Читать книгу Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914 - Richard Holmes - Страница 16

WHITEHALL OFTEN has an engaging way of imagining that soldiers somehow lie at the heart of its problems. ‘The British soldier is a very expensive instrument,’ lamented Lord Cranborne, Secretary of State for India in 1866–67.

One day, it is an estimate on a portentous scale for new barracks in new places, because he cannot stand the ordinary climate of India; another day, it is estimates for gymnastic institutes to give him exercise; then, for books to amuse his leisure hours, then a lumping sum for gas, because oil tries his eyes; then, for an ice-making machine to improve his dessert; then for separate cottages for married couples, because the wives like to keep cocks and hens; and – not to enumerate more items – an enormous bill for regimental beer, because Messrs Whitbread cannot brew good enough beer for him.

He wondered whether there might not be ‘races that have neither Koran nor caste to defend, nor depraved rulers to avenge’, who could not stand in for the British soldier, for it was ‘no improbable contingency’ that recruiting difficulties and the sheer expense of maintaining 65,000 British soldiers in India would soon force a substantial withdrawal.¹

The problem was simple enough. The British army and, until 1858, the Company, had to recruit, arm, equip and train sufficient officers and men to fill the ranks of HM’s regiments in India, to provide officers and specialists for locally recruited units, to ensure an adequate supply of manpower to make up for routine wastage, and to maintain some sort of reserve to meet unexpected shocks. And it had to do all this half a world away, near the very limit of Britain’s logistic reach.

Just getting to India involved a long and often perilous sea voyage. For the first century of British occupation this involved sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, at the mercy of the weather and, during frequent continental wars, of French warships and privateers. From the mid-eighteenth century the voyage was generally made in East Indiamen, such as the Maidstone, a four-masted sailing ship of 8–900 tons, which took the newly commissioned Ensign Garnet Wolseley of HM’s 80th Foot to India in 1852 under the command of Captain Peter Roe.

He kept up the reputation of the old class of vessels known as East Indiamen, a class then fast disappearing, and entirely unknown to the present generation. His officers were men of good manners, and the ship’s crew were all good British sailors, except the boatswain, a first-rate man all round, who was either a Dane or a Swede … ²

Colonel Arthur Wesley of HM’s 33rd left England by fast frigate in June 1796, caught up with his regiment at the Cape, and made the rest of the voyage in the Indiaman Queen Charlotte, he reached Calcutta in February 1797. Transformed into Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley, victor of Assaye, he left Calcutta aboard HMS Trident on 10 March 1805, and anchored off Dover on 10 September. The advent of paddle-steamers in the 1830s made the journey faster and less hazardous, but it was still by no means safe. The troopship Birkenhead, lost off the coast of South Africa in February 1852, was a modern iron-built steamer, but struck a submerged rock some fifty miles out from Simon’s Bay. The soldiers aboard obeyed the order ‘Women and children first’, and stood steady in rank and file on the open deck as she sank, giving the women and children a chance to get away in the ship’s boats. Captain Wright of the 91st, one of the few officers to survive, wrote of how:

The order and regularity that prevailed on board, from the time the ship struck until she totally disappeared, far exceeded anything I thought could be exceeded by the best discipline; and it is to be the more wondered at, seeing that most of the soldiers were but a short time in the Service. Everyone did as he was directed, and there was not a murmur or a cry among them until the ship made her final plunge. I could not name any individual officer who did more than another. All received their orders and carried them out as if the men were embarking instead of going to the bottom; there was only this difference; that I never saw any embarkation conducted with so little noise or confusion.³

Of the 693 passengers and crew aboard Birkenhead, 454, the majority of the soldiers aboard, were lost.⁴

By the 1870s most officers and men went to India in what Second Lieutenant Callwell remembered as ‘leviathans, the five Indian troopers, for these were over 7,000 tons, which meant a big ship in those times, and, designed on particularly graceful lines and painted a white that was almost dazzling at the start, barque-rigged moreover with huge yards, they were remarkably fine-looking vessels’. They may have looked fine enough, but Private John Fraser of the 5th Fusiliers thought that his voyage aboard HM troopship Crocodile in 1880 was ‘as bad, probably, as anything you may have read about in the most lurid of your excursions into popular fiction’.⁵

