by Seth Hunter
The brig began her salute and a string of signal flags broke from the halyard to inform the port authorities that she was carrying despatches for the governor and had not a minute to waste on their petty constraints; the hands were already trimming her yards for the last stage of her journey across the harbour entrance and up the seaway to Parel Island and Government House.
‘The good little bay,’ said a voice at Nathan’s ear and he turned to see the ship’s captain – Captain Hale – genial and relaxed for once, his duty almost done. He had been taut as a spring cable on the voyage from Bassara, rarely off the deck night and day, and, even as they entered the gulf, Nathan had seen him glaring at the clouds massing at their stern, as if they would deny him his goal even at the last. Nathan smiled and nodded, though he was surprised at the sentiment, for Hale was a lugubrious soul at the best of times, and his first lieutenant a veritable Jonah. Hale and Hearty, Tully called them, with sardonic humour. But the good little bay was not an expression of personal attachment.
‘That is what the Portuguese called it,’ the captain continued. ‘Bom bain. The English had another name for it, less gracious: “that hole of a place where the Portuguese come to mend their ships”. Not such a hole now, though, eh?’
Nathan looked across the water towards the crowded waterfront. What little knowledge he had of Bombay had been picked up from a book that had been lent him by one of his fellow passengers, an Anglican curate returning to India after a year’s furlough back in England. It had been a fishing village when the Portuguese first came here, over two centuries ago. They had built a factory and a fort, even a shipyard, but their principle occupation was the building of churches – churches and monasteries, and even a cathedral. The good little bay. But the King of Portugal had so little regard for their devotions that he gave the place to Charles II of England as a dowry for his daughter, Catherine of Braganza – and the Merry Monarch thought so little of this offering, he promptly rented it to the East India Company for ten pounds a year.
The return on that meagre investment would have bought all the kings and princes in Europe.
‘There you go,’ said Hale, handing Nathan his glass. ‘Up on the knoll beyond the quay.’
Government House had been a Franciscan monastery when the Portuguese owned the islands, but to Nathan it looked more like a Mughal palace, with its ornate balconies and arched windows, the palm trees bowing gently in the breeze and the Union Jack waving a lazy greeting from the flagstaff on the lawn.
They took the launch ashore, Nathan clutching the bag with his precious despatches and the chest full of silver coins at his feet. He thought it would make a good impression to hand it over to the governor for safekeeping: if he took it as a bribe, then so be it – Nathan had no objections to a bribe in a good cause. He was a long way from home; he needed all the help he could get.
He had given little thought to the problems he might encounter at the end of his voyage, but now he was here the full weight of his office descended on him – not so much fear of the French as a renewed apprehension of his own side. There were some who might be disposed to resent the instructions of a British admiral in a faraway place, and the imposition of a man whose only knowledge of the place came from a book he had borrowed from a fellow traveller. Jonathan Duncan, thirty-fourth Governor of Bombay, might well be among them.
‘Odd fish,’ Hale had said. ‘Not everyone likes him. But he knows India, I’ll say that for him. Been here a lot longer than most. If he takes to you, you will be up and running. If he doesn’t …’
He had left the sentence unfinished, but the implication was obvious. Nathan could make his bow, deliver his despatches, and take the next ship home by way of the Cape.
A part of his mind was still attached to the journey he had just made. It was filled with golden images of the Tigris: the women washing their clothes at the side of the river, the men in the fields, the perpetual motion of the earthen jars on the waterwheels. And crossing the desert, his eyes filled with sand and sun, his nose with the smell of the camels, his ears with their raucous, groaning bellow. He could hear it now, and the curses of their attendants, so that it was as if he was still there, making camp for the night. Save that he was sitting in a barge with the company ensign at the stern, among the sounds and the smells of the sea, the slapping of the wavelets on the hull, the cries of the gulls. And there was something very English about the little harbour below Government House with its jetty and cottages, even something that looked very like a tavern, and a small fort on the headland with another Union flag. There was even a church – God and Mammon, united in awesome majesty. It felt as if all the time he had been moving forward, the earth had been moving back – in time and in space – and suddenly he had been deposited in a small fishing village in Sussex, before the war.
