Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (26 page)

Nine of its locks were built adjacent to one another in a ladder immediately above the Ottawa River—in the very centre of the new capital, and beside the wooded bluff upon which they would presently erect the Parliament building of Canada. This was a splendid sight—a grand solution to an engineering problem, and a handsome object in itself. The river widened there into a basin, and upon it, between its thickly wooded banks, steamboats busily chugged and huge rafts of tree trunks, loosely lashed together, came floating down from the forest country to the west. There were mills on the southern shore, and all around them huge masses of timber untidily floated, prodded here and there by men with poles, or nudged about by boats. It was a very Canadian scene, suggestive of wild black woods not so far away, trappers and
voyageurs
and Indian paramours: but in regimental contrast the locks of the canal marched uniformly up the hill above the river. They looked at once disciplined and urbane, even perhaps a little snobbish, as they carried their little steamboats stage by stage away from that brash colonial tumble at the bottom. The Rideau Canal was specifically an imperial project, conceived it is said by the Duke of Wellington himself, intended largely for imperial military traffic: and its address was distinctly imperial too, as though it would never allow a steamboat in its charge to go native.
1

Here is another memorable product of the imperial technology. We stand upon the Grand Trunk Road in India, the principal strategic highway of the sub-continent, which runs direct from Calcutta, through Delhi and Lahore, to Peshawar in the Punjab; and along its dusty tree-lined length, hovered over by crows, rutted by wagons, supervised by guard towers like a Roman way, we hear above the distant chatter of women at their washing, and the laughter of children playing in the stream, muffled upon the air a noble snorting. The labourers pause upon their hoes. The women suspend their scrubs. The naked children scramble up the bank to the road. The passing ox-wagons hastily swerve aside, and even the spanking tonga of the passing memsahib, trotting down to
cantonment in Rawalpindi, apprehensively hesitates. Stand back. Adjust your dust-veils. It is time for the passage of the Government Steam Train, on its way to Attock on the Indus.

With smoke and sparks streaming from its bulbous funnel, here it comes at ten miles an hour along the wide straight road. On the driving platform of its three-wheeled traction engine, surrounded mysteriously by wheels, valves and levers, sit the European engineer and his assistant, one in a topee, one in a soft black cap, with bright kerchiefs around their necks, and expressions of resolute professionalism. There is a cyclopean light on the front of the engine, and its wheels are vast, solid and clad in rubber. Majestically clanking and puffing it approaches us, and now we see the turbanned Sikh fireman sitting with his piles of logs in the tender, and behind him the long line of the train—two-wheeled carts alternating with high four-wheeled wagons, like English hay-wains, and far at the back, wobbling slightly on its passage and raising a cloud of dust, a closed passenger carriage thickly covered, inside and out, with white robed travellers—standing on the couplings, hanging to the doors, crouched precarious upon the roof.

The great machine passes us. The engineer courteously removes his hat. The fireman grins, bows repeatedly and murmurs inaudible respects. The carts and wagons rumble by. The crowded passengers at the back stare down at us expressionless but superior, as though they have been admitted to some higher existence. With a stately hoot of its steam-whistle the Government Steam Train, unquestionably steering a way to Glory, ponderously but imperially disappears.
1

Botany gave style to the empire, too, and was one of the oldest of the imperial enthusiasms. From the earliest days of British expansion navigators, explorers and settlers had been concerned to collect rare
plants, transfer cuttings, experiment with the smoking of rolled-up leaves or the eating of hitherto unsuspected tubers. Since 1841 Kew Gardens, Queen Charlotte’s delicious belvedere beside the Thames outside London, had been a State institution, where all available botanical knowledge was considered, sifted and turned into green delight or sustenance; and by the middle of the century Kew had its derivatives or ancillaries in most of the British possessions—part pleasure-places, part scientific laboratories, with their learned keepers and their catalogues, experimenting, classifying, and sending a copious flow of samples, products or memoranda back to the central clearing-house at home. One important outpost in this chain of research was Jamaica, and a visitor to that island making a tour of its botanical gardens might be deluded into supposing that the British Empire was already a cohesive, centralized organization. Each of the three island gardens, each in a different climatic zone, played its own particular part in research, with its own specialities, its own methods, and its own team of diligent scientific gentlemen.

