Sahib (16 page)

But it was often companions rather than food or accommodation that caused difficulties. Albert Hervey sailed for Madras aboard the
Warren Hastings
in 1833:

My friends had secured me an excellent cabin in the poop of the ship and I had with me, as companion, a young writer [the East India Company’s most junior civil rank] fresh from Haileybury, who thought of nothing, night and noon, but hunting, riding, shooting and dissipation; and who thought it very manly and very fine to swear and curse, and to go to bed in a state of inebriety … 

I look back to those four months on board the
Warren Hastings
with feelings of horror … I suffered severely from sea-sickness, so that for the greater part of the voyage, and more particularly in very rough cold weather, I was confined to my cot. During this dreadful sickness, my fellow traveller would either bring company into the cabin, play cards and make such a noise I was in no enviable situation … 

I remember one night; there was a jollification in the cuddy; my friend had taken a great quantity of wine, and became very intoxicated. He came to the cabin, and turned into my bed whilst I was on the poop. He was sick, of course, and made my sleeping things in such a condition, that I was obliged to give them away to the sailors, for I could never use them again myself.
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Philip Meadows-Taylor, on his way to take up a commission in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s army in 1824, was altogether more fortunate:

Among the ladies especially, I had excited an interest by rescuing one of them, a lovely girl, from a watery grave. She had incautiously opened her port-hole during a storm, keeping the cabin-door shut. A great green sea poured in, flooding the whole place. I fortunately heard the rush of the water, and forcing open the door of her cabin, found her lying face downwards in the water which was pouring over the steerage deck. I carried her to the cabin of another lady and put her in, and next day was very sweetly thanked for my services.
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Scores of young officers found love, or something like it, in the hothouse atmosphere. Drummer John Shipp of HM’s 22nd Foot was allowed ashore at the Cape in 1802 and promptly fell in love with a fifteen-year-old Dutch girl called Sabina, ‘a person of exquisite loveliness, tall and rather slim, with black hair and eyes; her small waist and light foot made her every motion entrancing’. But sadly: ‘My Commanding Officer would not, for a moment, allow me to marry young as I was, and anything less honourable than marriage I would not contemplate.’ He decided to desert, but was arrested at pistol-point before he had gone far, ‘leaving for ever the embraces of her for whose sake I was willing to sacrifice all’. An unsympathetic court martial sentenced him to receive 999 lashes – ‘more than fifty for every year of my life’ – but his kindly commanding officer let him off.
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When Miss Elizabeth Mansell landed at Madras in 1796 she at once laid a charge of rape (then a capital offence) against Captain Cummings of the Indiaman on which she had travelled. She was the niece of a member of the presidency council, which might have told in her favour, but Cummings, fighting for his life, conducted his own defence with great skill. She had been seen ‘playing at Tagg with a couple of footmen’ soon after leaving Portsmouth, and witnesses agreed that she had been intimate with at least two other young men on the boat. The trial stopped at once, and Cummings, duly acquitted, was warned that taking away the young woman’s
character ‘would be a perpetual Blot on him’. Emboldened by his new-found legal eloquence he began to announce that she had possessed no character whatever even before she came on board, but was immediately ‘stopped from proceeding in this sort’.
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Albert Hervey catalogued the many ways in which soldiers passed the time. Some youngsters ruined themselves or their constitutions by drinking and gambling. Others shot seabirds – ‘such firing of guns, such shouting, such swearing’ – or ran about the ship in their new uniforms ‘to the great amusement of the officers and crew, and the detriment of their wardrobe’. One cavalry officer unwisely went aloft in his finery, and was caught by the sailors, who spread-eagled him, ‘to the great amusement of the spectators, to his great annoyance, and to the irreparable ruin of his beautiful new coat … it having become covered in pitch, tar and other marine abominations’. During his voyage to India, Surgeon Henry became a keen fisherman, catching thirteen sharks, the last of them twelve feet long. ‘This monster gave us an hour’s play,’ he wrote, ‘and I found my hands all blistered afterwards from the running out and hauling the rope – though quite unconscious of it at the time.’ Lieutenant Lambrecht of HM’s 66th was ‘clever and well read’, but was ‘spoiled by the sentimental and sensual sophistries of the French philosophical school’ and was ‘most agreeable when sober, but half mad when excited by wine’. Coming out of his cuddy drunk, he knocked down the sailor at the wheel and took his place, telling the furious captain that ‘the blackguard he had just ousted knew nothing whatever about his work’. He was forgiven the first time he did it, but was put under close arrest when he repeated the offence.
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Hervey advised his readers to ‘read, write, draw, keep a journal, work the ship’s course, take the latitude and longitude, the lunars, keep the time of the ship’s chronometers, and above all … remember … your duty to God – spend a portion of your day in thinking of, and praying to Him … ’.
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Henry Havelock was junior lieutenant in HM’s 13th Light Infantry at the not-so-junior age of twenty-eight when he sailed for Calcutta aboard
General Kydd
in 1823, and experienced a profound and life-changing conversion on the voyage:

