice of the Crimea were destined to become famous for as long as the century lasted. Garnet Wolseley was only twenty-one when he came out and had already been wounded and mentioned in dispatches while serving in Burma. He was twice wounded in the campaign and again mentioned in dispatches. The French gave him the L?gion d’Honneur. He was promoted captain in the field and after the war became a colonel at the age of twenty-five. By the time he celebrated his fortieth birthday Wolseley was a major-general and the subject of Gilbert’s affectionate lyric in The Pirates of Penzance. Another man who had an outstanding campaign was a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant of Engineers, Charles George Gordon. In the end he, even more than Wolseley, was to personify the new soldier-patriot. Gordon’s background was impeccable. He came from four generations of officers and both his father and his brother Henry became generals. He was brought up within the walls of Woolwich barracks, where his father was Inspector of the Carriage Department of the Royal Military Academy. As a child Gordon was rumbustious and anti-authoritarian, and it was an uncomfortable surprise to his later admiring biographers to learn that at fourteen his dearest wish was to become an eunuch. The strange worm that ate away at Gordon all his life had made its first appearance. He joined the RMA and proved to be a gifted cadet. Academically he could not be faulted. The problem lay with his temperament. Gordon was a quarrelsome young man, so much so that he lost a year’s seniority for striking a colleague. There was a greater punishment still. Instead of joining the Artillery as he wished, he was commissioned into the much less glamorous Engineers, of whom it was said that their officers ‘were either mad, Methodist, or married’. He served eighteen months at the depot in Chatham and then was posted to Pembroke, where the docks were being hastily fortified against the latest French invasion scare. There he met the mysterious Captain Drew, a fellow Engineer and devout evangelical Christian. Drew changed his life. After many fevered and prayerful conversations with this officer, Gordon went out to the Crimea in the simple but distressing hope of meeting his Maker. To attract God’s attention, he showed the kind of bravery in the campaign that was almost obligatory for a subaltern but which he burnished in his own fashion. He would carry out hair-raising reconnaissance of the Russian positions alone and unarmed and give himself any duties that exposed him to the greater risk. He would not accept parcels of food or clothing from home and extended this contempt for personal privation to the men serving under him, who he thought had only their own stupidity to blame for any suffering they endured. He was at last wounded. Had he died, he would have been remembered only by the sappers in his unit as the most colossal prig. Unfortunately for them, ten days after receiving his wound he returned, ready with more of the same maddening self-righteousness. The generals at last obliged Charlie Gordon with the sort of action that should have carried him off for good – the second assault on the Redan Redoubt of 18 June 1855. It was a sapper’s day out, for the plan called for ladder parties and scaling equipment. The abortive infantry attack was led by General Eyre, with whom Val Baker had served at the Cape; and there was another Cape hand in the main Engineers party, Colonel Richard Tylden. Garnet Wolseley also took part in the attack. Another lieutenant of Engineers and Gordon’s friend, in so far as he had any, the giant Gerald Graham, was awarded the VC for his part in this action. Lord Raglan, who had only ten more days to live, watched the assault from an exposed position, while earnestly entreating his staff officers to seek cover behind a battery wall. The day provided one of those telling stories by which the nineteenth-century army is illuminated. Led away from the carnage by Garnet Wolseley, Raglan paused by a wounded officer on a stretcher. ‘My poor young gentleman,’ he murmured with his trademark courtesy, ‘I hope you are not badly hurt.’ He was inviting the wounded man to think in those detached terms with which a true Briton faced death and mutilation – after all, he himself had left his right arm at Waterloo, struck by a musket ball that could as easily have done for the great Wellington, who was standing next to him. Instead of giving a smile or a feeble hurrah, the poor devil craned up from his stretcher and blamed his commander-in-chief for every drop of blood shed that day. Wolseley was outraged. It would, he said, have given him satisfaction to run his sword through the ‘unmanly carcass’. The adjective tells the story. It was not one Raglan himself would have bothered using. Like his chief, the Iron Duke, the Waterloo veteran required nothing more of his troops than that they stood their ground and took the consequences. They could be scoundrels or cowards, heroes or braggarts – it was all the same in the end. Of course he would have preferred the dying man to thank him for the courtesy of his enquiry, but if instead he screamed abuse, what had had been gained or lost? Hundreds were dying all around. It was Wolseley who thought enough of the moment to remember it later with such incandescent anger. A week or so later Val was part of the huge funeral cort?ge that followed Raglan’s coffin down to the sea. All four of the allied commanders-in-chief marched in