Then, as if his mind and his ear had been searching for it, he heard the tinkling sounds of a harpsichord, and a woman’s voice raised in song. He could not hear the words clearly – it might even have been another trick of his imagination, or his memory – but the lyrics echoed in his head:
I wish I were a scholar
And could handle the pen
I would write to my lover
And to all roving men
I would tell them of the grief and woe
That attend upon their lies
I would wish them have pity
On the flower when it dies
It was as if someone had reached out and stabbed him; he could hardly breathe, so strong was the sense of melancholy, and loneliness and desolation he felt.
‘You are always looking at the stars, my love. You forget the flowers at your feet.’
Who had said that to him? It was even sadder that he could not remember.
The launch had muscled into a small space among the vessels on the quayside and made fast. Hale had already stepped onto the wooden jetty and was looking up at him questioningly. Nathan took a tighter grip on his bag, filled with a horror of dropping it overboard at the last minute and watching helplessly as everything it contained, his own future with it, sank to the bottom of the harbour, and stepped across the narrow gap and followed the captain ashore.
Chapter Ten
The Tiger and the Goat
His Excellency the Governor of Bombay stood in the window of his study and looked out across the neat lawns of Government House towards the black storm clouds on the distant horizon.
The monsoon should have been over by now, and its lingering presence seemed ill-omened, a sign of heavenly disfavour. Even as he looked a flash of lightning lanced out from the centre of the storm – as sudden and venomous as a striking cobra – and he flinched, as if he had been singled out personally for the retribution of the gods.
He grunted impatiently at his own foolishness. The church bells were still ringing in celebration of the great victory that had been won 2,000 miles to the west. If the gods were not celebrating with them, then be damned to the gods.
‘You arrived just in time,’ he said, still gazing out to sea. ‘It seems the Elephanta still has one last kick left in her.’
‘The Elephanta?’
‘You have not heard of the Elephanta?’ Now he turned from the window and regarded the figure in the easy chair at the far end of the room. His tone was brusque, bordering on rude. ‘Name of the wind. Comes with the south-west monsoon. Been the death of more than one ship, even in Bombay harbour. Hits you at sea, you’d soon know about it.’
He sat at his desk and laid his hands on each side of the despatch that had been delivered to him, drumming his fingers on the smooth, polished surface of the wood: solid Indian teak intended for the garboard strakes of a gun-brig and presented to him by the shipbuilders of Surat in appreciation of his continuing patronage. His enemies would call it a bribe. Be damned to them, too.
It has been in my power to take eleven sail of the line, and two frigates; in short, only two sail of the line and two frigates have escaped me.
Yes. The fin
gers continued their brisk tattoo, beating to quarters. It had been a great victory. And even if it had not been so great, even if the numbers had been reversed, with just two sail of the line taken and the rest escaped, the governor would still have ordered the church bells to be rung, for, God only knew, they needed something to cheer about; some good news from home to boost the morale of his people – and remind his enemies who they were dealing with. He had already had the letter copied by his clerks for despatch to the governor-general in Calcutta, and he would make damned sure that bloody usurper in Seringapatam heard of it too, even if he could not send it to him by courier. Not if he did not want the courier fed to his tigers.
And yet … He set his spectacles on his long nose, the better to read that other paragraph, the one that concerned him personally:
From all the inquiries which I have been able to make, I cannot learn that any French Vessels are at Suez, to carry any part of this army to India. Yet I know that Bombay, if they can get there, is their prime objective.
‘If they can get here,’ he repeated dryly. He shot his visitor a look from under his shaggy brows. ‘Think you can stop them?’
