by Jan Morris
Yet the work that remained to be done was staggering, and perhaps not even the most sanguine New Imperialists really thought they could raise the health standards of the overseas possessions to the level of those at home. The filth and ignorance of so much of the Empire made a mockery of preventive medicine, and it was only in 1897 that the Colonial Office, under Manson’s inspiration, seriously bothered about tropical disease—until then its administrators had gone out heedless of causes and uninformed of cures. The new town of Nairobi, starting absolutely from scratch beside the Uganda Railway, blindly reproduced all the insanitary horrors of the ancient East, hundreds of cramped, dark, unventilated houses just made for disease, evil-smelling and damp with sewage. Literally millions of Indians died of the plague in an average decade: almost every great religious assembly led to an outbreak of cholera, and when, during the Bombay plague of 1897, the police and the Army took over, forcibly clearing houses and establishing sanitary zones, the people rioted in protest. In Malta, where they had not yet discovered that the goat was the carrier of Malta fever, an average of 600 British servicemen went to hospital with the disease each year, and within three years of their arrival in India more than 80 per cent of Europeans were attacked by enteric fever. During the five years it took to build the railway from the Indian Ocean to Umtali, in Rhodesia, nearly 500 Indians and 400 Europeans died: they used to run sweepstakes on the temperatures of the sick, the man with the highest fever winning the pool—if he lived.
The average Empire-builder seemed to accept these miseries fatalistically. A young man called T. E. Fell sailed out to the Gold Coast in the summer of 1897, to take up his duties with the Government, and wrote a series of letters home during the voyage. He is much concerned, poor boy, with the coming torments of the climate. He is sure to get the fever, he says, but Mama is not to worry, because everybody gets it. Still, he does wonder what it will be like, and how long it will last—though dear Mama must remember that
they all get it within a week or two, and it will be best to get it over soon. He is surprised to find how well he feels when they go ashore briefly at Freetown, but on arrival at Accra reminds his mother that, though he is sure to succumb before very few weeks have passed, she is on no account to worry about him. The days pass, though; the weather seems very pleasant; young Mr Fell, though overworked, is quite enjoying himself, and the premonitions of disease grow fewer—he is sure to get it sooner or later, of course, but in the meantime the company is agreeable enough (except for Mrs What’s-Her-Name, who is, ‘altho’ a lady, not my style, large, bouncy, slangy, colonial and drinks cocktails’). By the end of the year he seems to have forgotten about the fever, and writes cheerfully of the small black insects that infest his dinner table: ‘The more I squash the more arrive and each one squashed emits the exact odour of Worcester Sauce, so I am thinking of bringing out a patent.’1
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One gets the unfortunate impression, from the records of the time, that the British were more interested in the physical welfare of their own people than of their native subjects. It is true that they proudly claimed to have eliminated famine in India, by irrigation and by better transport. ‘If we had a complete record of the fortunes of an Indian village during the last three hundred years’, wrote Sir T. W. Holdernesse of the Indian Civil Service, ‘we should probably find that its population had ever and anon been blotted out by some terrible drought. A famine in this sense is no longer possible in India.’ But we seem to read more about the health of the British Army overseas, or the British settlers of the temperate zones, than we do of the poor natives, who were generally supposed, perhaps, to be used to it all, or beyond hygienic redemption. Kipling classed the improvement of health among the categories of the White Man’s Burden—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease
—but generally it was the Christian missionaries who seemed to care most about the bodily well-being of the tropical peoples. There were no women in the colonial services of the Empire. Compassion was not its strong point.
It was a man’s Raj, and it did much of its work simply by virile example—by putting on display the glitter, punch and profit of the scientific civilization. In everything they did the British demonstrated to their simpler subjects the power that was given man by the mastery of technique, whether it be expressed in the range of a Lee-Enfield or the tripling of crops by proper irrigation. Technical formulae, laboratory precision had been introduced for the first time into many aspects of tropical life. The standard Indian opium cake, made at the Government factory near Benares, was defined as ‘Pure opium 70 consistence, poppy petal pancakes, lewa of 52.50 consistence, and a powdering of poppy trash’—a prescription soon to be smoked away, by heathen Chinamen in fetid alcoves, into clouds of methodless delight.
The mere sight of the technical civilization was enough to stir a stagnant culture—the very fact of ice-boxes, telephones, telegraph offices, Empire No.1 ‘Incomparable’ Folding Baths. One of the symbolic scenes of Empire was that of the wondering native, confronted for the first time in his life by one of these modern marvels, and thus jolted into the realization that, though his tribal capital might indeed be the centre of the universe, and his native king the Lord of the East, West and Sunrise Peoples, still there might be something to be learnt from the white man after all. We see the aborigines of New South Wales, for instance, stopped in their tracks, as well they might be, by their first glimpse of Sydney’s double-decker steam trams—towering steel vehicles with scalloped awnings, wreathed in smoke from their traction engines. We see the Indians of the Six Nations dazed among the conifers as the coaches of the Canadian Pacific sweep by with a wail of the steam-whistle towards the Pacific. The white-robed Egyptians flutter down to Boulak, the ancient river port of Cairo, to see Mr Cook’s new steamer, Rameses the Great, bolted together from its component parts and launched into the Nile. The baffled Bechuanas, face down on their kopjes, peer to the plains below as the steam engine of the Matabele Expedition starts to chug in the middle of its laager, and the electric bulbs mysteriously flicker and light up in the officers’ mess-tent.
