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Here, There and Everywhere

by Lord Frederic Hamilton · English · Gutenberg #6368 · 501,183 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Here, There and Everywhere

Author: Lord Frederic Hamilton


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6368]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE ***




Produced by Karen Fabrizius, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

BY

LORD FREDERIC HAMILTON

TO MY GALLANT CANADIAN FRIEND GERALD RUTHERFORD, M.C. OF WINNIPEG




FOREWORD

So kindly a reception have the public accorded to "The Days Before
Yesterday" that I have ventured into print yet again.

This is less a book of reminiscences than a recapitulation of various
personal experiences in many lands, some of which may be viewed from
unaccustomed angles.

The descriptions in Chapter VIII of cattle-working and of
horse-breaking on an Argentine estancia have already appeared in
slightly different form in an earlier book of mine, now out of print.

F. H.

_London, 1921._




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in
print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch
Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of
cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace-Our Australian Jehu--The
shooting camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum,"
my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first
tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The
Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the
bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros
incident--The amateur Mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit
to Cooch Behar

CHAPTER II

Mighty Kinchinjanga--The inconceivable splendours of a Himalayan
sunrise--The last Indian telegraph office--The irrepressible British
Tommy--An improvised garden--An improvised Durbar hall--A splendid
ceremony--A native dinner--The disguised Europeans--Our shocking
table-manners--Incidents--Two impersonations; one successful, the
other the reverse--I come off badly--Indian jugglers--The
rope-trick--The juggler, the rope, and the boy--An inexplicable
incident--A performing cobra scores a success--Ceylon "Devil
Dancers"--Their performance--The Temple of the Tooth--The uncovering
of the Tooth--Details concerning--An abominable libel--Tea and
coffee--Peradeniya Gardens--The upas tree of Java--Colombo an Eastern
Clapham Junction--The French lady and the savages--The small Bermudian
and the inhabitants of England

CHAPTER III

Frenchmen pleasant travelling companions--Their limitations--Vicomte
de Vogue--The innkeeper and the ikon--An early oil-burning steamer--A
modern Bluebeard--His "Blue Chamber"--Dupleix--His ambitious scheme
--A disastrous period for France--A personal appreciation of the
Emperor Nicholas II--A learned but versatile Orientalist--Pidgin
English--Hong-Kong--An ancient Portuguese city in China--Duck junks--A
comical Marathon race--Canton--Its fascination and its appalling
smells--The malevolent Chinese devils--Precautions adopted
against--"Foreign devils"--The fortunate limitations of Chinese
devils--The City of the Dead--A business interview

CHAPTER IV

The glamour of the West Indies--Captain Marryat and Michael
Scott--Deadly climate of the islands in the eighteenth century--The
West Indian planters--Difference between East and West Indies--"Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"--Training-school for British
Navy--A fruitless voyage--Quarantine--Distant view of Barbados--Father
Labat--The last of the Emperors of Byzantium--Delightful little Lady
Nugent and her diary of 1802--Her impressions of Jamaica--Wealthy
planters--Their hideous gormandising--A simple morning meal--An
aldermanic dinner--How the little Nugents were gorged--Haiti--Attempts
of General Le Clerc to secure British intervention in Haiti--Presents
to Lady Nugent--Her Paris dresses described--Our arrival in
Jamaica--Its marvellous beauty--The bewildered Guardsman--Little trace
of Spain left in Jamaica--The Spaniards as builders--British and
Spanish Colonial methods contrasted

CHAPTER V

An election meeting in Jamaica--Two family experiences at contested
elections--Novel South African methods--Unattractive Kingston--A
driving tour through the island--The Guardsman as
orchid-hunter--Derelict country houses--An attempt to reconstruct the
past--The Fourth-Form room at Harrow--Elizabethan Harrovians--I meet
many friends of my youth--The "Sunday" books of the 'sixties--"Black
and White"--Arrival of the French fleet--Its inner
meaning--International courtesies--A delicate attention--Absent
alligators--The mangrove swamp--A preposterous suggestion--The swamps
do their work--Fever--A very gallant apprentice--What he did

CHAPTER VI

The Spanish Main--Its real meaning--A detestable region--Tarpon and
sharks--The isthmus--The story of the great pearl "La elegrina"--The
Irishman and the Peruvian--The vagaries of the Southern Cross--The
great Kingston earthquake--Point of view of small boys--Some
earthquake incidents--"Flesh-coloured" stockings--Negro hysteria--A
family incident, and the unfortunate Archbishop--Port Royal--A sugar
estate--A scene from a boy's book in real life--Cocoa-nuts--
Reef-fishing--Two young men of great promise

CHAPTER VII

Appalling ignorance of geography amongst English people--Novel
pedagogic methods--"Happy Families"--An instructive game--Bermuda--A
waterless island--A most inviting archipelago--Bermuda the most
northern coral-atoll--The reefs and their polychrome fish--A
"water-glass"--Sea-gardens--An ideal sailing-place--How the Guardsman
won his race--A miniature Parliament--Unfounded aspersions on the
Bermudians--Red and blue birds--Two pardonable mistakes--Soldier
gardeners--Officers' wives--The little roaming home-makers--A pleasant
island--The inquisitive German naval officers--"The Song of the
Bermudians"

CHAPTER VIII

The demerits of the West Indies classified--The utter ruin of
St. Pierre--The Empress Josephine--A transplanted
brogue--Vampires--Lost in a virgin forest--Dictator-Presidents, Castro
and Rosas--The mentality of a South American--"The Liberator"--The
Basques and their national game--Love of English people for foreign
words--Yellow fever--Life on an Argentina _estancia_--How cattle
are worked--The lasso and the "bolas"--Ostriches--Venomous toads--The
youthful rough-rider--His methods--Fuel difficulties--The vast
plains--The wonderful bird-life

CHAPTER IX

Difficulties of an Argentine railway engineer--Why Argentina has the
Irish gauge--A sudden contrast--A more violent contrast--Names and
their obligations--Cape Town--The thoroughness of the Dutch
pioneers--A dry and thirsty land--The beautiful Dutch Colonial houses
--The Huguenot refugees--The Rhodes fruit-farms--Surf-riding--Groote
Schuur--General Botha--The Rhodes Memorial--The episode of the sick
boy--A visit from Father Neptune--What pluck will do

CHAPTER X

In France at the outbreak of the war--The _tocsin_--The "voice of
the bell" at Harrow--Canon Simpson's theory about bells--His
"five-tone" principle--Myself as a London policeman--Experiences with
a celebrated Church choir--The "Grill-room Club"--Famous members
--Arthur Cecil--Some neat answers--Sir Leslie Ward--Beerbohm Tree and
the vain old member--Amateur supers--Juvenile disillusionment--The
Knight--The Baron--Age of romance passed

CHAPTER XI

Dislike of the elderly to change--Some legitimate grounds of
complaint--Modern pronunciation of Latin--How a European crisis was
averted by the old-fashioned method--Lord Dufferin's Latin
speech--Schoolboy costume of a hundred years ago--Discomforts of
travel in my youth--A crack liner of the 'eighties--Old travelling
carriages--An election incident--Headlong rush of extraordinary
turn-out--The politically-minded signalman and the doubtful
voter--"Decent bodies"--Confidence in the future--Conclusion

INDEX




HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

CHAPTER I

An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in
print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch
Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of
cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace--Our Australian Jehu--The
Shooting Camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum,"
my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first
tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The
Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the
bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros
incident--The amateur mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit
to Cooch Behar.


The drawbacks of advancing years are so painfully obvious to those who
have to shoulder the burden of a long tale of summers, that there is
no need to enlarge upon them.

The elderly have one compensation, however; they have well-filled
store-houses of reminiscences, chests of memories which are the
resting-place of so many recollections that their owner can at will
re-travel in one second as much of the surface of this globe as it has
been his good fortune to visit, and this, too, under the most
comfortable conditions imaginable.

Not for him the rattle of the wheels of the train as they grind the
interminable miles away; not for him the insistent thump of the
engines as they relentlessly drive the great liner through angry
Atlantic surges to her far-off destination in smiling Southern seas.
The muffled echoes of London traffic, filtering through the drawn
curtains, are undisturbed by such grossly material reminders of modern
engineering triumphs, for the elderly traveller journeys in a
comfortable easy-chair before a glowing fire, a cigar in his mouth,
and a long tumbler conveniently accessible to his hand.

The street outside is shrouded in November fog; under the steady
drizzle, the dripping pavements reflect with clammy insistence the
flickering gas-lamps, and everything, as Mr. Mantalini would have put
it, "is demnition moist and unpleasant," whilst a few feet away, a
grey-haired traveller is basking in the hot sunshine of a white coral
strand, with the cocoa-nut palms overhead whispering their endless
secrets to each other as they toss their emerald-green fronds in the
strong Trade winds, the little blue wavelets of the Caribbean Sea
lap-lapping as they pretend to break on the gleaming milk-white beach.

It is really an ideal form of travel! No discomforts, no hurryings to
catch connections, no passports required, no passage money, and no
hotel bills! What more could any one ask? The journeys can be varied
indefinitely, provided that the owner of the storehouse has been
careful to keep its shelves tidily arranged. India? The second shelf
on the left. South Africa? The one immediately below it. Canada?
South America? The West Indies? There they all are, each one in its
proper place!

This private Thomas Cook & Son's office has the further advantage of
being eminently portable. Wherever its owner goes, it goes, too. For
the elderly this seems the most practical form of Travel Bureau, and
it is incontestably the most economical one in these days when prices
soar sky-high.

There is so much to see in this world of ours, and just one short
lifetime in which to see it! I am fully conscious of the difficulty of
conveying to others impressions which remain intensely vivid to
myself, and am also acutely alive to the fact that matters which
appear most interesting to one person, drive others to martyrdoms of
boredom.

In attempting to reproduce various personal experiences on paper, I
shall claim the roaming freedom of the fireside muser, for he can in
one second skip from Continent to Continent and vault over gaps of
thirty years and more, just as the spirit moves him; indeed, to change
the metaphor, before one record has played itself out, he can turn on
a totally different one without rising from his chair, adjusting a new
needle, or troubling to re-wind the machine, for this convenient
mental apparatus reproduces automatically from its repertory whatever
air is required.

Having claimed the privilege of roaming at will far from my subject, I
may say that ever since my boyhood I had longed to take part in a
big-game shoot, so when the late Maharajah of Cooch Behar invited me
in 1891 to one of his famous shooting-parties, I accepted with
alacrity, for the Cooch Behar shoots were justly famed throughout
India. The rhinoceros was found there, tigers, as Mrs. O'Dowd of
_Vanity Fair_ would have remarked, "were as plentiful as cabbages";
there were bears, too, leopards and water buffaloes, everything, in
short, that the heart of man could desire. It was no invitation to
travel five hundred miles for two days' shooting only, there were to be
five solid weeks of it in camp, and few people entertained on so
princely a scale as the Maharajah. It was distinctly an invitation to
be treasured--and gratefully accepted.

The five-hundred-mile journey between Calcutta and Cooch Behar was
unquestionably a varied one. There were four hours' train on the
broad-gauge railway, an hour's steamer to cross the Ganges, ten hours'
train on a narrow-gauge railway, three hours' propelling by poles in a
native house-boat down a branch of the Brahmaputra, six miles of swamp
to traverse on elephants, thirty miles to travel on the Maharajah's
private two-and-a-half-feet-gauge toy railway, and, to conclude with,
a twenty-five-mile drive.

Cooch Behar is now, I believe, directly linked up with Calcutta by
rail.

We left Calcutta a party of four. My nephew, General Sir Henry
Streatfeild, and his wife, another of the Viceroy's aides-de-camp,
myself, and a certain genial Calcutta business magnate, most popular
of Anglo-Indians. As we had a connection to catch at a junction on the
narrow-gauge railway, an interminable wait at a big station in the
early morning was disconcerting, for the connection would probably be
missed. The jovial, burly Englishman occupied the second
sleeping-berth in my compartment. As the delay lengthened, he, having
some official connection with the East Bengal State Railway, jumped
out of bed and went on to the platform in Anglo-Indian fashion, clad
merely in pyjamas and slippers. Approaching the immensely pompous
native station-master he upbraided him in no measured terms for the
long halt. Through the window I could hear every word of their
dialogue. "This delay is perfectly scandalous, station-master. I shall
certainly report it in Calcutta." "Would you care, sir, to enter
offeecial complaint in book kept for that purpose?" "By George! I
will!" answered the man of jute and indigo, hot with indignation. He
was conducted through long passages to the station-master's office at
the back of the building, where a strongly worded complaint was
entered in the book. "And now, may I ask," questioned the irate
business man, "when you mean to start this infernal train?" "Oh, the
terain, sir, has already deeparted these five minutes," answered the
bland native. Fortunately there was a goods train immediately
following the mail, and some four hours afterwards our big friend
alighted from a goods brake-van in a furious temper. He had had
nothing whatever to eat, and was still in pyjamas, bare feet and
slippers at ten in the morning. We had delayed the branch train as no
one seemed in any particular hurry, so all was well.

During a subsequent journey over the same line, we had an awful
experience. Through the Alipore suburb of Calcutta there runs a little
affluent of the Hooghly known as Tolly Gunge. For some reason this
insignificant stream is regarded as peculiarly sacred by Hindoos, and
every five years vast numbers of pilgrims come to bathe in and drink
Tolly Gunge. The stream is nothing now but an open sewer, but no
warnings of the doctors, and no Government edicts can prevent natives
from regarding this as a place of pilgrimage, rank poison though the
waters of Tolly Gunge must be.

A party of us left Calcutta on a shooting expedition during one of
these quinquennial pilgrimages. We found the huge Sealdah station
packed with dense crowds of home-going pilgrims. The station-master
was at his wits' end to provide accommodation, for every third-class
carriage was already full to overflowing, and still endless hordes of
devotees kept arriving. He finally had a number of covered trucks
coupled on to the train, into which the pilgrims were wedged as
tightly as possible, a second engine was attached, and we started.
Next morning I was awakened by a nephew of mine, who cried with an
awestruck face, "My God! It is perfectly awful! Look out of the
window!" It was a fearful sight. The waters of Tolly Gunge had done
their work, and cholera had broken out during the night amongst the
densely packed pilgrims. Men were carrying out dead bodies from the
train; there were already at least fifty corpses laid on the platform,
and the tale of dead increased every minute. Others, stricken with the
fell disease, were lying on the platform, still alive, but in a state
of collapse, or in the agonising cramps of this swift-slaying scourge.
There happened to be two white doctors in the train, who did all that
was possible for the sufferers, but, beyond the administration of
opium, medical science is powerless in cholera cases. The horrors of
that railway platform fixed themselves indelibly on my memory. I can
never forget it.

The late Maharajah of Cooch Behar had had a long minority, the soil of
his principality was very fertile and well-cultivated, and so
efficiently was the little State administered by the British Resident
that the Maharajah found himself at his majority the fortunate
possessor of vast sums of ready money. The Government of India had
erected him out of his surplus revenues a gigantic palace of
red-brick, a singularly infelicitous building material for that
burning climate. Nor can it be said that the English architect had
been very successful in his elevation. He had apparently anticipated
the design of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and had managed to
produce a building even less satisfactory to the eye than the vast
pile at the corner of Cromwell Road. He had also crowned his edifice
with a great dome. The one practical feature of the building was that
it was only one room thick, and that every room was protected by a
broad double verandah on both sides. The direct rays of the sun were,
therefore, powerless to penetrate to the interior, and with the double
verandahs the faintest breath of air sent a draught through every room
in the house.

We reached Cooch Behar after dark, and it was somewhat of a surprise
to find the Maharajah and his entire family roller-skating in the
great central domed hall of the palace, to the strains of a really
excellent string band. The Maharajah having a great liking for
European music, had a private orchestra of thirty-five natives who,
under the skilled tuition of a Viennese conductor, had learnt to play
with all the fire and vim of one of those unapproachable Austrian
bands, which were formerly (I emphasise the _were_) the delight
of every foreigner in Vienna. These native players had acquired in
playing dance music the real Austrian "broken time," and could make
their violins wail out the characteristic "thirds" and "sixths" in the
harmonies of little airy, light "Wiener Couplets" nearly as
effectively as Johann Strauss' famous orchestra in the "Volks-Garten"
in Vienna.

The whole scene was rather unexpected in the home of a native prince
in the wilds of East Bengal.

The Maharajah had fixed on a great tract of jungle in Assam, over the
frontier of India proper, as the field of operations for his big-game
shoot of 1891, on account of the rhinoceros and buffaloes that
frequented the swamps there. As he did not do things by halves, he had
had a rough road made connecting Cooch Behar with his great camp, and
had caused temporary bridges to be built over all the streams on the
way. Owing to the convenient bamboo, this is fairly easy of
achievement, for the bamboo is at the same time tough and pliable, and
bamboo bridges, in spite of their flimsy appearance, can carry great
weights, and can be run up in no time, and kindly Nature furnishes in
Bengal an endless supply of this adaptable building material.

Our Calcutta party were driven out to the camp by the Maharajah's
Australian trainer in a brake-and-four. I had heard before of the
recklessness and skill of Australian stage-coach drivers, but had had
no previous personal experience of it. Frankly, it is not an
experience I should care to repeat indefinitely. I have my own
suspicions that that big Australian was trying, if I may be pardoned a
vulgarism, "to put the wind up us." Bang! against a tree-trunk on the
off-side. Crash! against another on the near-side; down a steep hill
at full gallop, and over a creaking, swaying, loudly protesting bamboo
bridge that seemed bound to collapse under the impact; up the
corresponding ascent as hard as the four Walers could lay leg to the
ground; off the track, tearing through the scrub on two wheels,
righting again to shave a big tree by a mere hair's-breadth; it
certainly was a fine exhibition of nerve and of recklessness redeemed
by skill, but I do not think that elderly ladies would have preferred
it to their customary jog-trot behind two fat and confidential old
slugs. One wondered how the harness held together under our Australian
Jehu's vagaries.

The Maharajah had chosen the site of his camp well. On a bare
_maidan_ overhanging a turbulent river a veritable city of white
tents gleamed in the sunshine, all neatly ranged in streets and lanes.
The river was not, as most Indian rivers in the dry season, a mere
trickle of muddy water meandering through a broad expanse of stones
and sand-spits, but a clear, rushing stream, tumbling and laughing on
its way as gaily as any Scotch salmon river, and forming deep pools
where great mahseer lurked under the waving fringes of water-weeds,
fat fish who could be entrapped with a spoon in the early morning.

Each guest had a great Indian double tent, bigger than most London
drawing-rooms. The one tent was pitched inside the other after the
fashion of the country, with an air-space of about one foot between to
keep out the fierce sun. Indeed, triple-tent would be a more fitting
expression, for the inner tent had a lining dependent from it of that
Indian cotton fabric printed in reds and blues which we use for bed
quilts. Every tent was carpeted with cotton dhurees, and completely
furnished with dressing-tables and chests of drawers, as well as
writing-table, sofa and arm-chairs; whilst there was a little covered
canvas porch outside, fitted with chairs in which to take the air, and
a small attendant satellite of a tent served as a bath-room, with big
tin tub and a little trench dug to carry the water away. Nothing could
be more complete, but I found my watchful old "bearer" already at work
raising all my trunks, gun-cases, and other possessions on little
stilts of bamboo, for his quick eye had detected signs of white ants.
By the end of our stay in camp I had reason to congratulate myself on
my faithful "bearer's" foresight, for none of my own things were
touched, whilst every one else was bemoaning the havoc the white ants
had played with their belongings. The guest-tents formed three sides
of a square facing the river, and in the centre of the open space
stood a large _shamyanah_, or flat-roofed tent with open sides,
which served as dining-room and general living-room. There are
certainly distinct advantages in a climate so settled that periods of
daily sunshine or of daily rain really form part of the calendar, and
can be predicted with mathematical certainty.

It so happened that the Census of 1891 was taken whilst we were in
camp, so I can give the exact number of retainers whom the Maharajah
brought with him. It totalled 473, including mahouts and
elephant-tenders, grooms, armourers, taxidermists, tailors,
shoemakers, a native doctor and a dispenser, and boatmen, not to
mention the Viennese conductor and the thirty-five members of the
orchestra, cooks, bakers, and table-waiters. The Maharajah certainly
did things on a grand scale. One of the English guests gave, with
perfect truth, his place of birth as required in the Indian Census
Return as "a first-class carriage on the London and North-Western
Railway, somewhere between Bletchley and Euston; the precise spot
being unnoticed either by myself or the other person principally
concerned."