Soldiers generally embarked on the Thames, the Medway or from the south coast of England. For most of the period all HM’s regiments in India maintained small depots in barracks at Chatham: the Company’s depot was there too until 1843, when it moved to the small Essex town of Warley. In 1852 Garnet Wolseley reported at Chatham Barracks, and found it ‘overcrowded with boy recruits, chiefly obtained from Ireland, and ensigns of all ages waiting for conveyance to India’. ‘Like all other ensigns,’ wrote Wolseley,

I was allotted one very small room as my quarters. It had the usual barrack table and two chairs; the rest of the furniture, as is usual in all barracks, I had to find myself. The officers’ quarters were very old and abominably bad. An old great-uncle of mine told me that he had towards the end of the previous century occupied a room in the house where I was now lodged. It was, he said, even then generally understood that these quarters were so bad that they had been condemned as unfit for use.

It was believed that the barrack master and his sergeants made a tidy living out of charging young officers for ‘barrack damages’ committed long before. ‘A cracked pane of glass,’ said Wolseley, ‘was a small silver-mine to these men. Fifty ensigns may have occupied the quarter with this cracked pane in it, and all had to pay for a new one.’ Shortly before embarking, he was billed for a latch-key. He had it in his pocket, and offered it to the sergeant, who continued to demand the money. Wolseley, with an early demonstration of the panache that was to take him to the very top of the army, furiously threw it into the river.⁶ Private Richard Perkes lived in an even less opulent barrack block, but expected less from life, as he told his brother in July 1841:

I do not no whether you know of my enlistment in the Honourable East India Company. I hope that you are as happy as I for I never was so happy in my life as what I ham now for I have plenty of everything that is needful and there is a school to go to and plenty of books to read and a good Bible and prayer Book … It is expected that I should go out of England either 31 of this month or the middle of the next to bengale in the east indies … It takes them a bout five months sailing on the sea there is 4 hundred a going of every month … ⁷

Soldiers and their families bound for, or returning from, India sailed either as part of the planned move of an entire regiment, which might require two or more ships, as drafts to reinforce units already in India, or as parties of invalids or men due for discharge back in Britain. Regiments bound for India marched or travelled by train to a major port of embarkation like Portsmouth, while smaller drafts generally set off from Chatham. Private soldiers sailed in formed drafts, usually commanded by officers and sergeants of their own regiments. Officers might either sail as draft-conducting officers, or travel privately, with an allowance given them by government or Company. Lieutenant Charles Scott, sailing in January 1861, was delighted to hear that: ‘my application for a passage had been granted or rather that the regulated allowance would be paid me to find my way out to India. I accordingly made my way up to town and took a passage on the Ellora for the 12th to Bombay.’ He was at Suez (‘a most awful hole’) on the 27th, Aden on 2 February, and arrived at Bombay on 10 February after as uneventful a journey as any traveller could hope for.⁸

Just over ten years before, Second Lieutenant Kendall Coghill of 2nd Bengal European Fusiliers, had travelled round the Cape in ‘a fine tea clipper of 600 tons … [and] wasted 103 days in love, war and idleness’ before seeing land.⁹ Even before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, it was possible to sail across the Mediterranean and travel through Egypt to resume the journey in the Red Sea, and this became increasingly popular after 1837. On 20 February 1852, Second Lieutenant Fred Roberts of the Bengal Artillery took the Ripon, a P&O steamer, from Southampton to Alexandria, and then boarded a Nile canal boat for Cairo. Here he stayed, like many young officers before and since, at Shepheard’s Hotel. Charles Scott observed that the canal journey to Cairo was ‘130 miles and they take 7 hours to do it. The country is very uninteresting and flat as a pancake.’ After booking in at Shepheard’s, ‘Hockley and I thought of riding to the Pyramids but found it would be too much of an undertaking as they are 10 miles off and the road bad & the Nile has to be crossed on a ferry’.¹⁰ Many of those who took the trouble to see the Sphinx seemed to find the creature disappointing:

It is certain that age, or that neglect which imparts, in time, a vinegar aspect to the countenance of the most comely belle, has bereft the Sphinx of all her benignity. To my perception the colossal head (all that now remains) very closely resembles, when seen in profile, a cynical doctor of laws, with wig awry, suffering strangulation per tight cravat.¹¹

From Cairo Second Lieutenant Roberts found himself transported the 90 miles across the desert to Suez in ‘a conveyance closely resembling a bathing-machine, which accommodated six people, and was drawn by four mules’. He then took the paddle-steamer Oriental via Madras to Calcutta, arriving there on 1 April.¹² Sergeant Robert Taylor of HM’s 64th made the same trip in 1858, with the difference that his comrades were provided with donkeys for the overland leg.