In the old garden at Bath near the northern coast, the second oldest in the western hemisphere, the mid-Victorian visitor would see a collection of plants chosen for their medical value, and for ‘qualities useful of the arts’—jujubes, that is, sago palms, camphor, litchi, tea plants, trees producing dyes, resin, or cabinetwoods. The little dark rectangle of the gardens, all fronds and shadows, was overlooked suitably by a small Anglican church, and contained specimens of the akee plant, first brought to Jamaica in a slave ship and now luxuriant all over the island, and the breadfruit brought from Tahiti by Captain Bligh, now a staple diet of the Jamaicans, and many thriving descendants of a cargo of rare plants captured by Admiral Rodney from a French warship during the wars—mangoes, cinnamon, oriental ebony, pandanus.

On then to Castleton, a far grander institution on the banks of the rushing Wag River, towered over by palms and wooded hills in the centre of the island, and stocked originally with 400 specimens direct from Kew. This was one of the great tropical gardens of the world, a truly Victorian establishment, with no hint of serendipity to its arrangements, but rather an ordered and deliberate magnificence. Here, where the rainfall was 100 inches a year, bananas
experimentally thrived, bamboos sprouted by the river, and the visitor could inspect teak trees from the newly acquired regions of Burma, figs and resinous guncardies from India, or mouse palms from British Guiana. Ferns dripped, orchids, climbers and stranglers twined themselves among the wild pines, queer birds croaked, black gardeners padded about with machetes, and in a green clearing among the woods there soared regally above the lily ponds a group of marvellous palms, fit for an imperial greenhouse, or for incarceration within the transept of the Crystal Palace.

And so to Cinchona, Jamaica’s high altitude garden, perched at about 5,000 feet on a ridge in the Blue Mountains—high above the heat haze of the coast, accessible only by rough tracks, with a landscape of stubbly hills and deep ravines stretching all around it, and the rich green of its own presence like an allegory in the wild. This, though one of the loveliest places imaginable, was no frivolous retreat either. It was established originally for the cultivation of quinine, an imperial specific.
1
They experimented with Assam tea up there too, and a gardener came out from Kew to plant European vegetables and flowers for the Kingston market, in the hope that one day the entire eastern part of the island might become one huge vegetable garden, revivifying the dying economy of the sugar-cane.

Here one could feel a sense of imperial purpose almost as absolute, if rather less disconcerting, than the furies of those young men in the Punjab. How usefully instructive, to be guided through the Cinchona vegetables by Mr Nock direct from Kew! How truly civilized, to see Mr Fawcett hard at work upon his Flora of Jamaica in his elegant Great House among the buddleias! How gratifying to know, as one looks out through the dark pinewoods to the deep valleys beyond, that one day all this beautiful island, liberated from bondage by British evangelism, will be made green, smiling and content by British science!
2

Quinine they badly needed, for if there was one aspect of applied science that seems, in retrospect, inadequate to the imperial needs, it was medicine. Here is Mr J. J. Cole, a surgeon with the British forces during the Sikh wars, on the recently discovered anaesthetic chloroform: ‘The practical surgeon views it in the hands of the military medical officer as a highly pernicious agent, which unquestionably it is…. In time of war, on the field of battle, on the bloody plain, or in the field hospital, it should not be found…. That it renders the poor patient unconscious cannot be doubted. But what is pain? It is one of the most powerful, one of the most salutary
stimul
ants
known’.

In England the principles of hygiene, as of modern surgery, were slowly being grasped, but the British knew hardly anything about the more exotic diseases of their overseas possessions, and often seemed to live as unhealthily as they possibly could. Since they generally believed fervently in the medicinal qualities of claret, they drank it ferociously—not perhaps quite as lavishly as they had in the heyday of John Company, when three bottles a day was normal for a man, and a bottle an evening quite customary for a healthy woman, but only because self-indulgence of that kind had gone out of fashion. The clothes they wore bore no relation to climatic conditions, but merely copied, a year or two late, the current London or Paris fashions. The water they drank was generally untreated, the food they ate was prepared out of sight by unwashed employees.
1
The average age of those many Britons already buried in the imperial cemeteries was pitiably young: this was partly because so many died in battle, but chiefly because medical science was not yet geared to the progress of empire.

