On the evening of 24 June, the shelling stopped. After a couple of hours the British sentries watched as a figure emerged from Nana Sahib’s lines. It was a stumbling, barefoot woman, and as she came closer they identified her as Rose Greenway, one of Nana Sahib’s prisoners. She was carrying a piece of paper. It was addressed to ‘The Subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’, and it offered safe passage by boat down the Ganges to Allahabad, well over 100 miles away. The officers argued hotly over whether the promise could be trusted and whether they should accept an offer of any kind. But the place was filled with sick and dying and General Wheeler had learned that they had a mere three days’ supply of food left. So, on the morning of 27 June, summoning what was left of its dignity, a miserable procession made its way to the riverbank. All were gaunt and haggard, military uniforms tattered, many of them in their underclothes. Those who could walk helped to carry the sick and wounded. ‘The old – battered and bruised –’, recalled one of the very few survivors, ‘babbled like children; others had a vacant stare in their eyes, as if they beheld visions of the future. Many a little child was raving mad.’
When they reached the water’s edge they found a flotilla of boats waiting and those who could do so waded out to them, dragging the injured. In what seemed a surprisingly kind gesture, Major Edward Vibart of the 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry found that Indian soldiers he had previously commanded insisted upon carrying his bags. Then suddenly, instead of pushing off, the boat crews jumped overboard and from all around the rebels – including those who had just carried Major Vibart’s bags – poured musket fire and grapeshot into the boats. The thatched roofs on some of the vessels caught fire, and those who leaped into the water and made it to the bank then had to evade the swords of mutineer cavalrymen in the shallows. Captured British soldiers were either shot or beheaded, their bodies tied into bundles of five or six and thrown in the river. A single boat escaped, chased downriver by rebels, and eventually two English officers and two Irish privates struggled ashore in territory belonging to a sympathetic rajah to tell the story of an almost unthinkable calamity.
But the worst was still to come at Cawnpore. Over one hundred women and children who had been previously captured and had not been part of the safe-passage offer were gathered together and forced into a nearby bibighar, the flat-roofed single-storey building built to house the native mistress of an English officer. Here, with very little food and in unspeakable conditions, the relatively healthy attempted to nurse the many sick and wounded, tormented by the July heat and jeered at by their gaolers. Finally, after almost two weeks of imprisonment, a group of mutineers approached the building, forced the muzzles of their muskets through the shutters and opened fire. This was too inefficient to act as a final solution, so, late in the afternoon of Wednesday, 15 July, five men, two of them butchers in their aprons, opened the doors of the building and went to work. One of them emerged twice from the building to get a new sword, because he had broken the blade. Within an hour, the screams had come to an end. Wives, daughters and more than a hundred children had been dismembered. The next morning, as a crowd of spectators looked on, a team of scavengers was sent into the building and, to their astonishment, discovered among the human remains a few women and children huddled against the wall, covered in the blood of the corpses among whom they had spent the night. Seeing the open door, two women ran outside and threw themselves down a well in the yard. The scavengers then threw the limbs, torsos and heads of the dead after them. The children who had survived the night were either thrown alive into the well after them, or decapitated.
The well was 50 feet deep and 9 feet across, but the rebels were afraid that not all the corpses would fit down the shaft. So they chopped some up and used the pieces to fill the gaps.
The next scene in what the historian Sir Charles Crosthwaite later called ‘the Epic of the Race’ took place at Lucknow, capital of the province of Oudh, some 50 miles away. Nineteenth-century European visitors had been astonished by the opulence of the city, adorned as it was with columns and gilded domes, gardens and fountains. ‘Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople: not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and so beautiful as this,’ an awestruck foreign correspondent wrote of the place at the time; ‘the more I gaze, the more its beauties grow on me.’ This luxury long predated the arrival of the East India Company, but, unsurprisingly, its traders liked what they saw. At first they had treated the province as a buffer state against the Mughal Empire, to protect Bengal. But, as the Company’s confidence grew, they began to assume control, through the usual arrangements of installing local residents (representatives) and engineering the succession of pliant nawabs. (One of these, a visitor reported, ‘would surprise visitors by appearing dressed as a British admiral or as a clergyman of the Church of England’. The nawab’s main object of affection was an English drayhorse, which he fed so extravagantly that the wretched animal could hardly move.) By the mid-1850s the province of Oudh – often called ‘the granary of India’ – provided the British with a steady income, a little of which was used to keep the nawabs sweet. The British community maintained retinues of servants, played cricket and croquet, worshipped their God, held horse-races, entertained each other to dinner, staged amateur theatricals and kept bands which had been taught European tunes.
