Darjeeling (23 page)

In the 1870s land was becoming available for planting. With his brother, Andrew opened out Lingia and then Tumsong estates, “a bold and arduous venture for father and Fred,” Andrew’s son Frank said years later, “and it was only by exercising the most rigid economy and sacrificing even the simplest of luxuries that they were able to achieve their objective.” A new tea garden doesn’t immediately start repaying its investment. “It
takes 5 or 6 years before the tea bush comes into bearing and manufacture can begin. These must have been lean years indeed, waiting for the first returns from the sale of their tea.”
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Andrew Wernicke was over six feet tall, lanky, and heavily bearded. “He walked with a slight stoop and one shoulder slightly depressed, owing to the loss of his left arm,” his son recalled late in his own life. “In expression his face was rather pale, somewhat care-worn and meditative. He seldom smiled and I don’t think I ever heard him laugh. His dress was always simple, and to my childish critical eyes, shabby.”
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Decades of living an arduous, austere life damaged his health. By 1883, Wernicke, severely suffering from rheumatism, was forced to retire. But he wasn’t done with tea, acquiring Glenburn Tea Estate in 1895 and then Bannockburn across the Rangili Valley from it.

Wernicke died in 1904. By then, the Wernickes and Stölkes had owned or managed more than a dozen gardens: Lingia, Marybong, Tumsong, Steinthal, Soom, Glenburn, Bannockburn, Makaibari, Risheehot, Pandam, Aloobari, Goomba, and Tukvar. This impressive list includes some of the most illustrious gardens in Darjeeling.

Among the colorful foreign figures in the nineteenth-century annals of Darjeeling tea is Louis Mandelli. His father, Jerome, from an aristocratic Maltese family, was raised in Milan and fled as a young man to South America to join freedom fighter and Italian patriot Guiseppe Garibaldi, who led the Italian Legion in Uruguay’s Civil War (1838–51). He returned with Garibaldi to capture Sicily and southern Italy from the Bourbons, events that led to the unification of the country. Falling out with his family, Jerome changed his surname from that of his father (Count Castel Nuovo) to that of his mother (Mandelli), which he passed down to his son, Louis.
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Or maybe it was the son himself who fought for Garibaldi in the late 1840s as a very young man. Accounts of Louis Mandelli’s early life are riddled with gaps, and the sketchy dates that are known do fit and can apply to him rather than his father.

But in 1864 Louis Mandelli
did
somehow finagle a position managing the Lebong & Minchu Tea Estate. He appears abruptly on Darjeeling municipal records, and on those of the Catholic Church, as he married in January 1865, not long after arriving. That he had no experience with tea seemed to matter little. Soon under his command were two more estates,
Mineral Springs and Chongtong. He now controlled 550 hectares (1,350 acres), a not insignificant amount considering the effort involved in moving between properties. “Being so busy looking after the three gardens under my charge,” Mandelli wrote in a letter, “and each of them is at a great distance from one to another, so I have to remain at each for days & days.”
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Before long, Mandelli became a partner in two other gardens. One was the picturesque Kyel Tea Estate. When a division of Lingia next door was given to Mary, the daughter of Lingia’s owner, as a wedding present in the 1870s and added to Kyel, the new estate was rechristened Marybong (“Mary’s place” in Lepcha). Even today, the winding fourteen-mile journey from Darjeeling to Marybong takes about ninety minutes by jeep in the dry season. Mandelli did it on horseback.

“I can assure you, the life of a Tea Planter is far from being a pleasant one, especially this year,” Louis Mandelli wrote to a friend down on the plains in 1876, “drought at first, incessant rain afterwards, & to crown all, cholera among the coolies, beside the commission from home to inspect the gardens, all these combined are enough to drive any one mad.”
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The rugged, feral life on an isolated garden, the hundreds of laborers under a planter’s responsibility, and the fickleness—and all too frequent cruelty—of nature when farming tea in the hills took their toll. So did the unhealthy climate and tropical diseases. “Quinine every morning, castor oil twice a week, and calomel”—also known as mercurous chloride, a poisonous white power used as a purgative, antiseptic, and fungicide—“at the change of the moon,”
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went the planters’ preventive, self-medicating prescription.

