To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Macartney’s mixed success at St. Petersburg was not held against him, and in 1769 he was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland and in 1775 Governor of the British Caribbean possessions of Grenada, the Grenadines, and Tobago. He arrived in the West Indies as the war with America was commencing, and quickly came under fire himself in 1779 when forced to surrender the islands to French forces under Comte d’Estaing. After a short stint in Paris as a prisoner of war, Macartney, now raised to the peerage, was reassigned to India where he was appointed Governor of Madras. In moving to the subcontinent, Macartney did not escape the increasingly global conflict, and arrived at Madras in 1781 just as it was being threatened by the forces of Haidar Ali. Never entirely trustful of military men, as Governor of Madras, Macartney clashed with Sir Eyre Coote and General Stuart, the commanders of British troops in the war against Mysore. After removing Stuart as commander and sending him to Britain under arrest, Macartney shifted gears, opting for diplomacy where arms had failed. In 1784, he succeeded in negotiating the Treaty of Mangalore with Tipu Sultan. Though he achieved a temporary peace with Mysore, repeated disputes with Governor-General Warren Hastings led Macartney to resign his post in 1785 and return to Britain in 1786. General Stuart, humiliated by his removal, was waiting in London and quickly issued a challenge to Macartney. Macartney accepted and the two men met near the Tyburn turnpike to settle their dispute. Macartney was wounded in the arm, but after a brief period of recuperation in Ireland eagerly accepted the offer to lead a mission to China in 1791.6

  Lord Macartney was an obvious choice to lead the China embassy. By 1792 he had much to recommend him. He had served ably in several important and difficult diplomatic posts and had repeatedly achieved tangible results. As an Indian official who had left his post in excellent financial shape, with no inkling of any irregularities or improprieties—a rare feat—he provided a stark contrast with public men like Warren Hastings who was just then being publicly skewered for his governance of British India. In his youth he had leveraged good looks and debonair charm into favor at the court of Catherine the Great; now it was hoped that his long diplomatic experience, his familiarity with despots, would help the British make vital inroads at the court of the Qianlong Emperor.

  For a task of such obvious import, Lord Macartney would require a large and committed staff. The embassy would come to include ninety-five members, but choosing his second in command, his primary assistant and advisor, the man who would take over the embassy if he should die, was the most crucial personnel decision he had to make. There was no man Lord Macartney trusted more than his old friend George Staunton, who readily agreed to join the mission. A fellow Irishman, Staunton had trained as a physician before immigrating to Grenada in 1762, where he made enough money as a doctor to set himself up as a prominent landholder. When Macartney had arrived in Grenada as governor in 1776, Staunton was one of the leading citizens of the island, and the two literary-minded Irishmen became fast friends. Staunton lost everything when the French took Grenada in 1779, and so when Macartney was chosen as Governor of Madras in 1780, Staunton was only too happy to accept the position as his secretary. In both Grenada and India, Staunton had proved himself very capable, and constantly useful—it was Staunton who had negotiated the treaty with Tipu Sultan—and so when Macartney was appointed ambassador to China there was never any question who he would choose as his right-hand man.7

  After Staunton, the embassy was staffed with a wide range of men with a variety of occupations responsible for the multifaceted tasks of the China mission. Since almost no Europeans knew enough of the Chinese language to serve as interpreters, Staunton was forced to turn to the Chinese College at Naples to find men who spoke the language. There he agreed to give two newly ordained Chinese priests, Jacobus Li and Paolo Cho, passage back home to China in return for their services as interpreters. Knowing that permission to travel within China was a rarity, two painters, William Alexander and Thomas Hickey, were employed to provide pictorial documentation of China. Also included were a surgeon, a physician, an experimental scientist, a metallurgist, a watchmaker, an instrument maker, a gardener, five German musicians and a fifty-man military escort led by Lt-Colonel George Benson.

