Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  The image of India as an El Dorado for the enterprising Scot persisted throughout the nineteenth century, fuelled by the exotic tales of those who returned with fortunes to invest or — more realistically — by continuing opportunities in the military and civil service. By the 1850s the prospect of fortune-making had been rendered negligible by much stricter regulation of East India Company servants’ independent trading activities, and by the transformation of the Company from a mercantile to a largely administrative organization. If, however, the curtailment of opportunities for freebooting had rendered Scottish nabobs something of an anachronism, it still remained commonplace for ambitious young Scots to flock to India as soldiers, surgeons and civil servants in the vast imperial bureaucracy that increasingly enveloped the subcontinent.

  Yet India had an ambivalent impact on the Scottish psyche, for, as contemporary commentators emphasized, it posed threats as well as provided opportunities, and was often a place of violence and tragedy, where dreams and illusions were shattered rather than fulfilled. Certainly, neither Sir Walter Scott nor his contemporary John Galt highlighted the attractions of the Orient when they touched on the subject in two novels in the 1820s; on the contrary, both were preoccupied with the corruption and immorality induced by the unrestrained ambition that characterized many nabobs and would-be nabobs, and none of their fictional emigrants was enriched by the Indian experience. The tone of Scott’s novel The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827) was set by the narrator’s preface, in which those who went to India were portrayed as a ‘gallant caste of adventurers, who laid down their consciences at the Cape of Good Hope as they went out to India, and forgot to take them up again when they returned’. 7 The villain of his novel, Richard Middlemas, having been duped by a fraudulent recruiting agent into enlisting in an East India Company regiment, resorted to murder and treachery as part of a complex plan to restore his fortunes and win Bangalore for the Company. By the time he died under the hoofs of a ceremonial elephant, he had blighted the lives of all around him, notably his fiancée, who returned to Scotland to live in sad seclusion after a series of Indian misadventures sparked off by Middlemas’s betrayal of her trust.

  John Galt, like Scott, had mixed feelings about emigration. While on the one hand he claimed that ‘every man of sense and talent seeks his fortune abroad, and leaves only the incapable and those who are conscious of their deficiencies at home’, 8 he was concerned at the ruthless acquisitiveness of many who returned to flaunt their wealth. He too used the medium of fiction to demonstrate the damaging effects on Scottish society of Indian riches unfairly won and unwisely spent. Malachi Mailings and Mr Rupees, the main characters in his novel The Last of the Lairds (1826) epitomize the conflict between the old Scotland of traditional values, where probity and a good name counted for more than possessions, and the brash new Scotland whose commercial priorities were inextricably linked with burgeoning overseas enterprise. At first Mailings, the laird of Auldbiggings, managed to thwart Rupees, who had returned from India determined to buy his way into the landed gentry:

  Ye see, when Mr Rupees the Nawbub came hame frae Indy, and bought the Arunthrough property frae the Glaikies, who, like sae mony ithers o’ the right stock o’ legitimate gentry, hae been smothered out o’ sight by the weed and nettle overgrowths o’ merchandise and cotton-weavry, he would fain hae bought Auldbiggings likewise, and sent that gett o’ the deil and the law, Caption, to make me an offer; but I was neither a prodigal son nor an Esau, to sell my patrimony for a mess o’ pottage, so I gied him a flea in his lug, and bade him tell the Nawbob to chew the cud o’ the sin of covetousness, the whilk is disappointment. 9

  But after Mailings had been tricked into borrowing money from Rupees, he faced the threat of losing his entire estate to his avaricious and flamboyant creditor when Rupees called in the loans, leaving the reader with the clear message that, while Mailings may have won a series of moral battles, he and his contemporaries were losing the war against the encroachment of wealth without responsibility represented by Rupees and his ilk.

  It was not only in fiction that the high hopes of an Indian sojourn could turn sour. In 1975 the University of Aberdeen was bequeathed ‘the diaries, papers, pictures, letters, swords, chests, instruments and medals relating to the family of Chalmers’. 10 Hidden in that bequest is an absorbing tale, not only of adventure and tragedy in the Indian Empire around the time of the Mutiny, but also of the networks of Aberdeen-based patronage, friendship and chain migration which sustained and enlivened the overseas sojourns of a significant number of the sons of north-east Scotland in that era.

  ‘Mamma must not give way, but remember that we have all promised to come back rich Nabobs, or at least with half a dozen Medals of which she shall be proud,’ wrote John Chalmers to his father in 1857. 11 As sons of a leading public figure in Scotland’s third city, John and his brothers were well placed to set foot on a more solid — if potentially less rewarding — Indian career ladder than had been available in the era of Henry Dundas. Their father, Alexander Wallace Chalmers, was for thirty-seven years governor of the Bridewell and East Prisons, Aberdeen. His marriage to Mary Jamson, the daughter of a local shipmaster, produced two daughters and then five sons, three of whom pursued careers in the military wing of the East India Company. Like many of their contemporaries, two of the Chalmers brothers undertook preliminary academic training at the city’s Marischal College, the records of which are peppered with the names of men — the sons of merchants and tradesmen, as well as those of the gentry and professional classes — who found military, medical and administrative careers in the East India Company. This trend continued after the fusion in 1860 of the two Aberdeen colleges, Marischal and King’s, into the University of Aberdeen, which during the first twenty years of its existence produced 458 graduates who worked abroad at some stage in their careers, mainly in India. They included seventy-seven recruits to the Indian army, fifteen missionaries and twelve civil servants, as well as seventy-nine men who joined the Indian medical service, eleven of them in 1865 alone. 12

