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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
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 Île 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-général 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 pâtissiers, 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 Réunion 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.
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