Mandelli found solace in ornithology, shooting and skinning some specimens, but mostly preserving ones that local collectors had shot or trapped for him on lengthy trips to Sikkim, Tibet, and Bhutan.

But deep losses on the estates and mounting debts to the bank began to wear him down, and he even found his beloved hobby exhausting. “The rains are frightful, the dampness horrible & the fog so dense that you cannot see few yards before you,” he wrote of collecting around Darjeeling, adding that any excursion into neighboring Sikkim is “simply madness, as the leeches will eat you alive.”
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But surely the biggest blow came from an English rival, Allan Octavian (A. O.) Hume. “Yes, Hume is a brute, in fact, I call him a
swindler, as far as birds are concerned,” Mandelli wrote to a friend in January 1876:

What else would be thought of a man who promised to help me /
and very grand and magnificent promises they were
/ to make my collection of Indian birds as perfect as he possibly could, in order only to get out the best & the rarest things to be found up here, & then leaving me on the lurch now, as he has found out that I am no more his slave subservient to his sneaking and bland manner & hypocritical ways?

Such robust underlining is not typical in Mandelli’s letters, except when writing of Hume. “I should say that swindler is too mild a term for such a man after having got out from me about 5000 birds & given only in return about 800, the commonest birds in India, 400 of which went down the khud [ravine or precipice], as they were not worth the carriage.”
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But how to complain about Hume, except in private letters like this? (“The only consolation I have in this matter is that I am not the only one who has been victimized!!!”)
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Hume had become director-general of agriculture in India in 1870 and was the country’s preeminent and most powerful ornithologist. Although considered the father of Indian ornithology, Hume is far better known as the founder of the Indian National Congress Party—the party of the Gandhi and Nehru clans, and still a dominant political force in the country. Hume made an open call to students in 1883, and during the party’s historical first meeting in 1885, the Brit was nominated to be the party’s general secretary, a position he held for nearly a quarter century.

Reading Mandelli’s letters it is impossible to picture him dancing in black tie at the Planters’ Club or playing a game of cards after a couple of rounds of pink gins. His bank, creditors, and poor health are frequently mentioned. “For the last two or three months I have been unwell & troubled with slow fever, cough, deafness etc. etc.,” Mandelli wrote in March 1877. “In fact I think old age is creeping fast on me.”
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He was just forty-four years old.

By the end of 1879 Mandelli was no longer in charge of any of the four gardens that he had recently been running or owning, an incredible turn of events. His problems—debts? poor harvests? depression?—must have severely worsened. In February the following year he committed suicide.

Mandelli left behind a wife and five children in Darjeeling. Municipal records show them steadily liquidating his property for cash over the next two years. They sold what remained of Mandelli’s prized bird collection to none other than A. O. Hume.
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The cause of Mandelli’s death was listed as “unknown” in the Bishop’s Death Register, but this was perhaps done by a sympathetic official knowing that burial in the church cemetery would be impossible if the truth was recorded. Before long, though, news of his suicide was considered common enough knowledge that when the British Museum, with thirteen of his birds in their collection, published an appreciation of Mandelli in 1906, the text clearly stated that Mandelli had taken his own life, though how remains a mystery. Mandelli used arsenic in preparing bird skins, and perhaps some grains helped him to end his life and hide the way he did it.
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This could be another reason his death was “unknown”: arsenic poisoning has many of the same symptoms as other ailments and, until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was difficult to detect, especially in a station as distant as Darjeeling.

Mandelli’s grave is impossible to locate today. The tomb is not in the main Old Cemetery, but the Catholic-dominated Singtom Cemetery, at North Point below St. Joseph’s School. Built in 1858, it is known as the New Cemetery. In both graveyards, the tombstones of settlers, soldiers, wives, and children are tipped over, cracked, broken, and obscured by moss, vines, and weeds. The inscriptions on the older ones have been worn away over the years, and vandals plucked out the brass letters on other ones during the violent, agitation-filled mid–1980s, rendering names and dates into a series of faint dots like a marquee with broken lightbulbs.

