Over the course of the eighteenth century such rules were honored more often in the breach and British territory in India gradually expanded from its bases in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta as it vied with France, the Netherlands, and a host of emerging Indian powers to fill the power vacuum created by a bankrupt, overstretched, and slowly receding Mughal Empire. Some of these powers, like the nawabs of Bengal, the nizams of Hyderabad, and the nawabs of Awadh had once been Mughal viceroys before gradually gaining their autonomy in the eighteenth century. Others, like the Kingdom of Mysore, had long been independent, while some were aggressively anti-Mughal. The Hindu Maratha Empire had been expanding out from its heartland in the western Deccan since the days of its renowned founder Shivaji’s titanic struggle for independence from the Mughals in the late seventeenth century. By the 1770s, the empire had evolved into a confederacy of Hindu states under the nominal leadership of a peshwa. De-centralization did not blunt ambition, and though Maratha expansion had been halted temporarily by Afghan forces at the Battle of Panipat in 1761 and subsequent internal divisions, the 1770s saw the empire re-energized and ready to contest for predominance of India. In 1775, Britain learned the strength of the Marathas first-hand when it intervened in an internal succession dispute, precipitating the first Anglo-Maratha War.
Authority in British India had originally been shared between the three most important posts, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, with primacy only moving toward Calcutta as it accumulated territory in Bengal in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Nawab of Bengal launched an attack on British Calcutta in 1756, but a British victory under General Robert Clive at Plassey in 1757, and a subsequent defeat of Bengal, Awadh, and the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II at Buxar in 1764 confirmed the East India Company as a territorial power. Though no one in 1765 could have imagined that Britain would one day rule over the entire subcontinent, by the time Eliza Fay arrived in 1779, the British were in the midst of a decades long struggle with France, Mysore, Hyderabad, and the Marathas for the remains of the Mughal Empire.
After weeks at sea, the sight of the verdant Malabar Coast should have been inviting, but Anthony was keen to commence his legal career and so the Fays were impatient to move on from Calicut to the capital of British India, Calcutta. As Eliza related in a letter to her sister some months later:
the importance of our speedy arrival in Bengal, which so many circumstances had contributed to prevent, and the apprehension lest our delay should afford time to raise serious obstacles against Mr. Fay’s admission to the Court, as an advocate, had long been as so many daggers, piercing my vitals: add to this the heart-breaking thought of what immense tracts lie between me and those dear friends, whose society alone can render me completely happy.3
The distance between Eliza and her friends back in England was indeed immense, especially by the standards of the eighteenth century. Eliza and her husband had left England on April 11, traveling the well-worn route from Dover to Calais on the French Channel coast, a mere three hours sail in favorable weather. Although France was then at war with Britain, the Fays traveled relatively unmolested and with much pleasure through the French countryside, journeying by carriage from Calais to Paris, stopping at Chantilly and at St. Denis to see the mausoleum of France’s medieval monarchs. Originally the Fays had planned on journeying overland to Marseille before taking ship to Livorno, however, the American War intervened and they were warned that this was a “very uncertain and dangerous method; as between the English and the French scarcely any vessel can pass free.” With the sea route closed to them, the Fays decided to purchase two horses and a one-horse chaise and made their way from Paris to Lyons via Chalon-sur-Saône on the south-eastern border of the Kingdom of Savoy. Soon after leaving Paris, a chance storm forced the couple to pause at Fontainebleau, one of the most magnificent royal chateaux, where the famous palace and gardens paled in comparison to the emotional impact made by standing in the very spot where the last war with France had officially ended.4
From Savoy they crossed the Alps into Italy, the mountains more sublime than Eliza could ever have imagined. In a vein reminiscent of the Romantics, Eliza rhapsodized:
having travelled through North Wales, I supposed myself to have acquired a tolerable idea of mountains and their appendages, such as cascades, torrents, and apparently air-hung bridges . . . but the passage of the Alps set at defiance all competition, and even surpassed whatever the utmost sketch of my imagination could have portrayed . . . in short they went so far beyond any idea I had formed of such appearances in nature, that they seemed to communicate new powers of perception to my mind and if I may so express it, to expand my soul, and raise it nearer to its Creator.