It was while the writer was sailing across the wide Atlantic towards Bengal, that the Spirit of God came to him with its offer of peace and mandate of love, which, though for some time resisted, at length prevailed. Then was wrought the great change in his soul which has been productive of unspeakable advantage to him in time, and he trusts has secured him happiness in eternity.
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But eternity was closer than many wished. Little could obscure the fact that the voyage to the East was a dangerous one. Between 1 December 1827 and 30 November 1828, twenty-one military officers of the East India Company died at sea, from natural causes or by accident. On his second trip to India, Garnet Wolseley, now a lieutenant in HM’s 90th Light Infantry, was nearly lost in a cyclone. ‘It is commonly supposed that most if not all the East Indiamen that have been lost eastward of the Cape have gone down in these “circular storms” and we very nearly did so,’ he wrote. ‘Our mainyard was snapped in two, and sails after sails, as they were set, were rent in pieces. We had already an unsafe amount of water in the hold, and it began to be whispered that we had sprung a leak.’

Later on in the voyage the ship hit a rock: bugles sounded the regimental call, and officers at once went below to their men, who were clearing away breakfast. Wolseley’s company fell in, and he ordered them to keep quiet and await instructions from the crew.

There we stood in deathly silence, and I know not for how long. The abominable candle in the lantern sputtered and went out. We were in almost absolute darkness, our only small glimmer of light coming through a very small hatchway which was reached by a long ladder. The ship began to sink by the stern, so it was evident to all thinking minds that we hung on a rock somewhere forward. The angle of our deck with the sea level above us became gradually greater, until at last we all had to hold on to the sides of our dark submarine prison … My predominant feeling was one of horrid repugnance at the possibility, which at last became the probability, of being drowned in the dark, like a rat in a trap. I should have liked to have had a swim for my life at the least … 

Happily they were ordered on deck in time to leave the ship, but the incident convinced Wolseley of the value of discipline: ‘It is based on faith, for without faith in your superiors it is only … an outward form filled with dust.’
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The loss of the
Birkenhead was
only one of the spectacular disasters to befall troopships. On 1 March 1825, the East Indiaman
Kent,
carrying half HM’s 31st Foot, caught fire in the Bay of Biscay. The ship eventually blew up, but 296 members of the 31st, forty-six of the regiment’s wives and fifty-two children were saved, together with nineteen passengers, the captain and 139 of the crew: fifty-four men, one woman, and twenty-one children perished. One soldier’s wife was immediately delivered of a robust baby boy aboard the rescuing
Cambria.
The soldiers behaved so well – some put their comrades’ children on their backs and swam with them to the boats – that Lieutenant Colonel Fearon, commanding the 31st, was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath. Captain James Spence, who survived the shipwreck, commanded the 31st at Sobraon, where he bore a charmed life: he had musket balls through his cap and sword scabbard, and his sword hilt was smashed by a grapeshot. His sword broke in a hand-to-hand battle with a Sikh, but he was saved when a private soldier bayoneted the man.

On 11 November 1858, the troopship
Sarah Sands
caught fire near Mauritius, and although all the women and children were put into the boats, the men of HM’s 54th helped the sailors to put out the blaze and pump out the hull which was flooded by water used for fire-fighting. The colours of the 54th were saved ‘at the hazard of their lives’ by Private William Wiles of the regiment, and Richard Richmond, one of the ship’s quartermasters. On 2 June 1859, the
Eastern Monarch,
full of wounded soldiers from Bengal, blew up at Spithead. One man, one woman and five children were killed, but the detachment commander acknowledged that the loss would have been far greater had it not been for