The daily routine of life in the camp was something like this: We men
all rose at daybreak, some going for a ride, others endeavouring with
a spoon to lure the cunning mahseer in the swift-running river, or
going for a three-mile walk through the jungle tracks. Then a bath,
and breakfast followed at nine, when the various _shikaries_ came
in with their reports. Should a tiger have made a "kill," he would be
found, with any luck, during the heat of the day close to the body of
his victim. The "howdah" elephants would all be sent on to the
appointed rendezvous, the entire party going out to meet them on "pad"
elephants. I do not believe that more uncomfortable means of
progression could possibly be devised. A pad elephant has a large
mattress strapped on to its back, over which runs a network of stout
cords. Four or five people half-sit, half-recline on this mattress,
hanging on for dear life to the cord network. The European, being
unused to this attitude, will soon feel violent cramps shooting
through his limbs, added to which there is a disconcerting feeling of
instability in spite of the tightly grasped cords. Nothing, on the
other hand, can be more comfortable than a well-appointed howdah,
where one is quite alone except for the mahout perched on the
elephant's neck. The Maharajah's howdahs were all of cane-work, with a
softly padded seat and a leather-strap back, which yielded to the
motion of the great beast. In front was a gun-rack holding five guns
and rifles, and large pockets at the side thoughtfully contained
bottles of lemonade (the openers of which were _never_ forgotten)
and emergency packets of biscuits.

The Maharajah owned about sixty elephants, in which he took the
greatest pride, and he was most careful in providing his guests with
proved "tiger-staunch" animals. These were oddly enough invariably
lady-elephants, the males being apt to lose their heads in the
excitement of meeting their hereditary enemies, and consequently apt
to run amok.

My particular elephant, which I rode daily for five weeks, was an
elderly and highly respectable female named "Chota Begum." Had she
only happened to have been born without a tail, and with two legs
instead of four, she would have worn silver-rimmed spectacles and a
large cap with cherries in it; would have knitted stockings all day
long and have taken a deep interest in the Church Missionary Society.

I soon got on very friendly terms with "Chota Begum." She was
inordinately fond of oranges, which, of course, were difficult to
procure in the jungle, so I daily brought her a present of
half-a-dozen of these delicacies, supplementing the gift at
luncheon-time with a few bananas. Chota Begum was deeply touched by
these attentions, and one morning my mahout informed me that she
wished, out of gratitude, to lift me into the howdah with her trunk. I
cannot conceive how he found this out, but I naturally was averse to
wounding the elephant's feelings by refusing the proffered courtesy,
though I should infinitely have preferred getting into the howdah in
the ordinary manner. The mahout, after the mysterious manner of his
kind, was giving his charge minute directions to be very careful with
me, when I suddenly felt myself seized by Chota Begum's trunk, lifted
into the air, and held upside down at the extreme length of that
member, for, it seemed to me, at least five minutes. Rupees and small
change rained from my pockets to the ground, cigar case, cigarette
case, matches and cartridge extractor streamed down to earth in
clattering showers from their abiding places; the blood rushed to my
head till I was on the very verge of apoplexy, and still Chota Begum,
remembering her instructions to be careful, held me up aloft, until
slowly, very slowly indeed, she lowered me into the howdah, dizzy and
stupid with blood to the head. The attention was well-meant, but it
was distinctly not one to be repeated indefinitely. In my youth there
was a popular song recounting the misfortunes of one Mr. Brown:
  "Old man Brown, upside down,
  With his legs sticking up in the air";
but I never imagined that I should share his unpleasant experiences.

I never enquired too minutely as to how the "kubber" of the
whereabouts of a tiger was obtained, but I have a strong suspicion
that unhappy goats played a part in it, and that they were tethered in
different parts of the jungle, for, as we all know, "the bleating of
the kid excites the tiger."

A tiger being thus located by his "kill," the long line of beating
elephants, riderless except for their mahouts, goes crashing through
the burnt-up jungle-growth, until a trumpeting from one of the
elephants announces the neighbourhood of "stripes," for an elephant
has an abnormally keen sense of smell. The various guns are posted on
their elephants in any open spot where a good view of the beast can be
obtained when he breaks cover. I have explained elsewhere how I
personally always preferred an ordinary shot-gun loaded with a lead
ball, to a rifle for either tigers or bears. The reason being that
both these animals are usually shot at very close quarters whilst they
are moving rapidly. Time is lost in getting the sights of a rifle on
to a swift-moving objective, and there is so little time to lose, for
it is most inadvisable to wound a tiger without killing him; whereas
with a shot-gun one simply raises it, looks down the barrels and fires
as one would do at a rabbit, and a solid lead bullet has enormous
stopping power. I took with me daily in the howdah one shot-gun loaded
with ball, another with No. 5 shot for birds, an Express rifle, and
one of the Maharajah's terrific 4-bore elephant-rifles; this latter's
charge was 14-1/2 drachms of black powder; the kick seemed to break
every bone in one's shoulder, and I was frightened to death every time
that I fired it off.

On that Assam shoot I was quite extraordinarily lucky, for on the very
first day the beating elephants announced the presence of a tiger by
trumpeting almost at once, and suddenly, with a roar, a great streak
of orange and black leaped into the sunlight from the jungle straight
in front of me. The tiger came straight for my elephant, who stood
firm as a rock, and I waited with the smooth-bore till he got within
twenty feet of me and I knew that I could not possibly miss him, and
then fired at his shoulder. The tiger fell dead. This was a very easy
shot, but it did me great service with my mahout. These men, perched
as they are on the elephant's neck, carry their lives in their hand,
for should the tiger be wounded only, he will certainly make a spring
for the elephant's head, and then the mahout is a dead man.
Incidentally the "gun" in the howdah will not fare much better in that
case. The mahout, should he have but small confidence in his
passenger's marksmanship, will make the elephant fidget so that it
becomes impossible to fire.

Two days later we were beating a patch of jungle, when, through the
thick undergrowth, I could just see four legs, moving very, very
slowly amongst the reeds, the body above them being invisible. "Bagh"
(tiger), whispered the mahout, turning round. I was so excited that I
snatched up the heavy elephant-rifle instead of the Express, and fired
just above those slow-slouching legs. The big rifle went off with a
noise like an air-raid, and knocked me with mangled shoulder-blades
into the seat of the howdah. I was sure that I had missed altogether,
and thought no more about it, but when the beat came up half an hour
later, a huge tiger was lying there stone dead. That, of course, was
an absolute piece of luck, a mere fluke, as I had never even seen the
brute. As soon as the Maharajah and his men had examined the big
tiger's teeth they at once pronounced him a man-eater, and there was
great rejoicing, for a man-eating tiger had been taking toll of the
villagers in one of the jungle clearings. I believe that tigers only
take to eating men when they are growing old and their teeth begin to
fail them, a man being easier to catch than a bullock or goat. The
skins of these two tigers have lain on my drawing-room carpet for
thirty years now.

On our second day the Maharajah shot a leopard. He was only wounded,
and I have never seen an animal fight so fiercely or with such
indomitable courage. Of course, the whole cat-tribe are very tenacious
of life, but that leopard had five bullets in him, and still he roared
and hissed and spat, though his life was ebbing from him fast. We must
have worked round in a circle nearer to the camp, for whilst we were
watching the leopard's furious fight the strains of the Maharajah's
orchestra practising "The Gondoliers," floated down-wind to us quite
clearly. I remember it well, for as we dismounted to look at the dead
beast the cornet solo, "Take a pair of sparkling eyes," began. There
was such a startling incongruity between an almost untrodden virgin
jungle in Assam, with a dead leopard lying in the foreground, and that
familiar strain of Sullivan's, so beloved of amateur tenors, that it
gave a curious sense of unreality to the whole scene.

This admirable orchestra made the evenings very pleasant. We put on
white ties and tail-coats every night for dinner in the open
_shamyanah_, where the Maharajah provided us with an excellent
European repast served on solid silver plates. As the endless
resources of this wonderful camp included an ice-making machine, he
also gave us iced champagne every evening. As an example of how
thorough the Maharajah was in his arrangements, he had brought three
of his _mallees_, or native gardeners, with him, their sole
function being to gather wild jungle-flowers daily, and to decorate
the tables and tents with them.

Neither the Maharajah nor his family ever touched any of the European
food, though, as they were not Hindoos, but belonged to the
Bramo-Somaj religion, there were no caste-laws to prevent their doing
so. Half-way through dinner the servants brought in large square
silver boxes, some of rice, others of various curries: hot curries,
dry curries, Ceylon curries, and green vegetable curries; these
constituted their dinner, and most excellent they were.

I really must pay a tribute to the graceful and delightful Maharanee,
who presided with such dignity and charm at these gatherings. I had
first met the Maharanee in London, in 1887, at the festivities in
connection with Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The Maharanee, the daughter
of a very ancient Bengal family, was then quite young. She had only
emerged "from behind the curtain," as natives of India say, for six
months. In other words, she had just emancipated herself from the
seclusion of the Zenana, where she had lived since her marriage. She
had then very delicate features, and most lovely eyes, with
exquisitely moulded hands and arms. Very wisely she had not adopted
European fashions in their entirety, but had retained the becoming
_saree_ of gold or silver tissue or brocade, throwing the end of
it over her head as a veil, and looking perfectly charming in it.
Everything in England must have seemed strange to her, the climate,
the habits, and the mode of living, and yet this little Princess
behaved as though she had been used to it all her life, and still
managed to retain the innate dignity of the high-caste native lady.

As one travels through life certain pictures remain vividly clear-cut
in the memory. The evenings in that shooting-camp are amongst these. I
can still imagine myself strolling with an extremely comely lady along
the stretches of natural lawn that crowned the bluff above the river,
the gurgle and splashing of the stream loud in our ears as we looked
over the unending expanse of jungle below us, vast and full of mystery
under the brilliant moonlight of India. In India the moonlight is
golden, not silvery as with us. The great grey sea of scrub, with an
occasional prominent tree catching this golden light on its clear-cut
outline, had something awe-inspiring about it, for here one was face
to face with real Nature. A faint and distant roar was also a reminder
that the jungle had its inhabitants, and through it all came the
quaintly incongruous strains of the orchestra playing a selection from
"The Mikado":

  "My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time,
   To make the punishment fit the crime,
   The punishment fit the crime."

The moonlit jungle night-scene, and the familiar air with its London
associations were such endless thousands of miles apart.

On the floor of my drawing-room, in Westminster, the skin of a bear
reposes close to those of two tigers. This is how he came there: We
were at breakfast when _kubber_ of a bear only two miles away was
brought in. The Maharajah at once ordered the howdah-elephants round.
Opposite me on the breakfast-table stood a large plate of buns, which
the camp baker made most admirably. Ever since my earliest childhood I
had gone on every possible occasion to the Zoological Gardens in
Regent's Park, and was therefore in a position to know what was the
favourite food of the ursine race. That they did not exist on buns in
the jungle was due to a lack of opportunity rather than to a lack of
inclination, so I argued that the dainty would prove just as
irresistible to a bear in the jungle as it did to his brethren in the
big pit near the entrance to the Zoo, and ignoring the rather cheap
gibes of the rest of the party, I provided myself with half-a-dozen
buns, three of which I attached by long strings to the front of my
howdah, where they swung about like an edible pawnbroker's sign. The
bear was lying in a very small patch of bamboo, and broke cover at
once. As I had anticipated, the three swinging buns proved absolutely
irresistible to him. He came straight up to me, I shot him with a
smooth-bore, and he is most decorative in his present position, but it
was all due to the buns. The Maharajah told me, much to my surprise,
that far more natives were killed by bears than by tigers in that part
of India.

The jungle was very diversified: in places it consisted of flat
tablelands of scrub, varied with broad open spaces broken by thick
clumps ("topes" they are called by Anglo-Indians) of bamboo. In other
parts there were rocky ravines covered with forest growth, and on the
low ground far-stretching and evil-smelling swamps spread themselves,
the home of the rhinoceros and water buffalo.

I had no idea of an elephant's climbing powers. These huge beasts make
their way quite easily up rocky ascents no horse could negotiate. In
coming down steep declivities, the wise creatures extend their
hind-legs, using them as brakes. Cautious old Chota Begum would never
ford any river without sounding the depth with her trunk at every
step. On one occasion two of the Maharajah's fishermen were paddling
native dug-outs down-stream as we approached a river. Chota Begum, who
had never before seen a dug-out, took them for crocodiles, trumpeted
loudly with alarm, and refused to enter the water until they were
quite out of sight. The curious intelligence of the animal is seen
when they are ordered to remove a tree which blocks the road. Chota
Begum would place her right foot against the trunk and give a little
tentative shove. Not satisfied with the leverage, she would shift her
foot again and again until she had found the right spot, then,
throwing her whole weight on to her foot, the tree would snap off like
a wooden match.

There was a great amount of bird-life in the jungle. It abounded in
peacocks, and these birds are a glorious sight sailing down-wind
through the sunlight with their tails streaming behind them, at a pace
which would leave any pheasant standing. As peacocks are regarded as
sacred by Hindoos, the Maharajah had particularly begged us not to
shoot any. There were plenty of other birds, snipe, partridges,
florican and jungle-cocks, the two latter greatly esteemed for their
flesh. I shot a jungle-cock, and was quite disappointed at finding him
a facsimile of our barndoor game-cock, for I had imagined that he
would have the velvety black wing starred with cream-coloured eyes,
which we associate with the "jungle-cock wing" of salmon flies. The
so-called "jungle-cock" in a "Jock Scott" fly is furnished by a bird
found, I believe, only round Madras. An animal peculiar to this part
of Assam is the pigmy hob, the smallest of the swine family. These
little beasts, no larger than guinea-pigs, go about in droves of about
fifty, and move through the grass with such incredible rapidity that
the eye is unable to follow them. The elephants, oddly enough, are
scared to death by the pigmy hogs, for the little creatures have
tushes as sharp as razors, and gash the elephants' feet with them as
they run past them.

I think that we all regretted the Maharajah's keenness about
water-buffalo and rhinos, for this entailed long days of plodding on
elephants through steamy, fetid swamps, where the grass was twenty
feet high and met over one's head, where the heat was intolerable,
without one breath of air, and the mosquitoes maddening. A day in the
swamps entailed, too, a big dose of quinine at bedtime. Between
ourselves, I was terrified at the prospect of having to fire off the
heavy four-bore elephant-rifle. The "kick" of fourteen-and-a-half
drachms of black-powder is tremendous, and one's shoulder ached for
two hours afterwards, though I do not regret the "kick" in surveying
the water-buffalo which has hung now in my hall for thirty years. I
have only seen two wild rhinoceroses in my life, and of the first one
I had only a very brief glimpse. We were outside the swamp, when down
a jungle-track came a charging rhinoceros, his head down and an evil
look in his eye. One look was enough for Chota Begum. That most
respectable of old ladies had quite evidently no love for rhinos. She
lost her nerve completely, and ran away for two miles as hard as her
ungainly limbs could lay leg to the ground. It is no joke to be on a
runaway elephant maddened with fright, and it is extremely difficult
to keep one's seat. The mahout and I hung on with both hands for dear
life, the guns and rifles crashing together with a deafening clamour
of ironmongery, and I was most thankful that there were no trees
anywhere near, for the terrified animal's first impulse would have
been to knock off both howdah and mahout under the overhanging branch
of a tree. When Chota Begum at length pulled up, she had to listen to
some terrible home-truths about her ancestry from the mahout, who was
bitterly disappointed in his beloved charge. As to questions of
lineage, and the morals of Chota Begum's immediate progenitors, I can
only hope that the mahout exaggerated, for he certainly opened up
appalling perspectives. Any old lady would have got scared at seeing
so hideous a monster preparing to rip her open, and under the
circumstances you and I would have run away just as fast as Chota
Begum did.

The only other wild rhinoceros I ever saw was on the very last day of
our stay in Assam. We were returning home on elephants, when they
began to trumpet loudly, as we approached a little dip. My nephew,
General Sir Henry Streatfeild, called out to me to be ready, as there
was probably a bear in the hollow. Next moment a rhinoceros charged
out and made straight for his elephant. Sir Henry fired with a heavy
four-bore rifle, and by an extraordinary piece of good luck hit the
rhino in the one little spot where he is vulnerable, otherwise he must
have been killed. The huge beast rolled over like a shot hare,
stone-dead.

One evening on our way back to camp, we thought that we would ride our
elephants ourselves, and told the mahouts to get down. They had no
fancy for walking two miles back to camp, and accordingly, in some
mysterious manner of which they have the secret, gave their charges
private but definite orders. I seated myself on Chota Begum's neck,
put my feet in the string stirrups, and took the big _ankus_ in
my hand. The others did the same. I then ordered Chota Begum to go on,
using the exact words the mahout did. Chota Begum commenced walking
round and round in a small circle, and the eight other elephants all
did the same. I tried cajoling her as the mahout did, and assured her
that she was a "Pearl" and my "Heart's Delight." Chota Begum continued
walking round and round in a small circle, as did all the other
elephants. I changed my tactics, and made the most unmerited
insinuations as to her mother's personal character, at the same time
giving her a slight hint with the blunt end of the _ankus_. Chota Begum
continued stolidly walking round and round. Meanwhile language most
unsuited to a Sunday School arose from other members of the party, who
were also careering round and round in small circles. Finally an Irish
A.D.C. summed up the situation by crying, "These mahouts have us beat,"
whereupon we capitulated, and a simultaneous shout went up, "Ohe,
Mahout-log!" It is but seldom that one sees a native of India laughing,
but those mahouts, when they emerged from the cover of some bamboos,
were simply bent double with laughter. How they had conveyed their
wishes to the elephants beats me still.

The best of things must come to an end, and so did the Cooch Behar
shoot. It is an experience that I would not have missed for anything,
especially as I am now too old to hope to be able to repeat it.

The Maharajah was good enough to invite me again the next year, 1892,
but by that time I was seated in an editorial chair, and could not
leave London. In the place of the brilliant sunshine of Assam, the
grimy, murky London atmosphere; instead of the distant roars from the
jungle, the low thunder of the big "machines" in the basement, as they
began to revolve, grinding out fresh reading-matter for the insatiable
British public.

The memories, however, remain. Blazing sunlight; splendid sport;
endless tracts of khaki-coloured jungle; princely hospitality;
pleasant fellowship; cheery company.

What more can any one ask?




CHAPTER II

Mighty Kinchinjanga--The inconceivable splendours of a Himalayan
sunrise--The last Indian telegraph-office--The irrepressible British
Tommy--An improvised garden--An improvised Durbar Hall--A splendid
ceremony--A native dinner--The disguised Europeans--Our shocking
table-manners--Incidents--Two impersonations; one successful, the
other reverse--I come off badly--Indian jugglers--The rope-trick--The
juggler, the rope, and the boy--An inexplicable incident--A performing
cobra scores a success--Ceylon "Devil Dancers"--Their performance--The
Temple of the Tooth--The uncovering of the Tooth--Details
concerning--An abominable libel--Tea and coffee--Peradeniya
Gardens--The upas tree of Java--Colombo an Eastern Clapham
Junction--The French lady and the savages--The small Bermudian and the
inhabitants of England.


During our early morning walks through the jungle-tracts of Assam, on
clear days we occasionally caught a brief glimpse of a glittering
white cone on the horizon. This was mighty Kinchinjanga, the second
highest mountain in the world, distant then from us I should be afraid
to say how many miles.

To see Kinchinjanga to perfection, one must go to Darjeeling. What a
godsend this cool hill-station is to Calcutta, for in twenty hours the
par-boiled Europeans by the Hooghly can find themselves in a
temperature like that of an English April. At Silliguri, where the
East Bengal Railway ends, some humorist has erected, close to the
station, a sign-post inscribed "To Lhassa 359 miles." The sign-post
has omitted to state that this entails an ascent of 16,500 feet. The
Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway, an intrepid little mountain-climber,
looks as though it had come out of a toy-shop, for the gauge is only
two feet, and the diminutive engines and carriages could almost be
pulled about with a string. As the little train pants its leisurely
way up 6000 feet, it is worth while noticing how the type of the
country people changes. The brown-skinned Aryan type of the plains is
soon replaced by the yellow, flat-faced Mongolian type of the hills,
and the women actually have a tinge of red in their cheeks.

The first time that I was at Darjeeling it was veiled in perpetual
mists; on the last occasion, to compensate for this, there were ten
days of continual clear weather. Then it is that it is worth while
getting up at 5.30 a.m. and going down into a frost-nipped garden,
there to wait patiently in the dark. In the eastern sky there is that
faintest of jade-green glimmers, known as the "false dawn"; below it
the deep valleys are still wrapped in dark purple shadows, when quite
suddenly Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn," _rododachtulos Aeos_, (was
ever more beautiful epithet coined?) lays one shy, tentative
finger-tip of blazing, flaming crimson on a vast unseen bulk, towering
up 28,000 feet into the air. Then quickly comes a second flaming
finger-tip, and a third, until you are fronting a colossal pyramid of
the most intensely vivid rose-colour imaginable. It is a glorious
sight! Suddenly, in one minute, the crimson splendour is replaced by
the most dazzling, intense white, and as much as the eye can grasp of
the two-thousand-mile-long mountain-rampart springs into light, peak
after peak, blazing with white radiance, whilst the world below is
still slumbering in the half-shadows, and the valleys are filled with
purple darkness. I do not believe that there is any more splendidly
sublime sight to be seen in the whole world. For a while the eternal
snows, unchanging in their calm majesty, dominate the puny world
below, and then, because perhaps it would not be good to gaze for long
on so magnificent a spectacle, the mists fall and the whole scene is
blotted out, leaving in the memory a revelation of unspeakable
grandeur. I saw this sunrise daily for a week, and its glories seemed
greater every day. For some reason that I cannot explain it always
recalled to me a passage in Job xxxviii, "When the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

No one has ever yet succeeded in scaling Kinchinjanga, and I do not
suppose that any one ever will.