The arduous, if sublime, slog through the Alps complete, the Fays journeyed down the Italian peninsula, through Turin and Genoa before finally boarding a ship at Livorno on the Ligurian coast.5
Livorno was a rising commercial power on the Italian peninsula. It had been the primary port of Tuscany since the Renaissance, but since the seventeenth century its fortunes had been closely tied to the expansion of British commerce. As British trade expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and British ships began to crowd the Mediterranean, Livorno became a vital link in her commercial chain. The close connection with Britain meant that by the time the Fays arrived in 1779, Livorno was home to many British trading houses and the frequent haunt of British travelers, merchants, artists, and writers, adding a familiar flavor to the Italian city. Unbeknownst to the Fays and their fellow British visitors, however, beneath the bustling commercial cosmopolitanism, there were some secretly working to undermine the British Empire.
The Fay’s arrival in Livorno coincided with the return of one of Tuscany’s most dynamic native sons, Filippo Mazzei. Born outside Prato, Mazzei had practiced medicine in Italy and the Middle East for several years before relocating to London in 1755, where he set up shop as an Italian language teacher catering to a population still in the throes of an obsession with the Grand Tour and all things Italian. In the British capital, Mazzei forged a close friendship with two like-minded Americans, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and with their encouragement moved to Virginia in 1773 to set up a silk plantation on land donated by Jefferson. Together, the Italian and the Virginian set up a commercial vineyard, but their relationship transcended shared commercial interests. They regularly conversed and corresponded about political and philosophical ideas, and their discussions helped sharpen both men’s commitment to the ideals of liberty. A convinced Patriot, Mazzei returned to Italy in 1779 as a clandestine agent of the state of Virginia, eager to play his part for the American cause. Thus while the Fays arranged passage across the Mediterranean, Mazzei was busy arranging shipments of arms from Livorno to the American rebels. He would continue these activities for the duration of the war and after 1783 would become a champion of republican principles throughout Europe, becoming a fixture of both the Polish and French revolutions. Such was his stature, that after he died in 1816, his family was invited by Jefferson himself to relocate to the new republic.6
Livorno had no intention of sacrificing its close commercial ties with Britain on the altar of republican liberty, and while the authorities did little to obstruct Mazzei’s gun-running, they offered no official support to America. This was largely the case throughout the fragmented states of Italy, each of which feared any entanglement in the contests between Europe’s great powers. Even Venice, which had lost much of its commercial traffic to Livorno, and whose ancient republican government might have made it a natural ally of an emerging republic, rebuffed a joint effort by Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams to establish commercial and diplomatic relations with the La Serenissima. For Venice there was little to gain and much to lose in allying itself with an infant nation whose ships rarely left the Atlantic for Venice’s Mediterranean domain. As Britain and France increasingly dominated the Mediterranean, strict neutrality was seen as the best means of survival for a small, declining commerc
ial state. Besides, despite the outward similarity in form of government, Americans—led by John Adams in his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America—had used Venice as an example of how republican institutions could be corrupted by wealth and aristocratic power. Even after formal independence, Venice remained skeptical, interpreting America’s early laws and institutions as merely British institutions by another name—“completely like those of England” in the words of Venice’s ambassador in London. This was surely a sign that America would soon return to the British fold.7
From Livorno, Eliza and Anthony ventured out across a tempestuous Mediterranean, plagued by French privateers and Arab pirates, to Alexandria on the Egyptian coast where they disembarked. Although they admired the lighthouse in the new harbor, Pompey’s column and the remnants of Cleopatra’s palace, Alexandria failed to impress. “This once magnificent City,” Eliza lamented, “built by the most famous of all Conquerors, and adorned with the most exquisite productions of art, is now little more than a heap of Ruins.” The trip down the Nile, “that perpetual source of plenty,” to Cairo was more to her liking, the dangers of bandits in the night notwithstanding. “As morning broke, I was delighted with the appearance of the country, a more charming scene my eyes never beheld.” As their boat meandered its way south, the prospect of ancient Cairo captured the imagination and blurred all sense of temporality, causing in Eliza a potent historical reverie. She confided to her sisters that:
