by Sarah Rose
While Fortune felt deservedly proud of his accomplishments, he tacitly acknowledged that Jameson had played at least some role in the tea’s success. “The flourishing condition of many of the plantations is, after all, the best proof and puts the matter beyond all doubt,” wrote Fortune to his superiors.
The Chinese manufacturers, meanwhile, were given “nice cottages and gardens.” They were told they would be separated, divided up among the plantations, and they eventually were—although this caused consternation among the new recruits as it had to their predecessors. The Chinese all wanted a fellow countryman to talk to, but the government required one expert per plantation. Still, Fortune felt that the company was serving the tea manufacturers as best it could since “everything was done which could add to their comfort in a strange land.”
On the morning of Fortune’s last day in the Himalayas, the tea experts rose early and bathed. They dressed in their finest linen robes, celebration clothes saved for special occasions such as New Year’s Day and the Full Moon Festival. In the dawn hours the appointed leader of the group, slightly older than the rest, a man of about Fortune’s own age, stepped forward and presented him with a small token of their appreciation. Fortune makes no mention of what the gift was, but he felt he could not accept it. He thanked them profusely, extolling their virtues and generosity. “I told them how much I was pleased with the motives by which they were actuated.” A more sensitive man would have realized that to refuse such a gift would humiliate everyone, with a corresponding tremendous loss of face.
He was still eager to help the tea makers in any way he could, though, and readily agreed to accept a packet of letters from the men—notes to wives, parents, and children. He promised to take the mail with him to Calcutta and direct it to a steamer on its way to China. He would do anything for the men, for “never, from the time of their engagement until I left them in their new mountain home, had they given me the slightest cause for anger.”
Fortune left the Chinese manufacturers in India with a heavy heart. “I confess I felt sorry to leave them.” It was as though he was saying good-bye to all traces of China, leaving his last three years of endeavor behind in India.
There is no hard evidence in East India Company documents of the exact date of the earliest appearance of tea in Darjeeling. By government accounts it would appear that the first tea seeds arrived in the Darjeeling mountains sometime in the early 1850s or maybe as early as 1849—in other words, during Fortune’s initial travels on behalf of the company. But because his original shipment was largely a failure, it is unlikely that any of those seeds found their way to Darjeeling. The founding tea stock in Darjeeling was green tea and likely came from Canton plants—all that was available to the experimental Saharanpur gardens in the 1840s. The first black tea in Darjeeling, however, could not have been from anything other than that sent by Fortune in those Wardian cases layered with soil and seeds.
Plant exchange among Calcutta, Saharanpur, and Darjeeling was commonplace. Campbell’s mentor, Brian Houghton Hodgson, former resident to the court of Nepal, had stayed on in the subcontinent and retired to the hill country of Darjeeling. Hodgson, too, was an avid collector and amateur naturalist who kept an eye on the development of national industries throughout the Himalayas and maintained a lively correspondence with company botanists. Within the first year of Fortune’s seeds and seedlings arriving successfully in India, it is very likely that the two lay naturalists cultivating Darjeeling, Hodgson and Campbell, campaigned hard to have the new seed haul subdivided and sent to the territory. If Fortune’s seeds were not represented in the very first season’s planting, they were most surely sown there by the completion of his travels.
Campbell had Fortune’s tea neatly planted in rows on the face of a hill, a large tract of land that could be expanded as needed. There were many such experimental crops under cultivation in Darjeeling. Campbell was also concerned with cotton and even opium and other products that might be economically viable in the region. When Fortune’s teas began arriving in the North-West Frontier over the course of the next two years, some portion was always set aside and sent onward to Campbell, along with other potential nursery stocks.
“Dr Campbell raised British Sikkim in ten years from its pristine condition of an impenetrable jungle, tenanted by half savage and mutually hostile races, never previously brought into contact with Europeans, to that of a flourishing European Sanatria [sic] and Hill Settlement, an international tribal mart of the first importance and a rich agricultural province,” read one homage.
Today Darjeeling is considered the champagne of black teas. It has the finest brew, the most delicate floral nose, the richest liquor, and the most opulent amber color. At auction, Darjeeling teas fetch some of the highest prices in the world. It is almost impossible to buy a lot from the first flush of the Darjeeling estates; they are snapped up as soon as they come to market. As the Chinese say, tea is the essence of mountains, and the mountains that produce Darjeeling tea are the most magnificent on earth.
Within a generation India’s nascent Himalayan tea industry would outstrip China’s in quality, volume, and price. India, meanwhile, was to become an ever more critical asset to Britain—if it could manage to hold on to it.
17
Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock, 1852
Behind the gates of the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock (RSAF Enfield), north of London, engineers and gun-smiths were experimenting with a new weapon to be used in India. Just as science and technology could revolutionize agriculture by making possible the movement of plants around the world, advances in weaponry would change the nature of soldiering—and perversely dissolve the East India Company’s hold on India.