This was the most laughable journey I ever had, every minute some man was going over his donkey’s head. The heat was very great, but no men fell out during this ride. The donkeys were most wonderful little animals, they performed the journey never halting and without water.¹³

The cross-desert trip was well organised. Horses were changed every ten or twelve miles, and at the way-stations there was a meal of eggs, mutton chops, stewed chicken, roast pigeon, eggs, with bottled beer and tea or coffee. There was a hotel at the halfway point, with a chance of some sleep of sorts. At Suez, passengers destined for Ceylon, Madras and Calcutta boarded large P&O steamers. These were altogether more popular that the East India Company’s steamers, whose notoriously crusty officers were apparently ‘dead against the passengers and dead against’ the steamships which did the Bombay run. After the East India Company’s demise, the Oriental and Peninsular Steam Navigation Company (now with the ‘Oriental’ and ‘Peninsular’ reversed to produce the more familiar P&O) took over, and the short rations of the Company steamers were replaced with magnificent menus and ‘a fusillade of soda water . . ,’.¹⁴

Lieutenant John Corneille left for India in 1754 with HM’s 39th as part of a small fleet, with his own regiment and an artillery detachment of seventy men and twelve short 6-pounder guns, crammed into the armed Indiamen Kent, London and Britannia. The latter vessel had 237 men ‘with livestock and provisions of all kinds laid on at the expense of the Company’, which was deeply anxious to get a British battalion to India.¹⁵ His voyage was uneventful, although the early loss of a gunner, who fell overboard while drawing up a bucket of water, warned the men that the sea could be dangerous even when it seemed calm:

Though a boat was let down in less than three minutes, and though the day was fine and the sea calm, yet he sank at about sixty yards’ distance in view of all the men on board. It was an introduction to the dangers of the sea and had at least this good effect, that it made our landsmen more cautious than they were at first.¹⁶

Lieutenant John Luard of HM’s 16th Light Dragoons had formerly served as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, so was less concerned about his voyage than another officer who feared ‘one hundred and twenty days in a sea prison, with a plank between one and eternity’. Luard sailed for India aboard the Marchioness of Ely, with the other half of the regiment on General Hewett. One officer recalled that ‘Old Die, the boatswain’, told him ‘that if he had been sent through hell with a small toothcomb he could not have picked up a more lousy crew’. They shared the ship with forty-four dozen ducks and hens, fifty-six pigs and seventy sheep. ‘The men were paraded each day to see that they were clean,’ wrote Luard, ‘and in hot weather they were paraded without shoes and stockings to see that their feet were washed and clean; their berths below were inspected daily and hammocks, unless the weather prevented, were sent on deck.’ The voyage took 121 days in all, and just before its end ‘Sergeant Major Maloney’s poor little child that had been ill nearly the whole of the voyage died, and was thrown over the sea gangway’.¹⁷

Women and children were regular passengers because a proportion of soldiers leaving for India were allowed to take their families with them. There were far fewer vacancies than there were ‘married families’, which led to heart-rending scenes as husbands and wives said farewell on the dockside. Regiments might be away for many years, and so a couple separated by a posting to India might very well be severed for ever. John Corneille reported:

a remarkable instance of love and resolution on the part of the wife of one of our corporals. The poor creature, passionately fond of her husband and loath to leave him, hoped that by disguising herself in the habit of a soldier she might remain undetected for some days and so make the voyage with him.

She was taken before the captain, still insisting that she was male, but quickly confessed her gender when ordered to show her chest. The regiment collected 20 shillings for her, and she was sent ashore ‘without enquiring if the husband was privy to the plot’, testifying to a degree of official sympathy.¹⁸

If a wife could remain concealed until a vessel was well under way she was likely to succeed in staying with her husband. Private John Pearman’s comrades of the 3rd Light Dragoons managed to smuggle ‘four young married women’ when they left for India from Gravesend aboard Thetis in 1845. In 1869, Mrs Johnson and Mrs Burns stowed away aboard the transport Flying Foam. On her arrival in India, Mrs Johnson was allowed to stay in the barracks of HM’s 58th Foot ‘as she has no other place to go’, and Mrs Burns was simply added to the authorised wives’ strength of her husband’s regiment, 107th Foot.