Mandelli’s legacy lives on not in tea but the animal kingdom. At least a half dozen birds carry his name, including Mandelli’s bush- warbler, Mandelli’s willow-warbler, Mandelli’s snow-finch, and Mandelli’s tit-babbler. The rare red-breasted (or Bhutan) hill partridge (
Arboricola mandellii
) is another. A dozen samples of these had been gathered by “Mr Mandelli’s hunters” but “nothing absolutely is known of its habits, food or note,” informed the three-volume
The Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon
,
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coauthored by Hume, generous, at least, in his attribution. Details of Mandelli’s spotted babbler (
Pellorneum ruficeps mandellii
), a rufous-colored bird with a puffy, pale breast streaked with browns and an upright tail, are more forthcoming. “They are very restless, energetic birds, constantly on the move and keeping up a never-ending chatter amongst
themselves,” reads the 1922 edition of another guide to British India’s fauna. They are easy to watch if “perfectly still, but a movement of hand or foot sends them scuttling off into denser cover,” the volume warn. “They have many sweet notes as well as harsh ones, but their prevailing note is that of the genus, a constantly repeated ‘pretty-dear, pretty-dear.’”
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During Darjeeling’s early decades, “all the managers and assistants on the estates [were] Europeans,” the
Darjeeling Gazetteer
noted in 1907.

It is a remarkable fact that, though educated natives are much cheaper than Europeans, it has not been found economical to employ them generally, although here and there a few natives have done remarkably well, and have proved themselves worthy of full trust in positions of responsibility. The result is that although the industry in the hills is now fifty years old, it is still almost entirely in the hands of Europeans.
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The exception was Makaibari. By the time this edition of the
Gazetteer
was published, the estate was already in its second generation of Indian ownership.

The man, though, who originally began planting out the garden in the mid-nineteenth century was a British officer, Captain Samler. After five years in the East India Company army, he had deserted along with ten Gorkha sepoys. They raided an armory at the base and headed 150 miles north to the heavily wooded slopes below Kurseong. It was the start of the monsoon, and the men planted maize—which would later lend the land they settled its name, Makaibari, “cornfield.” By time the ears were tall and ripening, the military police had located the rene- gades. The men were prepared, though, and repelled a series of raids. Eventually the authorities left the fugitives alone. From the tea nursery that Dr. Campbell had started in Kurseong—the town hovered on the ridgeline above them—Samler swiped saplings and planted them on Makaibari.
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Meanwhile, down on the plains, a precocious fourteen-year-old boy named Girish Chandra (G. C.) Banerjee, from a rich land-owning Bengali family, ran away from home on his horse. With perfect English and impeccable handwriting, he found work on a British base.
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He was clever, says Rajah Banerjee, his great-grandson, and by sixteen G. C. had
cornered the pony express service between Kurseong and Darjeeling and then began buying prime land. At twenty he was already the wealthiest man in region. He had also become a close friend of Samler’s.
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The British Crown granted Samler amnesty for his help during the 1857 rebellion, which some infer to mean that he helped track down and kill anyone suspected of taking part in the uprising.
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(Rajah denies this.) The government recognized his estate. In 1859, he was appointed agent for the Darjeeling Tea Company and made legal owner of Makaibari. Samler died the same year, but a month before passing away, he sold the estate to his friend G. C. Banerjee, the first of four generations of Banerjees to control it.

While planters and their assistants on Darjeeling’s estates were largely European, the laborers were all Nepalese. Cultivating tea in the hills requires a vast labor force, and manpower shortages have been a problem from the beginning. Even during Darjeeling’s pioneering decades, growth outpaced the available labor supply.

When the British began establishing gardens in the mid-nineteenth century, the population of the Darjeeling region was scant. Unable to get enough local Lepchas, they brought in Gorkhas from Nepal. Outside the region Gorkhas are best known for their legendary military prowess and ubiquitous large, curved kukri swords. The British fought them in the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814–16) and then incorporated them into their army.
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