Pax Britannica
Page 7
In 1859 a consignment of twenty-four wild rabbits arrived from England at a property near Geelong in Victoria. There had already been English rabbits elsewhere in Australia, but they had never spread like the Geelong tribe. Finding itself without natural enemies, and taking to bearing extra litters, the rabbit presently became one of Australia’s horrors, multiplying so appallingly that in many areas it actually seemed likely to defeat the human settlers, and take over for itself. By the 1870s rabbits were all over Victoria. By the 1880s they infested New South Wales. By the 1890s they had stormed right through Queensland almost to the Gulf of Carpentaria, in the extreme north. They ate everything, up to the flowers outside the farmhouse doors. Fences hundreds of miles long were erected in hopeless efforts to check them, and against the meshes thousands of rabbits could often be seen, dashing themselves in horrible frenzy. The New South Wales Government, blaming it all on Victoria, offered a prize of £25,000 for an effective remedy, and one grazier was said to have spent £40,000 of his own money, before he gave up and left the country. Rabbits were shot, trapped, poisoned with doctored carrots, assaulted by specially imported stoats and weasels: but they increased so fast that one traveller in the 1880s reported they scarcely bothered to move to let his carriage pass. ‘They frisked about in troops, ran after each other on the sands, and could be seen by hundreds sitting at the entrance to their holes.’ Louis Pasteur suggested introducing chicken cholera, which he had used against rabbits in France, but the Australians fought shy of a virus, and at the end of the century much of Australia was still ravaged or threatened by the rabbit, in a more nightmarish plague than ever the Egyptians invited.1
Diseases were often spread by the energies of Empire. Sometimes the original explorers transferred them. In 1891 Frederick Lugard led a force of some five hundred African soldiers, with wives, children and followers, from the Congo into Uganda. With them he took the sleeping-sickness, never before known in those parts, but so deadly that by 1897 nearly two-thirds of the local population had died of it, and the British still had no idea how to counter it. Almost every year meningitis sailed from Calcutta with the coolie ships for the West Indies, and in return the jigger insect, indigenous to the Americas, found its way from Mombasa across the Indian Ocean to Bombay. Hookworm was taken all over the world by indentured labourers from India. British ships often took cholera to the Far East, hidden away in bottles of holy water from the well Zem Zem, one of the five holy places of the pilgrimage to Mecca.
6
Saddest of all, in their irrepressible impulse to control, instruct or exploit the simple peoples of the world, the British all too often introduced them to the ailments of the civilized condition. Cancer, appendicitis and tuberculosis appeared for the first time in such elysiums as the South Sea islands. The pleasures of sex were corrupted at last by fears of syphilis and gonorrhea. Stout confident peoples, ready to face any hazard of heat or jungle terror, found themselves impotent before enemies they could not understand. The Eskimos of northern Canada were slaughtered by measles and smallpox. The Maoris of New Zealand, introduced to firearms, slaughtered each other, the death rate being compounded by ancient laws of blood-revenge. There were thought to be some 70,000 Indians in British Columbia in 1835: by 1897 there were 22,000.
The hierarchy of Britishness was extended. At one end of the Queen’s scale stood the British themselves, casting their shadows across the world. At the other end were the aborigines of the Australian Outback, ravaged by white men’s sicknesses, demoralized by white men’s examples, a people so debased and disinherited by the Pax Britannica that they seemed almost ready to dissolve into the dream-time that was their conception of the afterlife, where the unborn babies danced in the spirits of rocks and springs, or were supervised upon the shores of eternity by that homely governess, the turtle.1
1 Wakefield (1796–1862) first evolved his colonization theories in Newgate prison, where he was serving three years for the abduction of an heiress. He believed that land values in new colonies should be kept deliberately high, to encourage well-balanced settlements, and that revenues from land sales should be used to finance further emigration.
1 An achievement once defined by Halldor Laxness as ‘clearing away boulders, uprooting tree-stumps or digging ditches, and then posing in collar and tie in a photographer’s studio’.