Some children could be a real nuisance, as Major Bayley discovered when he left Bombay for England in 1858 aboard the steamer Ottawa with:

sick and wounded men, and widows and orphans – and heaven forbid that I should ever again find myself on board ship in company with children brought up in India. They were perfect little devils; and for the first day or two we had a fine time of it, as many of the passengers were cripples, and unable to move after them … Trench of the 52nd … was the terror of mischievous and impertinent children. When a complaint was made to him respecting the bad behaviour of one of them, he sought out the offender, whom he smilingly led away, paying no attention to the remonstrances of its mamma, to the fore part of the deck; from whence, a few moments after, a sound resembling the clapping of hands, accompanied by loud howls, was heard; after which the culprit was allowed to join his angry parent.

In a few days the effect of this discipline was very apparent; and peace and comfort pretty nearly established. There were one or two young persons who continued to be troublesome, but a call for Trench never failed to send them to their cabins double quick.¹⁹

‘When all were aboard the good ship the word was given to weigh anchor and the band played “God Save the Queen”,’ wrote Private Pearman.

We were now employed in getting out our sea kits and utensils for cooking, and being told off into messes – six each mess. Then we got our hammocks down and were shown how to tie them up and get into them. We were as close together as the fingers on our hands … There was little to do on board ship but play cards and sing in fine weather: parade twice a day, once for health, clean feet and body, and once for muster. Food was very good and I got very stout. A comrade named Hamilton, a tailor, learnt me the use of the needle, which I found afterwards to be very useful to me.²⁰

Pearman was lucky, because the weather was fine for most of his voyage. But Private Henry Metcalfe of HM’s 32nd Foot, who left Chatham on 14 June 1849, experienced

a very stormy voyage, being in a very severe storm off the Cape of Good Hope on the 15th, 16th and 17th August, in which we were what sailors term battened down between hatches without food or drink the whole of that time. We lost on that occasion two of our boats, the bulwarks stove in, our jib boom taken away, also our fore and main top masts, with the running and standing rigging. There was 2½ feet of water on the Troop Deck.²¹

Soldiers travelled on the troop deck, usually two decks down, with officers and civilian passengers a deck above them. Indiamen were generally armed, and could usually see off pirates and, if sailing in company, with the senior of their captains acting as commodore, might successfully take on a privateer. In early 1804, when there was a real danger from French frigates or privateers, Richard Purvis sailed aboard Sir William Bensley in company with the Indiaman Fame and the frigate HMS Brilliant. Surgeon Walter Henry of HM’s 66th Foot sailed for India in 1815, and although the Treaty of Ghent had just ended the inaptly named ‘War of 1812’ with the United States, his convoy took every precaution.

We sailed in a fleet of five ships – all Indiamen – our Captain being Commodore. One of the ships – the Princess Charlotte – the fastest sailor, was employed as a look-out frigate, to reconnoitre any suspicious strangers, as we were not quite sure that we might not fall in with an American frigate in our course; ignorant, most probably, of the Treaty of Ghent that had just been concluded. All the ships had troops on board, and we were determined to make a good fight.²²

The need to clear for action meant that the partitions between cabins were made of canvas so that they could be struck if the ship was brought to action stations. But the partitions were as readily demolished if furniture, procured by the passengers from fitters-out at the docks, slid about during a storm. Mirza Abutakt, a Moslem gentleman travelling by Indiaman, complained of how

Mr Grand, who was of enormous size, and whose cabin was separated from mine only by a canvas partition, fell with all his weight upon my breast and hurt me exceedingly. What rendered this circumstance more provoking was that if, by any accident, the smallest noise was made in my apartment, he would call out, with all the overbearing insolence which characterises the vulgar part of the English in their conduct to Orientals, ‘What are you about? You don’t let me get a wink of sleep’ and other such rude expressions.²³