  To assemble and arrange the vast quantity of gifts at the imperial court, John Barrow was chosen as comptroller of the embassy. Barrow had been born to a poor family in northern Lancashire in 1764, but a fascination with, and aptitude for mathematics, science, and navigation helped him to rise to the position of mathematics teacher at a school in Greenwich. By chance he met George Staunton when the former Grenada planter was looking for a tutor for his young son. It was Staunton’s patronage that secured Barrow the position in the embassy, a position that would be the making of him.8

  The journey did not begin auspiciously. The flotilla had departed Spithead with a “fair fresh breeze,” but as so often happened in the English Channel, the breeze rapidly deteriorated into a gale, forcing the fleet into Torbay, where they spent a monotonous two days waiting out the weather. When favorable winds returned, the party sailed south from Torbay along the French coast and across the Bay of Biscay to Cape Finisterre at the north-western tip of the Iberian Peninsula. At Cape Finisterre the waters calmed and the ships turned south-west to the cloud-enveloped island of Madeira in the Azores chain. The Azores were a common waypoint for European ships bound for both the Americas and Asia, well positioned to attract the growing current of commerce connecting the globe. For many in Britain, Portuguese possession of the islands was an ideal situation. Portugal had long been a British ally, the only European country to join, albeit briefly, with Britain in the American Wars. But Portuguese control had other benefits as well. The islands provided a crucial place of rest and resupply for British ships, without the need for costly British investments in infrastructure or defense. Controlled by a minor maritime power, the Azores would also be unlikely to serve as a base for attacking or disrupting British commerce with Asia. The lesson of America was being painfully learned. Possession of land cost money and men; possession of the seas made money.9

  From Madeira, the fleet sailed for the Canary Islands, a comfortable journey of four days, though the much celebrated peak of Tenerife came into view almost a full day before their arrival. The harbor at Santa Cruz was full of the ghosts of previous conflicts—Admiral Nelson had lost his arm here in 1797—and suffused with the tensions of a world about to descend once more into war. The Spanish governors did their best to keep the peace, but one rather testy French frigate nearly touched off a battle when, assuming that the incoming British squadron was a sign that war between Britain and France had at last commenced, fired its guns “pour l’honneur de la Grande Nation.” The British were characteristically appalled by this “true spirit of Gallic liberty” but Erasmus Gower’s restraint prevented further hostilities. For Barrow, this was yet more evidence of French hypocrisy and the hollowness of the charges of maritime tyranny lobbed at the British by France, America, and the League of Armed Neutrality during the American War. The French, Barrow complained, were the “loudest in complaining of the tyranny of the English in exercising the sovereignty of the seas; but, were the exercise of that sovereignty placed, unluckily for the world, in the hands of the French, their conduct on the continent is a sufficient test to evince with what degree of moderation they would hold the dominion of the ocean.” It was to reinforce and retain the dominion of the ocean, and of trade, that Barrow and his companions had come to Tenerife.10

  The presence of naturalists and artists in the embassy gave the China mission the flavor of an anthropological expedition. This was hardly an accident. Knowledge of the produce and products of a territory provided information about its extractive potential, while details of a territory’s peoples helped create a sense of the potential for trade and commerce. Thus, at every opportunity, Barrow and some of his comrades ventured forth in search of information about zoology, botany, geology, agriculture, and society of the country. At Tenerife, they made just such a
tour, climbing its formidable peak—the locals “bestowed” on them “very liberally the epithet of mad Englishmen”—where they were caught in violent storms and temperatures below freezing.11

  In Cape Verde, the British were struck by the heat, the poverty of the place, but above all by the degree of African control in this erstwhile Portuguese colony. The governor on the main island of St. Iago was Portuguese, and the commander of the garrison a huge Scotsman who had served in the American army during the war, but otherwise, the clergy, judges, customs officials, civil administrators, merchants, soldiers, and even the governors of the other islands, were all African, a fact that could not help but remind the expedition of the new colony of former slaves just then being established on the nearby coast of Sierra Leone.12

  The fleet did not tarry long in Cape Verde, weighing anchor on October 7 and heading south-west, skirting the southern borders of the famous Sargasso Sea on their way across the equator, and the Atlantic. Three weeks after leaving Cape Verde, the passengers got their first view of South America when Cape Frio was sighted on the horizon. The next day, October 30, the embassy fleet passed the stony sentinel of Sugarloaf and entered the awe-inspiring harbor of Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Portuguese Brazil. The sight was truly enchanting. An ecstatic John Barrow was swept away as the scene slowly unfolded before his eyes.

