In 1917, Edmund Russell, who had visited Hyderabad a few years earlier, wrote of being told that Jacob was already dabbling in wizardry when he lived there in 1869. ‘Very slight … he could slip in and out of harems in disguise and was begged for love potions and spells.’ Asked by a veiled woman to help her win back her husband’s affections, he consulted his Arabic books and cabalistic charms and, the next day, slipped her some powder and a paper on which were written some magic words. He told her to swallow the powder and stand near a pillar and wait until her husband passed. The spell having worked, she became the envy of the whole palace. ‘Everyone down to the lowest nauker begins to make love philtres, and dreams of the magic square of agate whose figures can be read in any direction and always give you the number you want,’ Russell wrote.5
Another report refers to Jacob being in Bareilly in 1870 to witness the resuscitation of a fakir who had been buried alive. ‘The man was buried, suspended in a deep grave by chains three feet from the bottom. The coffin was screwed down in the sight of many people,’ the local Commissioner Robert Drummond recorded. ‘Boards were placed above it six inches below the ground level. Earth was spread and corn was sown which sprang up and was reaped. Four men, two sent by the Commissioner and two by the Nawab, were always on guard. After six months, he was taken and revived after being rubbed and warmed. He said he could not have been revived before the six months expired as he had arranged to leave his body for that time. During that time, the blood condenses, becomes slimy and yellow and does not circulate.’6
In 1834, the Reverend John Hobart Caunter described a variation of the same trick I had seen in Alipurduar, where a magician placed a small girl beneath a wicker basket on the ground. ‘The man had seized the sword … and to my absolute consternation and horror, plunged it through (the basket) withdrawing it several times, and repeated the plunge with all the blind ferocity of an excited demon (until) the blood ran in streams from the basket.’ Caunter’s first impulse was ‘to rush upon the monster’ and save the girl ‘but he was armed and I, defenceless’. Moments later, the basket was shown to be empty and the girl appeared nearby absolutely sound.7
The great English conjuror Charles Bertram not only witnessed the trick numerous times when travelling through India in the first decade of the twentieth century, but he also claimed to have discovered its secret. The child made its escape before the sword was plunged into the basket ‘by grasping a strap around the juggler’s waist, and passing between the juggler’s legs, his movements being covered by a large cloth which the juggler uses for covering the basket’.8
The performance I witnessed, however, would have startled even Bertram who prided himself on having a logical explanation for almost everything he saw. The old man was no ordinary juggler. On that dusty December afternoon, I had just witnessed what only the most renowned magicians were capable of—magicians such as Jacob who, according to one witness, had performed a similar trick over tiffin at his Simla bungalow a century earlier.
‘He dropped the point to about two inches below the sternum and pushed slowly but forcibly. I distinctly felt the passage of the blade, but it was entirely painless, though I experienced a curious icy feeling, as though I had drunk some very cold water. The point came out my back and penetrated into the wood panelling behind, which, if I remember right, was of cedar wood. He left none of the weapon and laughingly remarked that I looked like a butterfly pinned on a cork. Several jokes at my expense were made by the others; and after a minute or two, he released me. I looked rather ruefully at the slit the blade had made in my clothes but Jacob said, “Never mind them; they’ll be all right by-and-by”. He began to show us another wonder, and I forgot all about it. But about an hour afterward, there was no trace whatever of any damage to the clothes.’9
Robert D’Onston Stephenson (aka Roslyn D’Onston), a student of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest proponents of the occult, was no stranger to magic. Nor, judging from his willingness to be pierced by one of Jacob’s ‘superbly mounted and damascened’ yataghans from Persia, did he have any doubts about this particular magician’s powers. He had met many fakirs and ‘examined their feats and probed their mysteries’, he wrote, but Jacob was in a league of his own. He was the ‘one man to whom common report attributed all the powers of Moses—and more’.10
Born in Yorkshire in 1841, D’Onston had been introduced into the black magic arts by Lord Lytton’s father, Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1859. To D’Onston, he was ‘the one man in modern times for whom all the systems of ancient and modern magism and magic, white and black, held back no secrets’.11 Shortly afterwards, he became his pupil. ‘I entered and he was standing in the middle of the sacred pentagon which had been drawn on the floor in red chalk, and holding in his extended right hand the baguette, which was pointing towards me’, D’Onston wrote of the ceremony. Lytton asked if he was ready to be initiated and ‘then and there (I was) administered the oaths of the neophyte of the “Hermitic Lodge of Alexandria”—the oaths of obedience and secrecy.’