The purpose-built troopships of the 1870s had large troop decks for the rank and file. Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who went out to India in 1902, ‘enjoyed every day of his voyage’. His battalion embarked from Southampton, and the voyage to Bombay took twenty-one days. ‘The food was excellent,’ he wrote, ‘and the ship’s bakers, who provided us with excellent bread, made money too by selling us penny buns.’ Sailors, too, made some extra money by charging a penny for a Bombay fizzer – a glass of fresh water with sherbet in it. The men slept in hammocks, and after the ship had passed Gibraltar they were allowed to sleep up on the hurricane deck or forecastle, rather than on the sweltering troop deck below. There was an hour’s ‘Swedish drill’ in the morning, and most of the rest of the time was spent gambling: ‘There were card-parties of Kitty-nap and Brag dotted here and there on the hurricane deck and forecastle, but Under and Over, Crown and Anchor, and House were the most popular games.’²⁴ A young officer, however, complained that troopships were poorly provided with first-class accommodation:

This was aft, over the screw, its main feature being a long saloon with cabins on either hand, those of the naval officers being on the starboard side while on the port side was an elongated rookery in which ladies and children were herded. There were also a large ladies’ cabin on the deck below, known as the ‘dovecote’, and senior officers dwelt on this deck, inside sombre, ill-ventilated structures dubbed ‘horse-boxes’. Pandemonium, which provided berthing for the meaner sort, was a deck below this again, well beneath sea level, where rats abounded and the air was tinned; it was no paradise, even if it hardly deserved the title by which it was invariably designated. Oddly enough, only on my fourth and last voyage on an Indian trooper, did I ever find myself relegated to these unpleasant quarters.²⁵

At the beginning of the period overseas travel was rare, and men took suitable precautions when undertaking it. John Corneille was off the Canaries when ‘most of the officers and men had themselves bled by way of precaution, as we were approaching the nearer visits of the sun. It is, I believe needless when in perfect health, the only precaution to be recommended is abstemiousness in eating and drinking, and regularity in hours.’²⁶ However, on sea as on land, soldiers were generally ready to drink to excess if they got the chance. Albert Hervey’s 1833 voyage was punctuated by ‘courts-martial innumerable amongst the recruits, several floggings, and one death’.²⁷ Lieutenant William Gordon-Alexander’s 93rd Highlanders left Portsmouth in June 1857 and were inspected by the Queen before departure, greatly valuing this ‘highly complimentary farewell from our much-loved Queen’. But during the ceremony of ‘Crossing the Line’ some of the sailors got drunk, and several of the 93rd joined in, and were put in irons. One of them ‘a violent-tempered man of bad character’ began to drum his heels on the deck, knowing that the colonel’s cabin was directly below. When Gordon-Alexander ‘had to take measures to put a stop to the noise … two other 93rd prisoners … then broke into bad language and “threatened to be even with me” the first time we were under fire together’.²⁸ Corneille had a rather easier time:

There is a forfeit which custom has fixed upon those who cross the equinox for the first time. It is taxed at a quart of brandy and a pound of sugar, or half a crown. Those that are not willing to pay undergo a christening of some severity. They are hoisted by a rope tied round their waist to the end of the main yard, and from there are given three duckings. We saw all the ceremony but the ducking, which the captain would not permit to take place for fear of the sharks.²⁹

Albert Hervey recalled ‘the usual ceremonies of saving and ducking’. He was exempt from ‘the dirty ordeal because he had crossed the line already’, but still had to pay ‘Neptune five shillings by way of a fee’.³⁰ In 1801 an unamused Mr Maw objected to the jollifications, and when he reached Bombay he accused the captain of assault: the justices inclined to his view, and the captain was fined a staggering £400.

It was always more congenial to travel as an officer than a soldier or NCO, but officers travelling without their regiments had to strike bargains with sea captains for their food and accommodation. It paid to get on the right side of the captain, and to remain there, for the commanders of East Indiamen were famously autocratic: in 1818 one clapped an army lieutenant in irons for whistling in his august presence. In August 1768, William Hickey, whose father had secured him an East India Company commission to get him out of London, visited one of the Honourable Company’s officials, Mr Coggan, at India House:

He advised me to try for a passage to Madras in the Plassey, and gave me a letter of introduction to Captain Waddell who commanded her and who was a particular friend of his.