When the revolt struck Lucknow, the party ended. The following extracts are taken from different days in the 1857 diary kept by an English clergyman’s wife:
It is impossible to describe the horror of the last few days. Captain and Mrs Macdonald and their children were murdered, the poor babies snatched out of their parents’ arms and cut to pieces before their eyes …
I walked round our fortifications last night with James; they are wonderfully strong, and the engineers say we can hold out against any number as long as provisions last …
Poor Miss Palmer’s leg was shot off this afternoon …
Very heavy firing all day: ten Europeans wounded: five buried this evening …
Poor Mr Polehampton is seized with cholera. There is no hope of his recovery …
Mrs Hersham’s and Mrs Kendal’s babies died: they get diarrhoea, for which there seems no cure …
Part of the roof of the Residency fell in this morning and buried six men of the 32nd; only two were dug out alive …
The smell in the churchyard is so offensive that it has made J. quite ill; and when he came back he vomited about two hours incessantly …
Mr Graham committed suicide this morning; he was quite out of his mind …
Three prisoners were brought in, and were undergoing a summary trial by drum-head court-martial, when a round shot struck and killed the trio …
The hospital is so densely crowded that many have to lie outside in the open air, without bed or shelter – amputated arms and legs lying about in heaps all over the hospital and little can be done to alleviate the intense discomfort and pain of the poor sufferers …
Mrs D.’s baby was christened this afternoon. Charlie D. was one godfather; I stood proxy. There were twenty-five funerals this evening …
Poor C.D. was quite delirious when I went to him this morning. It will indeed be wonderful if he lives, for not a single case of amputation during the siege has recovered …
This horrific drama was being played out in and around the elegant red-stone buildings the British had had built for them at Lucknow. The most imposing of these was the vast Residency, the seat of British power, and the scene of balls and investitures, billiard tournaments and concerts. Now it was punctured by cannonballs and reeked of sickness and decomposition. The improvised fortifications around the compound eventually extended to a circumference of about a mile. Inside, at the start of the siege, sheltered almost 800 British soldiers, about 50 drummers, 160 European civilians, 720 loyal Indian troops, a further 700 camp-followers and some 500 women and children. They were surrounded by the best part of 10,000 mutineers and supporters. One of the striking aspects of the diarie
s and recollections of the survivors is how the spirit of free enterprise which had animated the British in India still flourished in the appalling siege conditions, with some people almost starving, while others enjoyed dinners accompanied by sherry, champagne and claret. When someone died, their effects were auctioned off, with astonishing prices being commanded by food and soap.
As the siege dragged on for month after month, conditions inside the barricades grew worse and worse. Traders who had never wielded a gun took duty on the battered walls, one of them wearing a suit cut from the baize which had covered the Residency billiard table. At the sound of another assault, men struggled from the makeshift hospital to the battlements, the strain causing their wounds to reopen. Wives made bandages from their underclothes, nursed the wounded and prepared what food was available, which, the moment it was laid on a plate, was so covered in flies that no one could see what it was any longer. Children ran messages (the local school at La Martinière was subsequently awarded a British medal for the role played by its pupils). From outside the compound the mutineers taunted them with British bugle calls and turned British artillery on British citizens. Starving pack animals and horses went mad and then died, adding to the stench of severed limbs and overflowing latrines. Some especially horrific vignettes became particularly well known later, like the mother who sat sewing with her ten-year-old daughter and a baby at her side when a cannonball crashed through the wall and tore off the little girl’s head. The shock was so great that the mother lost her milk and her baby died of starvation. Those not killed or maimed by the incoming fire were prey to cholera, smallpox, dysentery and scurvy: by the middle of July, Europeans were dying at the rate of ten each day (none of the records seems to have bothered with a tally of the number of loyal Indians who perished). The chaplain’s wife recorded that her husband had had to conduct 500 funerals inside the embattled compound.
Just when it seemed things could get no worse, they did. A relief force fought its way through to the Residency and then became trapped inside; the main consequence was that there were now many more mouths to feed, and no more food than previously. (One of the rebels’ taunts was to mount chickens and chapattis on poles and wave them at the defenders.) Finally, in November, a second relief column reached Lucknow. When the soldiers broke into the rebel strongholds, slaughter was savage and indiscriminate. Women and children died alongside the mutinous sepoys – anyone attempting to surrender was bayoneted. But the ‘Cawnpore Dinner’ – 6 inches of steel – was just the start of it. ‘The scene was terrible,’ said a Lieutenant Fairweather, ‘but at the same time it gave me a feeling of gratified revenge.’ Loyal soldiers now butchered any rebel they could find, beheading some and trying, literally, to tear others to pieces. A witness counted nearly 2,000 corpses dragged by elephants from the rebel positions to be thrown into mass graves.
The savagery of the British revenge afterwards is striking. Entire villages were burned down; mutineers were smeared in pig fat before execution, tied to the muzzles of cannon and blown to pieces. At the site of the Cawnpore massacre rebels were made to lick the dried blood from the floor of the bibighar. In particular, there was the treatment of women and children to be avenged. A brigadier serving in Punjab believed that the gallows were too good for the mutineers. ‘Let us propose a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi,’ he said. ‘The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening.’ Such a reaction was only to be expected of a military man who had previously demonstrated his commitment to law and order by personally lopping the heads off criminals and piling them up on his desk. But the desire for vengeance affected everyone. Charles Spurgeon, the ‘Prince of Preachers’, thrilled an audience of 25,000 at the Crystal Palace in London when he told them that it was time for a holy war on the Indians. The Mutiny became the stuff of epic poetry and bad art. Edward Armitage’s hugely popular painting Retribution caught the mood – an enormous, well-muscled Britannia towering over the corpses of a mother and child, driving a sword into the chest of a tiger. The Times demanded that ‘every tree and gable end should have its burden in the shape of a mutineer’s carcass’. ‘I wish I were Commander in Chief in India,’ the normally quite civilized Charles Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts. ‘I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested … and raze it off the face of the Earth.’