Often such marvels seemed to arrive miraculously packaged direct from the Great White Queen, for the British were specialists in prefabricated structures. The south-east bank of the Mersey at Liverpool was known as the Cast-Iron Shore, because so many prefabricated iron buildings were made there for markets abroad, and the catalogue of Hemming’s, the Bristol ironworks, offered a completely prefabricated hotel, with a veranda, and a substantial Gothic-style church, with tower—a popular item in Australia—at £1,000. In Salisbury, Rhodesia, the Senior Judge lived in a prefabricated house of papiermâché boards on wooden beams, imported from England and called the Paper House. It had gables and pleasant verandas, stood on brick piles, and looked comfortable enough, if a little wobbly.
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The natives saw this millennium, and it worked. As a random example take the statistics of Ceylon. It had been unified under British rule in 1815, and in the eighty-odd years since then the British had impregnated it with the material signs and values of the West. They had built 2,300 miles of road and 2,900 miles of railway. They had raised the cultivated area from 400,000 acres to 3,200,000, the livestock from 230,000 head to 1.5 million, the post offices from four to 250, the telegraph lines from nil to 1,600 miles, the schools from 170 to 2,900, the school pupils from 2,000 to 170,000, the hospitals from none to 65, the annual tonnage of shipping cleared from 75,000 tons to 7 million. They had opened 12 banks, started 35 periodicals, launched a Government savings scheme with 18,000 depositors and a Post Office Savings Bank with 38,000 depositors.
In the deepest mountain jungles of Ceylon there lived the Rock Veddahs, bow-and-arrow aborigines with straggled hair and bushy beards, who had never mastered the simplest arts of cultivation, and conducted their frugal barter incognito, leaving their honeycombs on a stone in a clearing, and only returning for their scraps of cotton cloth when the
re was nobody else in the forest.
1 The Punjab colonies expanded fast—by 1940 the Lower Chenab colony alone supported 1½ million people—and all went well with them until the irrigated land was attacked by salination, a rotting of the soil caused by a rise in the level of the underground water table. It splotches the green fields like mould, in patches of grey decay, and by the 1960s it was said that the Punjabis were losing 150 acres of land every day. The Indus Basin was split between India and Pakistan in the partition of 1947.
1 Thomson (1858–95) was the first man to cross Kenya to the Great Lakes of Africa. He was overshadowed, in his lifetime and after, by his more flamboyant rival Stanley—the Scot outcoloured by the Welshman—and once said that he was neither an empire-builder, nor a missionary, nor truly a scientist, but ‘doomed to be a wanderer’.
1 Waghorn (1800–50) was commemorated by Thackeray in From Cornbill to Cairo: ‘He left Bombay yesterday morning, was seen in the Red Sea on Tuesday, is engaged to dinner this afternoon in Regent’s Park and (as it is about two minutes since I saw him in the courtyard) I make no doubt that he is by this time at Alexandria or at Malta, or perhaps both.’
1 The present road from Cairo to Suez follows the line of the Route, and the rest-house half-way is the last of the relay stations.
1 They can when the wind is right, at some times of the year, but it would have been much easier to cross the Zambesi six miles upstream. The bridge was completed in 1905, one of its designers being Sir Ralph Freeman, who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
2 Kitchener’s line was the basis of Sudan Railways, later to become one of the most comfortable systems in the world, but Napier’s was a terrible flop—the engines would not work, the rails did not fit, vital spares and tools had been left behind in India, and the railway was only just finished in time for the withdrawal of the expedition.
1 Two of them now stuffed in the entrance hall of the Field Museum in Chicago—they had been made famous by J. H. Patterson’s book The Man- Eaters of Tsavo.
2 This line became the Kenya and Uganda Railway, with the reputation of being the best-run railway in the Empire. The original Mombasa station is no longer in use, but will all too easily be recognized by regular travellers on British Railways.
1 Later the Indian railways came to be run largely by Eurasians. At our moment the crews of the most important trains, and the masters of the biggest stations, were expatriate Britons, often former Army N.C.O.s: Kim’s father, ex-Colour-Sergeant O’Hara of the Mavericks, had become a gang foreman on the Sind, Punjab and Delhi Railway.
1 As the British Army was humiliatingly to discover a year or two later, when it seldom knew where it was during the Boer War.
1 Ross (1857–1932) was born in India, the son of an Indian Army general, and served with the Indian Medical Service. In 1894 he met Manson (1844–1922), who had been a doctor in China, had done much research into tropical diseases, and had first thought that malaria might be caused by the mosquito. To the two of them is jointly due our understanding of malaria, and they both died honoured and famous in England.
1 Fell survived until the 1920s, dying at sea while returning to Fiji after leave. He served in the West Indies too, but is said to have been lonely throughout his colonial service, so that there is a retrospective poignancy to his early letters home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Freedmen
Tides of Fundy—Tides of Fundy
What is this you bring to me?