2 A sly Canadian political anecdote concerned Walter Scott, an early Premier of Saskatchewan, which acquired provincial status in 1905. Scott had hired a young English immigrant to drive him around his prairie constituency during an election campaign, often spending the night in tents. Said Scott one evening: ‘Well, you’d be a long time in England before you could say you had camped with the Premier.’ ‘Yes,’ the Englishman replied, ‘but you’d be there a damn sight longer before you’d be Premier.’
1 There are still many Dawes there, and by now their roots are far deeper than most Britons can claim at home. It was a Mr Dawes who, standing in his garden above Conception Bay, once pointed out to me across the water the spot where his forebears had first landed in the seventeenth century, and then, with a sweep of his arm, the successive hamlets into which they had spread over the generations. Not many families in Britain could view so wide a landscape with such dynastic intimacy.
2 Cupids never made its fortune. It remains a straggle of wooden houses about the bay, with a one-man canning plant, a couple of shops, the United Church of Canada and the Orange Lodge.
1 It was of this system that the young Winston Churchill, when Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, told the Commons in 1906: ‘It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.’ What a legacy it has left to the world! The South Africans have been trying to get rid of their Indians ever since, even offering to pay their passages home to India: in 1932 the Union Government devised a scheme to resettle them all in British Borneo, British Guiana, and British New Guinea, but nearly half a million of them remain. Indians form the largest ethnic group in British Guiana and are actually a majority in Fiji, and most of the Indians in East Africa are descended from coolies brought over to build the Uganda railway in the 1890s. Less than 5,000 Indians, however, live in Australia today.
1 He returned to Cairo in 1901, died in 1911 and is now, of course, an Egyptian national hero.
2 Negroes often appear in unexpected imperial contexts. In the village of Alutnuwara in Ceylon a couple of old muzzle-loading guns are used as gateposts. Nobody knows how they got there, but one story is that they were brought by a Negro regiment, commanded by a single British officer, which was transferred to Ceylon during a nineteenth-century rebellion. The officer, it is said, died of fever, and the Negroes gently melted into the environment, finding themselves local wives and living happily ever after.
1 In 1965 the last of the Afghan camel-men lived in an old people’s home at Alice Springs. After some fifty years in Australia he remained a devout Muslim, and asked many difficult questions about the state of the faith in the world—how many mosques were there in New York, was there still a minaret in Perth, was it true that Yugoslav Muslims ignored the rules about ablutions before prayer? So deep was the impression made by these men upon the Australians that to this day the transcontinental railway, the successor to their camel-trains, is nicknamed ‘The Ghan’ in their memory.
2 The lepers, the lunatics and the sheep have gone, the rabbits and convicts remain.
1 In the 1950s the rabbits were still costing Australia some £A6o million a year. Myxomatosis then laid them low, but by 1967 they were reviving, and the Australians were reduced to pumping into their warrens a foam impregnated with carbon-monoxide from motor-car exhausts.
1 Since then the Eskimos, the Maoris and the British Columbia Indians have all made remarkable recoveries. By 1967 there were more than 40,000 Indians, 11,500 Eskimos and nearly 200,000 Maoris, and the chief threat to all of them was only absorption int
o white society. Even the Australian aborigines are increasing.
CHAPTER FIVE
Pioneers
I pine for the roar of the lion on the edge of the clearing;
For the rustle of grass-snake; the bird’s flashing wing in the heath:
For the sun-shrivelled peaks of the mountains to blue heaven rearing;
The limitless outlook, the space, and the freedom beneath.
