Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (16 page)

But the Red River colony was a portent. Isolated though the settlement was, cut off from the eastern colonies by almost impenetrable wilderness, it showed what might be done. The line of little houses along the twin rivers, the stone church of St Andrews in whose porch, on winter Sunday mornings, the snowshoes of the parisioners were neatly piled, the blunt stone farmhouses which, year by year, extended ever farther into the prairie—all these more truly forecast Canada’s future than the passage of the Company canoes up and down the river, or the whoopee of the Metis on their ponies. At home in England the trend of empire was against the Company. The radical imperialists wanted all Canada open to settlement. The evangelists wanted every valley exalted. The financial community resented the tight-lipped and privileged manner of the Company—‘like a commercial tomb’, somebody said, ‘closed with the key of death to all except a favoured few….’ Even Lord
Palmerston thought commerce was not enough in itself as a justification of empire—it should lead ‘civilization with one hand and peace with the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better’.

New notions of imperial purpose were challenging the old, and in 1857 the conflict was to find expression in a Parliamentary Inquiry. The Government of Canada, newly self-governing, had proposed that the west should now be opened for settlement, and all the more progressive expansionists took advantage of the occasion. Though nobody perhaps quite realized it, it was the end of an era, for though the idea of Chartered Companies was to be revived later in the century, never again would a private company rule such immense possessions so frankly in the interests of profit. The Select Committee thus had an inquest air: in the 550 pages of its printed report almost every aspect of imperial duty was considered in the anachronistic context of a charter from Charles II. On race, for example: was the Company good to the natives? (‘I saw nothing but the utmost kindness to the Indians and fairness in dealing.’) On religion: was it a patron of Christian apostolism? (Twenty Anglican clergymen worked within the Company territories.) On development: was it a patron of technical progress? (‘A monopoly is no advance to any civilization.’) Most appositely of all, on colonization: did Sir George Simpson still consider that no portion of the territory was still fit for settlement, and if so how did he account for the passage in his well-known travel book
Journey
Round
the
World,
volume 1, page 55, in which he declares Red River to produce extraordinary crops, plump and heavy wheat, quantities of grain of all kinds, beef, mutton, pork, butter, cheese, and wool in abundance? (‘I there referred to merely a few small alluvial points occupied by the Scotch farmers.’)
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The Committee’s conclusions were not draconian, but were to
prove conclusive all the same. Though the Company of Adventurers was left paramount in the west for another thirteen years, still it was recognized that the Canadian people had a higher claim to the country. The Factors and Traders were not yet dispossessed of their heritage, and Sir George Simpson, prevaricating though some committee members thought him, was spared to die, full of years, honour and hard cash, still Governor-in-Chief, in his house at Lachine in 1860:
1
but the days of such late nabobs were numbered all the same, and as the members of the Select Committee appended their signatures to the report, they were really signing the epitaph of all the merchant venturers of England, piped with vermilion paddles through the tundras of the west, or familiarly smoking their hookahs on silken divans with the descendants of Aurungzebe or the Great Moghul. As Lord Valentia had once observed, welcoming the construction of a new Government House in India, the British Empire ought no longer to be governed by ‘a sordid mercantile spirit’. It should be ruled ‘with the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail-dealer in muslins and indigos’.

We are looking ahead. No epitaphs seemed imminent at Norway House that summer day, and no assembly could look less like a convention of retail drapers than the Factors and Traders gathered there. The Little Emperor was still in his prime—‘head of the most extended Dominions in the known world’, as he was described once at a State dinner in Norway, ‘the Emperor of Russia, the Queen of England and the President of the United States excepted.’ The Company prospered and was free. Confidently, around their polished table, they discussed next year’s Arrangements. They arranged furughs, and new appointments, and pemmican supplies for the establishment on the Pelly River. They arranged rations for the summer brigades, supplies of birch bark for canoe building, a going rate in the west for the Mexican silver dollar. They resolved that missionaries might be sold provisions at 50 per cent advance on the inventory prices, that paws should not be cut off the pelts of martens
(it reduced their value in London by ‘upwards of ten per cent’), that 2,500 pairs of tracking shoes and 500 buffalo tongues should be sent to Norway House from the Saskatchewan district, that Mr Roderick Mackenzie should be appointed an apprentice postmaster at a salary of
£
20 per annum, and that the quota of beaver skins to be sent to England in the autumn shipment should not exceed 18,000 skins.

