The greatest challenge facing Campbell, aside from the fevers and ennui, was public order. Hong Kong was not so much a fragrant harbour as a barbarous sink of iniquity, showing only the most fleeting acquaintance with propriety. For years it had been a haunt of outlaws and one of Campbell’s first tasks was to crush the pirate stronghold of Loong-Ur at Shuck-aw-wan. A small detachment killed or took prisoner the entire band.100 Even so, brigandry remained widespread. ‘No European ventured abroad without a revolver, and a loaded pistol was kept at night under every pillow’, explained one historian.101 One official claimed the Chinese encouraged every ‘thief, pirate and idle or worthless vagabond from the mainland to Hong Kong’102 to make trouble for the British. If private enterprise was anything to go by, the plan was working. By April 1844 the colony boasted thirty-one brothels and eight gambling dens catering for a population of 20,000.103
At least the health of his beloved 98th was slowly improving as Campbell moved the worst of the sick from the Belleisle into a hospital ship and a newly built infirmary over the winter of 1842–43.104 By the new year the disease was past its peak and Campbell himself had become acclimatised. ‘The officers tell me that he does not suffer so much from it [fever] here as he did in England’, remarked Saltoun.105 The barracks at Chuck Choo neared completion and between 31 January and 2 February the last men made their way ashore.106 Deaths from disease continued, albeit at a slower pace, and by May 1843 just 370 men of Campbell’s regiment were left alive. Nevertheless, when they paraded at their new barracks Saltoun was mightily impressed. ‘Their drill was perfect, stood under arms, and marched as well as I ever saw the Guards do’, he remarked. ‘They must have been a most admirable corps before they left home.’
That summer the fever returned anew. There was ‘scarcely a house that was not visited by death, none in which sickness was unknown’, wrote Cunynghame. ‘Amongst the soldiers, marines and sailors, the deaths were still more appalling, more especially at the naval store, and an adjoining barrack, which, from their unhealthiness were abandoned.’107 Each soldier visited hospital on average five times in 1843. Two in seven died.108 Brigadier Chesney, landing in October 1843, found the barracks of the capital ‘in the worst style, full of rats, and oppressed with foetid air’.109 ‘All the buildings early erected for the government were in every way very poor’, complained the Chinese Repository. ‘All the barracks were particularly bad, most of them, even the hospitals, were unfit to keep cattle in.’110 The soldiers’ families suffered the same conditions. Missionary Henrietta Shuck described the troops’ wives as ‘the most destitute set of human beings I ever saw. Many of them have not a second dress, or garment of any kind.’ Campbell’s capacity to improve matters was limited. Building materials and labour on Hong Kong were scarce and expensive, and the opium dealers paid better than the government. As commandant Campbell controlled the military forces on the island, but because Hong Kong was also home to the commander-in-chief, who showed little pity for the 98th, his power was drastically curtailed. In any case, the authorities were reluctant to spend money when so many officials advised abandoning Hong Kong. So it seemed the 98th was fated to stay on the island until reduced to nothing.
Hong Kong was not the only island occupied by the British. Chusan, up the coast near Ningpo, was being held to ensure the Chinese kept to the Nankin Treaty. As it enjoyed a milder climate, many thought this ‘Montpelier of China’ should be kept as a permanent colony instead.111 ‘How anybody in their senses could have preferred Hong Kong to Chusan seems incredible’, exclaimed Lord Elgin.112 In 1843 troop mortality on Hong Kong was 1 in 3.5. On Chusan it was 1 in 29.5.113 Unlike Hong Kong, Chusan was also fertile, well cultivated and self-sustaining. ‘Peaches, pears and plums and many more of your English fruits and vegetables grow here to perfection’, reported one officer. Its aspect, verdant and hilly, spoke of the English countryside. So when in January 1844 Campbell was appointed Chusan’s commandant and brigadier of the second class,* it was a most welcome promotion. On Chusan he would be military and civil governor combined, the benign despot of Charles Napier’s imagination. The snag was that the 98th would remain in Hong Kong under its new commandant Brigadier Chesney.114
Within a little over two years Campbell had gone from lieutenant-colonel to colonel to brigadier, but now aged 52, he was convinced his career had peaked. With his governor’s salary, he intended on ‘making a little purse, and passing the remaining years of my life in retirement and quiet. I will try and accomplish this object of saving as much as possible, and also of getting away as speedily as I can.’ Happily, in Chusan the ‘supply of every article of provisions … is most abundant and not one-half the price of very inferior articles at Hong-Kong’.115 ‘The desire to save is not founded upon avarice,’ explained Campbell, ‘but upon the love of that independence which frugality now may procure for me.’116 This sense of self-reliance was rather chippy. He loved quoting Burns’s Epistle to a Young Friend:
To catch dame Fortune’s golden smile,
Assiduous wait upon her;
And gather gear by ev’ry wile
That’s justified by honour;
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant;
But for the glorious privilege,
Of being independent.