In 1863, D’Onston’s interest in witchcraft took him to the West Coast of Africa, where he carried out the first of two murders to which he later admitted—that of a female witch doctor in Cameroon. Later, in the same year, he took up a post at the Customs House in Hull, but was dismissed in 1868 for frequenting brothels. He went on to become a military surgeon. It was this profession, his patronizing of prostitutes and the mysterious disappearance of his wife at around the same time that a dismembered female body was found in Regent’s Canal and the Thames, that made him, for a short time, one of the suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders.
On October 7, 1888, the News of the World printed a front-page story which concluded that the serial killer who was murdering prostitutes around Whitechapel must have had peculiar surgical knowledge. He must also be ‘cool, confident, cautious and daring, being previously familiar with the murder sites on which he had checked out the police beat times’.12 The description certainly fitted D’Onston, but could have applied equally well to any number of other suspects.
According to Ivor J. Edwards, author of Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals, what makes D’Onston the killer beyond any doubt is the fact that he had deliberately checked in as a patient at the London Hospital by faking a condition known as neurasthenia in late July 1888. He was thus able to avoid suspicion before carrying out the still-unsolved series of murders.
Jack the Ripper commenced his reign of terror on August 31, 1888. Mary Ann Nichols, the first victim of the ‘canonical five’, was found murdered only a three-minute walk away from D’Onston’s medical confinement. His ability to move in and out of the hospital undetected, his interest in the occult and satanic rituals, and the fact that his physical appearance matched that of the suspect made him a prime Jack-the-Ripper candidate.
Ten years earlier in 1878, D’Onston had gone to India where Bulwer-Lytton’s son was serving as Viceroy. Given the amount of literature already published on the subject of Indian jugglers, D’Onston’s account of what he saw, using the pseudonym Tautriadelta in A Modern Magician: An Autobiography, now seems unremarkable. He witnessed the famous mango trick in which a cloth is placed over a flower pot in which a mango seed has been planted. He described watching the cloth rising into the air, revealing a luxuriant young tree and how the tree grew large enough to produce fruit which was distributed to the bystanders. A final word of command, and the cloth covering the tree fell to the ground, leaving nothing underneath but the flower pot and the original seed. He also saw the basket trick, the rope trick and a variation of what he claimed he had experienced at the hands of Jacob: a fakir running a sword through his sternum without any discomfort or leaving any wounds.
The tone of his so-far humdrum account changed when he turned his attention to Jacob, whom he described as ‘a native jeweller and diamond merchant of Simla, a man of immense wealth, highly educated and polished’.13 D’Onston described that he had called on him at Belvedere only to be told
that he would be away for three days. Undeterred, he told the bearer to leave word that he had come hundreds of miles to see him. He also marked his visiting card with a hieroglyphic in the hope that Jacob would recognize him as a fellow practitioner of the occult.