Darjeeling itself, in spite of its magnificent surroundings, looks
like a portion of a transplanted London suburb, but there is a certain
piquancy in reflecting that it is only fifteen miles from the borders
of Tibet. The trim, smug villas of Dalhousie and Auckland Roads may
have electric light, and neat gardens full of primroses; fifteen miles
away civilisation, as we understand the term, ends. There are neither
roads, post-offices, telegraphs nor policemen; these tidy commonplace
"Belle Vues," "Claremonts" and "Montpeliers" are on the very threshold
of the mysterious Forbidden Land. An Army doctor told me that he had
been up at the last frontier telegraph-office of India. It is well
above the line of snows, and one would imagine it a terrible place of
captivity for the Sergeant and four Privates (all white men) in charge
of it, but the spirits of the British Tommy are unquenchable. The men
had amused themselves by painting notices, and the perpetual snow
round the telegraph-office was dotted with boards: "this way to the
swings and boats"; "the public are requested not to walk on the newly
sown grass"; "try our famous shilling teas"; "all season-tickets must
be shown at the barrier," and many more like them. It takes a great
deal to depress the average British soldier.

Natives of India are extraordinarily good at "camouflaging" improvised
surroundings, for they have been used to doing it for centuries. I was
once talking to Lord Kitchener at his official house in Fort William,
Calcutta, when he asked me to come and have a look at the garden. He
informed me that he was giving a garden-party to fifteen hundred
guests in three days' time, and wondered whether the space were
sufficient for it. I told him that I was certain that it was not, and
that I doubted whether half that number could get in. "Very well,"
said Lord Kitchener, "I shall have the whole of the Fort ditch turned
into a garden to-morrow." Next day he had eight hundred coolies at
work. They levelled the rough sand, marked out with pegs walks of
pounded bricks, which they flattened, sowed the sand with mustard and
cress and watered it abundantly to counterfeit lawns, and finally
brought cartloads of growing flowers, shrubs and palms, which they
"plunged" in the mustard-and-cress lawns, and in thirty-six hours
there was a garden apparently established for years. It is true that
the mustard-and-cress lawns did not bear close inspection, but, on the
other hand, you could eat them, which you cannot do with ours. Lord
Kitchener was fond of saying that he had never been intended for a
soldier, but for an architect and house-decorator. Certainly the
additions made to his official house, which were all carried out from
his own designs, were very effective and in excellent taste.

In a country like India, where so much takes place out of doors,
wonderful effects can be produced, as Lord Kitchener said, with some
rupees, some native boys, and a good many yards of insulated wire. The
boys are sent climbing up the trees; they drop long pieces of twine to
which the electric wires are tied; they haul them up, and proceed to
wire the trees and to fix coloured bulbs up to their very tops. Night
comes; a switch is pressed, and every tree in the garden is a blaze of
ruby, sapphire, or emerald, with the most admirable result.

Lord Minto was holding a large Investiture of the "Star of India" the
last time that I was in Calcutta. He wished to have at least two
thousand people present, and large as are the rooms at Government
House, not one of them would contain anything like that number, so
Lord Minto had an immense canvas Durbar Hall constructed. Here again
the useful factor comes in of knowing to a day when the earliest
possible shower of rain is due. The tent, a huge flat-topped
"Shamyana," was, when finished, roughly paved with bricks, over which
were spread priceless Persian and Indian carpets from the "Tosho
Khana" or Treasury. The sides and roof were stretched at one end with
sulphur-coloured Indian silk, at the other with pale blue silk, the
yellow silk with a two-foot border of silver tinsel, the blue edged
with gold tinsel. Cunning craftsmen from Agra fashioned "camouflage"
doorways and columns of plaster, coloured and gilt in the style of the
arabesques in the Alhambra, and the thing was done; almost literally,

  "Out of the earth a fabric huge
  Rose like an exhalation,"

and it would be impossible to imagine a more splendid setting for a
great pageant. Some one on the Viceroy's staff must have had a great
gift for stage-management, for every detail had been carefully thought
out. The scarlet and gold of the Troopers of the Body-guard, standing
motionless as brown statues, the mace-men with their gilt standards,
the entry of the Rajahs, all in full gala costume, with half the
amount of our pre-war National Debt hanging round their necks in the
shape of diamonds and of uncut rubies and emeralds, the Knights of the
Star of India in their pale-blue mantles, the Viceroy seated on his
silver-gilt throne at the top of a flight of steps, on which all the
Durbar carpets of woven gold were displayed, made, under the blaze of
electric light, an amazingly gorgeous spectacle only possible in the
East, and it would be difficult for any European to have equalled the
immense dignity of the Native Princes.

Custom forbids the Viceroy's wife to dine out, but it had been long
agreed between Lady Lansdowne and the Maharanee of Cooch Behar, that
should she ever return to India as a private person she should come to
a dinner served native fashion, "on the floor." My sister having
returned to Calcutta for her son's marriage in 1909, the Maharanee
reminded her of this promise. Upon arriving at the house, Lady
Lansdowne and two other European ladies were conducted up-stairs to be
arrayed in native garb, whilst the Maharajah's sons with great glee
took charge of myself, of yet another nephew of mine, and of the
Viceroy's head aide-de-camp. Although it can hardly be taken as a
compliment, truth compels me to confess that the young Cooch Behars
considered my figure reminiscent of that of a Bengalee gentleman. With
some slight shock to my modesty, I was persuaded to discard my
trousers, being draped in their place with over thirty yards of white
muslin, wound round and round, and in and out of my lower limbs. A
dark blue silk tunic, and a flat turban completed my transformation
into a Bengalee country squire, or his equivalent. My nephew, being
very slight and tall, was at once turned into a Sikh, with skin-tight
trousers, a very high turban, and the tightest of cloth-of-gold
tunics, whilst the other young man, a good-looking dark young fellow,
became a Rajput prince, and shimmered with silver brocades. I must own
that European ladies do not show up to advantage in the native
_saree_. Their colouring looks all wrong, and they have not the
knack of balancing their unaccustomed draperies. Our ladies all looked
as though they were terrified that their voluminous folds would
suddenly slip off (which, indeed, they owned was the case), leaving
them most indelicately lightly clad. One could not help observing the
contrast between the nervousness of the three European ladies, draped
respectively in white and gold, pink and silver, and blue and gold,
and the grace with which the Maharanee, with the ease of long
practice, wore her becoming _saree_ of brown and cloth of gold. As
it had been agreed that strict native fashion was to be observed, we
were all shoeless. The Maharanee, laughing like a child, sprinkled us
with rose-water, and threw garlands of flowers and wreaths of tinsel
round our necks. I felt like a walking Christmas-tree as we went down
to dinner.

Round a large, empty, marble-paved room, twelve little red-silk beds
were disposed, one for each guest. In front of each bed stood an
assemblage of some thirty silver bowls, big and little, all grouped
round a large silver platter, piled a foot high with a pyramid of
rice. This was the entire dinner, and there were, of course, neither
knives nor forks. No one who has not tried it can have any idea of the
difficulty of plunging the right hand into a pile of rice, of
attempting to form a ball of it, and then dipping it at haphazard into
one of the silver bowls of mysterious preparations. Very little of my
rice ever reached my mouth, for it insisted on spreading itself
greasily over the marble floor, and I was gratified at noting that the
European ladies managed no better than I did. Added to which,
half-lying, half-reclining on the little silk beds, the unaccustomed
European gets attacked by violent cramps; one is also conscious of the
presence of bones in the most unexpected portions of one's anatomy,
and these bones begin aching furiously in the novel position. Some
native dishes are excellent; others must certainly be acquired tastes.
For instance, after a long course of apprenticeship one might be in a
position to appreciate snipe stewed in rose-water, and I am convinced
that asafoetida as a dressing to chicken must be delicious to those
trained to it from their infancy. A quaint sweet, compounded of
cocoa-nut cream and rose-water, and gilded all over with gold-leaf,
lingers in my memory. As hands naturally get greasy, eating in this
novel fashion, two servants were constantly ready with a silver basin
and a long-necked silver ewer, with which to pour water over soiled
hands. This basin and ewer delighted me, for in shape they were
exactly like the ones that "the little captive maid" was offering to
Naaman's wife in a picture which hung in my nursery as a child, I
liked watching the graceful play of the wrists and arms of the
Maharanee and her daughters as they conveyed food to their mouths; it
was a contrast to the clumsy, ineffectual efforts of the Europeans.

The aide-de-camp looked so wonderfully natural as a Rajput prince (and
that, too, without any brown make-up) that we wished him to dress-up
in the same clothes next day and to go and write his name on the
Viceroy, to see if he could avoid detection.

These sorts of impersonations have to be done very thoroughly if they
are to succeed. I have recounted elsewhere how my father won the
rowing championship of the Mediterranean with his four-oar, in 1866.
The course being such a severe one, his crew had to train very
rigorously. It occurred to my father, who was extremely fond of boxing
himself, that a little daily practice with the gloves might with
advantage form part of the training. He accordingly had four pairs of
boxing-gloves sent out from England, and he and the crew had daily
bouts in our coach-house. The Duc de Vallombrosa was a great friend of
my family's, and used to watch this boxing with immense interest. The
Duc was a huge man, very powerfully built, but had had no experience
with the gloves. The present Sir David Erskine was the youngest member
of the crew, and was very slender and light built, and it struck my
father one day that it would be interesting to see this comparative
stripling put on the gloves with the great burly Frenchman. Sir David
realised that his only chance with his huge brawny opponent was to
tire him out, for should this formidable Colossus once get home on
him, he would be done. He made great play with his foot-work, skipping
round his big opponent and pommelling every inch of his anatomy that
he could reach, and successfully dodging the smashing blows that his
slow-moving antagonist tried to deal him. Suddenly, and quite
unexpectedly, the big Frenchman collapsed. The Duc de Vallombrosa took
his defeat in the most sportsmanlike fashion, but he remembered who
had originally proposed the match.

A week later my father was riding home from a picnic with some
ladies. As their horses were tired, he proposed that they should save
a long round by riding along the railway line and over a railway
bridge. The Due de Vallombrosa heard of this. Some few nights later
two gendarmes in full uniform appeared at our villa after dark, and
the bigger of the two demanded in the most peremptory fashion to be
taken in to my father at once, leaving the younger one to watch the
front door, where we could all see him marching up and down. When
ushered in to my father, the gendarme, a huge, fiercely bearded man,
adopted the most truculent manner. It had come to the knowledge of the
police, he said, that my father had ridden on horse-back over a
railway bridge, and along the line. Did he admit it? My father at once
owned that he had done so, but pleaded ignorance, should he have
broken any rule. Ignorance was no excuse, retorted the gendarme, even
foreigners were supposed to know the law. The big bearded gendarme,
whose tone became more hectoring and bullying every moment, went on to
say that my father had broken Article 382 of the French Penal Code, a
very serious offence indeed, punishable with from three to six months'
imprisonment. My father smiled, and drawing out his pocket-book, said
that he imagined that the offence could be compounded. The stern
officer of the law grew absolutely furious; did my father suppose that
a French gendarme could be bribed into forgetting his duty? He would
now take my father to the lock-up to pass the night there until the
_proces verbal_ should be drawn up, and though he regretted it,
his orders in similar cases were always to handcuff his prisoners. The
family, who had gathered together on hearing the loud altercation,
were struck with consternation. The idea of our parent being led in
fetters through a French town, and then flung into a French dungeon,
was so unspeakably painful to us that we were nearly throwing
ourselves at the big policeman's feet to implore him to spare our
progenitor, when the burly gendarme suddenly pulled off his false
beard, revealing the extensive but familiar features of the Duc de
Vallombrosa. The second slight-built gendarme at the door, proved to
be General Sir George Higginson, most admirably made up. My father
insisted on the two gendarmes dining with us. As our servants were not
in the secret, the presence of two French policemen in uniform at the
family dinner-table must have rather surprised them.

I must plead guilty myself to another attempt at impersonation. During
my father's second term of office as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, my
mother had a severe nervous breakdown, due to the unexpected death of
a very favourite sister of mine. One of the principal duties of a Lord
Lieutenant is (or rather was) to entertain ceaselessly, and private
mourning was not supposed to interfere with this all-important task.
So, after a respite of four months, the endless round of dinners,
dances, and balls recommenced, but my mother could not forget her
loss, and had no heart for any festivities, nor did she wish to meet
strangers. My father took a house for her on the sea-coast near
Dublin, to which she retired, and my only remaining unmarried sister
took, with Queen Victoria's permission, my mother's place as Lady
Lieutenant for two years.

A brother cannot be an impartial judge of his sister's personal
appearance, but I have always understood that my seven sisters were
regarded by most people as ranking only second to the peerless
Moncrieffe sisters as regards beauty. Certainly I thought this
particular sister, the late Lady Winterton, surpassed the others in
outward appearance, for she had beautiful and very refined features,
and the most exquisite skin and complexion. I thought her a most
lovely apparition when covered with my mother's jewels.

In those days (how far off they seem!) one of the great events of the
Dublin Season was the Gala-night at the theatre, or "Command Night" as
it was called, when all the men wore uniform or Court dress, and the
ladies their very best clothes. When the Lord and Lady Lieutenant
entered the State box, attended by the various members of their
Household, the audience stood up, the band playing "God Save the
Queen!" (yes, that was in Dublin in 1875!), and the Viceregal pair
then bowed their acknowledgments to the house from their box.

On the "Command Night" in 1875 my sister took my mother's place, and,
as I have already said, diamonds were exceedingly becoming to her.
According to custom, she went to the front of the box, and made a low
sweeping curtsey to the audience. Ten days later she received a letter
from an unknown correspondent, together with a photograph of a portly
elderly man with large grey whiskers. He had been taken in an unusual
position, for he was making a low bow and holding his high hat at
arm's length from him. The writer explained that on the Command Night
my sister had bowed to him in the most marked way. So taken aback was
he, that he had not acknowledged it. He, therefore, to make amends,
had had himself photographed in an attitude of perpetual salutation.
Other letters rained in on my sister from the eccentric individual,
and he sent her almost weekly fresh presentments of his
unprepossessing exterior, but always in a bowing attitude. We made,
naturally, inquiries about this person, and found that he was an
elderly widower, a hatter by trade, who had retired from business
after making a considerable fortune, and was living in Rathmines, a
South Dublin suburb. The hatter was undoubtedly mad, a mental
infirmity for which there is, of course, ample precedent in the case
of gentlemen of his profession.

On one occasion, when my sister was leaving for England, the hatter,
having purchased a number of fireworks, chartered a rowing-boat, and
as the mail-steamer cleared the Kingstown pier-heads, a _bouquet_
of rockets and Roman candles coruscated before the eyes of the
astonished passengers. I was then eighteen, and as none of us had set
eyes on the hatter, it occurred to me that it would be rather fun to
impersonate him, so, taking a photograph with me as guide, I got his
bald grey head and long grey whiskers accurately copied by a Dublin
theatrical wig-maker. It would have been difficult to carry out my
idea at the Viceregal Lodge, for in the hall there, in addition to the
regular hall-porter, there was always a constable in uniform and a
plain-clothes man on duty, to prevent the entry of unauthorised
persons, so I waited until we had moved to Baron's Court. Here I made
careful preparations, and arranged to dress and makeup at the house of
the Head-Keeper, a great ally of mine. I was met here by a hack-car
ordered from the neighbouring town, and drove up to the front door
armed with a nosegay the size of a cart-wheel, composed of dahlias,
hollyhocks and sunflowers. I gave the hatter's name at the door, and
was ushered by the unsuspecting footman into a library, where I waited
an interminable time--with my gigantic bouquet in my hand. At length
the door opened, but instead of my sister, as I had anticipated, it
admitted my father, and my father had a hunting-crop in his hand, and
to the crop was attached a heavy thong. His first words left me in no
doubt as to his attitude. "So, sir," he thundered, "you are the
individual who has had the impertinence to pester my daughter with
your attentions. I am going to give you, sir, a lesson that you will
remember to the end of your life," and the crop was lifted.
Fortunately the room was crowded with furniture, so, crouching between
tables, and dodging behind sofas, I was able to elude the thong until
I had tugged my wig off. The spirit-gum manufactured in those days must
have been vastly superior to that made now, for nothing would induce
my whiskers to part company with my face. Yelling out my identity, in
spite of the hatter's tactlessly adhesive whiskers, I made one bolt
for the open window, having successfully evaded the whirling crop
every time, but it was a lamentably tame ending to a carefully planned
drama.

Remembering these family incidents, we decided that it would be as
well to abandon the idea of a visit to Government House by a
distinguished Rajput nobleman.

I may possibly have been unfortunate in my personal experiences of
Indian jugglers, but I have never seen them perform any trick that was
difficult of explanation. For instance, the greatly over-rated Mango
trick, as I have seen it, was an almost childish performance. Having
made his heap of sand, inserted the mango-stone, and watered it, the
juggler covered it with a large basket, and _put his hands under the
basket_. He did this between each stage of the growth of the tree.
The plants in their various stages of growth were, of course, twisted
round the inside of the basket, and he merely substituted one for
another.

Colonel Barnard, at one time Chief of Police in Calcutta, told me a
most curious story. We have all heard of the Indian "rope-trick," but
none of us have met a person who actually saw it with his own eyes:
the story never reaches us at first-hand, but always at second- or
third-hand, exactly like the accounts one heard from credulous people
in 1914 of the passage of the 75,000 Russian soldiers through England.
No one had actually seen them, but every one knew somebody else whose
wife's cousin had actually conversed with these mysterious Muscovites,
or had seen trains with closely veiled windows rushing at dead of
night towards London, crammed to overflowing with Russian warriors.

In the same way Colonel Barnard had never met an eye-witness of the
rope-trick, but his policemen had received orders to report to him the
arrival in Calcutta of any juggler professing to do it. At length one
of the police informed him that a man able to perform the trick had
reached Calcutta. He would show it on one condition: that Colonel
Barnard should be accompanied by one friend only. The Colonel took
with him one of his English subordinates; he also took with him his
Kodak, into which he had inserted a new roll of films. They arrived at
a poor house in the native quarter, where they were ushered into a
small courtyard thick with the dense smoke arising from two braziers
burning mysterious compounds. The juggler, naked except for his
loin-cloth, appeared and commenced salaaming profoundly, continuing
his exaggerated salaams for some little while. Eventually he produced
a long coil of rope. To Colonel Barnard's inexpressible surprise, the
rope began paying away, as sailors would say, out of the juggler's
hand of its own accord, and went straight up into the air. Colonel
Barnard kodaked it. It went up and up, till their eyes could no longer
follow it. Colonel Barnard kodaked it again. Then a small boy,
standing by the juggler, commenced climbing up this rope, suspended to
nothing, supported by nothing. He was kodaked. The boy went up and up,
till he disappeared from view. The smoke from the herbs smouldering in
the braziers seemed almost to blot out the courtyard from view. The
juggler, professing himself angry with the boy for his dilatoriness,
started in pursuit of him up this rope, hanging on nothing. He was
kodaked, too. Finally the man descended the rope, and wiped a
blood-stained knife, explaining that he had killed the boy for
disobeying his orders. He then pulled the rope down and coiled it up,
and suddenly the boy reappeared, and together with his master, began
salaaming profoundly. The trick was over.

The two Europeans returned home absolutely mystified. With their own
eyes they had seen the impossible, the incredible. Then Colonel
Barnard went into his dark room and developed his negatives, with an
astounding result. _Neither the juggler, nor the boy, nor the rope
had moved at all_. The photographs of the ascending rope, of the
boy climbing it, and of the man following him, were simply blanks,
showing the details of the courtyard and nothing else. Nothing
whatever had happened, but how, in the name of all that is wonderful
had the impression been conveyed to two hard-headed, matter-of-fact
Englishmen? Possibly the braziers contained cunning preparations of
hemp or opium, unknown to European science, or may have been burning
some more subtle brain-stealer; possibly the deep salaams of the
juggler masked hypnotic passes, but somehow he had forced two
Europeans to see what he wished them to see.