Nobody knew the origins of malaria, yellow fever, typhus, cholera or typhoid—which was common in London itself, and presently killed the Prince Consort. Nobody indeed could distinguish malaria from yellow fever, and they were lumped together under the generic diagnosis Malignant Fever, and variously thought to be contagious, to be induced by inebriation, to emanate from the effluvia of ships’ bilges, or to strike indiscriminately out of the noxious tropical air.
1
One well-known imperial hypochondriac, Judge Roger Yelverton of the Bahamas, insisted that malaria in Nassau was caused by the storage of coal for the Imperial Lighthouse Tender, and when an anonymous modernist called this nonsense in the columns of the
Nassau
Guardian
, he imprisoned the newspaper’s editor for refusing to reveal the writer’s name.
2

The treatments proposed for all these complaints ranged from the lunatic to the merely excruciating. Military surgeons were, like Mr Code, often draconian in their mercies, and the fashionable quacks of Calcutta or the Cape shamelessly exploited their patients’ miseries and their own ignorance. Cholera, for instance, which was supposed to come from eating fish and meat at the same time, or from vaporous germ-clouds constantly drifting above the landscape, was often treated by the application of a red-hot ring to the patient’s navel, causing, so the doctors convincingly explained, ‘a revolution in the intestines’. Malaria was often treated by bleeding—if no surgeon was at hand somebody would open a vein with a pocket-knife—and scurvy sores were soothed with poultices made of soggy sea-biscuits. Panaceas of every kind flooded the market. The explorer James Grant’s medicine chest, when he went to Central Africa in the 1860s, contained Brown’s blistering tissue, lunar caustic, citric acid, julap, camomel, rhubarb, colocynth, laudanum, Dover’s powders, emetic essence of ginger and something called simply Blue Pill. General Gordon used to swear by Werburgh’s Tincture, which would ‘make a sack of sawdust sweat’. As for seasickness, the basic imperial complaint (after alcoholism, perhaps),
a thousand useless remedies were authoritatively prescribed: arrowroot, pork, drinking sea water, opium, plasters on the stomach, ice-bags on the spine, or the use of the Bessemer Saloon, a cabin suspended amidships and intended to ignore the oscillations of the hull—‘there is no reason now,’ declared Messrs Lorimer and Co. of London, advertising their infallible Cocaine Lozenges, ‘why the most timid should not thoroughly enjoy the tossing of the billows like true Britons’.

One has only to read the memoirs of the Victorian adventurers to realize the horrors of imperial life and travel in those days. The explorer John Speke, in Africa in 1857, suffered from something called Kichyoma-chyoma, ‘the little irons’, which entailed agonizing inner pains, ghastly deliria, epileptic spasms, making a barking noise and moving the mouth ‘in a peculiar chopping motion … with lips protruding’. In the same year the thousand men on board the troopship
Transit
, stranded on a bare and blazing coral reef in the Java Sea, kept up their strength on a diet of chopped baboons cooked in a stew of salt pork and beans—each hoping, so a survivor recorded, that somebody else was eating the baboons. Time and again we read of imperial travellers amputating their own limbs, or lying blind or paralysed for weeks at a time. In the cantonment at Kabul in 1841 Lieutenant Colin Mackenzie found his right arm gripped by the teeth of a mad bulldog—‘his jaws reeking with blood and foam, his mouth wide open, his tongue swollen and hanging out, and his eyes flashing a sort of lurid fire’. He held the creature at arm’s length and throttled it with his left hand.

Plagued with such discomforts themselves, the British had little time to concern themselves with the ailments of their subject races: not for another fifty years would there be any systematic attempt to distribute the discoveries of medical science throughout the imperial peoples. Survival of the rulers was the first necessity, and just how precarious survival could be was shown by the mortality returns which, from time to time, reached the Colonial Office from its distant stations. There was a terrible death-rate in all the tropical dependencies. In the late 1850s, of every thousand soldiers and their wives stationed in Bengal, sixty-four men and forty-four women died in an average year. During twenty months in Hong Kong, the 59th
Regiment buried 180 of its soldiers. As late as 1873, of 130 British soldiers on the Gold Coast, only twenty-two were fit for duty. Many died of tuberculosis, that scourge of the Victorians, many of dysentery, apoplexy, hepatitis or pneumonia. But the most telling statistics were sometimes to be found at the bottom of the list, after the more normal causes of death:
Suicide,
Suffered
the
Penalty
of
the
Law
, or worst of all,
Worn
Out &c
.