Mercifully, wiser counsels prevailed. Although it earned him the contemptuous nickname ‘Clemency’ Canning, the Governor General, Viscount Canning, attempted to insist that punishment be confined merely to those Indians who had perpetrated specific acts. He even abolished the East India Company’s Doctrine of Lapse, which had given Nana Sahib such incentive to join the rebels in Cawnpore. But although he presided over an administration which established the first Indian universities, developed a new penal code and devised and revised the taxation system, Canning was never quite the hand-wringing liberal that his nickname suggests. While he appreciated the need to nurture an elite sympathetic to the British, the peasants were another matter. ‘Our endeavour to better, as we thought, the village occupants of Oudh has not been appreciated by them,’ he said, and therefore they deserved ‘little consideration from us’. But he was wise enough to recognize that confiscating their lands would merely provoke resentment. Canning concluded that if the peasants were going to retain their blind fealty to local chieftains, then the British might as well do whatever they could to make life better for the existing ruling class. From now on, the British would run much of India with and through the indigenous princes, a form of indirect rule that would become a model for elsewhere in the empire. Most significantly, the British realized that India was too important for its government to be left in the hands of a commercial company, however grand. From now on, India would fall under the Crown. This made Canning the first man to become viceroy of India. The old poetry-writing emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, direct descendant of Genghis Khan, was taken under cavalry escort from Delhi on a bullock cart, and eventually exiled to a prison in Burma where he died. At four in the afternoon of 7 November 1862, Captain Nelson Davies watched as his body was lowered into an unmarked grave inside the prison compound. Captain Davies reported to London that, after a speedy interment, turf was laid on the grave and a bamboo fence erected at some distance, so that ‘by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests’.
Chapter Five
‘We had scarcely breakfasted before he announced to me the startling fact that he had discovered the sources of the White Nile’
Richard Burton, 1860
In June 1774 a Scotsman arrived in London telling astonishing tales. His appearance was quite astonishing, too – 6 feet 4, with a shock of red hair and a very bad temper. His body bore the evidence of captivity and of long wandering in the mountains; he had parasitic worms in his leg, malaria and dysentery. He was also said to have survived an elephant charge. The desert had affected his breathing, so that his lungs were reported to ‘heave like an organ-bellows’. Sometimes, when he was especially animated in conversation, his nose would begin to bleed.
He had been, he said, in a country called Abyssinia where he had braved lions and crocodiles, met holy men who ‘had neither ate nor drank for twenty years’ and witnessed remarkable things – banquets in which meat was carved from live cows tethered to a table, and raucous orgies in which there was ‘no coyness, no delays, no need of appointments or retirement to gratify their wishes’. Most importantly, he had stood in a patch of swamp and raised half a coconut shell to propose three toasts, first to King George III, then to the girl he (wrongly) believed to be waiting for him at home, and finally to Catherine the Great, to celebrate something amazing. For James Bruce claimed to have become the first European to have travelled to the source of the most celebrated river in the world.
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p; If this was true, Bruce had settled a question which had baffled learning since long before Ptolemy. (As it turned out, it was not true – he was nowhere near the source of the White Nile, and the place he was celebrating – which was not even the place where the Blue Nile began – had anyway been ‘discovered’ by a Portuguese priest many years previously.) Bruce was fêted in London and elected a fellow of the Royal Society, even though the Society’s president considered him a ‘brute’. But not everyone quite believed him. Dr Johnson, who had appointed himself an expert on Abyssinia, thought Bruce ‘not a distinct relater’ and soon came to doubt whether he had been to that country at all. Many of the public agreed. The author of the fantastical Adventures of Baron Munchausen dedicated one of his volumes to Bruce, saying they might be useful to him on his next journey. None of this mockery made Bruce – who retired back to Scotland – a particularly happy man. He had a right to be angry, for much of what he claimed to have seen was confirmed by later travellers. Most of all, while he might not have put the source of the Nile on the map, he had lodged the search for it in the public mind. James Bruce was a man ahead of his time. Within twenty-odd years of his arrival in London, the British began to develop an almost insatiable curiosity to know more about what lay beyond their little island. This appetite for knowledge of the world expressed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment. But it was more. In the person of the individual explorer on a dangerous mission, the empire united personal challenge, the destiny of mankind and the political purpose of the nation. To map was to conquer, and conquering led to ownership. The dogged struggles of their countrymen in desert and jungle gave the British a deep conviction about their national destiny and those who died while attempting to plant the flag achieved a sort of martyrdom.
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