by Alec Waugh
This was a flagrant breach of justice, and the British public recognized it as such. They demanded an inquiry. Eyre faced the inquiry with dignity and composure, satisfied that he had carried out his duty. He was convinced that Gordon had inspired the revolt. Fine points of the law had to be waived at a time of crisis. You have to make swift and stern decisions. The French had not been firm enough in Haiti. But a course of action that may appear reasonable when blood-maddened hooligans are chanting ‘It’s buckra blood we want’, appears in a very different light under the calm scrutiny of a court of law. The inspectors had nothing but praise for the promptitude and courage with which the governor had acted, and for the skill with which he had localized the disturbance, but they were unable to find any proof of an organized rebellion.
The trouble was that all the chief witnesses were dead. It seemed to the court of inquiry that the whole thing was unpremeditated. There had been admittedly a demonstration outside the courthouse; local resentment had in the first place risen over the leasing out of some land to small occupiers, to whom it was felt injustice had been done. As a result of these first disturbances, a number of warrants had been issued. Feelings were running high. Then the incident of the woman and the boy had started a mob riot. It was the kind of thing that can easily happen in a hot place with a hot-blooded populace that has a sense of grievance. Had any of the leaders of the demonstration been still alive, it might have been shown under cross-examination that the outbreak in Morant Bay had been planned as the spearhead of a general rising, but the leaders were all dead. The only real proof of a plot was that the demonstrators had marched up to the courthouse as though they had been drilled for it. Very few of them were armed with muskets, a few swung cutlasses, but the majority only carried cudgels which a witness described as not being ‘decent, pleasing sticks such as you would choose to walk with’. The procession had been joined by vagrants, and it may well have been that the first stones were thrown by them. When the riot had begun, and the murders had been committed, events had followed a logical course. As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. While they were still at liberty, let them glut their hatred. That was the judges’ verdict on the incident in general. In the view of that verdict, the judges could not fail to condemn the measures that Eyre had adopted after all resistance had been broken. His treatment of captives was inhuman; in particular the floggings. By maintaining martial law long after it was necessary, he had given licence not only to British troops but to the Maroon volunteers. Martial law was the suspension of all law, and it was recommended that in future colonial governors should be denied the right to declare martial law.
In view also of that verdict no case could stand against Gordon. Eyre’s policy had been directed by his belief that Gordon was plotting to turn Jamaica into a second Haiti. Gordon was a friend of the rebel leaders, and in the Morant Bay post office were found addressed to them two pamphlets written by Gordon on The State of the Island; and it was Gordon’s enemies, the men who had opposed his churchwardenship, who were murdered in the courthouse. He had announced publicly that in a few years’ time all the whites would have left the island. But he had been many miles away from Morant Bay when the action took place; he had been illegally transported thither so that he could be tried by court martial. It transpired during the investigation that prisoners had been flogged until they admitted Gordon’s guilt, and that a brigadier had never delivered to Gordon a letter of legal advice that had been sent to him while he was awaiting trial at Morant Bay. There is no doubt that the governor was resolved to rid himself of the turbulent Baptist. It was as much a murder as Banquo’s was. He had only one defence – ‘the man on the spot knows best’.
The man on the spot is always in a dangerous position. A situation arises without warning. He has to trust his instinct, and he is judged subsequently by men and women who cannot appreciate the emotional vibrations in the air and the irrational responses of unbalanced human beings. It is hard to judge in a cold climate things that happen in a hot one. Similar situations constantly arose during the period of European domination over coloured peoples.
This particular scandal was not, however, to end with the findings of the royal commission and the recall of Governor Eyre. It was to become a cause célèbre, on which the final curtain did not fall until July 1872.
During six years of acrimony and argument, in which jury after English jury had to listen to the rival claims of relative responsibility, families were to turn against each other and political parties were to be divided. The outcry following General Dyer’s shooting of the Indians at Amritsar fifty years later was shorter and less violent. Ideologies were involved. T. H. Huxley described the case as ‘at bottom one of the most important constitutional battles in which Englishmen have for many years been engaged’, while John Stuart Mill, whose last years it shadowed with failure and disappointment, asserted that ‘the question was whether the British dependencies and eventually perhaps Great Britain itself were to be under the government of law or of military licence.’
Timing is the secret of success. An international best-seller might well have passed unnoticed had it been published three years later or three earlier. A scandal only becomes a conflagration when a high pile of dry timber awaits ignition, and in 1865, England was in a highly inflammable condition. The country was enjoying a period of unparalleled prosperity. It had not been involved in a major war for half a century; its empire was supplying it with the raw materials that its factories were turning into exportable merchandise. The world needed its coal and steel. But this prosperity was built upon the squalid living conditions of the working classes. And that condition was stirring the conscience and rousing the indignation of the same type of man who, two generations earlier, had protested against the slave trade, with men like Ruskin inveighing against the industrialists who would shorten the lives of their labourers by thirty years a life if they might get needle packets twopence cheaper. The proletariat not only had a grievance but a mouthpiece.