On one occasion in Colombo, in Ceylon, there was an unrehearsed
episode in a juggler's performance. I was seated on the verandah of
the Grand Oriental Hotel which was crowded with French passengers from
an outward-bound Messageries boat which had arrived that morning. A
snake-charmer was showing off his tricks and reaping a rich harvest.
The juggler went round with his collecting bowl, leaving his
performing cobras in their basket. One cobra, probably devoid of the
artistic temperament, or finding stage-life uncongenial to him,
hungered for freedom, and, leaving his basket, glided swiftly on to
the crowded verandah. He certainly occupied the middle of the stage at
that moment and had the "spot-light" full on him, for every eye was
riveted on the snake, and never was such a scene of consternation
witnessed. Every one jumped on to the tables, women fainted and
screamed, and the Frenchmen, for some unknown reason, all drew their
revolvers. It turned out afterwards that the performing cobras had all
had their poison-fangs drawn, and were consequently harmless.

Its inhabitants declare that Ceylon is the most beautiful island in
the world. Those who have seen Jamaica will, I think, dispute this
claim, though Kandy, nestling round its pretty little lake, and
surrounded by low hills, is one of the loveliest spots imaginable. It
is also the most snake-infested spot I ever set foot in.

The Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Clifford, whom I had previously met
in Trinidad, had succeeded with some difficulty in persuading a band
of "Devil Dancers" to leave their jungle fastnesses, and to give an
exhibition of their uncanny dances in his garden; for, as a rule,
these people dislike any Europeans seeing them engaged in their
mysterious rites. The Colonial Secretary's dining-room was as
picturesque in its setting as any stage scene. The room was surrounded
with open arches, through which peeped the blue-velvet night sky and
dim silhouettes of unfamiliar tropical growths; in the place of
electric or mechanical punkahs, a tall red-and-gold clad Cingalee
stood behind every guest waving continuously a long-handled, painted
palm-leaf fan. The simultaneous rhythmic motion of the fans recalled
the temple scene at the end of the first Act of _Aida_. We found
the "Devil Dancers" grouped in the garden, some thirty in number. The
men were all short and very dark-skinned; they wore a species of kilt
made of narrow strips of some white metal, which clashed furiously
when they moved. Their legs and chests were naked except for festoons
of white shells worn necklace-wise. On their heads they had curious
helmets of white metal, branching into antlers, and these headdresses
were covered with loose, jangling, metallic strips. The men had their
faces, limbs, and bodies painted in white arabesques, which, against
the dark skins, effectually destroyed any likeness to human beings. It
would be difficult to conceive of anything more uncanny and less human
than the appearance of these Devil Dancers as they stood against a
background of palms in the black night, their painted faces lit up by
the flickering glare of smoky torches. As soon as the raucous horns
blared out and the tom-toms began throbbing in their maddening,
syncopated rhythm, the pandemonium that ensued, when thirty men,
whirling themselves in circles with a prodigious clatter of metals,
began shrieking like devils possessed, as they leaped into the air,
was quite sufficient to account for the terror of the Cingalee
servants, who ran and hid themselves, convinced that they were face to
face with real demons escaped from the Pit.

Like all Oriental performances it was far too long. The dancers
shrieked and whirled themselves into a state of hysteria, and would
have continued dancing all night, had they not been summarily
dismissed. As far as I could make out, this was less of an attempt to
propitiate local devils than an endeavour to frighten them away by
sheer terror. It was unquestionably a horribly uncanny performance,
what with the white streaked faces and limbs, and the clang of the
metal dresses; the surroundings, too, added to the weird, unearthly
effect, the dark moonless night, the dim masses of forest closing in
on the garden, and the uncertain flare of the resinous torches.

Amongst others invited to see the Devil Dancers was a French
traveller, a M. Des Etangs, a singularly cultivated man, who had just
made a tour of all the French possessions in India. M. Des Etangs was
full of curiosity about the so-called "Sacred Tooth" of Buddha, which
is enshrined in the "Temple of the Tooth," and makes Kandy a
peculiarly sacred place to the Buddhist world.

The temple, a small but very picturesque building, overhangs the lake,
and is surrounded by a moat, full of the fattest carp and tortoises I
ever saw. Every pilgrim to the shrine throws rice to these carp, and
the unfortunate fish have grown to such aldermanic amplitude of
outline that they can only just waddle, rather than swim, through the
water.

The Buddhist community must be of a most accommodating temperament.
The original tooth of Buddha was brought to Ceylon in A.D. 411. It was
captured about 1315 and taken to India, but was eventually restored to
Kandy. The Portuguese captured it again in 1560, burnt it, and ground
it to powder, but the resourceful Vikrama Bahu at once manufactured a
new tooth out of a piece of ivory, and the Buddhists readily accepted
this false tooth as a worthy successor to the real one, extended the
same veneration to it as they did to its predecessor, and, more
important than all, increased rather than diminished their offerings
to the "Temple of the Tooth."

M. Des Etangs had the whole history of the tooth at his fingers' end,
and Sir Hugh Clifford, who as Colonial Secretary was the official
protector of the tooth, very kindly offered to have it uncovered for
us in two days' time. He added that the priests were by no means
averse to receiving such an official order, for they would telegraph
the news all over the island, and thousands of pilgrims would arrive
to view the exposed tooth, each one, of course, leaving an offering,
to the great benefit of the temple.

Sir Hugh invited M. Des Etangs, the late General Oliphant and myself
to be present at the uncovering, which had to take place at seven in
the morning, in order to afford a sufficiently long day for the
exposition. He implored us all, in view of the immense veneration with
which the Buddhists regarded the ceremony of the uncovering, to keep
perfectly serious, and to adopt a becoming attitude of respect, and he
begged us all to give a slight bow when the Buddhists made their
prostrations.

Accordingly, two days later at 7 a.m., M. Des Etangs, General Oliphant
and I found ourselves in a lower room of the temple, the actual
sanctuary of the tooth itself, into which Christians are not generally
admitted. We were, of course, the only Europeans present.

Never have I felt anything like the heat of that sanctuary. We dripped
and poured with perspiration. The room was entirely lined with copper,
walls and roof alike, and the closed shutters were also
copper-sheathed. Every scrap of light and air was excluded; there must
have been at least two hundred candles alight, the place was thick
with incense and heavy with the overpowering scent of the frangipani,
or "temple-flower" as it is called in Ceylon, which lay in piled white
heaps on silver dishes all round the room. The place was crowded with
priests and leading Buddhists, and we Europeans panted and gasped for
air in that stifling, over-scented atmosphere. Presently the
Hereditary Keeper of the Tooth, who was not a priest but the lineal
descendant of the old Kings of Kandy, knelt down and recited a long
prayer. At its conclusion eight men staggered across the room, bearing
a vast bell-shaped shrine of copper about seven feet high. This was
the outer case of the tooth. The Hereditary Keeper produced an archaic
key, and the outer case was unlocked. The eight men shuffled off with
their heavy burden, and the next covering, a much smaller, bell-shaped
case of gold, stood revealed. All the natives present prostrated
themselves, and we, in accordance with our orders, bowed our heads.
This was repeated six times, the cases growing richer and more heavily
jewelled as we approached the final one. The seventh case was composed
entirely of cut rubies and diamonds, a shimmering and beautiful piece
of work, presented by the Buddhists of Burmah, but made, oddly enough,
in Bond Street, W.1.

When opened, this disclosed the largest emerald known, carved into the
shape of a Buddha, and this emerald Buddha held the tooth in his
hand. After prolonged prostrations, the Hereditary Keeper took a
lotus-flower, beautifully fashioned out of pure gold without alloy,
and placed the tooth in it, on a little altar heaped with frangipani
flowers. The uncovering was over; we three Europeans left the room in
a half-fainting condition, gasping for air, suffocated with the
terrific heat, and stifled with the heavy perfumes.

The octagonal tower over the lake, familiar to all visitors to Kandy,
contains the finest Buddhist theological library in the world. The
books are all in manuscript, each one encased in a lacquer box, though
the bookcases themselves containing these treasures were supplied by a
well-known firm in the Tottenham Court Road.

A singularly intelligent young priest, speaking English perfectly,
showed me the most exquisitely illuminated old Chinese manuscripts, as
well as treatises in ten other Oriental languages, which only made me
deplore my ignorance, since I was unable to read a word of any of
them. The illuminations, though, struck me as fully equal to the
finest fourteenth-century European work in their extreme minuteness
and wonderful delicacy of detail. The young priest, whom I should
suspect of being what is termed in ecclesiastical circles "a spike,"
was evidently very familiar with the Liturgy of the Church of England,
but it came with somewhat of a shock to hear him apply to Buddha terms
which we are accustomed to use in a different connection.

The material prosperity of Ceylon is due to tea and rubber, and the
admirable Public Works of the colony, roads, bridges and railways,
seem to indicate that these two commodities produce a satisfactory
budget. During the Kandy cricket week young planters trooped into the
place by hundreds. Planters are divided locally into three categories:
the managers, "Peria Dorai," or "big masters," spoken of as "P. D.'s,"
the assistants, "Sinna Dorai," or "little masters," labelled
"S. D.'s," and the premium-pupils, known as "creepers."

Personally I am inclined to discredit the local legend that all male
children born of white parents in Ceylon come into the world with
abnormal strength of the right wrist, and a slight inherited callosity
of the left elbow. This is supposed to be due to their parents having
rested their left elbows on bar-counters for so many hours of their
lives; the development of the right wrist being attributed in the same
way to the number of glasses their fathers have lifted with it. This,
if authenticated by scientific evidence, would be an interesting
example of heredity, but I suspect it to be an exaggeration. The
bar-room in the hotel at Kandy was certainly of vast dimensions, and
was continuously packed to overflowing during the cricket week, and an
unusual notice conspicuously displayed, asking "gentlemen to refrain
from singing in the passages and bedrooms at night," seemed to hint
that undue conviviality was not unknown in the hotel; but it must be
remembered that these young fellows work very hard, and lead most
solitary existences. An assistant-manager on a tea estate may see no
white man for weeks except his own boss, or "P. D.," so it is
perfectly natural that when they foregather with other young
Englishmen of their own age during Colombo race week, or Kandy cricket
week, they should grow a little uproarious, or even at times exceed
the strict bounds of moderation, and small blame to them!

Ceylon was formerly a great coffee-producing island, and the
introduction of tea culture only dates from about 1882. In 1870 a
fungus began attacking the coffee plantations, and in ten years this
fungus killed practically all the coffee bushes, and reduced the
planters to ruin. Instead of whining helplessly over their
misfortunes, the planters had the energy and enterprise to replace
their ruined coffee bushes with tea shrubs, and Ceylon is now one of
the most important sources of the world's tea-supply. Tea-making--by
which I do not imply the throwing of three spoonfuls of dried leaves
into a teapot, but the transformation of the green leaf of a camellia
into the familiar black spirals of our breakfast-tables--is quite an
art in itself. The "tea-maker" has to judge when the freshly gathered
leaves are sufficiently withered for him to begin the process, into
the complications of which I will not attempt to enter. I was much
gratified, both in Ceylon and Assam, at noting how much of the
tea-making machinery is manufactured in Belfast, for though Ulster
enterprise is proverbial, I should never have anticipated it as taking
this particular line. There is one peculiarly fascinating machine in
which a mechanical pestle, moving in an eccentric orbit, twists the
flat leaf into the familiar narrow crescents that we infuse daily. The
tea-plant is a pretty little shrub, with its pale-primrose,
cistus-like flowers, but in appearance it cannot compete with the
coffee tree, with its beautiful dark glossy foliage, its waxy white
flowers, and brilliant scarlet berries.

Peradeniya Botanical Gardens rank as the second finest in the world,
being only surpassed by those at Buitenzorg in Java. I had the
advantage of being shown their beauties by the curator himself, a most
learned man, and what is by no means a synonymous term, a very
interesting one, too. Holding the position he did, it is hardly
necessary to insist on his nationality; his accent was still as marked
as though he had only left his native Aberdeen a week before. He
showed me a tall, graceful tree growing close to the entrance, with
smooth, whitish bark, and a family resemblance to a beech. This was
the ill-famed upas tree of Java, the subject of so many ridiculous
legends. The curator told me that the upas (_Antiaris toxicaria_)
was unquestionably intensely poisonous, juice and bark alike. A
scratch made on the finger by the bark might have very serious
results, and the emanations from a newly lopped-off branch would be
strong enough to bring out a rash; equally, any one foolish enough to
drink the sap would most certainly die. The stories of the tree giving
out deadly fumes had no foundation, for the curator had himself sat
for three hours under the tree without experiencing any bad effects
whatever. All the legends of the upas tree are based on an account of
it by a Dr. Foersch in 1783. This mendacious medico declared that no
living thing could exist within fifteen miles of the tree. The
Peradeniya curator pointed out that Java was a volcanic island, and
one valley where the upas flourishes is certainly fatal to all animal
life owing to the emanations of carbonic acid gas escaping from
fissures in the soil. It was impossible to look at this handsome tree
without some respect for its powers of evil, though I doubt if it be
more poisonous than the West Indian manchineel. This latter
insignificant tree is so virulently toxic that rain-drops from its
leaves will raise a blister on the skin.

Amongst the wonders of Peradeniya is a magnificent avenue of talipat
palms, surely the most majestic of their family, though they require
intense heat to develop their splendid crowns of leaves.

Colombo has been called the Clapham Junction of the East, for there
steamship lines from Australia, China, Burmah, and the Dutch East
Indies all meet, and the most unexpected friends turn up.

I recall one arrival at Colombo in a Messageries Maritimes boat. On
board was a most agreeable French lady going out with her children to
join her husband, a French officer in Cochin China. I was leaving the
ship at Colombo, but induced the French lady to accompany me on shore,
the children being bribed with the promise of a ride in a "hackery" or
trotting-bull carriage. None of the party had ever left France before.
As we approached the landing-stage, which was, as usual, black with
baggage-coolies waiting for a job, the French children began howling
at the top of their voices. "The savages! the savages! We're
frightened at the savages," they sobbed in French; "we want to go back
to France." Their mother asked me quite gravely whether "the savages"
here were well-disposed, as she had heard that they sometimes met
strangers with a shower of arrows. And this in up-to-date,
electric-lighted Colombo! We might have been Captain Cook landing in
Tahiti, instead of peaceful travellers making their quiet way to an
hotel amidst a harmless crowd of tip-seeking coolies.

The unfamiliar is often unnecessarily alarming.

I remember a small ten-year-old white Bermudian boy who accompanied
his father to England for King George's coronation. The boy had never
before left his cedar-clad, sunlit native archipelago, and after the
ship had passed the Needles, and was making her way up the Solent, he
looked with immense interest at this strange land which had suddenly
appeared after three thousand miles of water. All houses in Bermuda
are whitewashed, and their owners are obliged by law to whitewash
their coral roofs as well. Bermuda, too, is covered with low
cedar-scrub of very sombre hue, and there are no tall trees. The boy,
a very sharp little fellow, was astonished at the red-brick of the
houses on the Isle of Wight, and at their red-tile or dark slate
roofs, and was also much impressed by the big oaks and lofty elms.
Finally he turned to his father as the ship was passing Cowes: "Do you
mean to tell me, Daddy, that the people living in these queer houses
in this odd country are really human beings like us, and that they
actually have human feelings like you and me?"




CHAPTER III

Frenchmen pleasant travelling companions--The limitations--Vicomte de
Vogue, the innkeeper and the Ikon--An early oil-burning steamer--A
modern Bluebeard--His "Blue Chamber"--Dupleix--His ambitious scheme--A
disastrous period for France--A personal appreciation of the Emperor
Nicholas II--A learned but versatile Orientalist--Pidgin
English--Hong-Kong--An ancient Portuguese city in China--Duck junks--A
comical Marathon race--Canton--Its fascination and its appalling
smells--The malevolent Chinese devils--Precautions adopted
against--"Foreign Devils"--The fortunate limitations of Chinese
devils--The City of the Dead--A business interview.


M. Des Etangs, the French traveller to whom I have already alluded,
agreed to accompany me to the Far East, an arrangement which I
welcomed, for he was a very cultivated and interesting man.
Unexpectedly he was detained in Ceylon by a business matter, so I went
on alone.

I regretted this, for on two previous occasions I had found what a
pleasant travelling companion an educated Frenchman can be. I do not
think that the French, as a rule, are either acute or accurate
observers. They are too apt to start with preconceived theories of
their own; anything which clashes with the ideas that they have
already formed is rejected as evidence, whilst the smallest scrap of
corroborative testimony is enlarged and distorted so that they may be
enabled to justify triumphantly their original proposition, added to
which, Frenchmen are, as a rule, very poor linguists. This, of course,
is speaking broadly, but I fancy that the French mind is very definite
and clear-cut, yet rather lacking in receptivity. The French suffer
from the excessive development of the logical faculty in them. This
same definite quality in the French language, whilst delighting both
my ear and my intelligence, rightly or wrongly prevents French poetry
from making any appeal to me; it is too bright and sparkling, there is
no mystery possible in so clear-cut a medium, added to which, every
syllable in French having an equal value, no rhythm is possible, and
French poetry has to rely on rhyme alone.

It is not on the cloudless summer day that familiar objects take on
vague and fantastic shapes; to effect that, mists and a rain-veiled
sky are wanted. Then distances are blotted out, and the values of
nearer objects are transformed under the swirling drifts of vapour,
and a new dream-world is created under one's very eyes. This is,
perhaps, merely the point of view of a Northerner.

As far back as 1881, I had made a trip down the Volga to Southern
Russia with that most delightful of men, the late Vicomte Eugene
Melchior de Vogue, the French Academician and man-of-letters. I
absolve Vogue from the accusation of being unable to observe like the
majority of his compatriots, nor, like them, was he a poor linguist.
He had married a Russian, the sister of General Anenkoff of Central
Asian fame; spoke Russian fluently, and very few things escaped his
notice. Though he was much older than me, no more charming companion
could be imagined. A little incident at Kazan, on the Volga, amused me
enormously. We were staying at a most indifferent hotel kept by a
Frenchman. The French proprietor explained to us that July was the
month during which the miraculous Ikon of the Kazan Madonna was
carried from house to house by the priests. The fees for this varied
from 25 roubles (then 2 pounds 10s.) for a short visit from the Ikon of
five minutes, to 200 roubles (20 pounds) for the privilege of sheltering
the miracle-working picture for an entire night. I must add that the
original Ikon was supposed to have been dug up in Kazan in 1597. In
1612 it was removed to Moscow, and was transferred again in 1710 to
Petrograd, where a large and pretentious cathedral was built for its
reception. In 1812, when Napoleon captured Moscow, the Kazan Madonna
was hastily summoned from Petrograd, and many Russians implicitly
believe that the rout of the French was solely due to this
wonder-working Ikon. In the meanwhile the inhabitants of Kazan
realised that a considerable financial asset had left their midst, so
with commendable enterprise they had a replica made of the Ikon, which
every one accepted as a perfectly satisfactory substitute, much as the
Cingalees regarded their "Ersatz" Buddha's tooth at Kandy as fully
equal to the original. The French landlord told us that in view of the
strong local feeling, he was obliged, in the interests of his
business, to pay for a visit from the Ikon, "afin de faire marcher mon
commerce," and he invited Vogue and myself to be present at the
ceremony.

Next day we stood at the foot of a small back-staircase which had been
prepared in Russian fashion for the reception of the Madonna. Both the
steps and banisters of the stairs were entirely draped in clean white
sheets, to which little sprigs of fir branches had been attached. On a
landing, also draped with sheets, a little white-covered table with
two lighted candles was to serve as a _reposoir_ for the Ikon.
The whole of the hotel staff--all Russians--were present, as well as
the frock-coated landlord. The Madonna arrived in a gilt
coach-and-four, a good deal the worse for wear, with a coachman and
two shaggy-headed footmen, all bareheaded. The priests carried the
Madonna up to the temporary altar, and the landlord advanced to pay
his devotions.

Now as a Roman Catholic he had little respect for an Ikon of the
Eastern Church, nor as a Frenchman could he be expected to entertain
lively feelings of gratitude to a miracle-working picture which was
supposed by Russians to have brought about the terrible disasters to
his countrymen in 1812. Confident in his knowledge that no one
present, with the exception of Vogue and myself, understood one word
of French, the landlord fairly let himself go.

Crossing himself many times after the Orthodox fashion, and making the
low prostrations of the Eastern Church, he began: "Ah! vieille planche
peinte, tu n'as pas d'idee comme je me fiche de toi." More low
prostrations, and then, "Et c'est toi vieille croute qui imagines que
tu as chasse les Francais de ce pays en 1812?" More strenuous
crossings, "Ah! Zut alors! et re-zut, et re-re zut! sale planche!"
which may be Englished very freely as "Ah! you old painted board, you
can have no conception of what I think of you! Are you really
swollen-headed enough to imagine that it was you who drove the French
out of Russia in 1812? Yah! then, you ugly old daub, and yah! again!"
The Russian staff, not understanding one word of this, were much
impressed by their master's devotional behaviour, but Vogue and I had
to go into the street and laugh for ten minutes.