The company’s fortunes had long depended on keeping tight control over the people and resources of India. It possessed an overwhelming superiority in arms and a monopoly on violence over Indians. The East India Company was potentate over the subcontinent, backed by the force of the Indian army. Ruled by Englishmen, the army was manned by Indians, with twenty-six thousand Europeans commanding two hundred thousand sepoys. From sipahi, Hindi for soldier, sepoys were Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Christian, and mostly recruited from the upper echelons of Indian society. The army oversaw a territory as large as the United States, containing a population of about 285 million. Without a private militia on the ground, the company could never have dominated India as it did or envisage using it as Britain’s larder.
The experiments at Enfield gave birth to a rifle that came to be known as the Pattern 1853 or P53 Enfield Rifle. Based on this pattern, rifles would be manufactured according to a single standardized design that was soon used throughout the British Empire. In particular, the P53 would be sent out to India for use by Indian army regiments. Although gunpowder had been invented in China about AD 850, it had long been in general use around the globe to propel rockets, mortars, and bullets. But the technology behind weapons had not advanced substantially for hundreds of years. The gun used by the British in the defeat of Napoleon at the turn of the nineteenth century—the Brown Bess, a “smoothbore” flintlock musket—was still the most common one in the Indian army in the 1840s and early 1850s.
From the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, shooting a gun involved connecting a flame or spark with gunpowder in a confined space, creating an explosive pressure that would send a spherical projectile in the only direction it could go—out of the muzzle of a pipe barrel. The main limitation of these weapons was the amount of time it took to load one. Each reloading was a multistep process that required a soldier to pour a measure of powder, insert a lead ball and some wadding in through the muzzle end of the gun, and then with a ramrod tamp it all down to the end near the trigger. Ignition was provided by a flint striking steel behind the gunpowder charge, producing a spark near a hole leading to the powder chamber. A sprinkling of primer powder conveyed this fire to the internal gunpowder. Preparing a shot in this way took a seasoned and well-drille
d soldier a minimum of fifteen to twenty seconds per shot.
Even in its day the Brown Bess was regarded as relatively inaccurate and unreliable. The problems with accuracy stemmed from the generous fit between the barrel and the ammunition. Since Bess tended to become fouled by gunpowder residue after a use or two, making it harder and harder to load, the barrel was designed to be somewhat larger than the projectile inside, which was a simple round lead ball. But this also meant that a musket ball had a lot of space around it inside the barrel, which caused it to bounce and bob through the barrel on its way to the exit. Gases from the explosion would also escape around the ball, slowing down the force of its propulsion. Being a smoothbore gun, Bess lacked rifling in the barrel, which also affected its accuracy. (Rifling—a groove cut in a spiral inside the barrel—helps impart a spin to the projectile so that it flies straighter and flatter.) The flint-on-steel ignition mechanism was also of some concern because it worked under fair conditions but tended to fail under damp conditions—a major liability in India, where the monsoon season lasts from June to November.
Despite such shortcomings Bess worked well enough for the military techniques of the day. Indian soldiers were trained to stand in lines perhaps two or three deep and to fire four rounds a minute at targets 50 to 65 yards away. When a phalanx of soldiers standing in a row fires volley after volley in the same general direction, whether or not their weapons are accurate or are certain to fire is less important than the speed of reloading; someone is bound to hit something in the field of fire. And when an opponent was in retreat or ammunition was low, the Brown Bess’s 17-inch bayonet provided a more certain means of attack during a direct charge. For 150 years, during the entire period of the company’s glory years on the Continent, the Indian army used this one weapon, backed up with cannons.
The longevity of the Brown Bess is not surprising: Armies have good reason to be conservative about replacing a known, tested technology with something experimental. Because armies are most efficient when equipment is standardized, with as little variation as possible, there is no simple way to phase in new and improved weaponry. But advances in personal weapons such as pistols and hunting guns were about to transform the standard soldier’s firearm, making it more accurate, consistent, and deadly than it had ever been before.
The trick to improving the Brown Bess was to make a bullet that could grab on to the grooves of a rifled barrel and at the same time be quick and easy to load. An inventor at Enfield named Richard Pritchett thought a French bullet might offer help in mastering Bess’s shortcomings and achieve these dual aims.
The French minié ball—roughly cylindrical but rounded on the leading end and hollowed out at its base—was more like the bullets of today. When it was discharged, the pressure of the expanding gases in its base would force the base to expand to fill the width of the barrel and thus grip the rifling grooves.
The early tests of the Pritchett experiment were greeted with enthusiasm at the Enfield Arms Factory. Whereas Bess could hit a target at 60 yards if handled by an experienced soldier, the new rifled weapons were accurate up to 600 yards. But the Pritchett bullet still required the marksman to go through numerous steps to load the gun, because the bullet did not come with its own casing, gunpowder, or priming charge. Moreover, because of the tight fit between bullet and barrel, the barrel needed to be kept greased so the bullet could be shoved smoothly into the chamber and pushed up tightly against the powder. To simplify loading, the bullet was packed in a paper “cartridge” that also included the necessary gunpowder and was greased on the exterior to ease its way into the barrel. Soldiers followed a precise, standardized routine for loading their weapons using these cartridges.
The P53 Enfield Rifle may have been a weapon superior to the Brown Bess in almost all regards and may even have been adaptable to India, had the company been more sensitive to the customs of the population over which it ruled.