At this time it had no vote. The middle classes had been enfranchised by the Reform Bill of 1832, which was in itself a revolution, and during the rioting the victor of Waterloo had to barricade his windows against the London mob. The proletariat was now demanding equal rights, and the aristocracy, the merchants and the middle classes were exceedingly apprehensive. What would happen to the country, or rather what would happen to them, if the rabble got control? A few years earlier a strike of the Builders’ Union for a nine-hour day had been backed by organized labour, and radical members of Parliament were demanding an enlargement of the franchise. During the summer of 1866 the Reform League was sponsoring demonstrations. Artisans in Trafalgar Square were brandishing red flags; the railings of Hyde Park were being stormed; the mob was on the move. It was not surprising that authority should have seen a kinship between the Negroes of Morant Bay and the rioters in London streets. It must, moreover, be remembered that less than ten years earlier the Indian mutiny had been attended by a series of atrocities on white women. Might not Governor Eyre have protected the planters of Jamaica from a similar fate?
On the Eyre issue the country was split in two. During the American Civil War, upper and middle class British opinion had been on the side of the Confederate south, while the British radicals formed an Emancipation Society in London to back the northern cause. This group included John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown s School-days. In Lancashire the Union and Emancipation Society of Manchester was even more influential.
A similar situation arose out of the Eyre case. As has been previously explained, much of the trouble in Jamaica had been due to the missionary activities of the nonconformist sect which held its meetings in a side street off the Strand, from which headquarters they became known as the Essex Hall Group. When the news of the massacres in Morant Bay reached London, this group immediately went into action, and under the letter heading of the Jamaica Committee demanded justice. Nineteen members of Parliament were members
of this committee, which was headed by John Bright, the leader for reform in the House. Thomas Hughes and John Stuart Mill were two of its most prominent members. It listed no members of the House of Lords, but a great many clergymen, and it was largely due to the energy of this committee that the Royal Commission was sent out to hold its court of inquiry. Many of the members of the committee were satisfied with the findings of the Commission. They felt that their protest had been vindicated; but the more violent wanted more. They demanded retribution and resolved to prosecute Eyre for murder, it being one of the curious features of English law that any subject of the Crown may instigate before a magistrate an action against any other. These threats forced a conservative faction to defend the ex-governor.
The timing of the drama contained so fruitful a coincidence that a novelist would have hesitated to include it in his narrative. It was on the very day after the riots in Hyde Park that Eyre embarked at Kingston for his return to England. He was given a proud send-off. The wharves were thronged. A military band played ‘God Save the Queen’. On board he was presented with an address of praise by a committee representing over a thousand of the leading merchants and planters, thanking him for his services to the island. Another address was presented by the bishop and clergy of Kingston. Eighteen months earlier he had been an object of distrust to those very signatories, but his prompt action at the time of the rising had erased, for them, the record of his deficiencies. Flags were dipped in his honour, and at Port-Royal a seventeen-gun salute was fired. It is reported that there were tears in the governor’s eyes as he made his final speech.
‘I now retire into private life, dismissed from the public service, after nearly a lifetime spent in it, but I have at least the consolation of feeling that there has been nothing in my conduct to merit it, nothing to occasion self-reproach, nothing to regret.’
He left with a heavy heart and with considerable apprehension as to the reception that he would receive in England, for he was aware that plans were in preparation to have him tried for murder. He could scarcely have been more surprised at being welcomed at Southampton by a committee of local gentlemen who announced that they wanted to give a dinner in his honour. He had not known when he embarked that twenty-four hours earlier the railings of Hyde Park had been pulled up by an indignant mob. He could not have guessed how the events of that day would make a number of Britons reassess their opinion as to the action of the colonial governor. ‘The mob’ was on the move. And Eyre had become a symbol of the necessity for enforcing order in an unstable world.
The dinner of welcome was held a week later and was to prove symptomatic of the conflicting viewpoints held by Eyre’s fellow countrymen. The address which was signed by many hundred worthy citizens of Southampton assured him that by his ‘firmness and determination, joined to that prompt action which alone makes a man in authority equal to the occasion’, he had saved an important colony and protected the lives and properties of loyal colonists. They expressed their regret that he had been ‘sacrificed to circumstances as many a great man has been before’. A hundred diners, who were presented to the guest of honour, included in their number Lord Cardigan, the commander of the light brigade at Balaclava, and the novelist Charles Kingsley, who was at that time Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. The speeches in the ex-governor’s honour were warm and vigorous, and at the dinner’s end Eyre jubilantly voiced his relief at the public vindication of his conduct.
His relief was to be short-lived, however. Outside the hall where the dinner had been held had gathered a large crowd of local toughs, yelling for that ‘bloodthirsty tyrant’. They surrounded each carriage as it passed, trying to open the doors to see if Eyre was in it. The coachmen lashed their horses, forcing a way through the throng, and there were many injuries. At the same time, in another part of the city, the more sedate section of the opposition was holding a meeting of protest against the dinner. Next day the story of the evening, the speeches of Cardigan and Kingsley, the mob hysteria and the protest meeting at the Victoria Rooms, was headline news throughout the country. Six years were to pass before the issue was finally closed.