The wife of a prominent official boarded the steamer at some
stopping-place, with her two daughters. They were pretentious folk,
talking French, and giving themselves tremendous airs. When they heard
Vogue and me talking the same language, she looked at us, gave a
sniff, and observed in a loud voice, "Evidently two French commercial
travellers!" Next morning she ignored our salutations. During the
great heat of the day she read French aloud to her daughters, and to
my great joy the book was one of Vogue's. She enlarged on the beauty
of the style and language, so I could not help saying, "The author
will much appreciate your compliment, madame, for he is sitting
opposite you. This is M. de Vogue himself." I need hardly say that the
under-bred woman overwhelmed us with civilities after that.

The Volga steamers were then built after the type of Mississippi
boats, with immense superstructures; they were the first oil-burning
steamers I had ever seen, so I got the Captain's permission to go down
to the engine-room. Instead of a grimy stokehole full of perspiring
firemen and piles of coal, I found a clean, white-painted place with
one solitary but clean man regulating polished taps. The Chief
Engineer, a burly, red-headed, red-bearded man, came up and began
explaining things to me. I could then talk Russian quite fluently, but
the technicalities of marine engineering were rather beyond me, and I
had not the faintest idea of the Russian equivalents for, say,
intermediate cylinder, or slide-valve. I stumbled lamely along somehow
until a small red-haired boy came in and cried in the strongest of
Glasgow accents, "Your tea is waiting on ye, feyther."

It appeared that the Glasgow man had been Head Engineer of the river
steamboat company for ten years, but we had neither of us detected the
other's nationality.

On another occasion, whilst proceeding to India in a Messageries
Maritimes boat, I made the acquaintance of an M. Bayol, a native of
Marseilles, who had been for twenty-five years in business at
Pondicherry, the French colony some 150 miles south of Madras.
M. Bayol was a typical "Marius," or Marseillais: short, bald, bearded
and rotund of stomach. It is unnecessary to add that he talked twenty
to the dozen, with an immense amount of gesticulation, and that he
could work himself into a frantic state of excitement over anything in
two minutes. I heard on board that he had the reputation of being the
shrewdest business man in Southern India. He was most capital company,
rolling out perpetual jokes and _calembour_, and bubbling over with
exuberant _joie de vivre_. I think M. Bayol took a fancy to me on
account of my understanding his Provencale patois, for, as a boy, I
had learnt French in a Provencale-speaking district.

All Englishmen are supposed in France to suffer from a mysterious
disease known as "le spleen." I have not the faintest idea of what
this means. The spleen is, I believe, an internal organ whose
functions are very imperfectly understood, still it is an accepted
article of faith in France that every Briton is "devore de spleen,"
and that this lamentable state of things embitters his whole outlook
on life, and casts a black shadow over his existence. When I got to
know M. Bayol better during our evening tramps up and down the deck,
he asked me confidentially what remedies I adopted when "ronge de
spleen," and how I combated the attacks of this deplorable but
peculiarly insular disease, and was clearly incredulous when I failed
to understand him. This amazing man also told me that he had been
married five times. Not one of his first four wives had been able to
withstand the unhealthy climate of Pondicherry for more than eighteen
months, so, after the demise of his fourth French wife, he had married
a native, "ne pouvant vivre seul, j'ai tout bonnement epouse une
indigene."

M. Bayol insisted on showing me the glories of Pondicherry himself, an
offer which I, anxious to see a Franco-Indian town, readily accepted.
There is no harbour there, and owing to the heavy surf, the landing
must be made in a surf-boat, a curious keel-less craft built of thin
pliant planks _sewn_ together with copper wire, which bobs about on the
surface of the water like a cork. At Pondicherry, as in all French
Colonial possessions, an attempt has been made to reproduce a little
piece of France. There was the dusty "Grande Place," surrounded with
even dustier trees and numerous cafes; the "Cafe du Progres"; the
"Cafe de l'Union," and other stereotyped names familiar from a hundred
French towns, and pale-faced civilians, with a few officers in
uniform, were seated at the usual little tables in front of them.
Everything was as different as possible from an average Anglo-Indian
cantonment: even the natives spoke French, or what was intended to be
French, amongst themselves. The whole place had a rather dejected,
out-at-elbows appearance, but it atoned for its diminishing trade by
its amazing number of officials. That little town seemed to contain
more bureaucrats than Calcutta, and almost eclipsed our own post-war
gigantic official establishments. On arriving at my French friend's
house, the fifth Madame Bayol, a lady of dark chocolate complexion,
and numerous little pale coffee-coloured Bayols greeted their spouse
and father with rapturous shouts of delight. Later in the day,
M. Bayol, drawing me on one side, said, "We have become friends on the
voyage; I will now show you the room which enshrines my most sacred
memories," and drawing a key from his pocket, he unlocked a door,
admitting me to a very large room perfectly bare and empty except for
four stripped bedsteads standing in the centre. "These, mon ami, are
the beds on which my four French wives breathed their last, and this
room is very dear to me in consequence," and the fat little
Marseillais burst into tears. I have no wish to be unfeeling, but I
really felt as though I had stumbled undesignedly upon some of the
more intimate details connected with Bluebeard's matrimonial
difficulties, and when M. Bayol began, the tears streaming down his
cheeks, to give me a brief account of his first wife's last moments,
the influence of this Bluebeard chamber began asserting itself, and it
was all I could do to refrain from singing (of course very
sympathetically) the lines from Offenbach's _Barbe-Bleue_ beginning:

  "Ma premiere femme est morte
  Que le diable l'emporte!"

but on second thoughts I refrained.

M. Bayol's garden reminded me of that of the immortal Tartarin of
Tarascon, for the only green things in it grew in pots, and nothing
was over four inches high. The rest of the garden consisted of bare,
sun-baked tracts of clay, intersected by gravel walks. I felt certain
that amongst these seedlings there must have been a two-inch high
specimen of the Baobab "l'arbre geant," the pride of Tartarin's heart,
the tree which, as he explained, might under favourable conditions
grow 200 feet high. After all, Marseilles and Tarascon are not far
apart, and their inhabitants are very similar in temperament.

I was pleased to see a fine statue of Dupleix at Pondicherry, for he
was a man to whom scant justice has been done by his compatriots. Few
people seem to realise how very nearly Dupleix succeeded in his design
of building up a great French empire in India. He arrived in India in
1715, at the age of eighteen, and amassed a large fortune in
legitimate trade; he became Administrator of Chandernagore, in Bengal,
in 1730, and displayed such remarkable ability in this post that in
1741 he was appointed Governor-General of the French Indies. In 1742
war broke out between France and Britain, and at the outset the French
arms were triumphant. Madras surrendered in 1746 to a powerful French
fleet under La Bourdonnais, the Governor of the Island of Reunion, and
a counterattack on Pondicherry by Admiral Boscawen's fleet in 1748
failed utterly, though the defence was conducted by Dupleix, a
civilian. These easy French successes inspired Dupleix with the idea
of establishing a vast French empire in India on the ruins of the
Mogul monarchy, but here he was frustrated by the military genius of
Clive, who, it must be remembered, started life as a civilian "writer"
in the East India Company's service. Dupleix encountered his first
check by Clive's dashing capture of Arcot in 1751. From that time the
fortunes of war inclined with ever-increasing bias to the British
side, and the decisive battle of Plassey in 1757 (three years after
Dupleix's return to France) was a death-blow to the French aspirations
to become the preponderant power in India.

Dupleix was shabbily treated by France. He received but little support
from the mother country; the vast sums he had expended from his
private resources in prosecuting the war were never refunded to him;
he was consistently maligned by the jealous and treacherous La
Bourdonnais, and after his recall to France in 1754 his services to
his country were never recognised, and he died in poverty.

G. B. Malleson's _Dupleix_ is a most impartial and interesting account
of this remarkable man's life: it has been translated into French and
is accepted by the French as an accurate text-book.

The whole reign of Louis XV. was a supremely disastrous period for
French Colonial aspirations. Not only did the dream of a great French
empire in the East crumble away just as it seemed on the very point of
realisation, but after Wolfe's victory on the Heights of Abraham at
Quebec, Canada was formally ceded by France to Britain in 1763, by the
Treaty of Paris.

This ill fortune pursued France into the succeeding reign of Louis
XVI., for in April, 1782, Rodney's great victory over Count de Grasse
off Dominica transferred the Lesser Antilles from French to British
suzerainty.

The same sort of blight seemed to hang over France during Louis XV.'s
reign, as overshadowed the Russia of the ill-starred Nicholas II.
Nothing could possibly go right with either of them, and it may be
that the prime causes were the same: the assumption of absolute power
by an irresolute monarch, lacking the intellectual equipment which
alone would enable him to justify his claims to supreme power--though
I hasten to disclaim any comparison between these two rulers.

Between Louis XV., vicious, selfish and incapable, always tied to the
petticoat and caprices of some new mistress, and the unfortunate
Nicholas II., well-intentioned, and almost fanatically religious, the
affectionate father and the devoted husband, no comparison is
possible, except as regards their limitations for the supreme
positions they occupied.

I have recounted elsewhere how, when Nicholas II. visited India as
Heir Apparent in 1890, I saw a great deal of him, for he stayed ten
days with my brother-in-law, Lord Lansdowne, at Calcutta and
Barrackpore, and I was brought into daily contact with him. The
Czarevitch, as he then was, had a very high standard of duty, though
his intellectual equipment was but moderate. He had a perfect craze
about railway development, and it must not be forgotten that that
stupendous undertaking, the Trans-Siberian Railway, was entirely due
to his initiative. At the time of his visit to India, Nicholas II. was
obsessed with the idea that the relations between Great Britain and
Russia would never really improve until the Russian railways were
linked up with the British-Indian system, a proposition which
responsible Indian Officials viewed with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
The Czarevitch was courteous, gentle and sincere, but though full of
good intentions, he was fatally inconstant of purpose, and his mental
endowments were insufficient for the tremendous responsibilities to
which he was to succeed, and in that one fact lies the pathos of the
story of this most unfortunate of monarchs.

To return from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and from the
disastrous collapse of the French Colonial Empire to my own infinitely
trivial personal experiences, I regretted the business which had
detained M. Des Etangs in Ceylon, and deprived me of the company of so
agreeable and cultivated a man-of-the-world.

There was a Dr. Munro on board the liner. Dr. Munro, at that time
Principal of a Calcutta College is, I believe, one of the greatest
Oriental scholars living. On going into the smoking-room of the
steamer one morning, I found the genial rotund little Professor at
work with an exquisitely illuminated Chinese manuscript before him. He
explained to me that it was a very interesting Chinese document of the
twelfth century, and that he was translating it into Arabic for the
benefit of his pupils. The amazing erudition of a man who could
translate off-hand an ancient Chinese manuscript into Arabic, without
the aid of dictionaries or of any works of reference, amidst all the
hubbub of the smoking-room of an ocean liner, left me fairly gasping.
Dr. Munro had acquired his Oriental languages at the University of
St. Petersburg, so, in addition to his other attainments, he spoke
Russian as fluently as English.

There was another side to this merry little Professor. We had on board
the vivacious and tuneful Miss Grace Palotta, who was making a
concert-tour round the world. Miss Palotta, whose charming personality
will be remembered by the frequenters of the old Gaiety Theatre, was a
Viennese by birth, and she sang those tuneful, airy little Viennese
songs, known as "Wiener Couplets," to perfection. She readily
consented to give a concert on board, but said she must be sustained
by a chorus. Dr. Munro himself selected, trained and led the chorus;
whilst I had to replace Miss Palotta's accompanist who was prostrate
with sea-sickness.

And so the big liner crept on slowly into steaming, oily, pale-green
seas, gliding between vividly green islands in the orchid-house
temperature of the Malay Peninsula, a part of the world worth
visiting, if only to eat the supremely delicious mangosteen, though
even an unlimited diet of this luscious fruit would hardly reconcile
the average person to a perpetual steam bath, and to an intensely
enervating atmosphere. Nature must have been in a sportive mood when
she evolved the durian. This singular Malay fruit smells like all the
concentrated drains of a town seasoned with onions. One single durian
can poison out a ship with its hideous odour, yet those able to
overcome its revolting smell declare the flavour of the fruit to be
absolutely delicious.

It is a little humiliating for a middle-aged gentleman to find that on
arriving in China he is expected to revert to the language of the
nursery, and that he must request his Chinese servant to "go catchee
me one piecee cuppee tea." On board the Admiral's yacht, it required a
little reflection before the intimation that "bleakfast belong leady
top-side" could be translated into the information that breakfast was
ready on deck. Why adding "ee" to every word should render it more
intelligible to the Celestial understanding, beats me. There are
people who think that by tacking "O" on to every English word they
render themselves perfectly clear to Italians and Spaniards, though
this theory seems hardly justified by results. "Pidgin English," of
course, merely means "business English," and has been evolved as an
easy means of communication for business purposes between Europeans
and Chinamen. The Governor of Hong-Kong's Chinese secretary prided
himself on his accurate and correct English. I heard the Governor ask
this secretary one day where a certain report was. "I placed it in the
second _business_-hole on your Excellency's desk," answered Mr. Wung
Ho, who evidently considered it very vulgar to use the term
"pigeon-hole."

Considering that eighty years ago, when it was first ceded to Britain,
Hong-Kong was a barren, treeless, granite island, it really is an
astonishing place. It is easily the handsomest modern city in Asia,
has a population of 400,000, and is by a long way the busiest port in
the world. It is an exceedingly pretty place, too, with its rows of
fine European houses rising in terraces out of a sea of greenery, and
it absolutely hums with prosperity. If Colombo is the Clapham
Junction, Hong-Kong is certainly the Crewe of the East, for steamship
lines to every part of the world are concentrated here. With the
exception of racing ponies, there is not one horse on the island.

Macao, the old Portuguese colony, is only forty miles from Hong-Kong.
The arrangements on the river steamers are rather peculiar, for only
European passengers are allowed on the spar deck. All Chinese
passengers, of whatever degree, have to descend to the lower decks,
which are enclosed with strong steel bars. Before the ship starts the
iron gates of communication are shut and padlocked, so that all
Chinese passengers are literally enclosed in a steel cage, shut off
alike from the upper deck and the engine-room. These precautions were
absolutely necessary, for time and time again gangs of river-pirates
have come on board these steamers in the guise of harmless passengers;
at a pre-arranged signal they have overpowered and murdered the white
officers, thrown the Chinese passengers overboard and then made off
with the ship and her cargo. An arms-rack of rifles on the European
deck told its own story.

Macao has belonged to Portugal since 1555. Its harbour has silted up,
and its once flourishing trade has dwindled to nothing. Gambling
houses are the only industry of the place. There are row and rows of
these opposite the steamer landing, all kept by Chinamen, garish with
coloured electric lights, each one clamorously proclaiming that it is
the "only first-class gambling house in Macao." A crowded special
steamer leaves Hong-Kong every Sunday morning for Macao, for the
special purpose of affording the European community an opportunity to
leave most of their excess profits in the pockets of the Chinese
proprietors of these places. The Captain and Chief Engineer of the
boat, who, it is almost superfluous to add, were of course both Clyde
men, like good Scots deplored this Sabbath-breaking; but like equally
good Scots they admitted how very lucrative the Sunday traffic was to
the steamboat company, and I gathered that they both got a commission
on this.

The old town of Macao is a piece of sixteenth and seventeenth century
Portugal transplanted into China. It is wonderful to find a southern
European town complete with cathedral, "pracas," fountains, and
statues, dumped down in the Far East. The place, too, is as
picturesque as a scene from an opera, and China is the last spot where
one would expect to find lingering traces of Gothic influence in
carved doorways and other architectural details. As far as externals
went Camoens, the great Portuguese poet, can scarcely have realised
his exile during the two years, 1556-1558, of his banishment to Macao.
He most creditably utilised this period of enforced rest by writing
_The Lusiads_, a poem which his countrymen are inclined to over
rate. All the familiar characteristics of an old Portuguese town are
met with here, the blue and pink colour-washed houses, an ample
sufficiency of ornate churches, public fountains everywhere, and every
shop-sign and notice is written in Portuguese, including the
interminable Portuguese street names. The only thing lacking seemed the
inhabitants. I presume the town must have some inhabitants, but I did
not see a single one. Possibly they were taking their siestas, or were
shut up in their houses, meditating on the bygone glories of Portugal,
tempered with regrets that they had neglected to dredge their harbour.

Admiral Sir Hedworth Meux, the Naval Commander-in-Chief in the
Pacific, who happens to be my sister's son, told me that he was
sending a destroyer for three or four days up the Canton River, on
special service, and asked if I would care to go, and I naturally
accepted the offer. The Admiral did not go up himself, but sent his
Flag-Captain and Flag-Lieutenant. The marshy banks of the Canton River
are lined with interminable paddy-fields, for, as every one knows,
rice is a crop that must be grown under water. After the rice harvest,
these swampy fields are naturally full of fallen grain, and thrifty
John Chinaman feeds immense flocks of ducks on the stubbles of the
paddy-fields. The ducks are brought down by thousands in junks, and
quack and gobble to their hearts' content in the fields all day,
waddling back over a plank to their junks at night. At sunset, one of
the most comical sights in the world can be witnessed. A Chinese boy
comes ashore from each junk with a horn, which he blows as a signal to
the ducks that bedtime has arrived. In his other hand the boy has a
rattan cane, with which he administers a tremendous thrashing to the
last ten ducks to arrive on board. The ducks know this, and in that
singular country their progenitors have probably been thrashed in the
same way for a thousand years, so they all have an inherited sense of
the dangers of the corporal punishment threatening them. As soon as
the horn sounds, thousands of ducks start the maddest of Marathon
races back to their respective junks, which they never mistake, with
such a quacking and gobbling and pushing of each other aside, as the
ungainly fowls waddle along at the top of their speed, as must be
witnessed to be credited. The duck has many advantages: in his wild
state, his extreme wariness and his powerful flight make him a
splendid sporting bird, and when dead he has most estimable qualities
after a brief sojourn in the kitchen. Domesticated, though he can
scarcely be classed as a dainty feeder, he makes a strong appeal to
some people, especially after he has contracted an intimate alliance
with sage and onions, but he was never intended by Nature for a
sprinter, nor are his webbed feet adapted for rapid locomotion.
Sufferers from chronic melancholia would, I am sure, benefit by
witnessing the nightly football scrums and speed-contests of these
Chinese ducks, for I defy any one to see them without becoming
helpless with laughter.

The river in the neighbourhood of Canton is so covered with junks,
sampans, and other craft, that, in comparison to it, the Thames at
Henley during regatta week would look like a deserted waste of water.
One misses at Canton the decorative war-junks of the Shanghai River.
These war-junks, though perfectly useless either for defence or
attack, are gorgeous objects to the eye, with their carving, their
scarlet lacquer and profuse gilding. A Chinese stern-wheeler is a
quaint craft, for her wheel is nothing but a treadmill, manned by some
thirty half-naked coolies, who go through a regular treadmill drill,
urging the boat along at perhaps three miles an hour. In addition to
their deck passengers, these boats have rows of little covered niches
for superior personages, and in every niche sits a grave, motionless
Chinaman, looking for all the world like those carved Chinese cabinets
we sometimes see, with a little porcelain figure squatting in each
carved compartment.

We had a naval interpreter on board, a jovial, hearty, immensely fat
old Chinaman. Our destroyer had four funnels, but as we were going up
the river under easy steam, only the forward boilers were going, so
that whilst our two forward funnels, "Matthew" and "Mark," were
smoking bravely, the two after ones, "Luke" and "John," were unsullied
by the faintest wisp of a smoke pennant trailing from their black
orifices. Our old interpreter was much distressed at this, for, as far
as I could judge, his countrymen gauged a vessel's fighting power
solely by the amount of smoke that she emitted, and he feared that we
should be regarded with but scanty respect.

The British and French Consulate-Generals at Canton are situated on a
large artificial island, known as Sha-mien. Here, too, the European
business men live in the most comfortable Europe-like houses,
surrounded with gardens and lawn-tennis courts. Here is the
cricket-ground and the club. Being in the Far East, the latter is, of
course, equipped with one of the most gigantic bar-rooms ever seen.
The British Consul-General had ordered chairs for us in which to be
carried through the city, as it would be derogatory to the dignity of
a European to be seen walking on foot in a Chinese town. Our business
with the Consul-General finished, we started on our tour of
inspection, the party consisting of the Flag-Captain, the
Flag-Lieutenant, the interpreter and myself, together with a small
midshipman, who, being anxious to see Canton, had somehow managed to
get three days' leave and to smuggle himself on board the destroyer.
The Consul-General warned us that the smells in the native city would
be unspeakably appalling, and advised us to smoke continuously, very
kindly presenting each of us with a handful of mild Borneo cheroots.

The canal separating Sha-mien from the city is 100 feet broad, but I
doubt if anywhere else in the world 100 feet separates the centuries
as that canal does. On the one side, green lawns, gardens, trees, and
a very fair imitation of Europe. A few steps over a fortified bridge,
guarded by Indian soldiers and Indian policemen, and you are in the
China of a thousand years ago, absolutely unchanged, except for the
introduction of electric light and telephones. The English manager of
the Canton Electric Co. told me that the natives were wonderfully
adroit at stealing current. One would not imagine John Chinaman an
expert electrician, yet these people managed somehow to tap the
electric mains, and the manager estimated the weekly loss on stolen
power as about 500 pounds.