the very excellent behaviour of the troops, and the great assistance I received from every individual officer under my command; so cool, collected and energetic were they
all,
that I feel it is only due to them to bring their names respectively before His Royal Highness.
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The Royal Navy’s strong grip on the sea meant that passages to and from India were not usually subject to interference by hostile vessels. The one major exception was during the later stages of the American War of Independence, when a vengeful France joined the fledgling United States. In 1781 Admiral Pierre-André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez beat a British squadron off West Africa, and then reached India, where he had the better of a series of clashes with Rear Admiral Sir Edward Hughes. It was then difficult for the armies of the three presidencies to support one another by land. When Madras came under pressure Eyre Coote, Commander in Chief, India, declared that he had ‘one foot in the grave and one on the edge of it’, but still set off from Calcutta to help, in the armed Indiaman
Resolution.
Chased by Suffren, he died at sea off Madras. Those captured by Suffren discovered that, as William Hickey sneered, he looked like ‘a little fat, vulgar English butcher’, and received his captives with his breeches unbuttoned at the knees, his collar undone and his sleeves rolled up.

Privateers or isolated frigates could create havoc amongst coastal traffic on lone Indiamen. When they appeared, ships were cleared for action, cabins demolished and women and children sent below into the fetid hold. Gentlemen usually remained on deck in an effort to help, sketching out a few defensive cuts with borrowed cutlasses and generally getting in the way of those whose job it was to fight the ship. The capture of a commerce raider was a matter for rejoicing. When HMS
La Sibylle
took the French national frigate
La Forte
in Belasore Roads on 28 February 1799, the insurance office of Madras, and the Calcutta, Bengal and Amicable Insurance Companies presented two fine swords to Captain Lucius Ferdinand Hardiman. In gilt and ivory, the swords were at the very apogee of Georgian military elegance, and are evidence of the damage that
La Forte
was doing to trade.
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Many ships containing India-bound troops were never heard of again, however. In January 1831, the Thames-built
Guildford
(521 tons) disappeared somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and was reported ‘lost at sea with all hands’. She probably went down in a tropical storm, but there is a chance that she was taken by pirates, for a European female – according to some sources a passenger named Ann Presgrave – was later sold to a Malay chief in Brunei.
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F
OR MOST OF THE PERIOD
, British troops – and many British civilians – arriving in India disembarked at Calcutta. Relief at the sight of land was tempered by the fact that safe landing was still some way off, because the Hooghly River estuary, with its shifting sandbanks, was notoriously difficult to navigate. The distinctive
James and Mary
shoal, near the mouth of the river, was named after a 1690s shipwreck there. Smaller vessels were conned up the river by Hooghly pilots, while larger ones would anchor at the mouth of the river and passengers would be disembarked into tenders for the last leg of the voyage. John Luard’s troop sergeant major summed up his first impressions of India as they made their way upstream, declaring that it was: ‘Hotter than Hades, and a damned sight less interesting.’
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William Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd, diverted to India because of the outbreak of the Mutiny, recalled how:

We had two tug steamers, and the pilot and tug commanders all sent bundles of the latest Calcutta papers on board, from which we learnt the first news of the sieges of Delhi and Lucknow, of the horrible massacre at Cawnpore, and of the gallant advance of the small force under generals Havelock, Neill and Outram for the relief of Lucknow. When passing Garden Reach, every balcony, verandah and housetop was crowded with ladies and gentlemen waving their handkerchiefs and cheering us, all our men being in full Highland dress and the
pipes playing on the poop. In passing the present No 46 Garden Reach … we anchored for an hour just opposite … Frank Henderson said to me, ‘Forbes-Mitchell, how would you like to be owner of a palace like that?’ When I, on the spur of the moment without any thought replied, ‘I’ll be master of that house and garden yet before I leave India.’ … Just thirty two years after, I took possession of the house No 46, where I have established the Bon Accord Rope Works.

When his regiment disembarked, Forbes-Mitchell was pleased to see that fellow Scots ‘who had long been exiled from home’ forced beer on the thirsty warriors, ‘and the Highlanders required but little pressing, for the sun was hot, and, to use their own vernacular, the exercise “made them gey an drauthy”’.
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Calcutta, the capital of British India until its replacement by New Delhi in 1911, became the liveliest of Indian cities. Captain Alexander Hamilton complained, however, that its origins were unpropitious:

The English settled there about the year 1690 … Mr Job Charnock, then being the Company’s agent in Bengal, had liberty to settle an Emporium in any part of the River’s side below Hughly [Hooghly], and for the sake of a large shady tree chose that place, tho’ he could not have chosen a more unhealthful place on the whole river; for three miles to the North Eastward is a saltwater lake that overflows in September and October and then prodigious numbers of fish resort thither, but in November and December, when the floods are dissipated these fish are left dry and with their putrefaction affect the air with stinking vapours, which the North-East Winds bring with them to Fort William, that they cause a yearly Mortality.