  While Mary Chalmers may have been proud of the medals bestowed on two of her sons, she must surely have bewailed the cost at which they were won, for the history of the Chalmers family was repeatedly punctuated by premature death. First to succumb was the eldest boy, Richard, a civil engineer and the only son to remain in Scotland, who died in Aberdeen in 1852, aged twenty-three. Six years later twenty-five-year-old Samuel succumbed to brain fever at Calcutta, and was buried in the military cemetery at Bhowanipore. John, who, like Samuel, was awarded the India Mutiny Medal, was invalided home in 1860 and died in Wales also aged twenty-five, less than a year later. William too was invalided home from service as an assistant surgeon in India, and died of consumption in 1863, at the age of twenty-nine, while Alexander, a chief engineer in the Royal Navy, also fell victim to tuberculosis in 1868, three years after being invalided out of the service.

  Samuel was the only one of the five Chalmers boys who did not attend Marischal College. His entry into the employment of the East India Company differed from that of his brothers in other ways too, since it took place for reasons of expediency rather than ambition, and under a cloud of unidentified disgrace that he felt barred his ultimate return home. After working as a druggist in Aberdeen, Sam left in February 1854 to seek greener pharmaceutical pastures in London, armed with a testimonial of competence from his employer and a somewhat unenthusiastic character reference from his minister, given more as a favour to Sam’s father than out of any high regard for the son himself. Perhaps these doubts were justified, for after writing home regularly during his first four months in London, Sam then fell silent for a year, until May 1855, when he wrote to his mother from Bengal, where he had sailed under an assumed name. ‘Look on me only as a pecuniary exile,’ he urged her, in a veiled reference to the financial misdemeanours that had probably led to his hasty departure:

  I have no intention of recalling to myself scenes that are past and gone, and which cannot b
e amended now, but merely consider it my duty … to let you know that, however unfortunate I may have been in my native country, fortune is smiling on me in this one abundantly … I have played the part of the prodigal, no doubt, but after all it was more misfortune than fault … Keep my being in India a secret, not that I care a pin, but then it is just as well that people don’t know. I may only expect to be pestered with Bills etc. 13

  Unlike most of the ‘unfortunates’ who shared his ‘dreadful passage ’, he had secured employment. Having enlisted in the East India Company’s artillery, he was one of a draft of recruits sent from Calcutta to Meerut, where he was appointed an assistant in the Indian Telegraph Department under Dr W. B. O’Shaughnessy, the Irish Superintendent of Electric Telegraphs in India. The medical officer in charge of the draft was William Watson, the son of Aberdeen’s distinguished sheriff, who honoured Sam’s request not to mention him in his letters home, but who passed on domestic news, including that of John Chalmers’s imminent arrival in India.

  Throughout his three years in India, Sam kept in regular communication with Watson, who on one occasion nursed him through a dangerous attack of cholera contracted in Agra. ‘It is an awful thing,’ he wrote to his mother while convalescing, ‘to be sick in India among natives, who care no more for you than a Dog; yet I have every reason to be thankful for having been cast among dear friends in the hour of my afflictions.’ Chief among those friends were William Watson and another Aberdonian, Dr Farquhar, with whom he could also share ‘old school anecdotes’ and speak ‘broad Scotch’. 14 Equally kind to him were two other acquaintances of his parents, Dr and Mrs J. P. Walker, with whom on one occasion, still convalescing, he enjoyed a rare ‘taste of home … a splendid dinner and tea, and then Mrs Walker favoured me with a selection of Scotch songs, and while she sang and played the piano, the Dr and I gave chorus’. 15

  The preservation of links with home and family meant a great deal to Sam, who wrote to his parents at least once a month, as well as to his brother John in the Punjab. Although the brothers never met in India, they clearly looked after each other’s financial and career interests. ‘What is mine is his and that his is mine is an agreement we have formed till we get wives,’ wrote Sam to his parents in 1857, by which time he evidently anticipated that his exile would not be permanent, for he continued, ‘Don’t mourn for us, we are both well and happy, and hope soon again to see you.’ 16 They maintained and exploited links with the Aberdeenshire community, which in Agra included not only Watson, Farquhar and the Walkers, but also Dr Murray from Peterhead, who was Far-quhar’s superior, and Dr Clarke from Ballater, the Acting Postmaster General, whose assistance John Chalmers tried unsuccessfully to secure in having Sam appointed to a more remunerative post in his department. The brothers also kept a finger on the pulse of events at home by regular scrutiny of the Aberdeen Herald, sent out by their parents and also circulated among the Aberdeenshire exiles. ‘We enjoy the papers much,’ Sam told his father in 1856, just as his parents in Aberdeen perused the Indian press keenly, exchanged news with neighbours whose sons were also in India, and put new recruits in touch with their own boys. 17