as I drew near Grand Cairo, and beheld those prodigies of human labour, the Pyramids of Egypt, these sensations were still more strongly awakened, and I could have fancied myself an inhabitant of a world, long passed away: for who can look on buildings, reared . . . above three thousand years ago, without seeming to step back as it were, in existence, and live through days, now gone by, and sunk in oblivion “like a tale that is told.”8
After a short stay in Cairo, the English party, now well-armed, made the treacherous three-day journey across the desert to the Red Sea port of Suez, sleeping “under the canopy of heaven” and dodging “troops of Arabian robbers” along the way. Rather than sailing the roughly 13,000 miles around the entire African continent by way of the Cape of Good Hope—a journey of at least six months—the Fays had elected to travel to Cairo by ship before making their way overland across the Sinai to Suez and thence by sea to India. At Suez the Fays and a small party of English people boarded the Nathalia, a Danish ship from Serampore, a Danish trading post just north of Calcutta on the Hooghly River.9
Having reached Suez in September 1779, Eliza and Anthony once again boarded ship, sailing from Suez south through the Red Sea before halting once more at Mocha, the Yemeni port famous around the world as a marketplace for coffee. The journey had been smooth, if uneventful, perhaps a welcome relief after the tribulations of that between Cairo and Suez. “Our passage down the Red Sea was pleasant,” Eliza wrote, “but afforded no object of interest, save the distant view of Mount Horeb, which again brought the flight of the children of Israel to my mind; and you may be sure, I did not wonder that they sought to quit the land of Egypt, after the various specimens of its advantages that I have experienced.” Mocha itself was a fairly large walled town with excellent supplies of food and fresh water. The only complaint from the perspective of a northern European was the heat. Such was the scorching heat in the Yemen that the sailors manning the Fays’ ship had a proverb, as sailors always did, that there was only a thin sheet of paper between Mocha and Hell.10
The longest seaborne leg of the journey, lasting about seven weeks, followed the Fay’s departure from Mocha in mid-September 1779. Aboard the Nathalia they traveled out into the Gulf of Aden, the body of water pinched between the southern coast of Arabia and the Horn of Africa, and finally into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean proper. Either as a result of good luck or good planning, the passengers sailing in the Nathalia were spared the wrath of the Indian Ocean’s notorious Monsoon in their journey from Mocha to Calicut. The tranquil seas made other, more mundane reflections possible and Eliza was thus able to survey the motley crew of fellow passengers.
The captain of the ship, Chenu, had only recently, and unofficially risen to the post upon the death of the Nathalia’s original commander, Captain Vanderfield, and his first officer during the journey across the desert. Conscious of his new and precarious status, Chenu was overbearing in his insistence on the maintenance of proper forms and appearances. He was, consequently, despised by everyone on board. In addition to Captain Chenu, there were Mr. and Mrs. Tulloh, who never so much as “smiled unless maliciously” and John Hare, a barrister, like Anthony, on his way to practice in the courts of India. Hare was a snob of the highest order, “a little mortal, his body constantly bent in a rhetorical attitude as if addressing the Court,” who would not deign to have “a City name on any article” of his attire for fear of being thought the son of the tradesman he in fact was. To this unpleasant cast of characters was added Mr. Manesty, not yet 20, who was going out to India to be a contract writer for the East India Company establishment at Bombay; Mr. Moreau, a musician seeking patronage in an increasingly Europeanized South Asia; and Mr. Fuller, a businessman who, having lost everything, was looking to India as a last chance to fix his ailing fortunes.11
In Eliza’s words the passengers of the Nathalia seem an unusual collection of comic characters, however, in terms of profession, if not in personality, they were standard fare. The British Empire in the eighteenth century was a land of opportunity, a place where fortunes could be made or remade (and just as easily lost), a place where merit might perhaps, for once, outpace birth or connections. With the Revolutionary War and the suspension of America as an outlet for such ambitious or restless individuals, young men and women of all stations, stripes, and professions made the perilous journey from metropole to colony in the hope that fortune would favor them. The men and women aboard the Nathalia in 1779 were hardly any different.