When, eight days later, the company dispersed, back to the Athabaska and the Mackenzie, English River and Lac la Pluie, north to the Bay or over the Rockies to the Pacific slopes, when the Governor’s bugle sounded for the last time across the lake, and Norway House returned to its ledgers and routine, no doubt it seemed that these Arrangements would survive more or less for ever. And in a way they would: the merchant venturers might disappear from the conduct of empire, but the profit motive never did.
1

I
N November 1846 the Governor of Nova Scotia, Sir John Harvey, received a fateful instruction from Lord Grey, the Colonial Secretary in Lord John Russell’s Whig Government at home. Harvey’s territory was one of the five British colonies on the mainland of Canada, on the eastern flank of the Little Emperor’s country. It was a pleasant region of Scottish flavour, given an elegant veneer by the hundreds of loyalist families who had moved there after the American Revolution, bringing with them their fastidious tastes in architecture and their inherited sense of independence.

Since 1819 Nova Scotia had elected its own legislature, and politically its capital, the seaport of Halifax, was unexpectedly sophisticated. Political parties slandered each other, newspapers thundered, debates went on all night. Province House, where the Assembly met, was so much the most impressive building in the colony that country people came hundreds of miles to look at it, and inside it the legislators—farmers, merchants, sea captains—honoured all the forms of British parliamentary procedure. ‘It was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope’, wrote Charles Dickens, who attended the State opening in 1842. ‘The Governor delivered the Speech from the Throne. The military band outside struck up
God
Save
The
Queen
with great vigour; the people shouted; the Ins rubbed their hands; the Outs shook their heads; the Government party said there was never such a good speech; the Opposition declared there was never such a bad one; and in short everything went on and promised to go on just as it does at home.’

But it was not really quite like Westminster. For one thing the total population of the colony was only about 100,000, and for
another, though the Halifax Assembly dutifully honoured the parliamentary traditions, it had no ultimate responsibility at all. Its arguments were impotent. Its decisions could be vetoed without question by the Governor, who governed with the help of a Council nominated entirely by himself, and was accountable only to London. Constitutionally the Canadian colonies were in more or less the condition of the American possessions before the Revolution, and they were well aware of the parallels. In both Upper and Lower Canada—the first predominantly British, the second predominantly French—there had actually been small rebellions.
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Everywhere else there was growing agitation against domination from England—‘Resolved’, said a motion presented to the Quebec Assembly in 1834, ‘that this House is nowise disposed to admit the excellence of the present Constitution of Canada’. In Nova Scotia there had been no violence, but the Reform Party of the little colony fought incessantly for responsible government. ‘We seek for nothing more than British subjects are entitled to,’ they said, ‘but we will be content with nothing less.’

All this was ominously reminiscent of 1775, and ‘American notions of liberty’ was a pejorative phrase much used by conservative Englishmen when they discussed Canadian affairs. The British did not know how best to react. They were chary of exerting what Canning long before called ‘the transcendental power of Parliament’ over all British possessions—‘an arcanum of empire, which ought to be kept back within the penetralia of the constitution’. On the other hand they were reluctant to let colonies go simply by default. In 1838 Lord Melbourne’s Whig Government had been concerned enough about the discontent in Canada to send a special emissary as Captain-General, High Commissioner and Governor-in-Chief of all the colonies there. Their choice was at first sight strange: Lord Lambton, first Earl of Durham, was one of the most splendid swells of his time, and the man who had given a distinctly undemocratic
bon
mot
to the language in his youthful assertion that anyone should be able to ‘jog along on
£
40,000 a year’. He was a quarrelsome and
difficult aristocrat, almost excessively handsome—just the man, one might suppose, to drive the discontented Canadian reformers to their own Tea Parties and Continental Congresses.