The letter I delivered the same day to Captain Waddell at his house in Golden Square. He received me with much civility, saying that, although he had determined not to take any more passengers … he could not refuse his friend Mr Coggan. He told me he expected to sail early in December, and that I as well as everybody else must be on board prior to the ship’s leaving Gravesend. I next ascertained what was to be paid, and found it to be fifty guineas for a seat at the captain’s table.³¹

In 1804 Richard Purvis’s father was told that his son, a newly appointed East India Company cadet, was to sail aboard Sir William Bensley at the cost of £95 and for this ‘of course he is to be at the Captain’s table – I hope you will approve it – at the third mate’s he could have gone for £55’.³² The following year Captain George Elers of HM’s 12th Foot returned from Madras:

Captain Crawford and myself made a bargain with Captain Timbrell, of the Hawkesbury, for a passage, and we got a large cabin between us, where we slung our cots. It was the last aft on the starboard side. This cabin cost us something more than £200 each, and part of the 74th Regiment’s poor, worn-out old men came on board with us; also the colours of the regiment and Lieutenant Colonel Swinton, commanding officer … [Other passengers included] a Mrs Ure, the wife of a Dr Ure of Hyderabad, who had two fine children of three and four years old under her charge, the children of Colonel Kirkpatrick of Hyderabad, by a Princess, to whom report said he was married. Her Highness would not part with her children until £10,000 had been settled on each of them. They were a boy and a girl, and they had a faithful old black man, who was very fond of them. Mrs Ure had an infant of only a few months old, nursed by a young native woman, immensely fat, and she had also a young European woman to be her maid.³³

A traveller’s status was no guarantee of comfort, however. Warren Hastings, an outgoing governor-general, complained of:

The Want of Rest, the violent Agitation of the Ship, the Vexation of seeing and hearing all the Moveables of your cabin tumble about you, the Pain in your Back, Days of Unquiet and Apprehension, and above all the dreadful Fall of the Globe Lantern.³⁴

The Hon. Emily Eden, sister to Governor-General Auckland, wrote to her friend Lady Campbell in 1836:

I know you will shudder to hear that last Saturday, the fifth day of dead calm, not a cloud visible, and the Master threatening three weeks more of the same weather, the thermometer at 84 in the cabin – temps on the go and meals more than ever the important points of life – at this awful crisis the Steward announced that the coffee and orange-marmalade were both at an end.

No wonder the ship is so light, we have actually ate it a foot out of the water since we left the Cape.³⁵

It took Garnet Wolseley fifty days to get to Table Bay. He shared a cabin with Ensign Grahame of HM’s 22nd Foot, and sometimes their large square porthole was fastened shut by the crew. ‘When so fastened down in the tropics the cabin became unbearable,’ he recalled, ‘and I for one could not sleep below, for the cockroaches flying about and settling at times on nose or face made me bound out of my cot and to hurry up into the delightful air.’³⁶ Officers were then allowed ashore in Africa, but soldiers were confined to their ships in case they deserted. Wolseley, who made a virtue of trusting his men, found the practice appalling, for they were at the Cape for ten days. ‘I pitied the poor rank and file,’ he wrote, ‘in whom, at that period, sufficient trust was not placed to be allowed ashore.’³⁷

But it was often companions rather than food or accommodation that caused difficulties. Albert Hervey sailed for Madras aboard the Warren Hastings in 1833:

My friends had secured me an excellent cabin in the poop of the ship and I had with me, as companion, a young writer [the East India Company’s most junior civil rank] fresh from Haileybury, who thought of nothing, night and noon, but hunting, riding, shooting and dissipation; and who thought it very manly and very fine to swear and curse, and to go to bed in a state of inebriety …

I look back to those four months on board the Warren Hastings with feelings of horror … I suffered severely from sea-sickness, so that for the greater part of the voyage, and more particularly in very rough cold weather, I was confined to my cot. During this dreadful sickness, my fellow traveller would either bring company into the cabin, play cards and make such a noise I was in no enviable situation …

I remember one night; there was a jollification in the cuddy; my friend had taken a great quantity of wine, and became very intoxicated. He came to the cabin, and turned into my bed whilst I was on the poop. He was sick, of course, and made my sleeping things in such a condition, that I was obliged to give them away to the sailors, for I could never use them again myself.³⁸

Philip Meadows-Taylor, on his way to take up a commission in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s army in 1824, was altogether more fortunate:

Among the ladies especially, I had excited an interest by rescuing one of them, a lovely girl, from a watery grave. She had incautiously opened her port-hole during a storm, keeping the cabin-door shut. A great green sea poured in, flooding the whole place. I fortunately heard the rush of the water, and forcing open the door of her cabin, found her lying face downwards in the water which was pouring over the steerage deck. I carried her to the cabin of another lady and put her in, and next day was very sweetly thanked for my services.³⁹