No street in Canton is wider than eight feet, and many of them are
only five feet broad. They are densely packed with yellow humanity,
though there is no wheeled traffic whatever. There are countless miles
of these narrow, stifling alleys, paved with rough granite slabs,
under which festers the sewage of centuries. The smells are
unbelievably hideous. Except for an occasional canal, a reeking open
sewer, there are no open spaces whatever. And yet these narrow alleys
of two-storied houses are marvellously picturesque, with coloured
streamers and coloured lanterns drooping from every house and shop,
and the shops themselves are a joy to the eye. They are entirely open
to the street in front, but in the far dim recesses of every one there
is a species of carved reredos, over which dragons, lacquered black,
or lacquered red, gilded or silvered, sprawl artistically. In front of
this screen there is always a red-covered joss table, where red lights
burn, and incense-sticks smoulder, all of which, as shall be explained
later, are precautions to thwart the machinations of the peculiarly
malevolent local devils. In food shops, hideous and obscene entrails
of unknown animals gape repellently on the stranger, together with
strings and strings of dried rats, and other horrible comestibles; in
every street the yellow population seems denser and denser, the colour
more brilliant and the smells more sickening. We could not have stood
it but for the thoughtful Consul-General's Borneo cigars, though the
small midshipman, being still of tender years, was brought to public
and ignominious disaster by his second cheroot. After two hours of
slow progress in carrying-chairs, through this congeries of narrow,
unsavoury alleys, now jostled by coolies carrying bales of merchandise
suspended from long bamboos resting on their shoulders (exactly as
they did in the pictures of a book, called _Far Off_, which I had
as a child), now pushed on one side by the palanquin of a mandarin, we
hungered for fresh air and open spaces, less crowded by yellow
oblique-eyed Mongolians; still, though we all felt as though we were
in a nightmare, we had none of us ever seen anything like it, and in
spite of our declarations that we never wished to see this
evil-smelling warren of humanity again, somehow its uncanny
fascination laid hold of us, and we started again over the same route
next morning. The small midshipman had to be restrained from indulging
in his yearning to dine off puppy-dog in a Chinese restaurant, in
spite of the gastric disturbances occasioned by his precocious
experiments with cheroots.

I imagine that every Chinaman liable to zymotic diseases died
thousands of years ago, and that by the law of the survival of the
fittest all Chinamen born now are immune from filth diseases; that
they can drink sewage-water with impunity, and thrive under conditions
which would kill any Europeans in a week.

The inhabitants of Canton are, I believe, mostly Taoists by religion,
but their lives are embittered by their constant struggles with the
local devils. Most fortunately Chinese devils have their marked
limitations; for instance, they cannot go round a corner, and most
mercifully they suffer from constitutional timidity, and can be easily
frightened away by fire-crackers. Human beings inhabiting countries
subject to pests, have usually managed to cope with them by adopting
counter-measures. In mosquito-ridden countries people sleep under
mosquito-nets, thus baffling those nocturnal blood-suckers; in parts
of Ceylon infested with snakes, sharpened zig-zag snake-boards are
fastened to the window-sills, which prove extremely painful to
intruding reptiles. The Chinese, as a safeguard against their devils,
have adopted the peculiar "cocked hat" corner to their roofs, which we
see reproduced in so much of Chippendale's work. It is obvious that,
with an ordinary roof, any ill-disposed devil would summon some of his
fellows, and they would fly up, get their shoulders under the corner
of the eaves, and prise the roof off in no time. With the peculiar
Chinese upward curve of the corners, the devils are unable to get
sufficient leverage, and so retire discomfited. Most luckily, too,
they detest the smell of incense-sticks, and cannot abide the colour
red, which is as distasteful to them as it is to a bull, but though it
moves the latter to fury, it only inspires the devils with an abject
terror. Accordingly, any prudent man can, by an abundant display of
red silk streamers, and a plentiful burning of joss-sticks, keep his
house practically free from these pests. A rich Chinaman who has built
himself a new house, will at once erect a high wall immediately in
front of it. It obstructs the light and keeps out the air, but owing
to the inability of Chinese devils to go round corners it renders the
house as good as devil-proof.

We returned after dark from our second visit to the city. However much
the narrow streets may have offended the nose, they unquestionably
gratified the eye with the endless vista of paper lanterns, all softly
aglow with crimson, green, and blue, as the place reverberated with
the incessant banging of firecrackers. The families of the shopkeepers
were all seated at their supper-tables (for the Chinese are the only
Orientals who use chairs and tables as we do) in the front portions of
the shop. As women are segregated in China, only the fathers and sons
were present at this simple evening meal of sewage-fed fish, stewed
rat and broiled dog, but never for one instant did they relax their
vigilance against possible attacks by their invisible foes. It is
clear that an intelligent devil would select this very moment, when
every one was absorbed in the pleasures of the table, to penetrate
into the shop, where he could play havoc with the stock before being
discovered and ejected. Accordingly, little Ping Pong, the youngest
son, had to wait for his supper, and was sent into the street with a
large packet of fire-crackers to scare devils from the vicinity, and
if little Ping Pong was like other small boys, he must have hugely
enjoyed making such an appalling din. Every single shop had a stone
pedestal before it, on which a lamp was burning, for experience has
shown how useful a deterrent this is to any but the most abandoned
devils; they will at once pass on to a shop unprotected by a guardian
light.

We had been on the outskirts of the city that day, and I was much
struck with an example of Chinese ingenuity. The suburban inhabitants
all seem to keep poultry, and all these fowls were of the same
breed--small white bantams. So, to identify his own property, Ching
Wan dyed all his chickens' tails orange, whilst Hung To's fowls
scratched about with mauve tails, and Kyang Foo's hens gave themselves
great airs on the strength of their crimson tail feathers.

It is curious that, in spite of its wealth and huge population, Canton
should contain no fine temples. The much-talked-of Five-Storied Pagoda
is really hardly worth visiting, except for the splendid panorama over
the city obtained from its top floor. Canton here appears like one
endless sea of brown roofs extending almost to the horizon. The brown
sea of roof appears to be quite unbroken, for, from that height, the
narrow alleys of street disappear entirely. We were taken to a large
temple on the outskirts of the city. It was certainly very big, also
very dirty and ill-kept. Compared with the splendid temples of Nikko
in Japan, glowing with scarlet and black lacquer, and gleaming with
gold, temples on which cunning craftsmanship of wood-carving, enamels
and bronze-work has been lavished in almost superfluous profusion, or
even with the severer but dignified temples of unpainted cryptomeria
wood at Kyoto, this Chinese pagoda was scarcely worth looking at. It
had the usual three courts, an outer, middle, and inner one, and in
the middle court a number of students were seated on benches. I am
afraid that I rather puzzled our fat Chinese interpreter by inquiring
of him whether these were the local Benchers of the Middle Temple.

The Chinese dislike to foreigners is well known, so is the term
"foreign devils," which is applied to them. Our small party met with a
most hostile reception that day in one part of the city, and the crowd
were very menacing until addressed by our fat old interpreter. The
reason of this is very simple. Chinamen have invariably
chocolate-coloured eyes, so the great distorted wooden figures of
devils so commonly seen outside temple gates are always painted with
light eyes, in order to give them an inhuman and unearthly appearance
to Chinese minds. It so happened that the Flag-Captain, the
Flag-Lieutenant, the midshipman and myself, had all four of us
light-coloured eyes, either grey or blue, the colour associated with
devils, in the Chinese intelligence. We were unquestionably
foreigners, so the _prima facie_ evidence of satanic origin
against us was certainly strong. We ourselves would be prejudiced
against an individual with bright magenta eyes, and we might be
tempted to associate every kind of evil tendency with his abnormal
colouring; to the Chinese, grey eyes must appear just as unnatural as
magenta eyes would to us. We were inclined to attribute the hostile
demonstration to the small snottie, who, in spite of warnings, had
again experimented with cheroots. His unbecoming pallor would have
naturally predisposed a Chinese crowd against us.

The feeling of utter helplessness in a country where one is unable to
speak one word of the language is most exasperating. My youngest
brother, who is chairman of a steamship company, had occasion to go to
the Near East nine years ago on business connected with his company.
The steamer called at the Piraus for eight hours, and my brother, who
had never been in Athens, took a taxi and saw as much of "the city of
the violet crown" as was possible in the time. He could speak no
modern Greek, but when the taxi-man, on their return to the Piraus,
demanded by signs 7 pounds as his fare, my brother, hot with indignation
at such an imposition, summoned up all his memories of the Greek
Testament, and addressed the chauffeur as follows: "_o taxianthrope,
mae geyito!_" Stupefied at hearing the classic language of his
country, the taxi-man at once became more reasonable in his demands.
After this, who will dare to assert that there are no advantages in a
classical education?

All the hillsides round Chinese cities are dotted with curious stone
erections in the shape of horseshoes. These are the tombs of wealthy
Chinamen; the points of the compass they face, and the period which
must elapse before the deceased can be permanently buried, are all
determined by the family astrologers, for Chinese devils can be as
malignant to the dead as to the living, though they seem to reserve
their animosities for the more opulent of the population.

It is to meet the delay of years which sometimes elapses between the
death of a person and his permanent burial, that the "City of the
Dead" exists in Canton. This is not a cemetery, but a collection of
nearly a thousand mortuary chapels. The "City of the Dead" is the
pleasantest spot in that nightmare city. A place of great open sunlit
spaces, and streets of clean white-washed mortuaries, sweet with
masses of growing flowers. After the fetid stench of the narrow,
airless streets, the fresh air and sunlight of this "City of the Dead"
were most refreshing, and its absolute silence was welcome after the
deafening turmoil of the town. We were there in spring-time, and
hundreds of blue-and-white porcelain vases, of the sort we use as
garden ornaments, were gorgeous with flowering azaleas of all hues, or
fragrant with freesias. All the mortuaries, though of different sizes,
were built on the same plan, in two compartments, separated by pillars
with a carved wooden screen between them. Behind this screen the
cylindrical lacquered coffin is placed, a most necessary precaution,
for Chinese devils being fortunately unable to go round a corner, the
occupant of the coffin is thus safe from molestation. Other elementary
safeguards are also adopted; a red-covered altar invariably stands in
front of the screen, adorned with candles and artificial flowers, and
incense-sticks are perpetually burning on it. What with the
incense-sticks and abundant red silk streamers, an atmosphere is
created which must be thoroughly uncongenial, even to the most
irreclaimable devil. The outer chapel always contains two or four
large chairs for the family to meditate in.

It must be remembered that the favourite recreation of the Chinese is
to sit and meditate on the tombs of their ancestors, and though in
these mortuaries this pastime cannot be carried out in its entirety,
this modified form is universally regarded as a very satisfactory
substitute. In one chapel containing the remains of the wife of the
Chinese Ambassador in Rome, there was a curious blend of East and
West. Amongst the red streamers and joss-sticks there were metal
wreaths and dried palm wreaths inscribed, "A notre chere collegue
Madame Tsin-Kyow"; an unexpected echo of European diplomatic life to
find in Canton.

The rent paid for these places is very high, and as the length of time
which the body must rest there depends entirely upon the advice of the
astrologers, it is not uncharitable to suppose that there must be some
understanding between them and the proprietor of the "City of the
Dead."

We can even suppose some such conversation as the following between
the managing-partner of a firm of long-established family astrologers
and that same proprietor:

"Good-morning, Mr. Chow Chung; I have come to you with the melancholy
news of the death of our esteemed fellow-citizen, Hang Wang Kai. A
fine man, and a great loss! What I liked about him was that he was
such a thorough Chinaman of the good old stamp. A wealthy man, sir, a
_very_ wealthy man. The family are clients of mine, and they have just
rung me up, asking me to cast a horoscope to ascertain the wishes of
the stars with regard to the date of burial of our poor friend. How
inscrutable are the decrees of the heavenly bodies! They may recommend
the immediate interment of our friend: on the other hand, they may
wish it deferred for two, five, ten, or even twenty years, in which
case our friend would be one of the fortunate tenants of your
delightful Garden of Repose. Quite so. Casting a horoscope is _very_
laborious work, and I can but obey blindly the stars' behests.
Exactly. Should the stars recommend our poor friend's temporary
occupation of one of your attractive little Maisonettes, I should
expect, to compensate me for my labours, a royalty of 20 per cent. on
the gross (I emphasize the gross) rental paid by the family for the
first two years. They, of course, would inform me of any little sum
you did them the honour to accept from them. From two to five years, I
should expect a royalty of 30 per cent.; from five to ten years, 40
per cent.; on any period over ten years 50 per cent. Yes, I said
fifty. Surely I do not understand you to dissent? The stars may save
us all trouble by advising Hang Wang Kai's immediate interment. Thank
you. I thought that you would agree. These terms, of course, are only
for the Chinese and Colonial rights; I must expressly reserve the
American rights, for, as I need hardly remind you, the Philippine
Islands are now United States territory, and the constellations _may_
recommend the temporary transfer of our poor friend to American
soil. Thank you; I thought that we should agree. It only remains for
me to instruct my agents, Messrs. Ap Wang & Son, to draw up an
agreement in the ordinary form on the royalty basis I have indicated,
for our joint signature. The returns will, I presume, be made up as
usual, to March 31 and September 30. As I am far too upset by the loss
of our friend to be able to talk business, I will now, with your
permission, withdraw."

Had I been born a citizen of Canton, I should unquestionably have
articled my son to an astrologer, convinced that I was securing for
him an assured and lucrative future.




CHAPTER IV

The glamour of the West Indies--Captain Marryat and Michael
Scott--Deadly climate of the islands in the eighteenth century--The
West Indian planters--Difference between East and West Indies--"Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"--Training-school for British
Navy--A fruitless voyage--Quarantine--Distant view of Barbados--Father
Labat--The last of the Emperors of Byzantium--Delightful little Lady
Nugent and her diary of 1802--Her impressions of Jamaica--Wealthy
planters--Their hideous gormandising--A simple morning meal--An
aldermanic dinner--How the little Nugents were gorged--Haiti--Attempts
of General Le Clerc to secure British intervention in Haiti--Presents
to Lady Nugent--Her Paris dresses described--Our arrival in
Jamaica--Its marvellous beauty--The bewildered Guardsman--Little trace
of Spain left in Jamaica--The Spaniards as builders--British and
Spanish Colonial methods contrasted.


Since the earliest days of my boyhood, the West Indies have exercised
a quite irresistible fascination over me. This was probably due to my
having read and re-read _Peter Simple_ and _Tom Cringle's Log_ over and
over again, until I knew them almost by heart; indeed I will confess
that even at the present day the glamour of these books is almost as
strong as it used to be, and that hardly a year passes without my
thumbing once again their familiar pages. Both Captain Marryat and
Michael Scott knew their West Indies well, for Marryat had served on
the station in either 1813 or 1814, and Michael Scott lived for sixteen
years in Jamaica, from 1806 to 1822, at first as manager of a sugar
estate, and then as a merchant in Kingston. Marryat and Scott were
practically contemporaries, though the former was the younger by three
years, being born in 1792. I am told that now-a-days boys care for
neither of these books; if so, the loss is theirs. What attracted me in
these authors' West Indian pictures was the fact that here was a
community of British-born people living a reckless, rollicking, Charles
Lever-like sort of life in a most deadly climate, thousands of miles
from home, apparently equally indifferent to earthquakes, hurricanes,
or yellow fever, for at the beginning of the twentieth century no one
who has not read the Colonial records, or visited West Indian churches,
can form the faintest idea of the awful ravages of yellow fever, nor of
the vast amount of victims this appalling scourge claimed. Now,
improved sanitation and the knowledge that the yellow death is carried
by the Stegomyia mosquito, with the precautionary methods suggested by
that knowledge, have almost entirely eliminated yellow fever from the
West India islands; but in Marryat and Scott's time to be ordered to
the West Indies was looked upon as equivalent to a death sentence. Yet
every writer enlarges upon the exquisite beauty of these green, sun-
kissed islands, and regrets bitterly that so enchanting an earthly
paradise should be the very ante-room of death.

In spite of the unhealthy climate, in the days when King Sugar reigned
undisputed, the owners of sugar estates, attracted by the enormous
fortunes then to be made, and fully alive to the fact that in the case
of absentee proprietors profits tended to go everywhere except into
the owners' pockets, deliberately braved the climate, settled down for
life (usually a brief one) in either Jamaica or Barbados, built
themselves sumptuous houses, stocked with silver plate and rare wines,
and held high and continual revel until such time as Yellow Jack
should claim them. In the East Indies the soldiers and Civil Servants
of "John Company," and the merchant community, "shook the pagoda tree"
until they had accumulated sufficient fortunes on which to retire,
when they returned to England with yellow faces and torpid livers,
grumbling like Jos Sedley to the ends of their lives about the cold,
and the carelessness of English cooks in preparing curries, and
harbouring unending regrets for the flesh-pots and comforts of life in
Boggley Wollah, which in retrospect no doubt appeared more attractive
than they had done in reality. The West Indian, on the other hand,
settled down permanently with his wife and family in the island of his
choice. Barbados and Jamaica are the only two tropical countries under
the British flag where there was a resident white gentry born and bred
in the country, with country places handed down from father to son. In
these two islands not one word of any language but English was ever to
be heard from either black or white. The English parochial system had
been transplanted bodily, and successfully, with guardians and
overseers complete; in a word, they were colonies in the strictest
sense of the word; transplanted portions of the motherland, with most
of its institutions, dumped down into the Caribbean Sea, but blighted
until 1834 by the curse of negro slavery. It was this overseas
England, set amidst the most enchanting tropical scenery and
vegetation, that I was so anxious to see. Michael Scott, both in _Tom
Cringle_ and _The Cruise of the Midge_, gave the most alluring pictures
of Creole society (a Creole does _not_ mean a coloured person; any one
born in the West Indies of pure white parents is a Creole); they
certainly seemed to get drunk more than was necessary, yet the
impression left on one's mind was not unlike that produced by the
purely fictitious Ireland of Charles Lever's novels: one continual
round of junketing, feasting, and practical jokes; and what gave the
pictures additional piquancy was the knowledge that death was all the
while peeping round the corner, and that Yellow Jack might at any
moment touch one of these light-hearted revellers with his burning
finger-tips.

Lady Nugent, wife of Sir George Nugent, Governor of Jamaica from 1801
to 1806, kept a voluminous diary during her stay in the island, and
most excellent reading it makes. She was thus rather anterior in date
to Michael Scott, but their descriptions tally very closely. I shall
have a good deal to say about Lady Nugent.

The West Indies make an appeal of a different nature to all Britons.
They were the training-ground and school of all the great British
Admirals from Drake to Nelson. Benbow died of his wounds at Port Royal
in Jamaica, and was buried in Kingston Parish Church in 1702, whilst
Rodney's memory is still so cherished by West Indians, white and
coloured alike, that serious riots broke out when his statue was
removed from Spanish Town to Kingston, and his effigy had eventually
to be placed in the memorial temple which grateful Spanish Town
erected to commemorate his great victory over de Grasse off Dominica
on April 12, 1782, as the result of which the Lesser Antilles remained
British instead of French. For all these reasons I had experienced,
since the age of thirteen, an intense longing to see these lovely
islands with all their historic associations.