The ploy worked and, three days later, D’Onston was enjoying tiffin at his bungalow with three other men, one of whom was ‘a general officer whose name is a household word in England and India’, but whose identity has never been positively identified. He wrote that he was received ‘with great empressement by Mr Jacob (thanks to the hieroglyph) and we proceeded to enjoy the repast’.14
After the guests had lit up their Trichinopoly [cigars], the General asked Jacob to show them some ‘tricks’. Jacob disliked the term, but agreed to the request. He told a servant to bring in all the men’s walking-sticks. Selecting a thick grapevine stick with a silver band, which belonged to the General, he asked for a glass bowl of water to be placed on the table. He stood the stick on its knob in the water and held it upright for a few moments. ‘Then we saw scores of shoots like rootlets issuing from the knob till they filled the bowl and held the stick upright; Jacob standing over it, muttering all the time,’ wrote D’Onston. ‘In a few moments more, a continuous crackling sound was heard, and shoots, young twigs, began rapidly putting forth from the upper part of the stick.’ These grew and became covered with leaves, which flowered before their eyes. Slowly, the flowers changed into small bunches of grapes and, ten minutes from the start of the trick, ‘a fine, healthy standard vine loaded with bunches of ripe black Hamburgs stood before us’.
A servant carried the vine around, and everyone helped themselves to the fruit. Jacob then covered the table with a sheet and when he removed it there was nothing left but the General’s stick. To make sure it hadn’t been a trick, D’Onston had secretly put a small bunch of grapes in his coat pocket.
This was only the first of a series of ever more incredible feats that D’Onston attributed to Jacob on that particular afternoon. Thrusting a sword through D’Onston’s upper torso was followed by ‘astral projection’. Jacob began by asking everyone at the gathering to give him an account of a battle they had fought in. The General went first, giving his experience of the Balaclava ride in 1854. ‘He told it as a brave soldier would, simply, but earnestly, and manfully,’ D’Onston wrote.
Jacob listened carefully as if entranced, not missing a single word. From the inner pocket of his jacket, he took out a small wand and pointed it towards the inlaid panelling of the room. ‘In an instant, a thick mist gathered there, of a deep violet hue, which rolled away to each side, and there was plainly visible to our eyes the field of Balaclava with the Light Brigade drawn up. We saw [Captain] Nolan ride up, we heard the trumpets blare out the advance, and, finally, the “charge”. We watched the death of that unfortunate officer, and then saw the Light Brigade in their headlong charge on the guns. Every incident repeated itself before us. We saw them spike the guns and return, but the most distinct figure to our eyes was that of our friend the General. We saw their return impeded by a dense mass of Russian lancers, two of whom speared the General (he was not a general then) while he was cutting down a third on his right front. Down he went, and the shock of battle rolled on, leaving him on the ground in our full view. Presently, he staggered to his legs and caught a riderless troop-horse, which came up to him without any shyness when he whistled a call. We saw him mount with extreme difficulty and ride off to the British lines, where he arrived in safety, though shot and shell hurtled round him at times like a hailstorm.’
With Jacob pointing his wand again, the vision disappeared. Those gathered looked at each other. The General took a long breath and swore quietly. Fresh cigars were handed out and then each officer told his own story. Jacob listened intently before reproducing on the wall the scenes described, with a wave of his wand. Asked how he did it, he explained that every event that had ever occurred still existed in what he called the astral light, and could be reproduced at any time and in any place by those, like himself, who possessed the knowledge and the power.
Jacob then took the men outside to a large pond where he demonstrated the art of walking on water. Fish could be seen darting away from him as he walked to the end of the pond and back. D’Onston asked to see his shoes which looked as if he had just strolled over a wet pavement. ‘That is nothing; anyone who can float in air, can walk on water,’ Jacob said. ‘But I will show you something that really requires power.’
Bringing out the wand again, he waved it slowly round his head. Soon the air was so thick with butterflies that it resembled a heavy snowstorm. They settled on everything like a swarm of bees. He then made them rise into the air until they formed a dark cloud passing over the sun, before drifting off out of sight altogether.
As the gathering broke up, Jacob took D’Onston aside. ‘I followed him out to the verandah, and we spoke on occult subjects for a few minutes, and then he said to me. “I will give you a special experience, which will give you something to think about. Shut your eyes and imagine that you are in your bedroom in your bungalow.”’ D’Onston followed his instructions. He then told him to open his eyes. ‘I opened them to find that I was in my bedroom—three-quarters of a mile in two seconds!’ D’Onston walked out of his bedroom to the dining room to the astonishment of his friends. ‘So I sat down and told them all that had occurred.’ One of his friends then asked to see the grapes. They were still in his pocket. ‘They’re the real thing, my boy,’ said his friend. ‘Genuine English black Hamburgs.’