Appearances, however, were deceptive. ‘Radical Jack’ Lambton, ‘The Angry Boy’, was a man of progress himself, an active supporter of the 1832 Reform Bill at home, and an advocate of colonial reform too. He believed that the idea of Empire need not be stagnant, but could be reanimated by bold innovations—‘the experiment of keeping colonies’, he thought, ‘and of governing them well, ought at least to have a trial’. Durham went out to Canada in terrific state, several ships being required to transfer his effects. He soon restored order there, and was nicknamed The Dictator only half in fun: but he saw as his real task the discovery of a formula to keep Canada, and all such white colonies of the Crown, loyal to the British Empire. As one of the Canadian discontents himself said, he was ‘the first statesman to avow a belief in the possibility of a permanent connection between the colonies and the Mother Country’.

Now, eight years later, the consequences of his mission were still impatiently awaited all over the Empire, for to many it seemed that the future of the white settlement colonies was the key to the survival of the Empire itself: and nowhere were reforms awaited more eagerly than among the legislators of Halifax, into whose session Charles Dickens, wrapping himself against the brilliant January cold, had found his way during his single day ashore in Nova Scotia (‘the day uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful; the whole aspect of the town cheerful, thriving, and industrious’).

In 1846 there were five main groups of white settlers in the overseas empire. In Canada there were perhaps 1½ million Europeans, about half of them French-speaking. In the Caribbean a dozen islands were inhabited by some 70,000 Europeans. In Australia five convict settlements had matured into communities with their own legislatures. In New Zealand there were infant colonies on both islands. In South Africa perhaps 20,000 Britons co-habited with twice as many Afrikaners.

Many people in England still thought it might be wise to be rid of these possessions while the going was good—sooner or later they were sure to be a nuisance. Others, drawing similar conclusions from different premises, and comparing the generally torpid state of Canada, for example, with the vivacity of the United States, thought it only fair to the colonies to release them from their imperial bonds. On the other hand evangelicals thought the colonists should be kept under imperial control for the sake of the Indians, Negroes and aboriginals they might otherwise be tempted to oppress, and strategists argued that if Britain did not control these far-flung territories, rival Powers might seize command of the oceans. Finally there were the visionaries who called themselves the Colonial Reformers, who believed that systematic colonization was not merely an opportunity, but a duty: these were the hungry forties, the home population had grown by a half in thirty years, and the right thing for England was the migration of whole communities, to found their own British dependencies elsewhere in the world.

Whatever their views, almost everyone interested in the Empire realized that the existing half-cock system could not last, for in the end any true-born Englishman, wherever he lived in the world, would surely demand the right to run his own affairs. As it was, none of the infant overseas settlements were truly self-governing. Many had their own Assemblies—some, like those of the Bahamas or Bermuda, 200 years old, and constitutionally identical with the assemblies of the lost American colonies. Their powers, however, were equally limited everywhere. Sir John Harvey and his colleagues could ignore all their resolutions if they wished, and very often did. The white settlers of the Empire, full British citizens though they were, were unrepresented in Parliament at Westminster: yet in the last resort it was the will of that very different legislature, so many thousands of miles away across the waters, that decreed the way they lived.

Some of the white settlements were already quite urbane. Some were very raw. One in an interesting transitional condition was the colony of New South Wales. This had begun as a penal settlement,
and it was only in 1840 that the transportation of convicts there had been suspended: yet in many ways its capital, Sydney, was already a paradigm of the white overseas empire—uncertain yet assertive, crude-genteel, possessed of a certain latent power but racked with inferiority complexes, half loyal, half abusive to the Mother Country far away. New South Wales considered itself absolutely British. In a colony still inhabited chiefly by ex-convicts and their children, there was no thought of national independence—its citizens were, as a sad couplet said,

The separate colonies of the Australian mainland—New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, West Australia—were isolated from each other by immense tracts of hideously unexplored country, and could communicate only by sea.
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Nevertheless already the country had acquired a certain bold allure of its own. British soldiers in India committed offences in the deliberate hope of transportation there, prison governors in the colonies complained that the quality of transported criminals was not low enough, while the children of the original convicts were growing up with all the dash and dubious merits of a frontier society.
2

Architecturally Sydney was surprisingly impressive, for a city that had been in existence scarcely more than half a century. As the great three-master from England sailed carefully between the headlands of Port Jackson, then as now one of the supreme moments of travel, to discover the glorious sheltered harbour within, with its islands and wooded coves sprawling languid under the sun—as the stranger approached this celebrated and notorious place,
populated first by thieves, murderers, whores and paupers, he saw before him not a dismal penitentiary, but a prosperous and not unattractive seaport of some 30,000 inhabitants, set pleasantly on a green peninsula, and busy with the masts and riggings of many ships. A steam ferry puffed back and forwards across the harbour, and among the trees on the outskirts of the town, looking across the water, were isolated villas and cottages on the foreshore, like pleasure pavilions in a great water-garden.