Had he been born 200 years later, he would have been belting out ‘My Way’ in a karaoke bar.
For the first time Campbell’s duties extended beyond the purely regimental, which brought its own problems. His garrison included the 2nd Madras Native Infantry quartered in a local temple, four companies of the 18th Foot,117 and a small Madras European Artillery contingent positioned on ‘Joss House Hill’, where their guns could command the town and harbour. As brigadier, Campbell could no longer rely on the regimental loyalty enjoyed by a lieutenant-colonel, and on Chusan he had both Indian and European soldiers of the East India Company as well.
When the British first arrived, Chusan’s population had been hostile. Locals blew up the pulpit of a makeshift army church,118 and during the short stay of the 98th in October 1842, Lieutenant Shadwell (in company with the nephew of the Duke of Wellington, Captain Wellesley RN) had been set upon by kidnappers and tied up. Shadwell managed to wriggle one hand free, fire his pistol and scare off his assailants.119 Fortunately, by the time Campbell landed, major crimes were rare. There had not been a single case of murder since 1842. The inmates of the gaol were mostly there for selling samshoo (rice spirit) to the troops.120 According to one missionary, ‘the people have the character of being industrious and easily governed. Highway robbery, though not unknown, is of extremely rare occurrence,’ although at the same time, ‘housebreaking is more common, and petty thefts are of daily occurrence’.121 Nor did the people of Chusan show much urge to throw off their barbarian overlords in bloody revolt. ‘The inhabitants do not seem to take umbrage at [their island’s] occupation by our troops, who scrupulously preserve it from injury’, claimed one visitor.122 Should the natives change their minds, Campbell had a robust fort on the island. There was also a bi-monthly steamer service from Hong Kong, so help was not far away in the event of a crisis.123
Unlike the passionate young colonists reshaping the world in Britain’s image, Campbell showed no wish to impose his own religion and culture on the island. His ethos was laissez faire, leaving the Chinese to do as they pleased, under the ultimate authority of British officers acting as magistrates.* That said, he had no tolerance for Chinese interference, and more than once seized mandarins who strayed onto Chusan from the mainland.124 The result was an island, in the words of one missionary, ‘free from that turbulent hostility to foreigners, which prevails among their countrymen in the province of Canton … The lower classes exhibit no decided indications of hostility. The better classes, however, who had rank and consequence to lose, are naturally dissatisfied with the present state of things.’125 Feeling secure, Campbell’s officers found digs scattered about the capital, Tinghae, ‘perfectly isolated
from each other, and with as much confidence and security as if they were residing in an English town’.126
Campbell was keen for his 98th to join him. Since his departure from Hong Kong, the new barracks at Chuck Choo had proved distressingly feverish. For example, on 30 June 1844, 109 of his men were in hospital. Saltoun’s replacement, Major-General D’Aguilar, estimated that maintaining a garrison on Hong Kong would cost one entire regiment every three years.127 Like Campbell, D’Aguilar had served in Walcheren and knew how fever destroyed troops, so he agreed to send the 98th north. The first detachment reached Chusan on 17 February 1845. On 27 April, Gregory, junior lieutenant-colonel of the regiment, arrived with the headquarters staff.128 Campbell had a house built in the cantonment:**
so as to be near the regiment, where the presence of some superior officer in the corps, who really takes an interest in its well-being, is very much wanted. This will cost me some money but for an object of so much importance to the interests and welfare of the corps, I must make some sacrifice of more than ordinary moment in the present miserable plight of my unfortunate regiment.129