D’Onston waited almost twenty years before writing about what he had witnessed at Jacob’s bungalow in the April 1896 edition of the occult magazine, Borderland. Newspapers called it ‘one of the most startling stories of sensation that has appeared for many a long day … Baron Munchausen himself could hardly outdo the veracious narrative of this marvellous mage.’15
For a public hungry for anything they could find out about Jacob, the Borderland article was proof, if proof were still needed, that he was the most extraordinary wonder worker India had ever seen. But not everyone was convinced. Commenting on D’Onston’s account, the Pall Mall Gazette, which had been following Jacob’s career closely for a number of years, dismissed it as nonsense. ‘The story of his occult powers is chiefly due to his affectation of mysterious authority in order to gain influence at the native courts,’ the newspaper reported. ‘Stripped of his reputed power to transport himself instantaneously from Simla to Hyderabad, or to perform other psychical miracles, Mr Jacob is simply an astute merchant and jewel merchant gifted with a highly sensitive nature, very fond of ingenious mechanical contrivances (his phonograph is his inescapable companion) and in many ways as superstitious as an Irish peasant.’ The paper then added the following peculiar rider: ‘He keeps a perfect menagerie of dogs and is generous to the poor.’16
At the time of D’Onston’s visit in 1878, Jacob’s reputation as a wonder worker was hardly known outside India. That was about to change in ways he could never have imagined, thanks to an accidental meeting with a fresh-faced American journalist in the dining room of Lawries Hotel.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MYSTERIOUS MR ISAACS
AS the editor of a fiercely anti-British newspaper advocating Home Rule for India, Francis Marion Crawford cut an unlikely figure. To begin with, he was an American who had spent most his life in Italy, and he was an aspiring opera singer. He had once been written off by one of his aunts as a ‘shy, gawky boy, who gave no promise of any sort of genius’.1
Crawford had come to India to study Sanskrit. That, too, was an anomaly for the pampered son of one of America’s most famous sculptors. Thomas Crawford, his father, is best known for the massive equestrian statue of George Washington which stands in the centre of Richmond, Virginia. His mother, Julia Ward Howe, was an early feminist and successful poet who composed ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. She is also credited with inventing the idea of Mother’s Day.
Crawford first bec
ame interested in Sanskrit at the age of sixteen when he picked up a second-hand copy of Monier Williams’ Sanskrit Manual. Daunted by the prospect of learning 300 characters of the alphabet, he tossed the book aside. Six years later, it was the only book he took with him on a trekking expedition to the hills of Olevano Romano in Italy. After three months of camping with nothing else to read he decided to become a Sanskrit scholar.
It was Crawford’s Sanskrit tutor Doctor Da Cunha who lured him to India with the promise of a teaching position at the University of Bombay. The position never materialized but, within a few weeks of arriving in February 1879, the spoilt son of Massachusetts gentry was studying ancient Zoroastrian scriptures under the guidance of an old fire temple priest.
Down to his last £10, Crawford was so desperate for cash that he was considering enlisting in the Sixth Regiment of the Dragoons to fight in the Second Afghan War when the offer of a job at the Indian Herald in Allahabad came up. The newspaper’s previous editor had succumbed to cholera and as long as Crawford was prepared to brush aside the health risk, the position was available. He took the job on the spot.
When Crawford entered the offices of the Indian Herald in Allahabad in July 1879, the 6’2”, broad-shouldered, beef-eating American towered above the paper’s strictly vegetarian proprietor Ajudhianath Kunzru. Crawford initially got on well with Kunzru. Both men shared a love of languages. He also found Allahabad a congenial posting. As the holiest of the four sacred cities of India because of its position at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, Allahabad was brimming with Sanskrit scholars, and Crawford found no shortage of men ready and willing to help a stranger.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 9