On November 4 Eliza finally caught her initial glimpse of the subcontinent. The south-western coast of India had long been a place of cross-cultural contact, a center of trade between Asia and the Middle East, a landing point for Vasco de Gama and Zheng He, and home to a panoply of ethnicities and nationalities: Indians, Arabs, Jews, Portuguese, Chinese, and, more recently, Dutch, French, and British. With India now finally in view, Eliza was feeling optimistic. She wrote, still aboard the ship with the coast slowly approaching, that she was “looking with a longing eye, towards Bengal, from where my next [letter] will be dated. The climate seems likely to agree very well with me, I do not at all mind the heat, nor does it affect my spirits, or my appetite.”12
Eliza’s initial optimism, however, was not to last. As the Nathalia came to anchor in the Roads off Calicut there was a worrying sign of the trouble and misery to come. There were no British ships in the harbor, and no flag flew from the British consulate. The fears of what these signs might presage were quickly made manifest. Shortly after entering the harbor, the Nathalia was surrounded by foreign vessels that approached “with an air of so much hostility that we became seriously alarmed.” Despite the conspicuous absence of guns, ammunition, and fighting men aboard the ship, Captain Chenu felt a show of force was the best course of action, hoping to scare off the threat with pantomime belligerence. The whole scene was made even more ridiculous by Mrs. Tulloh, who, craving some “romantic danger,” “insisted on having a chair brought upon the deck, in which she was determined to sit, and see the engagement; observing that, it was the next best thing to escaping from shipwreck.” The surrounding vessels must surely have seen through this farcical tableau, the presence of a middle-aged woman in a chair hardly being consistent with a man o’war preparing for battle. Nonetheless, the foreign ships failed to engage, leaving the passengers of the Nathalia relieved, if a bit confused.13
Confusion quickly turned into apprehension over the next three days as the passengers remained on ship waiting for information about the situation on shor
e. Men sent from the ship into Calicut to survey the scene returned with troubling news: the British consul had fled the area weeks earlier, taking with him all his belongings. Fearing the worst, the assistance of the Danish consul was sought to help the frightened Britons pass for Danes. From the Danes they learned that there was indeed some sort of conflict brewing between the British and Haidar Ali, the de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, in which Calicut now lay.
The Malabar Coast had been one of the first flashpoints of globalization. Vasco de Gama, making the first bold venture around the Horn of Africa, had landed in the region—like Fay making landfall at Calicut—almost three hundred years earlier in 1498. He found the region of Malabar—a low, water-logged plain stretching from the sea to the Western Ghats—teeming with pepper, and in the centuries that followed the Portuguese and Dutch vied with petty local princes to control the lucrative spice trade and the diverse range of merchants who flocked to the area. The British only got involved in south-western India belatedly, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the British began to advance, pincer-like, from their bases at Madras on the south-east coast and Bombay, just north of Malabar.
Unbeknownst to Eliza Fay, by the time she arrived on the Malabar Coast, Haidar Ali had had a long and contentious history with the British. The son of a military commander in the service of the Raja of Mysore in southern India, Haidar Ali Khan first rose to prominence in 1749, when he commanded troops during the Second Carnatic War, part of a series of mid-century conflicts for control of the south-eastern coast of India. At their heart, the Carnatic Wars were the result of competition between an expansionist French East India Company based at Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast and their British rivals based in nearby Madras, which echoed similar imperial rivalries in Europe and North America. The First and Third Carnatic Wars can in many ways be seen as imperial echoes of the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War respectively. As they jockeyed for position, the French and British made alliances with various local powers, especially the great native powers of south India: the nizams of Hyderabad, the rajas of Mysore, and the peshwas of the Maratha Empire. During the Third Carnatic War (1758–63), Haidar Ali earned a far-reaching reputation as an inspired military commander when he came to the aid of his French allies during the British siege of Pondicherry. Although the French would lose the war and with it much of their power and territory in India, Haidar Ali emerged with a fearsome reputation, an army complete with French artillery and French deserters, and official command of Mysore’s armies. By 1761, he had seized the de facto rule of Mysore from its titular ruler Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, and begun the expansion of the kingdom south into Kerala and Malabar, making it a serious regional power.
To Begin the World Over Again Page 31