In 1884 I travelled from Buenos Ayres to Canada in a tramp steamer
simply and solely because she was advertised to call at Barbados and
Jamaica. Never shall I forget my first night in that tramp. I soon
became conscious of uninvited guests in my bunk, so, striking a light
(strictly against rules in the ships of those days), I discovered
regiments and army corps of noisome, crawling vermin marching in
serried ranks into my bunk under the impression that it was their
parade ground. For the remainder of the voyage I slept on the saloon
table, a hard but cleanly couch. We lay for a week at Rio de Janeiro
loading coffee, and we touched at Bahia and at Pernambuco. At this
latter place as at Rio an epidemic of yellow fever was raging, so we
had not got a clean bill-of-health. As the blunt-nosed tramp pushed
her leisurely way northward through the oily ultra-marine expanse of
tropical seas, I thought longingly of the green island for which we
were heading. We reached Carlisle Bay, Barbados, at daybreak on a
glorious June morning, and waited impatiently in the roadstead (there
is no harbour in Barbados) for the liberating visit of the medical
officer from the shore. He arrived, gave one glance at our
bill-of-health, and sternly refused _pratique_, so the hateful
yellow flag remained fluttering at the fore in the Trade wind,
announcing to all and sundry that we were cut off from all
communication with the shore. Never was there a more aggravating
situation! Barbados, all emerald green after the rainy season, looked
deliciously enticing from the ship. The "flamboyant" trees,
_Ponciana Regia_, were in full bloom, making great patches of
vivid scarlet round the Savannah. The houses and villas peeping out of
luxuriant tangles of tropical vegetation had a delightfully home-like
look to eyes accustomed for two years to South American surroundings.
Seen through a glass from the ship's deck, the Public Buildings in
Trafalgar Square, solid and substantial, had all the unimaginative
neatness of any prosaic provincial townhall at home. We were clearly
no longer in a Latin-American country. It was really a piece of
England translated to the Caribbean Sea, and we few passengers, some
of whom had not seen England for many weary years, were forbidden to
set foot on this outpost of home. It was most exasperating; for never
did any island look more inviting, and surely such dazzling white
houses, such glowing red roofs, such vivid greenery, and so absurdly
blue a sea, had never been seen in conjunction before. Barbados is
almost exactly the size of the Isle of Wight, but in spite of its
restricted area, all the Barbadians, both white and coloured, have the
most exalted opinion of their island, which in those days they
lovingly termed "Bimshire," white Barbadians being then known as
"Bims." Students of Marryat will remember how Mr. Apollo Johnson, at
Miss Betty Austin's coloured "Dignity ball," declared that "All de
world fight against England, but England nebber fear; King George
nebber fear while Barbados 'tand 'tiff," and something of that
sentiment persists still to-day. As a youngster I used to laugh till I
cried at the rebuff administered to Peter Simple by Miss Minerva at
the same "Dignity ball." Peter was carving a turkey, and asked his
swarthy partner whether he might send her a slice of the breast.
Shocked at such coarseness, the dusky but delicate damsel simpered
demurely, "Sar, I take a lily piece turkey bosom, if you please."
Dignity balls are still held in Barbados; they are rather trying to
one of the senses. In the "eighties" it was a point of honour amongst
"Bims" to wear on all and every occasion a high black silk hat. During
our enforced quarantine we saw a number of white Bims sailing little
yachts about the roadstead, every single man of them crowned with a
high silk hat, about the most uncomfortable head-gear imaginable for
sailing in. Another agreeable home-touch was to hear the negro boatmen
all talking to each other in English. Their speech may not have been
melodious, but it fell pleasantly enough on ears accustomed for so
long to hear nothing but Spanish. From my intimate acquaintance with
Marryat, even the jargon of the negro boatmen struck me with a
delightful sense of familiarity, as did the very place-names, Needham
Point and Carlisle Bay. I was fated not to see Barbados again for
twenty-two years.

In the early part of the eighteenth century a French missionary, one
Father Labat, visited Barbados and gave the most glowing account of it
to his countrymen. According to him the island was brimful of wealth,
and the jewellers' and silversmiths' shops in Bridgetown rivalled
those of Paris. I should be inclined to question Father Labat's strict
veracity. This worthy priest declared that the planters lived in
sumptuous houses, superbly furnished, that their dinners lasted four
hours, and their tables were crowded with gold and silver plate. The
statement as to the length of the planters' dinners is probably an
accurate one, for I myself have been the recipient of Barbadian
hospitality, and had never before even imagined such an endless
procession of fish, flesh, and fowl, not to mention turtle,
land-crabs, and pepper-pot. West Indian negresses seem to have a
natural gift for cooking, though their _cuisine_ is a very highly
spiced and full-flavoured one.

Father Labat's motive in drawing so glorified a picture of Barbados
peeps out at the end of his account, for he drily remarks that the
fortifications of the island were most inadequate, and that it could
easily be captured by the French; he was clearly making an appeal to
his countrymen's cupidity.

Upon making the acquaintance of Bridgetown some twenty years after my
first quarantine visit, I can hardly endorse Father Labat's opinion
that the streets are strikingly handsome, for Bridgetown, like most
British West Indian towns, looks as though all the houses were built
of cards or paper. It is, however, a bright, cheery little spot, seems
prosperous enough, and has its own Trafalgar Square, decorated with
its own very fine statue of Nelson. Every house both in Jamaica and
Barbados is fitted with sash-windows in the English style. This
fidelity to the customs of the motherland is very touching but hardly
practical, for in the burning climate of the West Indies every
available breath of fresh air is welcome. With French windows, the
entire window-space can be opened; with sashes, one-half of the window
remains necessarily blocked.

Let strangers beware of "Barbados Green Bitters." It is a most
comforting local cocktail, apparently quite innocuous. It is not;
under its silkiness it is abominably potent. One "green bitter" is
food, two are dangerous.

In St. John's churchyard, some fourteen miles from Bridgetown, is to
be seen one of the most striking examples of the vanity of human
greatness. A stone reproduction of the porch of a Greek temple bears
this inscription,

     HERE LYETH YE BODY OF
     FERDINANDO PALEOLOGOS
  DESCENDED FROM YE IMPERIAL LYNE
     OF YE LAST CHRISTIAN
     EMPERORS OF GREECE
  CHURCHWARDEN OF THIS PARISH
        1655-1656
   VESTRYMAN TWENTY YEARS
    DIED OCTOBER 3, 1678.

Just think of it! The last descendant of Constantine, the last scion
of the proud Emperors of Byzantium, commemorated as vestryman and
churchwarden of a country parish in a little, unknown island in the
Caribbean, only then settled for seventy-three years! Could any
preacher quote a more striking instance of "_sic transit gloria
mundi_"?

Codrington College, not far from St. John's church, is rather a
surprise. Few people would expect to come across a little piece of
Oxford in a tropical island, or to find a college building over two
hundred years old in Barbados, complete with hall and chapel. The
facade of Codrington is modelled on either Queen's or the New
Buildings at Magdalen, Oxford, and the college is affiliated to Durham
University. Originally intended as a place of education for the sons
of white planters it is now wholly given over to coloured students.
It can certainly claim the note of the unexpected, and the quiet
eighteenth-century dignity of its architecture is enhanced by the
broad lake which fronts it, and by the exceedingly pretty tropical
park in which it stands. Codrington boasts some splendid specimens of
the "Royal" palm, the _Palmiste_ of the French, which is one of
the glories of West Indian scenery.

Though Father Labat may have drawn the longbow intentionally, some of
the country houses erected by the sugar planters in the heyday of the
colony's riotous prosperity are really very fine indeed, although at
present they have mostly changed hands, or been left derelict. Long
Bay Castle, now unoccupied, is a most ambitious building, with marble
stairs, beautiful plaster ceilings, and some of its original
Chippendale furniture still remaining. A curious feature of all these
Barbadian houses is the hurricane-wing, built of extra strength and
fitted with iron shutters, into which all the family locked themselves
when the fall of the barometer announced the approach of a hurricane.
I was shown one hurricane-wing which had successfully withstood two
centuries of these visitations.

Barbados is the only ugly island of the West Indian group, for every
available foot is planted with sugar-cane, and the unbroken,
undulating sea of green is monotonous. In the hilly portions, however,
there are some very attractive bits of scenery.

On my first visit, as I have already said, I saw nothing of all this,
except through glasses from the deck of a tramp. I was also to be
denied a sight of Jamaica, for the Captain knew that he would be
refused _pratique_ there, and settled to steam direct to the Danish
island of St. Thomas, where quarantine regulations were less strict, so
all my voyage was for nothing.

Not for over twenty years after was I to make the acquaintance of
Kingston and Port Royal and the Palisadoes, all very familiar names to
me from my constant reading of Marryat and Michael Scott.

I suppose that every one draws mental pictures of places that they
have constantly heard about, and that most people have noticed how
invariably the real place is not only totally different from the fancy
picture, but almost aggressively so.

I have already mentioned Lady Nugent's journal or "Jamaica in 1801." I
am persuaded that she must have been a most delightful little
creature. She was very tiny, as she tells us herself, and had brown
curly hair. She was a little coy about her age, which she confided to
no one; by her own directions, it was omitted even from her tombstone,
but from internal evidence we know that when her husband, Sir George
Nugent, was appointed Governor of Jamaica on April 1, 1801 (how
sceptical he must have been at first as to the genuineness of this
appointment! One can almost hear him ejaculating "Quite so. You don't
make an April fool of me!"), she was either thirty or thirty-one years
old. Lady Nugent was as great an adept as Mrs. Fairchild, of revered
memory, at composing long prayers, every one of which she enters _in
extenso_ in her diary, but not only was there a delightful note of
feminine coquetry about her, but she also possessed a keen sense of
humour, two engaging attributes in which, I fear, that poor
Mrs. Fairchild was lamentably lacking.

Lady Nugent and her husband sailed out to Jamaica in a man-of-war,
H.M.S. _Ambuscade_, in June, 1801. As Sir George Nugent had been
from 1799 to 1801 Adjutant-General in Ireland, this name must have had
quite a home-like sound to him. We read in Lady Nugent's diary of June
25, 1801, after a lengthy supplication for protection against the
perils of the deep, the following charmingly feminine note: "My
nightcaps are so smart that I wear them all day, for to tell the truth
I really think I look better in my nightcap than in my bonnet, and as
I am surrounded by men who do not know a nightcap from a daycap, it is
no matter what I do." Dear little thing! I am sure she looked too
sweet in them. They sailed from Cork on June 5, and reached Barbados
on July 17, which seems a quick voyage. They stayed one night at an
inn in Bridgetown, and gave a dinner-party for which the bill was over
sixty pounds. This strikes quite a modern note, and might really have
been in post-war days instead of in 1801.

Lady Nugent found the society in Jamaica, both that of officials and
of planters and their wives, intensely uncongenial to her. "Nothing is
ever talked of in this horrid island but the price of sugar. The only
other topics of conversation are debt, disease and death." She was
much shocked at the low standard of morality prevailing amongst the
white men in the colony, and disgusted at the perpetual gormandising
and drunkenness. The frequent deaths from yellow fever amongst her
acquaintance, and the terrible rapidity with which Yellow Jack slew,
depressed her dreadfully, and she was startled at the callous fashion
in which people, hardened by many years' experience of the scourge,
received the news of the death of their most intimate friends. She was
perpetually complaining of the unbearable heat, to which she never got
acclimatised; she suffered "sadly" from the mosquitoes, and never
could get used to earthquakes, hurricanes, or scorpions.

With these exceptions, she seems to have liked Jamaica very well. It
must have been an extraordinary community, and to understand it we
must remember the conditions prevailing. Bryan Edwards, in his
_History of the British West Indies_, published in 1793, called
them "the principal source of the national opulence and maritime power
of England"; and without the stream of wealth pouring into Great
Britain from Barbados and Jamaica, the long struggle with France would
have been impossible.

The term "as rich as a West Indian" was proverbial, and in 1803 the
West Indies were accountable for one-third of the imports and exports
of Great Britain.

The price of sugar in 1803 was fifty-two shillings a hundredweight.
Wealth was pouring into the island and into the pockets of the
planters. Lady Nugent constantly alludes to sugar estates worth
20,000 or 30,000 pounds a year. These planters were six weeks distant
from England, and, except during the two years' respite which followed
the Treaty of Amiens, Great Britain had been intermittently at war with
either France or Spain during the whole of the eighteenth century. The
preliminary articles of peace between France and Britain were signed
on October 1, 1801, the Peace of Amiens itself on March 27, 1802, but
in July, 1803, hostilities between the two countries were again
renewed. All this meant that communications between the colony and the
motherland were very precarious. Nominally a mail-packet sailed from
Jamaica once a month, but the seas were swarming with swift-sailing
French and Spanish privateers, hanging about the trade-routes on the
chance of capturing West Indiamen with their rich cargoes, so the
mail-packets had to wait till a convoy assembled, and were then
escorted home by men-of-war. This entailed the increasing isolation of
the white community in Jamaica, who, in their outlook on life,
retained the eighteenth-century standpoint. Now the eighteenth century
was a thoroughly gross and material epoch. People had a pretty taste
in clothes, and a nice feeling for good architecture, graceful
furniture, and artistic house decoration, but this was a veneer only,
and under the veneer lay an ingrained grossness of mind, just as the
gorgeous satins and dainty brocades covered dirty, unwashed
bodies. Even the complexions of the women were artificial to mask the
defects of a sparing use of soap and water, and they drenched
themselves with perfumes to hide the unpleasant effects of this lack
of bodily cleanliness. On the surface hyper-refinement, glitter and
show; beneath it a crude materialism and an ingrained grossness of
temperament. What else could be expected when all the men got drunk as
a matter of course almost every night of their lives? Over the
coarsest description of wood lay a very highly polished veneer of
satin-wood, which might possibly deceive the eye, but once scratch the
paper-thin veneer and the ugly under-surface was at once
apparent. Money rolled into the pockets of these Jamaican planters;
there is but little sport possible in the island, and they had no
intellectual pursuits, so they just built fine houses, filled them
with rare china, Chippendale furniture, and silver plate, and found
their amusements in eating, drinking and gambling.

Even to-day the climate of Jamaica is very enervating. Wise people
know now that to keep in health in hot countries alcohol, and wine
especially, must be avoided. Meat must be eaten very sparingly, and an
abstemious regime will bring its own reward. In the eighteenth
century, however, people apparently thought that vast quantities of
food and drink would combat the debilitating effects of the climate,
and that, too, at a time when yellow fever was endemic. There are
still old-fashioned people who are obsessed with the idea that the
more you eat the stronger you grow. The Creoles in Jamaica certainly
put this theory into effect. Michael Scott, in _Tom Cringle_, describes
many Gargantuan repasts amongst the Kingston merchants, and as he
himself was one of them, we can presume he knew what he was writing
about. The men, too, habitually drank, of all beverages in the
world to select in the scorching heat of Jamaica, hot brandy and
water, and then they wondered that they died of yellow fever! Every
white man and woman in the island seems to have been gorged with
food. It was really a case of "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die"; but if they hadn't eaten and drunk so enormously, presumably
they would not have died so rapidly.

Lady Nugent was much disgusted with this gormandising. On page 78 of
her journal she says, "I don't wonder now at the fever the people
suffer from here--such eating and drinking I never saw! Such loads of
rich and highly-seasoned things, and really the gallons of wine and
mixed liquors that they drink! I observed some of our party to-day eat
at breakfast as if they had never eaten before. A dish of tea, another
of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock-negus; then
Madeira, sangaree, hot and cold meats, stews and pies, hot and cold
fish pickled and plain, peppers, ginger-sweetmeats, acid fruit, sweet
jellies--in short, it was all as astonishing as it was disgusting."

It really does seem a fair allowance for a simple morning meal.

The life of a Governor of Jamaica is now principally taken up with
quiet administrative work, but in 1802 he was supposed to hold a
succession of reviews, to give personal audiences, endless balls and
dinners, to make tours of inspection round the island; and, in
addition, as _ex officio_ Chancellor of Jamaica, it was his duty
to preside at all the sittings of the Court of Chancery. During their
many tours of inspection poor little Lady Nugent complains that, with
the best wishes in the world, she really could not eat five large
meals a day. She continues (page 95), "At the Moro to-day, our dinner
at 6 was really so profuse that it is worth describing. The first
course was of fish, with an entire jerked hog in the centre, and a
black crab pepper-pot. The second course was of turtle, mutton, beef,
turkey, goose, ducks, chicken, capons, ham, tongue, and crab patties.
The third course was of sweets and fruits of all kinds. I felt quite
sick, what with the heat and such a profusion of eatables."

One wonders what those planters' weekly bills would have amounted to
at the present-day scale of prices, and can no longer feel surprised
at their all running into debt, in spite of their huge incomes. The
drinking, too, was on the same scale. Lady Nugent remarks (page 108),
"I am not astonished at the general ill-health of the men in this
country, for they really eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises.
All the men of our party got drunk to-night, even to a boy of fifteen,
who was obliged to be carried home." Tom Cringle, in his account of a
dinner-party in Cuba, remarks airily, "We, the males of the party, had
drunk little or nothing, a bottle of claret or so apiece, a dram of
brandy, and a good deal of vin-de-grave (_sic_)," and he really
thinks that nothing: moderation itself in that sweltering climate!

In spite of her disgust at the immense amount of food devoured round
her, Lady Nugent seems to have adopted a Jamaican scale of diet for
her children, for when she returned to England with them in the
_Augustus Caesar_ in 1805, she gives the following account of the
day's routine on board the ship. It must be observed that George, the
elder child, was not yet three, and that Louisa was under two. "When I
awake, the old steward brings me a dish of ginger tea. I then dress,
and breakfast with the children. At eleven the children have biscuits,
and some port wine and water. George eats some chicken or mutton at
twelve, and at two they each have a bowl of strong soup. At four we
all dine; I go to my cabin at half-past seven, and soon after eight I
am always in bed and the babies fast asleep. The old steward then
comes to my bedside with a large tumbler of porter with a toast in it.
I eat the toast, drink the porter, and usually rest well."

Those two unfortunate children must have landed in England two
miniature Daniel Lamberts. It is pleasant to learn that little George
lived to the age of ninety. Had he not been so stuffed with food in
his youth, he would probably have been a centenarian.

During Nugent's term of office events in Haiti, or San Domingo, as it
was still called then, occasioned him great anxiety. Before the
outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Haiti had been the most
prosperous and the most highly civilised of the West Indian islands.
But after the French National Assembly had, in 1791, decreed equal
rights between whites and mulattoes, troubles began. The blacks
rebelled; the French rescinded the decree of 1791 and, changing their
minds again, re-affirmed it. The blacks began murdering and plundering
the whites, and many planters emigrated to Jamaica and the United
States. That most extraordinary man, Toussaint l'Ouverture, a pure
negro, who had been born a slave, re-established some form of order in
Haiti until Napoleon, when the preliminary articles of the Peace of
Amiens had been signed between Britain and France, hit upon the idea
of employing his soldiers in Haiti, and sent out his brother-in-law,
General Le Clerc, with 25,000 French soldiers to re-conquer the
island. It was a most ill-fated expedition; the soldiers could not
withstand the climate, and died like flies; France losing, from first
to last, no less than 40,000 men from yellow fever. In 1802, Le Clerc,
who seems to have been a great scoundrel, died, and in 1804 Haiti
declared her independence.

After the Peace of Amiens the French Government were exceedingly
anxious to secure the cooperation of British troops from Jamaica,
seasoned to the climate, in restoring order in Haiti, and even offered
to cede them such portions of Haiti as were willing to come under the
British flag. During the ten months of General Le Clerc's
administration of Haiti he was perpetually sending envoys to General
Nugent in Jamaica, and continually offering him presents. It is not
uncharitable to suppose that these presents were proffered with a view
of winning Nugent's support to the idea of a British expedition to
Haiti. Nugent, however, sternly refused all these gifts. Madame Le
Clerc, Napoleon's sister, who is better known as the beautiful
Princess Pauline Borghese, a lady with an infinity of admirers, was
far more subtle in her methods. Her presents to Lady Nugent took the
irresistible form of dresses of the latest Parisian fashion, and were
eagerly accepted by that volatile little lady. Indeed, for ten months
she seems to have been entirely dressed by Madame Le Clerc, who even
provided little George Nugent's christening robe of white muslin,
heavily embroidered in gold. Ladies may be interested in Lady Nugent's
account of her various dresses. "Last night at the ball I wore a new
dress of purple crape, embroidered and heavily spangled in gold, given
me by Madame Le Clerc. The skirt rather short; the waist very high.
On my head I wore a wreath of gilded bay-leaves, and must have looked
like a Roman Empress. I think that purple suits me, for every one
declared that they never saw me looking better." Dear little lady! I
am sure that she never did, and that the piquant little face on the
frontispiece, with its roguish eyes, looked charming under her gold
wreath. Again, "I wore a lovely dress of pink crape spangled in
silver, sent me by Madame Le Clerc." She gives a fuller account of her
dress at the great ball given her to celebrate her recovery after the
birth of her son (Dec. 30, 1802).

"For the benefit of posterity I will describe my dress on this grand
occasion. A crape dress, embroidered in silver spangles, also sent me
by Madame Le Clerc, but much richer than that which I wore at the last
ball. Scarcely any sleeves to my dress, but a broad silver spangled
border to the shoulder-straps. The body made very like a child's
frock, tying behind, and the skirt round, with not much train. On my
head a turban of spangled crape like the dress, looped-up with pearls.
This dress, the admiration of all the world over, will, perhaps, fifty
years hence, be laughed at, and considered as ridiculous as our
grandmothers' hoops and brocades appear to us now."

In fairness it must be stated that General Nugent punctiliously
returned all Madame Le Clerc's presents to his wife with gifts of
English cut-glass, then apparently much appreciated by the French. He
seems to have sent absolute cart-loads of cut-glass to Haiti, but in
days when men habitually drank two bottles of wine apiece after
dinner, there was presumably a fair amount of breakage of decanters
and tumblers.

I notice that although Lady Nugent complains on almost every page of
"the appalling heat," the "unbearable heat," the "terrific heat, which
gives me these sad headaches," she seems always ready to dance for
hours at any time. Some idea of the ceremonious manners of the day is
obtained from the perpetual entry "went to bed with my knees aching
from the hundreds of curtsies I have had to make to the company."