the parade. There were detachments from every British regiment and the way was lined two-deep with soldiers who had not been paraded but came anyway to pay their last respects. As the bands played the Dead March from Saul, and even the Russian guns fell silent, what was passing was the death of the old army and its sentimental connection to the distant and almost forgotten wars against Napoleon. As a member of Raglan’s escort, Val had been placed above the battle with a highly privileged view of the conduct of the campaign. A more ambitious – or indiscreet – officer might have attempted something in print or, if not that, written letters to his family intended for posterity. That was not Val’s nature. In the three short years since leaving Ceylon, the principal military virtue Val had acquired happened to coincide with his private character. As he rode down the hill following Raglan’s coffin, he kept up that social mask which is the hardest of all to maintain, an implacable and chilling visage de bois. He was twenty-eight years old and not about to croak. In the late summer of 1855, when the war had reached stalemate and no one could stomach the idea of a second winter campaign, the British ambassador to Constantinople came up to Balaclava with an embassy retinue. His purpose was to tour the battlefields and distribute medals. To Val’s complete surprise the ambassador’s private secretary was none other than his friend Laurence Oliphant, whom he had last seen heading for Kathmandu. Val gave him dinner in the cavalry camp. Loquacious as ever, Oliphant swiftly took charge of the evening. Yes, he had been to Nepal, but then, three years ago, at the time Val was fighting at the Cape, he made a semi-secret journey from St Petersburg down the Volga and along the Black Sea littoral. This was a restricted military area, about which the Russians were (understandably, in the light of circumstance) very sensitive. It turned out that Oliphant was one of the few Englishman ever to have penetrated to Sebastopol itself, over which so much blood had been spilt. Disguised as a German farm-hand, he skulked round the streets with his eyes wide open, taking particular interest in the massive fortifications. He correctly identified the Malakhov redoubt as the key to the city’s defences. When he came home, he wrote a book about his travels, published a few months before war with Russia was declared. The point of the story was in its coda. Oliphant had been secretly summoned to the Horse Guards at the end of 1853 and quizzed by Raglan about what he had seen – and this, he declared complacently to Val, was why they were all where they were now. Three years had changed these two men to a remarkable degree. The hare was dining with the tortoise. Oliphant had been presented at court in 1852 – the queen fixing him with a peculiarly intent stare, though why she should do so he left Val (and us) to guess at – and he also let fall offhandedly that literary London considered him one of the better young writers of the day. Only recently he had reviewed Eight Years in Ceylon for Blackwood’s Magazine. In fact, he remembered now an interesting and recent anecdote about Sam that his brother might like to hear. It was a tale told with all of Oliphant’s penchant for mystery and intrigue, and it began on the boat taking him from Marseilles on his way to take up his post at the embassy in Constantinople. On the same ship was a fellow called James Hanning Speke, a captain in the 46th Bengal Infantry, a native regiment that Oliphant did not for a moment suppose Val had ever come across. Speke was something of an amateur explorer and towards the end of his service in the Punjab had taken the idea of shooting in Central Africa. In 1854 he was on his way home to England to volunteer for the Turkish contingent when he stopped off at Aden. There he met a Lieutenant Richard Burton of the 18th Bombay Native Infantry. They met by chance in the only decent hotel at Steamer Point. The Baker connection to the story was apparently very slight: Sam was staying at the same hotel, on his way home with his family from Ceylon. The three men, very different in personality but all of them interested in the empty spaces on the map, fell to discussing Africa together. Burton, very much the more finished article as an explorer, let it be known in his languid, mocking way that he was thinking of setting up an expedition to Somalia. Had Sam Baker not just given up one romantic dream, it was exactly the sort of challenge he would have jumped at. Instead, Speke begged to go. The expedition nearly killed him – he was stabbed eleven times by a fanatic’s spear – and he found he did not like Burton half as much as he supposed he would; but seeing Africa for the first time left him with an impossible dream, one which Oliphant winkled out on the ship from Marseilles. When the present war was over, he was determined to return to Africa with Burton and discover the source of the Nile, believed to be located in some as yet unknown inland sea. If the sea was there, as some ancients supposed, no white man had ever seen it. To find it was the Holy Grail of geography. If such a thing could be accomplished, and the discovery claimed for Britain, it would be the sensation of the century. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/brian-thompson/imperial-vanities-the-adventures-of-the-baker-brothers-and/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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