  As the first member of the Chalmers family to go to India, Sam often imparted advice and information to his younger brothers who followed in his footsteps. ‘Always sleep with your drawers on,’ he instructed John, when the latter arrived in Calcutta in 1855, courtesy of a Company cadetship gifted by a former rector of Marischal College. Sam — who frequently assured his parents that their youngest son was a first-rate scholar who would ‘turn out a great Officer if he is spared’18 — also recommended that John enhance his chances of promotion and good remuneration by learning Hindustani, ‘because he cannot get charge of a Native Regt. until he passes an examination on it, and moreover he gets 1000 Rupees as a gift of the Company if he speaks well’. 19 When William Chalmers — who in 1855 was pursuing a commercial career in Edinburgh and Glasgow — sought Sam’s advice about openings in India, the response was qualified. While on the one hand ‘situations here are as thick as mites in a cheese ’, and the rapidly expanding railway network in particular offered numerous remunerative openings, on the other hand Sam reminded his brother that there was ‘no place like home’, advising him to bide his time and not rush out to India prematurely. ‘Don’t let yourself believe I don’t want you out here,’ he continued. ‘I shd be very glad of it, but it is a long road to come on chance and maybe be disappointed.’ 20 Nine months later, by which time William had returned to Aberdeen to study medicine at Marischal College, Sam was still ambivalent in his encouragement, perhaps because his brush with death was still fresh in his mind: ‘Tell Bill to grind away, and that there is a good field for him yet in India, but if he can do well where he is, to stay. Rupees are tempting, but think of Cholera. A man of talent should not be in India.’ 21 By December, however, he was more optimistic, urging his brother to ‘Go ahead as you are doing, and a Superintending Surgeoncy may be yours yet in India’. 22

  Like many emigrants all over the world, Sam Chalmers’s opinions of India fluctuated according to his health and circumstances. In September 1855 he succumbed to an attack of fever, along with a fit of depression and homesickness:

  I suppose you will wonder what sort of a place this India really is, and form I have no doubt very fine ideas regarding it, but alas, how miserable is the reality, for in two lines I can picture India to you from the Cape to the Himalayas as one vast semi-cultivated plain covered with Mud Houses not one built straight, and the inhabitants beggars living many of them in filth and hardly a rag to cover their bodies. When you see two miles of India and one village, you may say you have seen it all. Meerut, Delhi, Agra, Lahore, Benares are no doubt fine-looking places at a distance and because there are Europeans there, but give me my choice and Scotland for me. I am now in what is considered a dangerous part of India. The mail is frequently robbed here and the men murdered; and 25 miles from this there is a place where they lately looked on it as sport, to knock one another’s heads off as an offering to their gods, but the Govt has put a stop to it. I go to bed with my cudgel and gun every night, independent of a Guard outside, but they are blacks, and as they are not Company’s Sepoys and very corpulent, I don’t much fancy their protection. 23

  By November, however, when he had recovered his health and spirits, he believed that his decision to come to India was ‘a dispensation of Providence fraught with good to me’, for ‘no man cd be more comfortable or better off than I am at present’. 24 His contentment was short-lived. Although initially happy to be transferred to Seepree in January 1856 at increased pay, he soon found the work so hard, the food so unpalatable and the inspector of his division so hostile that in April he requested a transfer to Agra and from there to the Punjab. By this time he was determined to purchase his discharge from the army and resume his previous occupation as a druggist, perhaps prompted by his encounter with a son of the Thurso manse who, having run away from home to military service, had ‘at least freed himself of that yoke ’, succeeded in business and ‘assured me could any day go home with 30,000 hard cash’. 25

  In fact Sam Chalmers never left the service of the Indian Telegraph Department. By April 1857 John had purchased his brother’s discharge and, with the help of Dr Walker, Dr Clarke of the Post Office and another Scot, the Reverend John Milne of Calcutta, secured his admission to a three-year course at Calcutta Medical College, ‘with a view to obtaining a Sub-Assistant Surgeoncy’. 26 But Sam’s plans were thwarted when he became caught up in the events of the Mutiny, during which he was present at the siege of Delhi. ‘I cannot describe to you the scenes I have been an eye-witness of during the past five months,’ he wrote to his father on 18 October 1857:

  The account furnished in newspapers is a mere shadow of the reality. I came inside the city on the 17th, three days after the attack, but it was not to view the Delhi I saw last year; it was to cast my eyes on a heap of ruins, deserted houses, starving inhabitants, and putrid corpses of man and
beast. Misery was the watchword. Plundering went on to a terrible extent, shops and goods of all descriptions blocked up the roads, and here and there dead Sepoys. Not a European house is fit to be occupied, they were burned to the ground. Shall I reveal to you the horrors of the 8th, 10th and 11th of June? Ladies butchered at the breakfast table, children torn from their mothers arms and dashed upon the flags, husbands tied to the wall and saw their wives ravished, spat upon, vivisected, and had their throats cut, maddened Sepoys rushing here and there and calling for the Europeans to come out and be tortured. 27