In 1811 Sir George Nugent was appointed Commander-in-Chief in Bengal,
and their voyage from Portsmouth to Calcutta occupied exactly six
months, yet there are people who grumble at the mails now taking
eighteen days to traverse the distance between London and Calcutta.

Lady Nugent was much shocked at the universal habit of smoking amongst
Europeans in the East Indies. She sternly refused to allow their two
aides-de-camp to smoke, "for as they are both only twenty-five, they
are too young to begin so odious a custom," an idea which will amuse
the fifteen-year-olds of today.

Not till 1906 did I find myself sailing into Kingston Harbour and
actually set eyes on Port Royal, the Palisadoes, and Fort Augusta, all
very familiar by name to me since my boyhood.

I had taken the trip to shake off a prolonged bronchial attack; a
young Guardsman, a friend of mine, though my junior by many years, was
convalescent after an illness, and was also recommended a sunbath, so
we travelled together. The hotels being all full, we took up our
quarters in a small boarding-house, standing in dense groves of orange
trees, where each shiver of the night breeze sent the branches of the
orange trees swish-swishing, and wafted great breaths of the delicious
fragrance of orange blossom into our rooms. I was in bed, when the
Guardsman, who had never been in the tropics before, rushed
terror-stricken into my room. "I have drunk nothing whatever," he
faltered, "but I must be either very drunk or else mad, for I keep
fancying that my room is full of moving electric lights." I went into
his room, where I found some half-dozen of the peculiarly brilliant
Jamaican fireflies cruising about. The Guardsman refused at first to
believe that any insect could produce so bright a light, and bemoaned
the loss of his mental faculties, until I caught a firefly and showed
him its two lamps gleaming like miniature motor head-lights.

Some pictures stand out startlingly clear-cut in the memory. Such a
one is the recollection of our first morning in Jamaica. The
Guardsman, full of curiosity to see something of the mysterious
tropical island into which we had been deposited after nightfall,
awoke me at daybreak. After landing from the mail-steamer in the dark,
we had had merely impressions of oven-like heat, and of a long,
dim-lit drive in endless suburbs of flimsily built, wooden houses,
through the spice-scented, hot, black-velvet night, enlivened with
almost indecently intimate glimpses into humble interiors, where
swarthy dark forms jabbered and gesticulated, clustered round smoky
oil-lamps; and as the suburbs gave place to the open country, the vast
leaves of unfamiliar growths stood out, momentarily silhouetted
against the blackness by the gleam of our carriage lamps.

It being so early, the Guardsman and I went out as we were, in pyjamas
and slippers, with, of course, sufficient head protection against the
fierce sun. Just a fortnight before we had left England under snow, in
the grip of a black frost; London had been veiled in incessant thick
fogs for ten days, and we had fallen straight into the most
exquisitely beautiful island on the face of the globe, bathed in
perpetual summer.

When we had traversed the grove of orange trees, we came upon a lovely
little sunk-garden, where beds of cannas, orange, sulphur, and
scarlet, blazed round a marble fountain, with a silvery jet splashing
and leaping into the sunshine. The sunk-garden was surrounded on three
sides by a pergola, heavily draped with yellow alamandas, drifts of
wine-coloured bougainvillaa, and pale-blue solanums, the size of
saucers. In the clear morning light it really looked entrancingly
lovely. On the fourth side the garden ended in a terrace dominating
the entire Liguanea plain, with the city of Kingston, Kingston
Harbour, Port Royal, and the hills on the far side spread out below us
like a map. Those hills are now marked on the Ordnance Survey as the
"Healthshire Hills." This is a modern euphemism, for the name
originally given to those hills and the district round them by the
soldiers stationed in the "Apostles' Battery," was "Hellshire," and
any one who has had personal experience of the heat there, can hardly
say that the title is inappropriate. From our heights, even Kingston
itself looked inviting, an impression not confirmed by subsequent
visits to that unlovely town. The long, sickle-shape sandspit of the
Palisadoes separated Kingston Harbour on one side from the blue waters
of the Caribbean Sea; on the other side the mangrove swamps of the Rio
Cobre made unnaturally vivid patches of emerald green against the
background of hills. On railways a green flag denotes that caution
must be observed; the vivid green of the mangroves is Nature's
caution-flag to the white man, for where the mangrove flourishes,
there fever lurks.

The whole scene was so wonderfully beautiful under the blazing
sunlight, and in the crystal-clear atmosphere, that the Guardsman
refused to accept it as genuine. "It can't be real!" he cried, "this
is January. We have got somehow into a pantomime transformation scene.
In a minute it will go, and I shall wake up in Wellington Barracks to
find it freezing like mad, with my owl of a servant telling me that I
have to be on parade in five minutes." This lengthy warrior showed,
too, a childish incredulity when I pointed out to him cocoa-nuts
hanging on the palms; a field of growing pineapples below us, or great
clusters of fruit on the banana trees. Pineapples, cocoanuts, and
bananas were bought in shops; they did not grow on trees. He would
insist that the great orange flowers, the size of cabbages, on the
Brownea trees were artificial, as were the big blue trumpets of the
Morning Glories. He was in reality quite intoxicated with the novelty
and the glamour of his first peep into the tropics. By came
fluttering a great, gorgeous butterfly, the size of a saucer, and
after it rushed the Guardsman, shedding slippers around him as his
long legs bent to their task. He might just as well have attempted to
catch the Scotch Express; but, as he returned to me dripping, he began
to realise what the heat of Jamaica can do. All the remainder of that
day the Guardsman remained under the spell of the entrancing beauty of
his new surroundings, and I was dragged on foot for miles and miles;
along country lanes, through the Hope Botanical Gardens, down into the
deep ravine of the Hope River, then back again, both of us dripping
wet in the fierce heat, in spite of our white drill suits, larding the
ground as we walked, oozing from every pore, but always urged on and
on by my enthusiastic young friend, who, suffering from a paucity of
epithets, kept up monotonous ejaculations of "How absolutely d----d
lovely it all is!" every two minutes.

I had to remain a full hour in the swimming-bath after my exertions;
and the Guardsman had quite determined by night-time to "send in his
papers," and settle down as a coffee-planter in this enchanting
island.

It is curious that although the Spaniards held Jamaica for one hundred
and sixty-one years, no trace of the Spaniard in language, customs, or
architecture is left in the island, for Spain has generally left her
permanent impress on all countries occupied by her, and has planted
her language and her customs definitely in them. The one exception as
regards Jamaica is found in certain place-names such as Ocho Rios, Rio
Grande, and Rio Cobre, but as these are all pronounced in the English
fashion, the music of the Spanish names is lost. Not one word of any
language but English (of a sort) is now heard in the colony. When
Columbus discovered the island in 1494, he called it Santiago,
St. James being the patron saint of Spain, but the native name of
Xaymaca (which being interpreted means "the land of springs")
persisted somehow, and really there are enough Santiagos already
dotted about in Spanish-speaking countries, without further additions
to them. When Admiral Penn and General Venables were sent out by
Cromwell to break the Spanish power in the West Indies, they succeeded
in capturing Jamaica in 1655, and British the island has remained ever
since. To this day the arms of Jamaica are Cromwell's arms slightly
modified, and George V is not King, but "Supreme Lord of Jamaica," the
original title assumed by Cromwell. The fine statue of Queen Victoria
in Kingston is inscribed "Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress
of India, and Supreme Lady of Jamaica."

Venables found that the Spaniards, craving for yet another Santiago,
had called the capital of the island Santiago de la Vega, "St. James
of the Plain," and to this day the official name of Spanish Town, the
old capital, is St. Jago de Vega, and as such is inscribed on all the
milestones, only as it is pronounced in the English fashion, it is now
one of the ugliest names imaginable. The wonderfully beautiful gorge
of the Rio Cobre, above Spanish Town, was called by the conquistadores
"Spouting Waters," or Bocas de Agua. This has been Anglicised into the
hideous name of Bog Walk, just as the "High Waters," Agua Alta, on the
north side of the island, has become the Wagwater River. The Spanish
forms seem preferable to me.

Some one has truly said that the old Spaniards shared all the coral
insect's mania for building. As soon as they had conquered a place,
they set to work to build a great cathedral, and simultaneously, the
church then being distinctly militant, a large and solid fort. They
then proceeded to erect massive walls and ramparts round their new
settlement, and most of these ramparts are surviving to-day. We, in
true British haphazard style, did not build for posterity, but allowed
ramshackle towns to spring up anyhow without any attempt at design or
plan. There are many things we could learn from the Spanish. Their
solid, dignified cities of massive stone houses with deep, heavy
arcades into which the sun never penetrates; their broad plazas where
cool fountains spout under great shade-trees; their imposing
over-ornate churches, their general look of solid permanence, put to
shame our flimsy, ephemeral, planless British West Indian towns of
match-boarding and white paint. We seldom look ahead: they always did.
Added to which it would be, of course, too much trouble to lay out
towns after definite designs; it is much easier to let them grow up
anyhow. On the other hand, the British colonial towns have all good
water supplies, and efficient systems of sewerage, which atones in
some degree for their architectural shortcomings; whilst the Spaniard
would never dream of bothering his head about sanitation, and would be
content with a very inadequate water supply. Provided that he had
sufficient water for the public fountains, the Spaniard would not
trouble about a domestic supply. The Briton contrives an ugly town in
which you can live in reasonable health and comfort; the Spaniard
fashions a most picturesque city in which you are extremely like to
die. Racial ideals differ.




CHAPTER V

An election meeting in Jamaica--Two family experiences at contested
elections--Novel South African methods--Unattractive Kingston--A
driving tour through the island--The Guardsman as orchid
hunter--Derelict country houses--An attempt to reconstruct the
past--The Fourth-Form Room at Harrow--Elizabethan Harrovians--I meet
many friends of my youth--The "Sunday" books of the 'sixties--"Black
and White"--Arrival of the French Fleet--Its inner
meaning--International courtesies--A delicate attention--Absent
alligators--The mangrove swamp--A preposterous suggestion--The swamps
do their work--Fever--A very gallant apprentice--What he did.


The Guardsman's enthusiasm about Jamaica remaining unabated, I
determined to hire a buggy and pair and to make a fortnight's
leisurely tour of the North Coast and centre of the island. Though not
peculiarly expeditious, this is a very satisfactory mode of travel; no
engine troubles, no burst tyres, and no worries about petrol supplies.
A new country can be seen and absorbed far more easily from a
horse-drawn vehicle than from a hurrying motor-car, and the little
country inns in Jamaica, though very plainly equipped, are, as a rule,
excellent, with surprisingly good if somewhat novel food.

As the member for St. Andrews in the local Legislative Council had
just died, an election was being held in Kingston. Curious as to what
an election-meeting in Jamaica might be like, we attended one. The
hall was very small, and densely packed with people, and the
suffocating heat drove us away after a quarter of an hour; but never
have I, in so short a space of time, heard such violent personalities
hurled from a public platform, although I have had a certain amount of
experience of contested elections. In 1868, when I was eleven years
old, I was in Londonderry City when my brother Claud, the sitting
member, was opposed by Mr. Serjeant Dowse, afterwards Baron Dowse, the
last of the Irish "Barons of the Exchequer." Party feeling ran very
high indeed; whenever a body of Dowse's supporters met my brother in
the street, they commenced singing in chorus, to a popular tune of the
day:

  "Dowse for iver! Claud in the river!
  With a skiver through his liver."

Whilst my brother's adherents greeted Dowse in public with a sort of
monotonous chant to these elegant words:

  "Dowse! Dowse! you're a dirty louse,
  And ye'll niver sit in the Commons' House."

It will be noticed that this is in the same rhythm that Mark Twain
made so popular some twenty years later in his conductor's song.

  "Punch, brothers, punch with care,
  Punch in the presence of the passen-jare."

In spite of the confident predictions of my brother's followers, Dowse
won the seat by a small majority, nor did my brother succeed in
unseating him afterwards on Petition.

Another occasion on which feeling ran very high was in Middlesex
during the 1874 election. Here my brother George was the Conservative
candidate, and owing to his having played cricket for Harrow at
Lord's, he was supported enthusiastically by the whole school, the
Harrow masters being at that time Liberals almost to a man. My tutor,
a prominent local Liberal, must have been enormously gratified at
finding the exterior of his house literally plastered from top to
bottom with crimson placards (crimson is the Conservative colour in
Middlesex) all urging the electors to "vote for Hamilton the proved
Friend of the People." Possibly fraternal affection may have had
something to do with this crimson outburst. My youngest brother took,
as far as his limited opportunities allowed him, an energetic part in
this election. He got indeed into some little trouble, for being only
fifteen years old and not yet versed in the niceties of political
controversy, he endeavoured to give weight and point to one of his
arguments with the aid of the sharp end of a football goal-post. My
brother George was returned by an enormous majority.

The most original electioneering poster I ever saw was in Capetown in
March, 1914. It was an admirably got-up enlargement of a funeral card,
with a deep black border, adorned with a realistic picture of a
hearse, and was worded "Unionist Opposition dead. Government dying.
Electors of the Liesbeck Division drive your big nails into the coffin
by voting for Tom Maginess on Saturday." Whether it was due to this
novel form of electioneering or not, I cannot say, but Maginess won
the seat by two thousand votes. I still have a copy of that poster.

Neither Londonderry nor Capetown are in Jamaica, but oddly enough,
Middlesex is, for the island is divided into three counties, Cornwall,
Middlesex, and Surrey. The local geography is a little confusing, for
it is a surprise to find (in Jamaica at all events) that Westmoreland
is in Cornwall, and Manchester in Middlesex.

Kingston owes its position as capital to the misfortunes of its two
neighbours, Port Royal and Spanish Town. When Port Royal was totally
destroyed by an earthquake in 1692, the few survivors crossed the bay
and founded a new town on the sandy Liguanea plain. Owing to its
splendid harbour, Kingston soon became a place of great importance,
though the seat of Government remained in sleepy Spanish Town, but the
latter lying inland, and close to the swamps of the Rio Cobre, was so
persistently unhealthy that in 1870 the Government was transferred to
Kingston. Though very prosperous, its most fervent admirer could not
call it beautiful, and, owing to its sandy soil, it is an intensely
hot place, but in compensation it receives the full sea breeze. Every
morning about nine, the sea breeze (locally known as "the Doctor")
sets in. Gentle at first, by noon it is rushing and roaring through
the town in a perfect gale, to drop and die away entirely by 4 p.m. By
a most convenient arrangement, the land breeze, disagreeably known as
"the Undertaker," drops down from the Liguanea Mountains on to the
sweltering town about 11 p.m., and continues all through the night. It
is this double breeze, from sea by day, from land by night, that
renders life in Kingston tolerable. Owing to the sea breeze invariably
blowing from the same direction, Jamaicans have the puzzling habit of
using "Windward" and "Leeward" as synonyms for East and West. To be
told that such-and-such a place is "two miles to Windward of you"
seems lacking in definiteness to a new arrival.

As we rolled slowly along in our buggy, the Guardsman was in a state
of perpetual bewilderment at having growing sugar, coffee, cocoa, and
rice pointed out to him by the driver. "I thought that it was an
island," he murmured; "it turns out to be nothing but a blessed
growing grocer's shop." Half-way between Kingston and Spanish Town is
the Old Ferry Inn, the oldest inn in the New World. It stands in a
mass of luxuriant greenery on the very edge of the Rio Cobre swamps,
and is a place to be avoided at nightfall on that account. This fever
trap of an inn, being just half-way between Kingston and Spanish Town,
was, of all places in the island to select, the chosen meeting-place
of the young bloods of both towns in the eighteenth century. Here they
drove out to dine and carouse, and as they probably all got drunk,
many of them must have slept here, on the very edge of the swamp, to
die of yellow fever shortly afterwards.

Sleepy Spanish Town, the old capital, has a decayed dignity of its
own. The public square, with its stately eighteenth-century buildings,
is the only architectural feature I ever saw in the British West
Indies. Our national lack of imagination is typically exemplified in
the King's House, now deserted, which occupies one side of the square.
When it was finished in 1760, it was considered a sumptuous building.
The architect, Craskell, in that scorching climate, designed exactly
the sort of red-brick and white stone Georgian house that he would
have erected at, say, Richmond. With limitless space at his disposal,
he surrounded his house with streets on all four sides of it, without
one yard of garden, or one scrap of shade. No wonder that poor little
Lady Nugent detested this oven of an official residence. The interior,
though, contains some spacious, stately Georgian rooms; the
temperature being that of a Turkish bath.

Rodney's monument is a graceful, admirably designed little temple, and
the cathedral of a vague Gothic, is spacious and dignified. Spanish
Town cathedral claims to have been built in 1541, in spite of an
inscription over the door recording that "this church was thrown downe
by ye dreadfull hurricane of August ye 28, 1712, and was rebuilt in
1714." It contains a great collection of elaborate and splendid
monuments, all sent out from England, and erected to various island
worthies. The amazing arrogance of an inscription on a tombstone of
1690, in the south transept, struck me as original. It commemorates
some Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and after the usual eulogistic
category of his unparalleled good qualities, ends "so in the
fifty-fifth year of his age he appeared with great applause before his
God."

There is a peculiarly beautiful tree, the _Petraea_, which seems
to flourish particularly well in Spanish Town. When in flower in
February, neither trunk, leaves, nor branches can be seen for its
dense clusters of bright blue blossoms, which are unfortunately very
short-lived.

Four miles above Spanish Town the hideously named Bog Walk, the famous
gorge of the Rio Cobre, commences. I do not believe that there is a
more exquisitely beautiful glen in the whole world. The clear stream
rushes down the centre, whilst the rocky walls tower up almost
perpendicularly for five or six hundred feet on either side, and these
rocks, precipitous as they are, are clothed with a dense growth of
tropical forest. The bread-fruit tree with its broad, scalloped
leaves, the showy star-apple, glossy green above deep gold below,
mahoganies, oranges, and bananas, all seem to grow wild. The
bread-fruit was introduced into Jamaica from the South Sea Islands,
and the first attempt to transplant it was made by the ill-fated
_Bounty_, and led to the historical mutiny on board, as a result
of which the mutineers established themselves on Pitcairn Island,
where their descendants remain to this day. Whatever adventures marked
its original advent, the bread-fruit has made itself thoroughly at
home in the West Indies, and forms the staple food of the negroes.
When carefully prepared it really might pass for under-done bread,
prepared from very indifferent flour by an inexperienced and unskilled
baker. It is the immense variety of the foliage and the constantly
changing panorama that gives Bog Walk its charm, together with the
red, pink, and fawn-coloured trumpets of the hibiscus, dotting the
precipitous ramparts of rock over the rushing blue river. Bog Walk is
distinctly one of those places which no one with opportunities for
seeing it should miss. It opens out into an equally beautiful basin,
St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, of which Michael Scott gives an admirable
description in _Tom Cringle_. I should hardly select that steamy
cup in the hills as a place of residence, but as a natural
forcing-house and a sample of riotous vegetation, it is worth seeing.

The native orchids of Jamaica are mostly oncidiums, with insignificant
little brown and yellow flowers, and have no commercial value
whatever. The Guardsman, however, was obsessed with the idea that he
would discover some peerless bloom for which he would be paid hundreds
of pounds by a London dealer. Every silk-cotton tree is covered with
what Jamaicans term "wild pines," air-plants, orchids, and other
epiphytes, and every silk-cotton was to him a potential Golconda, so
whenever we came across one he wanted the buggy stopped, and up the
tree he went like a lamp lighter. I am bound to admit that he was an
admirable tree climber, but I objected on the score of delicacy to the
large rents that these aerial rambles occasioned in his white ducks.
On regaining the ground he loaded the buggy with his spoils, despite
the driver's assertion that "dat all trash." Unfortunately with his
epiphytes he brought down whole colonies of ants, and the Jamaican ant
is a most pugnacious insect with abnormal biting powers. After I had
been forced to disrobe behind some convenient greenery in order to rid
myself of these aggressive little creatures, I was compelled to put a
stern veto on further tree exploration.

The ascent from Ewarton, over the Monte Diavolo, is so splendid that I
have made it five times for sheer delight in the view. Below lies
St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, a splendid riot of palms, orange, and forest
trees, and above it towers hill after hill, dominated by the lofty
peaks of the Blue Mountains. It is a gorgeously vivid panorama, all in
greens, gold, and vivid blues. Monte Diavolo is the only part of
Jamaica where there are wild parrots; it is also the home of the
allspice tree, or pimento, as it is called in the island. This curious
tree cannot be raised from seed or cutting, neither can it be layered;
it can only propagate itself in Nature's own fashion, and the seed
must pass through the body of a bird before it will germinate. So it
is fortunate, being the important article of commerce it is, that the
supply of trees is not failing. Bay rum is made from the leaves of the
allspice tree.

Once over the Monte Diavolo, quite a different Jamaica unrolls itself.
Broad pasture-lands replace the tropical house at Kew; rolling,
well-kept fields of guinea-grass, surrounded with neat, dry-stone
walls and with trim gates, g

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