William Hamilton
5
BENEATH a low kopje on the Makabusi River, 150 miles south of the Zambesi and 400 miles from the Indian Ocean, there stood at this time in fine rolling country a settlement of low brick buildings, with roofs of corrugated iron. Some had verandas, some were stark as shoe-boxes, and they were separated by wide strips of bare ground, worn by wagon-tracks and sometimes lined with scraggy trees. This was the township of Salisbury, Rhodesia, seven years old that summer, and only one muddy stage removed from the outspanning of the pioneers. Salisbury was a proper frontier town: a raw outpost of the British way, set in a territory largely unexplored and inhabited by African tribes so unpredictable that only a few months before the settlement had been in a state of siege, with the entire white population beleaguered in the police compound. Down the generations a long succession of such frontier posts had been created by the British, each maturing with time and stability, until their roads were paved, their savages restrained, their saloon toughs genteel in collars and ties and their natural avarice clothed respectably in municipal councils and benevolent societies. Salisbury was one of the latest, and was still making its way. Up at the cemetery a row of neat new iron crosses marked the graves of men killed in the Mashona rebellion a few months before. No epitaph was given them, nor even a home address: only the final imperial text: ‘For Queen And Empire’.
Cecil Rhodes, the most visionary of imperialists, had decreed the foundation of Salisbury. As Prime Minister of the Cape, and one of the great mine-owners of the Kimberley diamond fields, he had looked northward from South Africa and seen that the territory of the Mashonas and the Matabeles, between the Limpopo and the Zambesi rivers, was ripe for the British touch. For one thing, he was dreaming of that All-Red route from the Cape to Cairo. For another, he wished to turn the flank of the unfriendly Boers of the Transvaal Republic. Thirdly, he really did believe that the extension of British influence in Africa would be good for the Africans. Fourthly, he thought there might be gold up there. He had therefore induced King Lobengula of Matabeleland, who held some sort of sway over both the Mashonas and the Matabeles, to grant him a mining concession in those areas, and then persuaded the British Government to allow him a Royal Charter, authorizing him to govern and administer them. He formed a Chartered Company, the British South Africa Company, to occupy the country, and in 1890 he sent a column of pioneers northwards into Mashonaland.
Two hundred young men had formed the nucleus of this column, with an escort of five hundred police. They had been carefully recruited as the embryo of a new white colony, and included farmers, miners, engineers, lawyers, doctors, builders, artisans and miscellaneous adventurers. They had travelled under military discipline as soldiers, but when they reached Mashonaland they were disbanded and let loose as civilian settlers. A young pioneer called Frank Phillips, who travelled in many parts of the Empire in the 1890s, summed up their attitudes thus: ‘There was much swearing at times, and a fond wish never to see old England again until pockets were pretty well lined with the needful.’ The origins of Salisbury were therefore rough but not altogether ready—many of the pioneers were totally ignorant of Africa and the outdoor life. The concessions extracted from Lobengula were morally dubious, for he had little idea how much he was signing away, and the Company’s right to administer the country at all, however confidently it had gained the imperial assent, was morally shaky. The local tribes, secretive Mashona, mercurial Matabele, repeatedly turned on the settlers, and Lobengula, finding himself dispossessed, proved a bitter enemy until his death in 1893. There had been two major wars against the Matabeles, and that summer the Mashonas were still in rebellion. Disease had ravaged the settlers’ cattle. The gold reefs had proved disappointing. All in all things had not been easy, and Salisbury had developed a wiry, rather bitter, often bigoted kind of self-sufficiency, mud on its boots and guns on its shoulders.
2
It was a sign of the imperial times that Rhodesia, an enormous and carefully ill-defined slab of territory, should be governed by a Company. The New Imperialism was easily fired by dreams of freebooter and buccaneer, and was also much concerned with private profit: and prominent in its lore were the grand old companies which had created the original Empire, established the imperial routes and planted the first trading posts—the Levant Company, Hudson’s Bay, the Gold Coast and Gambia Companies, above all the East India Company, a major power in itself, with its own armies, warships, diplomats and currencies. Inspired by these swashbuckling examples, the British conceived the idea of re-creating such companies of adventurers, both to blaze new trails and to administer new possessions of the Crown, as they had done long before. Since 1882 four Chartered Companies had been formed, and given sovereign rights in various unexploited parts of the Empire. The system was admirably suited to men like Cecil Rhodes, who saw in it the chance both of profit and of almost sovereign power, and his British South Africa Company was much the biggest and most ebullient of them all.