‘Well, I will do what I can. I am at your command.’
The governor regarded him over the top of his spectacles. He was a dark-looking cove, almost as dark as a native. You might have taken him for one if it had not been for the uniform. Dark as an Arab. All that gallivanting across the desert, the governor supposed, all that mucking about in a sambuk on the Tigris. But it did not look as if it had been too tiring a journey. In fact, he looked as if he had just strolled in off the Bombay Island ferry to pass the time of day. But then he was young – too damned young, in the governor’s opinion. Give him a month or two in this fever swamp – that would age him, that would take the shine off him. Turn him into as much of a walking corpse as the rest of them.
Jonathan Duncan had been out in India for twenty-six years and he knew it showed. He was forty-two and looked and moved like an old man, even by the standards of Bombay where men could age ten years in an evening – and be dead by morning. Old Duncan, they called him, ‘the Guvnor’, if they had a fondness for him, ‘the Old Goat’, if they did not, and most did not. He knew what they said about him.
Spends all day shuffling around Government House in his slippers and dressing gown, with his hair hanging down to his shoulders, like a miser in a counting house.
That was the commander of the garrison, in his journal, a few days before the fever took him and his effects were delivered to the man he despised. He had even had the nerve to write to the company directors in London to make a formal complaint. Shows no respect for the dignity of his office, he had written.
Much good it had done him. Much good it would do any of them. Duncan did his job and he did it well. The directors weren’t complaining.
He had come out to India as a boy of sixteen, back in 1772. Just after Clive had won Bengal for the British and made the Honourable Company the greatest power in the land. Duncan’s role in this triumph was less spectacular. He had been a lowly clerk, the lowest of the low, grafting away in the company’s service for fifteen years – until Cornwallis made him supervisor in Benares and he showed what he could do.
And now he was Governor of Bombay.
He had been in the post for three years now. Longer than the average lifespan in a place like Bombay. For a European, that is. Two monsoons and you’re dead, people said. If the climate didn’t carry you off, the cholera would, or the typhus or any one of a dozen other diseases endemic to the place. But it was not going to happen to him. It might age him, it might turn his skin yellow and make his hair drop out, but it was not going to kill him; he had too much to do.
He was presently engaged in building a wall to hold back the sea. Then he was going to drain the land and turn seven islands into one, with a causeway linking it to the mainland. The Duncan Causeway. Bombay was going to be the greatest city in Asia one day, maybe the world. He might not live to see it, but he was damned if he was going to let some jumped-up tart of a French general put him off his stride, before he had barely started.
‘Trouble is, now you’ve sunk his fleet, he’s got nowhere to go,’ he grumbled. ‘Can’t go back. Might as well go forward.’
‘Sir?’
‘This – Bonaparte.’ He glanced again at the admiral’s letter. ‘Italian, ain’t he? They run out of generals of their own?’
‘He is from Corsica,’ the newcomer drawled. ‘You have not heard of him?’
‘Of course I have heard of him,’ the governor snapped. He might play the fool all he liked, he was damned if he was going to be taken for one. ‘We may be damned colonials but we can read despatches. We even have newspapers. I read all about his romp through Italy. Just didn’t expect him to come knocking at my door.’
‘Well, I hope we may be able to prevent that.’
Duncan regarded the speaker thoughtfully. Yes, I heard you the first time, he thought. He knew what was on the fellow’s mind. He adjusted his spectacles on his nose and studied the last paragraph – the postscript – the sting in the tale.
The officer who carries this despatch to you possesses my instruction, subject to your approval, to assume command of those of His Majesty’s naval forces that are available to him in order to prevent the despatch of French troops and materiel to India. I recommend him to you unreservedly as an officer of great merit and distinction in whom you may place the utmost reliance should you wish to place your own naval resources at his disposal.
The governor was not sure he liked the sound of that. He was not sure he liked it at all.