News from nowhere—vague and haunting‚
As the white fog from the sea.
Night and day I hear fresh rumours,
From an unknown fabled shore‚
Of new orders soon to reach me,
And a summons at my door.
Bliss Carman
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IN 1897 the most-frequented route into the goldfields of the Klondike, in the north-west corner of Canada, ran from the coast of Alaska, in United States territory, over the White Pass to Lake Bennett and the tributaries of the Yukon River. To thousands of adventurers of every nationality this terrible journey was a memorable introduction to the Pax Britannica.
Skagway, the Alaskan port at the foot of the trail, was perhaps the most lawless town on earth. It was one enormous confidence trick, a municipal swindle, totally beyond the control of Washington and run by a villain of superlative skill called Jefferson Randall Smith—‘Soapy’ Smith to history. Almost everything in town was geared to the fleecing of innocent new-comers, as they spilled hopefully off the ships from the south. Teams of rogues met them on Smith’s behalf—‘The Reverend’ Charles Bowers, ‘Slim Jim’ Foster or ‘Old Man’ Tripp—posing as philanthropists of one kind or another, and exquisitely skilled in techniques of robbery, fraud or extortion. Skagway was infested with Smith’s spies, stooges, tame lawyers and sham charities. The Merchants’ Exchange, the Cut Rate Ticket Office, the Civic Information Bureau, the firm called Reliable Packers—all were front organizations for Soapy Smith. So was the Telegraph Office, across whose counter many a new-comer passed his safe arrival message and his fee, for there was in fact no telegraph line to Skagway. The fates seemed mysteriously to conspire against the gullible new arrival: and when at last he found himself, bruised, dazed, cheated of all he had, homeless and destitute in the streets of Skagway, sometimes Soapy Smith himself, breathing shocked and charitable concern, would offer him just enough cash to get him back to Seattle again, grateful at the last and well out of the way.
From this dream-like Gomorrah, where nothing was what it seemed, the more resolute or sceptical prospectors set out nevertheless for the Klondike, shouldering what was left of their gear, and labouring up the long steep mountain trail, deep in snow, that was to remain for ever in the world’s memory.1 Up they stumbled, boot to boot, shrouded in dark greatcoats, loaded with bales and packs and crates, dragging their tortured pack-horses up the ice like figures out of Dante. Thousands of pack-animals died on the way, to be pushed over the brink or trampled underfoot: but so long as the pass was open the rush continued, the rabble behind forcing on those in front, so that the line of stampeders seldom stopped or broke, but moved inexorably, day after day, towards the bleak and windswept summit of the pass.
On that summit flew the Union Jack. There the Queen’s territories began. In a wooden hut half-buried in the snow waited the officers of the North West Mounted Police, very British, staunch and gentlemanly, with their Queen’s Regulations, their files and their always gleaming brass buttons. They had a Maxim gun to keep villains out, and in that cruel semi-Arctic setting they diligently imposed the imperial standards. Nobody could enter Canada over the White Pass unless he had a year’s supply of food and all the necessary equipment to survive. Horses with sores or injuries were shot at once, to prevent unnecessary suffering. The injured were given first-aid, the perplexed were advised, Smith’s men were sent packing back to the coast, all were checked and counted. Massive in their fiir hats and immense beaver coats, the Mounties were like images of order up there, sure and incorruptible. After the fantasies of Skagway they must have seemed wonderfully substantial.
The Mounties had moved into these regions only three years before, when the first prospectors reached the Yukon. It was debatable whether they really had a right to control the White Pass, for the frontier between Canada and the United States was not demarcated: but their presence in the Yukon, and the tradition of British authority which they represented, made the Klondike gold rush like no other. Violence was almost unknown, even in the gaudiest days of the stampede. In Dawson City, the most extravagant of the boom towns, with its clapboard saloons along the Klondike River, its gambling joints and its brothels, its flamboyant millionaires and its fabulous consumption of liquor—even in Dawson City the proprieties were scrupulously balanced. A girl might set up as a prostitute indeed, in her crib on Paradise Alley, but she certainly might not flaunt herself in a belly-dance, or show her knickers on the music-hall stage. A man could get roaring drunk six nights a week,
but he must not talk obscenely, brawl, or speak disrespectfully of the Queen. Children might not be employed in saloons, spirits might not be sold to minors, ‘using vile language’ was one of the most frequent charges in the police courts—a well-known badman from Kansas was once ejected from a Dawson saloon simply for talking too loud.
As for Sundays in that rip-roaring little metropolis, they were as absolutely sacred as Victoria herself could demand. The bars, theatres and dance halls closed at a minute before midnight every Saturday night, and not a whisky was sold again, not a hip was wriggled, not a bet was placed, until two in the morning on Monday. The Sunday sounds of Dawson City were psalms and snores. No kind of work was allowed. Men were arrested for fishing on a Sunday, or for sawing wood. The only hope of living it up, between Saturday night and Monday morning, was to take a boat downriver and slip across the line into the States—out of reach of the Pax Britannica and its stern schoolmarm values.