The East India Company’s Platoon Exercise Manual stipulated the correct method to load the P53, which was no different from the way Indian sepoys loaded the Brown Bess. Upon hearing the first command, “Prepare to load,” a soldier placed his rifle butt on the ground, 6 inches in front of him. At the command “Load,” the drill instructed: “First—bring the cartridge to the mouth, holding it between the forefinger and the thumb with the ball in the hand, and bite off the top; elbow close to the body. . . .” This standard procedure of “biting the bullet” was so fundamental a part of the routine that the phrase survives long after the procedure itself has been forgotten. With the cartridge and bullet still in his mouth, the soldier tore open the paper to gain access to the powder. He poured it into the muzzle and then shoved the bullet and greased cartridge paper (as wadding) after it, pushing it down to come in contact with the powder.
Grease on the paper cartridge was needed to keep the barrel slippery over repeated firings. It also protected the gunpowder in the cartridge from the wet, variable weather of India, since ammunition might be kept in storage for up to three years. Using a good, dependable grease became an integral part of the operation of the new P53.
The grease of choice for the company, because it was both cheap to manufacture and widely available, was a mixture of beef tallow and pork fat.
Had the Englishmen in charge sought to be insensitive to their Indian sepoys, they could hardly have been more successful than in their selection of a lubricant. Pigs are haram, outlawed, to the Muslim soldiers of northern India, while no high-caste Hindu will touch a dead cow, let alone bring one to his mouth. The animal fats in the P53’s cartridges would therefore defile and debase every religious Indian who was commanded to use them.
The Enfield rifle was adopted and introduced to the Indian troops as a general issue weapon in 1856. The East India Company trained its infantry and musketry divisions first, and regiments and detachments were sent to the various arsenals and depots to receive instruction in the new weapons.
As soldiers were exposed to the new cartridges, rumors began to spread. It was said that the Enfield rifle was part of a mass plan on the part of the company to convert Indian troops to Christianity by rendering them impure, and thus forcing them to give up their caste status. After centuries of British domination in India, this seemed all too likely a plot to the angry Indian troops.
As the story goes, one January day a lowborn khalasi, or laborer, at the Dum-Dum arsenal near Calcutta said to a high-caste Brahmin sepoy who refused to sip water out of the same water pot, owing to his loftier ritual status, “The Saheb-logue [Europeans] will make you bite cartridges soaked in cow and pork fat, and then where will your caste be?”
Throughout the winter and spring of 1857 news of the tainted cartridges spread. On May 9 sepoys of the Third Bengal Light Cavalry flatly refused the order to bring the cartridges to their mouths and load their weapons. The rebels were court-martialed on the spot and sentenced to the unusually severe punishment of ten years’ imprisonment under hard labor. For two hours the rest of the regiment stood watch in the afternoon sun as officers stripped the mutineers of their uniforms and paraded them naked, shackled in leg irons, through the army town of Meerut. Even the local prostitutes were disgusted and afterward refused their favors to anyone in the regiment. “We have no kisses for cowards,” the women said.
That night several other sepoy regiments, from both the infantry and the cavalry, broke ranks and turned on their officers. The sepoys liberated the eighty-five rebels from jail, hailing them as heroes to their race. Then they burned the company’s bungalows and offices. Every European was massacred on sight.
The cavalry retreated to Delhi, and for the next six months India would catch fire.
The P53 Enfield Rifle ignited a holocaust of murder, siege, brutality, and repression; women and children, Indian and British, were butchered, cities were sacked, and civilians were murdered by soldiers. The British refer to the summer of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny; Pakistanis and Indians refer to it as the First War for Independence. Whatever n
ame is used, it was bloody beyond all precedent and it threatened the very existence of the East India Company.
The mutiny continued throughout the heat of spring. In the town of Kanpur (known as Cawnpore before 1947) in northern India, a former ruler named Nana Sahib brought the mutiny to its gruesome pinnacle. The company had recently deposed Nana Sahib according to the “doctrine of lapse,” a policy by which a native Indian ruler was induced to “sacrifice” his territory to the company if he could not provide a legitimate heir.
When three hundred British troops, along with their wives and children, were imprisoned in the barracks of Cawnpore with no food and little water, Nana Sahib stepped in and offered the British safe passage downriver to a city still in company hands.
Starved, dehydrated, and diseased, some two hundred of them already dead, the British accepted Nana Sahib’s offer. But as they boarded the boats for safety, the native crew members set fire to the boats’ thatched canopies and suddenly jumped overboard. At the same time a volley of rifle fire erupted from the banks. Only four British men survived the escape downriver by swimming to safety.
The Indians gathered together those who had avoided the boat massacre and herded them into an open courtyard. They shot all the men. Some women and children survived for a time; some were carried away and raped.
The British sent a relief column, but it arrived a day too late; the sepoys had already butchered the remaining women and children in the courtyard. The “floor of the yard and the verandah and some of the rooms were bespattered with blood and the bloodmarks of children’s hands and feet, women’s dresses, hats, Bibles, marriage certificates, etc., lay scattered about,” wrote one eyewitness.