The fort itself, in the most literal sense of one of the key bastions of British rule in India, followed the best principles of artillery fortification:

Fort William was built in a regular Tetraon of brick and mortar called
Puckah,
which is a composition of brick-dust, Lime Molasses and cut hemp and is as hard and tougher than firm stone or brick, and the town was built without Order as the
Builders thought most convenient for their own Affairs, everyone taking in what ground most pleased them for gardening so that in most houses you must pass through a Garden into the House, the English building near the River’s side and the natives within land … About fifty yards from Fort William stands the Church built for the pious charity of Merchants residing there … 
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Robert Clive described Calcutta as:

One of the most wicked places in the Universe. Corruption, Licentiousness and a want of Principle seem to have possessed the Minds of all Civil Servants, by frequent bad examples they have grown callous, Rapacious and Luxurious beyond Conception.
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In 1856 Ensign Charles MacGregor remarked that he thought Calcutta was ‘not much of a place. It is all very well if you like balls, and that sort of thing.’
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The capture of the city by Suraj-ud-Daula in 1756 was only a brief check to its rise; Mrs Sherwood recalled:

The splendid sloth and the languid debauchery of European Society in those days – English gentlemen, overwhelmed with the consequences of extravagance, hampered by Hindoo women and by crowds of olive-coloured children, without either the will or the power to leave the shores of India … Great men ride about in state coaches, with a dozen servants running before or behind them to bawl out their titles; and little men lounged in palanquins or drove a chariot for which they had never intended to pay, drawn by horses which they had bullied or cajoled out of the stables of wealthy Baboos.
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Minnie Wood was unhappily married to an officer in the Company’s service. She had no idea of the hardships of life in India, and he wrongly thought that he had married an heiress. In 1856 she wrote home to her mother in England:

I do not like Calcutta at all – the smells are awful, indeed I do not see one redeeming quality in the place. The country round is very pretty, but the Indians and their habits are disgusting. It is nothing uncommon to see a man stark naked begging, as do boys who run by the side of our carriage.
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Most newly arrived officers were housed in the barracks or in the casemates of Fort William: Henry Havelock found the barracks so crowded in 1823 that subalterns were lodged two to a room. Fred Roberts’s father, commanding the Lahore Division, advised him to put up at a hotel until ordered to report to the Bengal Artillery depot at Dum Dum. He felt lonely because his comrades from the steamer had all gone off to barracks, and:

was still more depressed later on by finding myself at dinner tête à tête with a first-class specimen of the results of an Indian climate. He belonged to my own regiment, and was going home on a medical certificate, but did not look as if he would ever reach England.
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He was shocked to find that:

The men were crowded into badly ventilated buildings, and the sanitary arrangements were as deplorable as the state of the water supply. The very efficient scavengers were the large birds of prey called adjutants, and so great was the dependence placed on exertions of these unclean creatures that any injury done to them would be treated as gross misconduct. The natural result of this state of affairs was endemic sickness, and a death-rate of over ten per cent per annum.

Once the East India Company’s rule had extended into Bengal, new arrivals did not stay in Calcutta for long. The Company’s young officers were quickly posted off to learn their trade. Ensign MacGregor went to 40th BNI at Dinapur:

I play rackets and ride, and in fact take an immense lot of exercise. We have got a gymnasium in our compound, and leaping-poles, dumb-bells, &c, besides single-staves and foils. I declare life would be intolerable if it was not for something of that kind. Unless you can do something … India is the slowest place in the world, not even excluding Bognor. However, with all these things I manage to get on very well. Tomorrow I begin those delightful drills. I look forward to them with such joy.
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Exercise was welcome, for most travellers had put on weight during the long passage from England, as Lieutenant Bayley of HM’s 52nd Light Infantry wrote of his arrival in 1853:

We used to watch the men at their dinners, and they were so well and plentifully supplied that, in spite of their sea-appetite, many could not get through their rations … and I shall never forget the appearance of the detachment on our arrival in India, when their canvas suits were laid aside, and they tried to button their coatees. Half of them could not be got to meet round the waist.