Scores of young officers found love, or something like it, in the hothouse atmosphere. Drummer John Shipp of HM’s 22nd Foot was allowed ashore at the Cape in 1802 and promptly fell in love with a fifteen-year-old Dutch girl called Sabina, ‘a person of exquisite loveliness, tall and rather slim, with black hair and eyes; her small waist and light foot made her every motion entrancing’. But sadly: ‘My Commanding Officer would not, for a moment, allow me to marry young as I was, and anything less honourable than marriage I would not contemplate.’ He decided to desert, but was arrested at pistol-point before he had gone far, ‘leaving for ever the embraces of her for whose sake I was willing to sacrifice all’. An unsympathetic court martial sentenced him to receive 999 lashes – ‘more than fifty for every year of my life’ – but his kindly commanding officer let him off.⁴⁰

When Miss Elizabeth Mansell landed at Madras in 1796 she at once laid a charge of rape (then a capital offence) against Captain Cummings of the Indiaman on which she had travelled. She was the niece of a member of the presidency council, which might have told in her favour, but Cummings, fighting for his life, conducted his own defence with great skill. She had been seen ‘playing at Tagg with a couple of footmen’ soon after leaving Portsmouth, and witnesses agreed that she had been intimate with at least two other young men on the boat. The trial stopped at once, and Cummings, duly acquitted, was warned that taking away the young woman’s character ‘would be a perpetual Blot on him’. Emboldened by his new-found legal eloquence he began to announce that she had possessed no character whatever even before she came on board, but was immediately ‘stopped from proceeding in this sort’.⁴¹

Albert Hervey catalogued the many ways in which soldiers passed the time. Some youngsters ruined themselves or their constitutions by drinking and gambling. Others shot seabirds – ‘such firing of guns, such shouting, such swearing’ – or ran about the ship in their new uniforms ‘to the great amusement of the officers and crew, and the detriment of their wardrobe’. One cavalry officer unwisely went aloft in his finery, and was caught by the sailors, who spread-eagled him, ‘to the great amusement of the spectators, to his great annoyance, and to the irreparable ruin of his beautiful new coat … it having become covered in pitch, tar and other marine abominations’. During his voyage to India, Surgeon Henry became a keen fisherman, catching thirteen sharks, the last of them twelve feet long. ‘This monster gave us an hour’s play,’ he wrote, ‘and I found my hands all blistered afterwards from the running out and hauling the rope – though quite unconscious of it at the time.’ Lieutenant Lambrecht of HM’s 66th was ‘clever and well read’, but was ‘spoiled by the sentimental and sensual sophistries of the French philosophical school’ and was ‘most agreeable when sober, but half mad when excited by wine’. Coming out of his cuddy drunk, he knocked down the sailor at the wheel and took his place, telling the furious captain that ‘the blackguard he had just ousted knew nothing whatever about his work’. He was forgiven the first time he did it, but was put under close arrest when he repeated the offence.⁴² Hervey advised his readers to ‘read, write, draw, keep a journal, work the ship’s course, take the latitude and longitude, the lunars, keep the time of the ship’s chronometers, and above all … remember … your duty to God – spend a portion of your day in thinking of, and praying to Him … ’.⁴³

Henry Havelock was junior lieutenant in HM’s 13th Light Infantry at the not-so-junior age of twenty-eight when he sailed for Calcutta aboard General Kydd in 1823, and experienced a profound and life-changing conversion on the voyage:

It was while the writer was sailing across the wide Atlantic towards Bengal, that the Spirit of God came to him with its offer of peace and mandate of love, which, though for some time resisted, at length prevailed. Then was wrought the great change in his soul which has been productive of unspeakable advantage to him in time, and he trusts has secured him happiness in eternity.⁴⁴

But eternity was closer than many wished. Little could obscure the fact that the voyage to the East was a dangerous one. Between 1 December 1827 and 30 November 1828, twenty-one military officers of the East India Company died at sea, from natural causes or by accident. On his second trip to India, Garnet Wolseley, now a lieutenant in HM’s 90th Light Infantry, was nearly lost in a cyclone. ‘It is commonly supposed that most if not all the East Indiamen that have been lost eastward of the Cape have gone down in these “circular storms” and we very nearly did so,’ he wrote. ‘Our mainyard was snapped in two, and sails after sails, as they were set, were rent in pieces. We had already an unsafe amount of water in the hold, and it began to be whispered that we had sprung a leak.’