The story of those six years has been recently told fully and entertainingly by Bernard Semnel in The Governor Eyre Controversy. It was a breathless battle. On one side there was the Jamaica Committee raising funds for the prosecution of Eyre and two of the officers involved in Gordon’s trial; on the other was the Eyre Defence Committee raising funds for the ex-governor’s defence. And one of the curious features of the controversy was the unexpected sides on which various public figures were aligned. A number of writers entered the arena, as writers invariably do on such occasions, and they would have been expected to take the side of the underprivileged, but this was not so in this case. Eyre numbered among his followers Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens, while the Jamaica Committee could only offer in retort Thomas Hughes, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and John Stuart Mill, not one of whom could be classified as a man of letters. It was not surprising to find Carlyle, with his veneration of ‘the hero’, taking the side of the strong man, but Dickens was a democrat, the poor man’s friend, the founder of the Daily News. He was not, however, a radical. In Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities he had shown his distrust of mob hysteria. He was an admirer of Carlyle; as a family man he was a respecter of law and order. But though he registered his vote against chaos, he took no active share in the committee’s work; and the committee was ubiquitously busy.
There were questions and motions in the House, there were letters to the Times and to the Daily News. Eyre was prosecuted twice, once on a charge of murder and once for high crimes and misdemeanours. On the first occasion the case was heard before a Shropshire bench, with the defence superbly argued by an advocate who was later, as Lord Halsbury, to occupy the woolsack, and the magistrates dismissed the case. On the second occasion the evidence was heard in London before a grand jury whose foreman announced that ‘twelve honest men and true’ were agreed that they could not find sufficient grounds for indicting ex-Governor Eyre. A grand jury in London had earlier dismissed the plea for an indictment against the two officers, Colonel Nelson and Lieutenant Brand, who were most prominently concerned in Gordon’s trial, though here the jury ignored the charge that had been given to them by the judge in the course of a six hours’ speech – the chief point of issue being the legality of martial law in a British colony.
It was in June 1868 that the second case against Eyre was thrown out of court, but the issue was not finished yet. Eyre’s personal position had yet to be established. Since he had been vindicated in two courts of law, was he not entitled to a pension and should not the government pay the expenses of the action in which he had been involved through his service to the government? The Eyre Defence Committee eventually won its point, yet the Jamaica Committee left the field with its head high. In the final debate in the House of Commons, Peter Taylor, who had once been chairman of the Committee, claimed that though they had ‘failed in all their direct aims and almost been overwhelmed amid a storm of obloquy and misrepresentation, they had fulfilled their mission; they had stamped out a policy. Never again in a British colony, whatever may be the outcome of the contemptible vote tonight, never again in a British colony shall be enacted the policy of ex-Governor Eyre nor the world stand aghast at the atrocities of a Jamaica massacre.’
One of the most curious features of the case was the silence maintained by the ex-governor. He retired into private life and survived for thirty years, but never issued any public statement about himself.
2. THE PANAMA CANAL
A few years later the sultry peace of the Caribbean was disturbed by another scandal. For over a century, Americans had been concerned over the narrow isthmus of Panama and the difficulties that it presented to their trade and shipping. That concern was quickened by the gold rush of ‘49. It was ridiculous that the east and west coasts of the same country should be so far apart. The
successful opening of the Suez Canal suggested an obvious solution. Why not a canal across the isthmus? The only problem was – where should it be driven? Through Nicaraguan or through Colombian territory? For a while, two corrupt governments played power politics against each other. At first it appeared that the Nicaraguans would gain the prize, and United States scientists made a preliminary survey. The Colombians had to work fast, clearly, and they leaped at the offer of ten million francs for a concession made by two French engineers, Wyse and Reclus. Louis Buonaparte Wyse was an old man when he made the survey, yet he rode for eleven days across the mountains to reach the appropriate authorities. He returned to Paris with the concession signed. That was in 1878; and in that summer there gathered in Paris a great congress of savants to discuss the feasibility of opening operations.
The idea of the canal fired the imagination of a France humiliated by the defeats of 1870. She still longed for la gloire, but not upon the battlefield. She could prove her superiority by intellectual achievements, and was not Lesseps at hand, le grand Français in Gambetta’s phrase, who had restored to France the prestige that her generals had lost? As president of the Geographical Society, he presented to this international gathering the resolution ‘that this Congress is of the opinion that a canal on the level between the two oceans is feasible and most desirable in the interests of commerce and shipping, and that in conformity with the indispensable requirements of access and operation, it ought to be cut between the Gulf of Limón – on which is situated the town of Colón – and the Bay of Panama.’ The resolution was carried by a large majority, the only noes being cast by those who, like Eiffel, preferred locks for this ‘oceanic Bosphorus’. The evidence that most affected the delegates was the survey that had been made by Wyse. That survey may still be seen in Paris. The drawings were exquisitely executed, but it has since been discovered that they were inaccurate. It had also been stated that of the 136 members who attended the congress, only forty-six were engineers or geographers.