A church steeple dominated the town, from the highest point upon its promontory, and there were cannon gleaming on the rampart of a fort, and many wooden windmills on the ridge above, and presently the traveller still apprehensive about the nature of the place would be comforted to see the brand new palace of the Governor, commodiously built of stone, as the local guide-book said, ‘somewhat in the Elizabethan style, but not exactly’.
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All around it lay a green expanse of botanic garden, splashed with orange-flower and bougainvillaea, stocked with the figs, sugar-canes and bamboos of Empire as well as the quinces and apples of home. It was really very encouraging: and when one stepped ashore, into the broad straight streets of the town, familiar British sights and sounds were everywhere. The Lord Nelson Hotel looked snugly inviting, men of the good old British regiments stood guard at the barracks, the Eclipse stage coach clattered across the cobbles with the mail for Parramatta just as it might run out of Charing Cross on the Oxford road. With all this, as one gratified newcomer wrote, there seemed to be every sign of sobriety, ‘as much respect shown to the Sabbath… as even in Edinburgh, which is acknowledged to be, in this respect, the most exemplary town in the world’.

Sydney had an official manner, for it had been mostly laid out by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, a major-general and a man of taste, who had found it in what he called a state of ‘infantile imbecility’, a muddle of lanes, shambled huts and unpainted barracks, and turned it into this handsome white town, hedged with geraniums and
speckled with orchards. The Governor was fortunate to find among his convicts a gifted architect, Francis Greenway, a bankrupt Gloucestershire builder who had forged a credit note and been transported for fourteen years’ penal servitude. Greenway had grown up in the knowledge of Regency Clifton and Bath, and Macquarie had plucked him from the chain-gang to give a similar dignity to Sydney. Though the Governor’s plans for a truly imperial capital, on a Roman scale, mostly came to nothing, still Greenway was so successful that he was presently granted an absolute pardon and became for a few years the official Government architect—dying in poverty all the same, for he was a quarrelsome and incorrigible man, in 1837.

So the little city had been elevated by a number of good Regency buildings, an excellent simple church, the biggest barrack block in the overseas Empire, and one or two well-proportioned terraces of private houses, shady with verandahs, magnolias and lush Moreton Bay fig trees, whose fruit lay upon the city pavements squashy beneath one’s feet. Well-connected as our traveller doubtless was, or we would not be in his company, soon he found himself inside one of those agreeable residences, or in one of the suburban villas, perhaps, which soon spread out to the south, or in the quarter made newly fashionable by the steamboat service to the north side of the harbour. In these districts he would discover that the social consciousness of Sydney was already acute. There was a distinct Sydney gentry, descended not of course from convict stock but from soldiers, merchants, officials and successful ‘squatters’ or sheep-graziers. Families like the Wentworths, the Macleays or the Macarthurs were already fearfully snobbish, and had long since apotheosized their own fairly ordinary origins into legends of patrician privilege. ‘Personal history is at a discount,’ as one new arrival reported in 1843, ‘and good memories and inquisitive minds are particularly disliked….’ Such residents, however, loved to greet the
right
sort
of visitor from England, and to demonstrate that even in Australia, my dear, some of us know what breeding means.

There were Sydneysiders already noticeably peevish at any suggestions of provinciality, who would have you know that the
very
latest novels were to be found at the circulating library, and that in
their experience Rickard’s Fashionable Repository was quite the equal of anything in Bond Street. Many more, though, assiduously aped all things English, fluttered ingratiatingly about the Governor’s family or the officers of the garrison, and would never dream of wearing a dress from Rickard’s so-called Fashionable Repository, preferring to import all their clothes direct from London. As a contemporary satirist wrote of them: