Empire
Page 6
James Cook belongs to the cadre of modestly born, determined individuals who were to carve out imperial possessions across the world, a man you could tell to do a job and be confident that he would carry it out, even if it cost him his life – as in his case it eventually did.* He seems to have been immune even to the charms of the Polynesian women with whom so many of his crewmen contracted relationships (and to whom, all too often, they gave a dose of venereal disease). A tall figure with a small head, a farmer’s complexion and a strong, beaky nose, he had been born in 1728 in a cold, two-room thatched cottage in north Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer. By eighteen he was working on a North Sea coal-ship, and on joining the Royal Navy his exceptional navigation and charting skills earned him rapid promotion to the rank of master.
The voyages of exploration carried out under James Cook’s command expressed the combination of motives which drove the new expansion of empire. Inevitably, competition with the historical enemy was part of it. When, in the 1760s, the Fellows of the Royal Society heard that Paris was planning to dispatch expeditions to watch the transit of Venus across the sun (a predictable astronomical event vital for calculating the distance between the earth and the sun), they were troubled, demanding that Britain should do the same. The vessel which would carry British ambition was a one-time coal-ship, renamed the Endeavour. She was of no great size (a mere 106 feet long and under 30 feet wide) and was so crammed with scientific instruments that when she reached Rio de Janeiro the viceroy there found it impossible to believe that anyone would have embarked on such a dangerous expedition merely in the interests of science. Concluding that they must have some ulterior motive (he suspected spying or smuggling) he refused to allow the crew ashore. The 7,860 pounds of sauerkraut on board might have driven him to the alternative conclusion that the ship’s captain was mad. That was certainly the conclusion the crew came to when Captain Cook attempted to force them to eat it.
Cook got his way by insisting that the officers eat the stuff, at which point the sailors demanded they be given the same privilege. It certainly saved some of their lives – as Cook intended – by protecting them from scurvy, the scourge of long-distance mariners.* This was an experiment with an immediate imperial application, for if British sailors could survive long journeys without becoming sick, the Royal Navy could defend territory anywhere. But the nutritional research was incidental. The main scientific purpose of the Endeavour’s voyage was encapsulated in Joseph Banks. Although much less well known than Captain Cook, in his way – both for what he did and for what he represented – Banks is every bit as significant a figure. In class, background and education he could hardly have stood in greater contrast. Where Cook had made his own way in the world, Banks was the son of an MP, had been educated at Eton and Oxford, was heir to a comfortable estate in Lincolnshire and was fifteen years younger than Cook. He stood over six feet tall, and oozed the confidence of inherited wealth. But he shared Cook’s commitment to exploring and claiming the world for the empire. (If he’d had his way Iceland would have been part of Britain.) In later life, festooned with the usual Establishment garlands of a baronetcy, public appointments and fashionable portraits, he became an enthusiastic proposer of the colonization of Australia; and it was he who supervised the shipping of plants to the new colony and he who contrived to smuggle high-quality merino sheep from Spain and thence, eventually, to Australia where they became the core of the national herd.
But his greatest contribution was in firing a popular belief in the intellectual and scientific purpose of empire. To say Banks was a devoted botanist fails quite to convey his obsession: there are plenty of stories of his being arrested for vagrancy after being discovered rolling around in hedgerows and ditches while out plant-hunting. As a student at Oxford he had paid out of his own pocket for the Cambridge professor of botany to deliver a series of lectures. He corresponded with the great Swedish ‘prince of botanists’ Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy. More than eighty plants carry his name and he is given the credit for introducing species such as the eucalyptus and mimosa to Europe: as a result the domestic gardens of Britain bear the stamp of imperial exploration. Banks’s unquenchable thirst to see, touch, weigh, measure and classify the natural world expressed the European Enlightenment’s belief in science and rationality, and when talk began of an expedition to the South Seas he immediately proposed that he – and an entourage of assistants, two artists, four servants and two greyhounds – be included. The Royal Society endorsed the application of what they called ‘A Gentleman of large fortune who is well versed in natural history’. The Admiralty was powerless to resist.
The two men were a formidable team. Cook was a great navigator and resolute captain, willing to enforce his beliefs in warding off scurvy by having those who refused his diet flogged: the expedition reached Tahiti without losing a single man to the disease. Apart from the ‘pestiferous’ flies which even ate the paint off botanical paintings as the artists worked, the island turned out to be a pleasant enough destination, populated by a gentle, sensual people whose women were unusually attractive. The Tahitians proved to have remarkable thieving skills, but the president of the Royal Society, the Earl of Morton, had advised the expedition to treat the native people they encountered kindly. In a note of guidance quite at variance with the usual depiction of brutal imperialists, he asked them ‘To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms … shedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature … They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.’ This was a comparatively easy request to heed, for the women wore few clothes and the main currency of barter seems to have been sex, which the islanders readily traded for hard-to-obtain commodities like iron: a British vessel visiting Tahiti not long before was said to have begun to fall apart as sailors levered the nails from the beams before they went ashore. On his return to England at the end of the voyage, Banks was caricatured as ‘the Botanic macaroni’* who had been so seduced by the beauty of the women of this tropical paradise that he had returned to the Endeavour from one field trip stripped of almost all his clothes. As he explained things, it was the misfortune of the British to live in a changeable climate, where they were ‘obligd to Plow, Sow, Harrow, Reap, Thrash, Grind, Knead and bake our daily bread’, whereas in Tahiti, ‘Love is the Chief Occupation … both the bodies and souls of the women are modeled into the utmost perfection for that soft science.’
(In time, this belief in what we might call the climatic theory of empire provided an apparently scientific justification for the expansion of Britain overseas: societies living in changeable, temperate weather of the kind that afflicted small islands off the coast of Europe were obliged to work hard to make the earth yield crops, which in turn created ambitions, markets, banks, law and decent government. Tropical islands, where nature was more obliging, were obviously backward and needed to be brought to a higher level of development.)
Eventually, though, the expedition had to move on. Captain Cook had been issued with a secret set of orders from the Admiralty which he was to follow once the transit of Venus had been observed. These made clear a set of political and commercial objectives, too. From Tahiti he was to sail to explore the Great South Land believed to exist at the bottom of the world, to claim in the name of the king any new territories he came across, to make friends with any natives he encountered, and, at the end of his journey, to seal all logbooks and journals and hand them to the Admiralty. The crew were to be forbidden to talk of where they had been until given official permission to do so. This intelligence-gathering of distant parts would ‘redound greatly to the Honour of this Nation as a Maritime Power, as well as to the Dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and may tend greatly to the advancement of the Trade and Navigation thereof’. After three months in his Polynesian paradise, Cook departed to fulfil his orders. After a further three months, his ship reached the two islands of New Zealand, w
hich he sailed around in a figure of eight, raising the flag on each and claiming them in the name of George III. Then, on 31 March 1770 he set his vessel westwards. Within a few weeks they had struck land again.
They had discovered the east coast of the world’s only island continent. It would be another thirty years before Banks’s protégé Matthew Flinders managed to circumnavigate what came to be called Australia, thereby demolishing the ancient myth of an enormous landmass covering the South Pole which had lain behind Cook’s secret orders.* Joseph Banks’s first impressions of the new continent were odd. He thought ‘the countrey … resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair’. But his ideas about the place improved after Captain Cook put into a bay where the crew caught a lot of stingrays and Banks could go ashore, foraging for specimens. He returned with such an abundance of previously unrecorded leaves and flowers that Cook named the anchorage Botanist Harbour, which later became Botany Bay. Nine years later, when called before a parliamentary committee grappling with what was to be done about the bursting state of Britain’s prisons, Banks advised that the continent’s fertile soil, mild climate and absence of fierce wild animals made it ripe for use as a penal colony.
It was the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 which had brought the prisons issue to a head. The American colonies had long been a dumping ground for British criminals – selling offenders as labourers for the term of their sentence was a great deal cheaper than paying to accommodate them in prisons. When the colonies refused to accept any more convicts, the government simply locked them up on derelict ships moored in the Thames or off the English south coast. The hulks were clearly not a long-term solution, yet the drift of population into the growing cities and the rising cost of food ensured a steady stream of new inmates. When gangs of soldiers discharged from the army after the American war turned to crime, the need to find some alternative became urgent. There was talk of a penal colony in Africa* – a new cargo for the first leg of the triangular trade. New Zealand was ruled out because the Maoris were said to be too fierce. Canada did not want riff-raff. Pilot-schemes for Honduras and Newfoundland failed. New South Wales, on the other hand, offered the advantage of being a very, very long way away and, as for the indigenous people, they were nomadic and would soon wander off somewhere else.
In January 1788, the first consignment of over five hundred male and nearly two hundred female felons arrived in Australia, aboard eleven vessels. The scenes that occurred when the previously segregated men and women came together after the best part of a year at sea may be imagined: on the first Sunday, the mission’s commander, Captain Arthur Phillip, preached a sermon in which he heartily extolled the benefits of marriage. Many of the first white settlers took his advice. Over the following eighty years a further 161,000 convicts arrived in Australia.
Because he was born in the county, Captain Cook is generally included in most lists of famous Yorkshiremen. Yet his father was not English, and Cook might almost as easily stand for the new nation which was stamping itself upon the world. The British Empire was the creation of ‘Britain’. But much of it was made by Scots.
A century earlier, as they watched the English accrue wealth and status from their overseas possessions, the Scots had begun to chafe at the unfairness of it all. The far edges of the Atlantic already nourished a New England. New France stretched from Canada towards the Gulf of Mexico. New Spain was governed by a viceroy in Mexico. Where was the New Scotland? Nova Scotia had not been a roaring success, King James only persuading socially ambitious Scotsmen that it was a worthwhile destination by the age-old expedient of promising honours – baronetcies in this case – for those who would export a few settlers there. Scotland – or the Edinburgh Establishment – yearned for more.
Cometh the hour, cometh William Paterson, who in 1696 persuaded the worthies of Scotland that he had just what they needed, in a plan for a ‘New Caledonia’ at Darien, on the thin strip of land between North and South America: from here, he claimed, the Scots would be able to trade with the Far East and so break the monopoly held by the English East India Company. Paterson had already hawked his settlement scheme around England, Holland and the Holy Roman Empire, and in each place they had seen him off. But, like a good salesman, after each reverse he refined his patter. Now he talked of the Panamanian isthmus as ‘the door of the seas and the key of the universe’. ‘Trade will increase trade,’ he told them, ‘and money will beget money, and the trading world shall need no more to want work for their hands, but will rather want hands for their work.’ To a small, comparatively poor country living in the shadow of a much wealthier, mightier neighbour, this was beguiling talk: the Scots leaped at the idea and begged Paterson to take their money. According to some estimates, a fifth of the entire wealth of the country was invested in the Darien Scheme – others claim the figure was much higher. The first five ships set sail for the New World in the summer of 1698. But the unfortunate investors had reckoned without the fact that the climate in Darien was beyond filthy and soon the colonists began to die in alarming numbers. The local Indians turned out to be not much interested in buying their trinkets. The Spanish were under the impression that the whole area belonged to them, and eventually besieged the settlement of New Edinburgh. The English colonists in North America and the Caribbean refused to help supply the Scots because they did not want another fight with Spain.
Despite the dismal fate of the first settlers, a second fleet set out in late 1699, swept along on gusts of missionary fervour, acquisitiveness and national pride. This time the thousand additional settlers carried a cargo which included lots of little blue bonnets which they had been persuaded that local tribespeople might be desperate for. They were, unsurprisingly, unable to find a market for them in the jungle. The settlers’ predicament was not made any more comfortable by three earnest ministers accompanying the expedition, who were soon wandering the jungle wailing to the settlers that ‘We’re all doomed.’ The settlers’ sins – or their vanity, unpreparedness or sheer bad luck – had found them out. The Darien Scheme was a disaster. Henceforth – apart from the occasional privateer – the Scots’ only choice was to throw in their lot with the English.
The massive debt which now hung around the necks of so many eminent Scots was certainly one of the reasons for the 1707 Act of Union, which merged the governments of England and Scotland: apart from the relief of their debts, the commercial opportunities were enormous – as Robert Burns put it, the country had been ‘bought and sold for English gold’. In return for surrendering their independence, the Scots gained generous representation in the Westminster parliament, while retaining their own legal and religious settlement. The attraction of Union for the English was the elimination of a potential colonial rival and the extinction of a commercial menace. Most of all, it seemed to promise an end to hundreds of years of suspicion, hostility and periodic war. Peaceful Union in turn created the possibility of a new international identity, which found common cause in a shared commitment to stable government, the monarchy, the military and Protestantism, all of which could find a focus in the empire. Many Scots seized with both hands the opportunities which now lay open to them. As early as 1731 a Scottish director of the East India Company was writing irritably to his brother asking him to stop recommending any more men for medical positions, ‘for all the East India Company ships have either Scots Surgeons or Surgeon’s mates, and till some of them die I can, nor will, look out for no more, for I am made the jest of mankind, plaguing all the Societys of England with Scots Surgeons’.
The suppression of the last Jacobite rising in 1745 clinched things. Now the imperial project became increasingly attractive also to Stuart families, who needed somehow to make up the wealth confiscated by a vindictive government in London. In Sir Walter Scott’s words, India became Scotland’s ‘corn chest … where we poor gentry must send our youngest sons as we send our black cattle to the south’. For educated but indigent Scots, the empire wa
s a blessing, and in the last quarter of the eighteenth century no one did more to promote their interests than the Edinburgh-born Tory minister and ‘uncrowned king of Scotland’ Henry Dundas. In Gillray’s famous cartoon he stands, kilted, with one foot in London and the other in India, as fleets of merchant ships pass between his legs. Three of his brothers made the journey to the subcontinent, and two of them never returned. But India was much more than a family business: so great was Dundas’s more general patronage that the wit Sydney Smith observed that ‘as long as he is in office, the Scotch may beget younger sons with the most perfect impunity. He sends them by loads to the East Indies and all over the world.’
A pattern had been set. In the two centuries following the Union, Scotland provided governors, governors general, residents, district commissioners and agents. In the wildernesses of northern Canada the Hudson’s Bay Company was represented by Orcadians. Kilted Highlanders were glorified for their roles in the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War. Tropical newspaper offices were presided over by men with soft Highland accents. Lowland doctors treated tropical sicknesses. Scots built enormous trading companies, created botanical gardens, commanded merchant vessels. There were Scottish farmers, shopkeepers, lawyers and teachers everywhere. ‘We want more Scots. Give us Scots. Give us the whole population of Glasgow,’ screamed the mayor of Sandhurst, South Australia. Glasgow itself was soon calling itself ‘The Second City of the Empire’, the Clyde was an imperial artery, and when a Glasgow company met the military’s request for the world’s first instant coffee (Camp Coffee – it had a large dose of chicory mixed in) its label showed a Sikh bearer waiting on a kilted Gordon Highlander. David Livingstone was a Scotsman and there were many, many more where he came from. Scottish engineers built roads and railways, bridges and barracks, everywhere.* There were Highland Games in Alberta and Burns Nights in Singapore. ‘Thank God we’re all Scots here,’ remarked Sir George Mackenzie, managing director of the Imperial British East Africa Company. Let the Edinburgh-born doctor Leander Starr Jameson, the reckless leader of the Boer War shambles that was the Jameson Raid, be the standard bearer for these empire-builders. He was the inspiration for Kipling’s ‘If’. A century on, it is still regularly voted the nation’s favourite poem.