It was a company, but more than a company. You could not look it up in the Register of Companies, because it was not obliged to register under the Companies Act. In the field it could acquire territory, make treaties, administer laws, levy taxes and custom duties, coin money, maintain its own armed forces. Rhodes saw it partly as a means of exploiting the wealth of the country, but partly as a specific instrument of British expansionism. Its chairman, the Duke of Abercorn, said at its first annual general meeting that the shareholders were more interested in earning dividends than in any ‘high political or philanthropic motives’. They hoped to be backing a new Rand. To Rhodes, and to the Imperial Government in London, the Company was also a convenient way of keeping foreigners out of the country, and binding the whole of Southern Africa more closely within the Empire.
The headquarters of the Company was in Kimberley, where Rhodes had made his fortune, but its roots had been carefully planted in the British hierarchy. Two Dukes and a V.C. were on its board, and its air of realistic patriotism attracted the best kind of investor. Its all-embracing concessions extended half-way up the east coast of Africa, merging indefinitely with the British protectorate in Nyasaland: south of the Zambesi it dealt with London through the Colonial Office, north of the river through the Foreign Office. Its flag was the Union Jack with a lion in the middle and the letters BSAC. Its stamps showed the Company crest supported by springboks and surmounted by an imperial lion. Its motto was ‘Justice, Freedom, Commerce’. It laid its own railways, built its own roads, ran its own courts of law, was served by its own district officers and telegraph services. The men who settled under its auspices were absolutely its subjects: every immigrant was bound to abide by its laws, and defend its possessions if called upon. In return the Company helped to settle them, supplied stock at reduced terms, distributed free seed and undertook to buy crops. It was a sort of feudalism.1
3
‘As for us,’ said the Rhodesia Herald, dutifully celebrating the Jubilee, ‘in this distant corner of VICTORIA’S domain, no matter what our troubles, we join in the deafening shout that will, today, go up in the space before St Paul’s—“Long Live The Queen!”’ But elsewhere the paper was full of dispatches about the Mashona troubles, and in the shops they were selling Robert Baden-Powell’s book on the Matabele campaign of the previous year (‘guilty’, the Herald reviewer thought, of ‘glaring inaccuracies and execrable taste’). The air was full of bloodshed, grievance, and warlike rumour. ‘I estimate there were considerably over 100 natives’, reported Captain van Neikerk of the police, in a dispatch to the Chief Staff Officer i
n Salisbury, describing how he and four others had recently attacked a couple of Mashona kraals. ‘I managed, almost at the cost of my life, to capture the chief alive, he was very nearly putting an assegai through me. … Trooper Hellberg also captured a woman and three children. … I must bring to your notice the gallant and brave manner in which Sergeant Major Weeden, Sergeant McAdam and Trooper Hellberg behaved yesterday in the fight, considering the enormous odds the four of us had to contend with.’
Salisbury naturally felt tense. There were still only a thousand citizens. The railway had not yet reached the town, and all communication was by mule-coach or ox-wagon. The coaches, built like the Australian mail-coaches to the Cobb pattern, were dragged along by spindly sore-covered teams of animals, and were often jammed with twelve passengers inside and seven or eight on top. The wagon trains, sometimes of thirty oxen, hauled their covered wagons with fearful labour through the veldt, men and beasts co-operating to drag them across rivers or up precipitous bluffs. Even these tenuous links were threatened now by the rinderpest, a vicious cattle disease which had killed thousands of animals throughout East Africa that summer: the transport riders were desperately inoculating their oxen by soaking strings in the lung-fluid of a victim, and threading them through their tails—if the inoculation ‘took’ the tails presently dropped off, and the animals were immune.