Possesses my instruction … to assume command of those of His Majesty’s naval forces that are available to him? What was that supposed to mean? His Majesty’s forces in Bombay consisted of just one ship – the old Pondicherry, captured from the French in 1793 and on her last legs, by all accounts. She had just emerged from the shipyards at Surat after her latest surgery, having her knees mended, or something like that – the fourth or fifth time she’d been in the yard since they had taken her from the French. It would be far cheaper to scrap her, but she kept the flag flying, he supposed. The only other naval forces in the region were the company’s own – the ships of the Bombay Marine. It was true that the directors had applied to the Admiralty to recommend a ‘serving officer of distinction’ to act as commodore, but this was just flannel, a diplomatic gesture to ensure the Admiralty’s continuing support for the policies of the Honourable Company. The officers of the Bombay Marine were servants of the company. They were paid by the company and pensioned by the company and they swore an oath of loyalty to the company. And if they needed a commodore, the company would provide them with one. They were not at the beck and call of the Royal Navy, no matter what this Nelson fellow thought. Who the Devil did he think he was?
Well, the answer to that was plain enough. He was a British admiral. A victorious British admiral. A bloody hero. He had just won one of the greatest victories in the annals of the Royal Navy. The church bells would be ringing out for him all over the British Empire, never mind Bombay. If they had made Jervis an earl after the Battle of St Vincent, it was very likely that they would make this fellow a duke. King, Parliament, the whole country, would be singing his praises. What was the Governor of Bombay to a man like that? Jonathan Duncan? Who was Jonathan Duncan? He could hear them now, if he as much as raised a whimper of protest.
Even so. It was a damnable piece of impertinence. And he wasn’t going to roll over for them. He owed it to the company to make a stand. He owed it to himself. He owed it to the officers and crews of the Bombay Marine. He was not going to subject them to a gibbering idiot who had never heard of the Elephanta. No matter how many admirals he had in his corner. And if he did, he was going to make it perfectly clear who was in charge here – and it wasn’t Sir Horatio-in-the-Mouth-of-the-Nile, or even their lordships of the Admiralty.
‘We have our own Bonaparte over here, you know,’ h
e said. ‘I wonder if you have ever heard of him?’
The fellow frowned a little, inclining his head in polite enquiry.
‘Tipu the Tiger,’ said Duncan. ‘Mean anything to you?’
The frown cleared. ‘The Sultan of Mysore.’
‘Indeed. The Sultan of Mysore. So what do you know about him? Because he is a lot nearer to us than Bonaparte at the moment and a damn sight more dangerous.’
The fellow nodded. ‘I am aware of the danger he poses. I confess I know little of his character or his power …’
‘Well, let me endeavour to inform you before we go any further. Fatah Ali Tipu, to give him his proper name, Sultan of Mysore – we call him the Tiger, not on account of his military prowess, but because he has a passion for the brutes. Keeps them in cages in his palace and lets them wander around the palace when the mood takes him. Even got a mechanical one that eats a British soldier. No, I am quite serious. It’s an organ. Play a tune while it’s doing it, by all accounts.’
‘A live British soldier?’
‘No. Good God, man. A wooden soldier. Tiger eats it while it’s playing. Tiger growls, soldier screams. No, he’s got real tigers for eating people. So they tell me. Feeds his prisoners to them. Oh he’s a charmer, no mistake. His father was Hyder Ali. Never heard of him? Well, never mind, we’ve only fought two wars against him. He was an army officer but the old rajah made him commander-in-chief, which was more than a little foolish of him, because Hyder Bloody Ali locked him up and took the crown himself. Though, of course, being a Musselman, he called himself Sultan. Brought in the French to train his army for him and set about making war on his neighbours. When he died, his son took over – this is Tipu. We’ve only fought one war against him – so far. Which we won. Trouble is we didn’t kill him. And you know what they say about a wounded tiger?’ He doubted if the fellow did, but he could probably guess.