  Having cleared this channel, one of the most magnificent scenes in nature bursts upon the enraptured eye. Let anyone imagine to himself an immense sheet of water running back into the heart of a beautiful country, to a distance of about thirty miles, where it is bounded by a skreen of lofty mountains, always majestic, whether their rugged and shapeless summits are tinged with azure and purple, or buried beneath the clouds—Let him imagine this sheet of water gradually expand, from the narrow portal through which it communicates with the sea . . . to be everywhere studded with immeasurable little islands, scattered over its surface in every diversity of shape, and exhibiting every variety of tint that an exuberant and incessant vegetation is capable of affording . . . Let him figure to himself this beautiful sheet of water . . . to be encompassed on every side by hills of moderate height, rising in gradual succession above each other, all profusely clad in lively green, and crowned with groups of the noblest trees, while their shores are indented with numberless inlets, shooting their arms across the most delightful valleys, to meet the murmuring rills, and bear their waters into the vast and common reservoir of all.13

  The town itself was charming enough, but beside the jaw-dropping magnificence of its natural setting, the best Barrow could say about it was that while it did little to improve upon God’s creation, at least the settlement did not “disfigure” it. But what struck Barrow most of all were the plantations and the slaves who worked them.

  The Portuguese of Brazil congratulated themselves for treating their slaves better than other European nations (a rationalizing practice common to all European nations), but Barrow was suspicious of such self-justifying cant, and given the rotten nature of the entire system, not sure it really mattered. “Where the whole system is bad,” he wrote, “the degrees of atrocity may perhaps be the less discernible.” Despite Portuguese claims of gentle treatment, “whole cargoes of these ill-fated people [slaves] were annually transported from their native country and their connections, cut off from every hope of returning, and doomed to toil for the remainder of their days in the foreign fields of South America.” Likewise, the fact that the staggering mortality rates on American plantations meant that new shipments of slaves were constantly required just to maintain their numbers put the lie to the contention that Africans were better off as slaves. “It is vain to tell us that the condition of the African negro is meliorated in the colonies, when a constant importation is required to keep up their numbers. But even admitting that their situation was improved by a passage across the Atlantic, by what rule of right do we assume ourselves the power of compelling people to be happy contrary to their wishes?”14

  The “horrid calamity” of “perfidy and brutality” that was Atlantic slavery could not continue for long. Soon enough, Barrow believed, the slaves would take matters into their own hands. They had done so in Haiti the year before, breaking the “chains of Gallic tyranny” in the “glorious struggle for liberty.” It had been a violent revolution, but for Barrow, one in which, unlike the “French subversion,” the violence had been justified or at least understandable. And that necessary violence was sure to come to the British West Indies before too long. “The secret spell, that caused the negro to tremble at the presence of the white man, is in a great degree dissolved; the supposed superiority, by which a hundred of the former were kept in awe and submission by one of the latter, is no longer acknowledged; the mind has broken its fetters with those of the body, and freedom of thought has produced energy of action.” But in this danger, there was also opportunity, the opportunity to reform and re-envision the nature of the British Empire, to gain financially, and save their souls in the process.15