Soldiers who arrived in Calcutta in drafts were taken by steamer to Chinsurah, the depot for British units serving in Bengal. John Pearman, who reached India in October 1845, recalled how:

We had a parade at 10 am, got white clothing served out, took our sea clearance money, and like soldiers, went off at once to spend it. At night we could not sleep, what with the heat and the noise the jackals made. In the morning before it was light the black men came into the rooms, which are very large open rooms, only iron and wood rails for walls. They sat at the foot of your bedstead with a large earthen vessel on their heads, holding two or three gallons, calling out ‘Hot coffee, Sahib.’ This was done so much that my comrade, by name Makepiece but wrongly named, threw a boot at the poor fellow, broke the vessel and the hot coffee ran down his body, but did not scald him. Of course Makepiece had to pay for the coffee.
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Journeys further up the Ganges were often difficult, as Gunner Richard Hardcastle of the Royal Horse Artillery discovered in 1857:

Nov 27th: Succeeded in getting off the sand at about 6pm yesterday having been on 30 hours. This morning we are on our way to Gazepore and I only hope we may not have another stoppage. Seeing the apparent useless attempts of our native seamen to get our vessel off the sand, our Sgt Maj asked the Captain to allow some of our men to work the capstan he refused saying that their slow movements would ameliorate the ship’s progress better than if stronger men were employed. The captain appears to give a good account of the natives generally and says they are better than English sailors for this sort of work. He has seen them, he said, work from morn’ till night, nearly one half of their time in the water, without a grumble. The little time I have been here among them I can
see they are very patient and spite of you will be your slave. Even if you find one that has the advantage of a good education and speak to him as though you consider him as an equal he still thinks himself your inferior … [They] have thin lips, fine aquiline nose, noble foreheads and above all a splendid set of white teeth.
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Units which arrived intact, like HM’s 32nd in 1846, immediately set off for their garrison up-country. ‘We were drilled to pitching and striking of tents,’ wrote Private Waterfield,

so as not to be lost when on the road. The bustle attendant upon a European camp in India was something strange to us all. The constant jabbering of the natives, and the roaring of the camels, together with elephants and buffaloes, reminds one of the striking contrast between India and peaceful England. It’s an old saying that there’s no stopping a woman’s tongue, but the women of Bengal beat all I ever saw, for they will fight, and keep up such a chatter that they may be heard above the din of the Camp.
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In March 1834, HM’s 38th had reached Berhampore when, as Sergeant Thomas Duckworth told his parents, a drunken man was killed in an accident:

We came to this Station and he fell down the Stares when drunk and killed himself in the Company that I belong to not less than 9 or 10 Men as come to untimely end by being drunk, some drowned, some smothered, others going out to the Country and ill-treating the Natives and getting killed by them. The Barracks in Berhampore are 3 in number they are like Cotton Factorys for anything that you ever see they are 2 storeys high with flat roofs … the Barracks up the country are never more than one storey and thatched and those are not made with Brick and Mortar there is not so much Vermine in those Barracks as up the Country.
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Landing at Madraspatam – soon to be shortened by the British to Madras – was another matter altogether. There was no natural harbour, and new arrivals disembarked into local craft, either
massulah
surf boats or primitive catamarans, which made the perilous
journey through the surf. Major Armine Mountain of HM’s 26th landed at Madras in 1829, and was shocked at the sight of the ‘catamaran’ which was to take him ashore:

It is impossible to conceive a more primitive vehicle; it consists simply of three logs of wood, some seven or eight feet long, lashed together without any attempt at excavation of bulwark, and awkwardly, though not always, brought to a point in front. On this rudest of rude rafts, generally, three natives stand in line stark naked, and with only a string tied round the waist, just above the hips; but I immediately observed the truth of Bishop Heber’s observation, that the duskiness of the skin does away with the idea of indelicacy. They were generally very small men, not so perfectly formed as I expected, and very noisy.
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In 1833 Cadet Hervey, still recovering from having received his first salute from a grenadier sergeant who came on board to explain disembarkation procedures, affirmed that:

In crossing the surf some degree of skill is necessary to strand the boats in safety, and the boatmen usually demand a present for the job; but griffins [i.e. newly arrived young officers] are 50 kind and
so
liberal, and these boatmen are such acute judges of physiognomy, that they can tell at a glance, whether there is a possibility of success or not. If refused, they sometimes bring their boats broadside on to the surf; the consequence is a good ducking, if not an upset altogether into the briny element; this is by way of revenge … 

We crossed the dreaded surf and landed in safety. Passengers are either carried out of the way of the water in a chair or on the backs of boatmen. Upon gaining a footing, I was instantly surrounded by a multitude of naked-looking savages, all jabbering away in broken English and Malabar, asking me to take a
palankeen,
and some actually seized hold of me, and were about to lift me into one; however, I asked the sergeant, who was with me, for his cane, which being obtained, I laid about me right and left, and soon cleared myself of the crowd.
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