Fresh recruits arrived from home to make up for the 98th’s losses, but their quality was questionable.130 Campbell did not want his regiment’s professionalism compromised, so a moratorium was placed on all leave for officers, except on medical grounds, to provide the maximum number to lick the green troops into shape. By June Campbell recorded:
Men improving, but still a great want of individual correctness in carriage, facings, motions of the firelock, etc; but they move in line and open column very fairly, and I confidently expect, before the end of the year, to have them more perfect than any battalion in this part of the world.131
Their spiritual well-being Campbell regarded as secondary, but as trade followed the flag, so the church was never far behind. Campbell’s policy of minimal interference was out of step with the new mood of cultural imperialism and crusading Anglicanism. ‘The Chinese only require Christianity to be at the head of the civilised world,’ argued Brigadier Chesney,132 though ruthless imperialists would say that this was precisely why it was best denied them. With growing pressure to convert and civilise the natives, Chusan soon got its first Anglican missionary. On arrival in September 1845, the Reverend George Smith was shocked to find no military chaplain and so began holding services for troops in an appropriated Buddhist temple, attracting by his own estimate congregations of over 500. Any missionary named Smith was going to have a hard time charming Campbell and, suspicious that Smith’s ambitions extended beyond the British garrison, Campbell did not see any reason to encourage his efforts. For his part, Smith complained of ‘frequent deeds of violence on the part of the soldiery, numerous scenes of intoxication from the maddening draughts of samshoo, a general disregard of the feelings of the Chinese, and continual outbreaks of a proud overbearing spirit on the vanquished race’. Then again, missionaries often have a tendency to exaggerate the degeneracy of their flock upon first arrival, to make its salvation at their hands all the more praiseworthy. Smith at least admitted that ‘the administration of the police under the British has been generally marked by a spirit of moderation and mildness’.133
Although the 98th’s arrival initially lightened Campbell’s mood, within weeks of his optimistic June appraisal, he was depressed:
I have only one thought and one wish left, and that is for repose; for my spirit has already been sufficiently broken by disappointment, and as all I wished to have pleased, have sunk into the grave, success or miscarriage in the struggles of professional life have become empty sounds.
Shadwell put this melancholy down to ‘his relentless enemy, ague’, but the morbid wretchedness afflicting him seems more than just a reaction to fever. In the letters and journal extracts quoted by Shadwell, Campbell frequently switches from terrible prophecies and regret to wild expectations of triumph and promotion. According to Shadwell, his journal was very intermittent, often stopping entirely when Campbell was engaged in active service. This pendulum swing from weltschmerz to euphoria seems less the result of long-term malaria and more the roller-coaster psyche of a manic depressive. Of course, it may simply have been the result of isolation. A brigadier was by necessity at one remove from his officers and men, but in London he could have found colleagues propping up the bar in the United Service Club in the same predicament. In Chusan, Campbell was the lonely governor, commandant and dictator, his only living relatives over six months’ sail away. With no wife or family at hand to provide any emotional support, and his adopted family, his regiment, still recovering from near annihilation, that he became sick at heart perhaps needs no clinical explanation.
The misery stretched on through the summer. ‘Dined at mess: a feeling of coldness comes over me now at that table’, he wrote on 22 July:
So few remain of those who came out originally with the corps and the necessity of being very strict with the young ones since appointed leads them to look upon me as a very particular old gentleman, towards whom the prevailing sentiment is one more of fear than of liking, and I am too old to enter into the amusements and conversation of youths of their age.