  For Barrow, and many like him in Britain, the whole project of Atlantic imperialism had been a costly error, economically and morally. The plantation-based economies of North America and the West Indies cost money to govern and protect, proving over the years to be a constant drain on Britain’s finances. The costs of maintaining this Atlantic empire had led directly to the disastrous war with America, and the immorality of an empire built on slavery, as Granville Sharp had observed, had contributed to Britain’s humiliating defeat. Just as abolitionists sought to cleanse the British Empire of the sin of slavery, men like John Barrow hoped to create a new, moral empire out of the ruins of the old. The products of the Atlantic colonies most valued by Britain, sugar, cotton, etc., Barrow realized, were “originally transplanted from the East, where the labour of slaves is not required, nor any extraordinary waste of Europeans occasioned.” There was thus no need to create colonies of plantations in the Americas when the same commodities could be had through trade with Asia, all without the burdens, both financial and moral, engendered by Atlantic empires. All that was needed to correct this error then was to re-concentrate Britain’s resources in the east, to create an empire of free trade and free labor in Asia. With such an empire, “India and China may eventually prove the great sheet anchors of our commercial prosperity.”16

  This was the reason why the China mission was so vitally important. In the wake of Britain’s American debacle, it was nothing less than a mission to save Britain’s soul. The expansion of British trade in Asia provided the possibility of resetting the terms and conditions of British imperialism. In the place of territorial Atlantic empires built on the backs of slaves, a new empire of free trade and free labor could be constructed in the east. Without territorial possessions to weigh them down with costs, this new empire would be an economic boon to Britain. Without economies reliant on the labor of slaves, they believed, this new empire would be a moral empire of mutual, if unequal benefit. In this sense, the loss of the American colonies had been fortuitous rather than disastrous. Without the weight of North American obligations, Britain could at last reimagine its empire as one of trade and morality rather than of exploitation and sin. That it sought to do so on the back of an expanded opium trade seems not to have troubled them overmuch.

  Reinvigorated by a renewed sense of mission, the embassy departed Rio de Janeiro on December 17, striking out east across the south Atlantic. Rather than making the usual stops at the Cape of Good Hope and southern India, the embassy fleet had opted to take advantage of the uninterrupted winds of the “great southern ocean,” voyaging across the southern Indian Ocean before turning north-east at Amsterdam Island and heading for Indonesia. The embassy arrived at the Sunda Strait, the heavily trafficked passageway between the islands of Sumatra and Java, on February 26 after an open ocean journey of twenty-four days. The passage through the strait itself, on seas “as smooth as the Serpentine . . . in Hyde Park,” weaving between a “crowd of little islands” too numerous for even t
he “indefatigable Dutch” to name, through the “constantly prowling” shoals of sharks, past tropical shores choked with vegetation, “one mass of soft and luxuriant green,” took three full days. About halfway through the passage they paused to resupply at Anjerie, a considerable village with a small Dutch outpost on the Java shore. The choice of stopping place was fortuitous, if sobering, for within the bamboo palisade of the Dutch fort, under a simple wooden grave maker lay the remains of Colonel Charles Cathcart. The homage paid to their fallen countryman and his corner of a foreign field was pregnant with meaning for the embassy. Only five years earlier Cathcart himself had been selected to lead a mission to the Emperor of China only to die en route. After following in his footsteps across the ocean, they now gazed down at his final resting place, recording his grave marker before the wood deteriorated in the tropical heat, marking his life and his death before they were consigned forever to foreign oblivion. Surely, they hoped, someone would do the same for them if the worst were to happen.17

  Once through the Sunda Strait, the squadron veered east along the northern coast of Java to Batavia (modern Jakarta), the capital of Dutch Indonesia and one of the most important trade centers of Asia. What immediately struck the crew upon entering the harbor of Batavia was the vast number of vessels dotting the bay. Dutch Indiamen were to be expected, as were the Javanese canoes and Malay proas, but it seemed as if all the world was represented at Batavia. There were massive Chinese junks, “whose singular forms seemed to bespeak an antiquity as remote as that of Noah’s ark,” French ships “carrying into the Eastern world, in addition to the natural products of their country, the monstrous doctrines of the Rights of Man,” and a plethora of British vessels from Bengal, Bombay, and across the empire. Only a few years earlier the presence of British ships in Dutch Indonesia would have portended war, but much had changed during the American War.18