Even the anniversary of leading the forlorn hope at San Sebastian failed to cheer him up: ‘Did not think of it until late in the evening – thirty two years since. Time flies very fast, and few of those who were with me then are now alive.’*134
Depression was little understood in the 1840s. Medical science commonly thought of it not as an illness, but as an affliction: a state of mind rather than a sickness, although when these moods became extreme it was acknowledged, as James Prichard wrote in 1837, that ‘there is a degree of this affection which certainly constitutes disease of mind’.135 Most doctors of the early nineteenth century saw mania and melancholia as separate states, not as two sides of the same coin. It was not until 1854 that two French psychiatrists suggested that this dichotomy could have a common cause, conceived respectively as la folie à double-forme and la folie circulaire, and it was decades until the understanding of its pathology led to treatment. It is impossible from such a distance to assess Campbell in any meaningful psychiatric sense, but his behaviour could indicate manic depression. Manic depression would go a long way to explaining the switch from modesty to near exhibitionism he displayed. At times he wanted nothing more than to retreat from the world and then at others he wanted to rule it. Equally, his famous temper could be a symptom of clinical depression, but then again it could simply be because he had a lot to be angry about.
Early 1846 coincided with one of Campbell’s upswings. He was positive that the 98th, now a picture of health, could go ‘through such a review as no corps in the East could surpass’. Pleased with their rejuvenation, he had already taken them out into the countryside to practise skirmishing. ‘The regiment is now in first rate order’, he wrote on 21 February. By March he was positively ebullient:
5th March – Anniversary of Barrosa! An old story – thirty-five years ago. Thank God for all His goodness to me! Although I have suffered much in health and in many ways, I am still as active as any man in the regiment, and quite as able as the youngest to go through fatigue.
A few months ago he had longed for the grave. Now he was fizzing with energy. ‘The Catholic clergyman called on me yesterday to tell me of a rumour being in circulation on the other side, that a délégué, sent by the Emperor, was on his way to retake Chusan, and that he was to have three thousand chosen men for this service’, wrote Campbell on 13 March. ‘I wish it would prove true.’136
It was a curious brand of morality that licensed ruthlessness in the imposition of a peace treaty, but made breaking treaty obligations towards its defeated enemy taboo. Nevertheless, it was government policy. In spite of the voices arguing that it would be a better prize than Hong Kong, Chusan was to be handed back, and so, as the Chinese neared the final instalment of the indemnity stipulated by the Treaty of Nankin, arrangements for the transfer began. The Chinese took some convincing that the preparations
were genuine,137 but the British government no longer wanted to carve out markets solely through territorial acquisition. Free trade was in vogue and the old mercantilist dogma, which valued colonies as monopolistic markets and sources of raw materials, was receding.138 It was cheaper to maintain a military base from which to impose and police those new free trade principles, and they had Hong Kong for that. So, on 5 May, the Nemesis ferried the Chinese commissioners over to Chusan and five days later they were given jurisdiction over the island.139
All at once Chusan resembled Paris in 1944 – everyone scrambling to distance themselves from the departing occupiers. ‘The approaching evacuation of the island by the British had evidently unsettled the minds of all the respectable classes of Chinese’, recalled Smith. ‘The merchants and shopkeepers, who had acquired any gain by connexion with the British, had everything prepared for a general and sudden emigration on the departure of the troops’, though the ‘boatmen, coolies, and servants regard the departure of the British as a cessation of their high wages’.140 Campbell feared that the returning mandarins would inflict vicious reprisals on collaborators, so the British issued an edict offering protection – a valueless promise once Campbell’s troops were no longer there to enforce it. The key officials tainted by association were moved to Shanghai and Ningpo, to remain in the care of British consuls.141
The 98th was to sail to India but the troop transports did not arrive until July, giving Campbell an opportunity to make sure the Chinese settled back in as he intended. There were a number of loose ends to tidy up, like extracting a guarantee that the European cemetery would be left undisturbed. They did not embark until 21 July and even then the captain of the Lord Hungerford, with Campbell and the headquarters of the 98th on board, had difficulty clearing the harbour. They eventually got underway four days later.142
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