Later on in the voyage the ship hit a rock: bugles sounded the regimental call, and officers at once went below to their men, who were clearing away breakfast. Wolseley’s company fell in, and he ordered them to keep quiet and await instructions from the crew.

There we stood in deathly silence, and I know not for how long. The abominable candle in the lantern sputtered and went out. We were in almost absolute darkness, our only small glimmer of light coming through a very small hatchway which was reached by a long ladder. The ship began to sink by the stern, so it was evident to all thinking minds that we hung on a rock somewhere forward. The angle of our deck with the sea level above us became gradually greater, until at last we all had to hold on to the sides of our dark submarine prison … My predominant feeling was one of horrid repugnance at the possibility, which at last became the probability, of being drowned in the dark, like a rat in a trap. I should have liked to have had a swim for my life at the least …

Happily they were ordered on deck in time to leave the ship, but the incident convinced Wolseley of the value of discipline: ‘It is based on faith, for without faith in your superiors it is only … an outward form filled with dust.’⁴⁵

The loss of the Birkenhead was only one of the spectacular disasters to befall troopships. On 1 March 1825, the East Indiaman Kent, carrying half HM’s 31st Foot, caught fire in the Bay of Biscay. The ship eventually blew up, but 296 members of the 31st, forty-six of the regiment’s wives and fifty-two children were saved, together with nineteen passengers, the captain and 139 of the crew: fifty-four men, one woman, and twenty-one children perished. One soldier’s wife was immediately delivered of a robust baby boy aboard the rescuing Cambria. The soldiers behaved so well – some put their comrades’ children on their backs and swam with them to the boats – that Lieutenant Colonel Fearon, commanding the 31st, was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath. Captain James Spence, who survived the shipwreck, commanded the 31st at Sobraon, where he bore a charmed life: he had musket balls through his cap and sword scabbard, and his sword hilt was smashed by a grapeshot. His sword broke in a hand-to-hand battle with a Sikh, but he was saved when a private soldier bayoneted the man.

On 11 November 1858, the troopship Sarah Sands caught fire near Mauritius, and although all the women and children were put into the boats, the men of HM’s 54th helped the sailors to put out the blaze and pump out the hull which was flooded by water used for fire-fighting. The colours of the 54th were saved ‘at the hazard of their lives’ by Private William Wiles of the regiment, and Richard Richmond, one of the ship’s quartermasters. On 2 June 1859, the Eastern Monarch, full of wounded soldiers from Bengal, blew up at Spithead. One man, one woman and five children were killed, but the detachment commander acknowledged that the loss would have been far greater had it not been for

the very excellent behaviour of the troops, and the great assistance I received from every individual officer under my command; so cool, collected and energetic were they all, that I feel it is only due to them to bring their names respectively before His Royal Highness.⁴⁶

The Royal Navy’s strong grip on the sea meant that passages to and from India were not usually subject to interference by hostile vessels. The one major exception was during the later stages of the American War of Independence, when a vengeful France joined the fledgling United States. In 1781 Admiral Pierre-André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez beat a British squadron off West Africa, and then reached India, where he had the better of a series of clashes with Rear Admiral Sir Edward Hughes. It was then difficult for the armies of the three presidencies to support one another by land. When Madras came under pressure Eyre Coote, Commander in Chief, India, declared that he had ‘one foot in the grave and one on the edge of it’, but still set off from Calcutta to help, in the armed Indiaman Resolution. Chased by Suffren, he died at sea off Madras. Those captured by Suffren discovered that, as William Hickey sneered, he looked like ‘a little fat, vulgar English butcher’, and received his captives with his breeches unbuttoned at the knees, his collar undone and his sleeves rolled up.

Privateers or isolated frigates could create havoc amongst coastal traffic on lone Indiamen. When they appeared, ships were cleared for action, cabins demolished and women and children sent below into the fetid hold. Gentlemen usually remained on deck in an effort to help, sketching out a few defensive cuts with borrowed cutlasses and generally getting in the way of those whose job it was to fight the ship. The capture of a commerce raider was a matter for rejoicing. When HMS La Sibylle took the French national frigate La Forte in Belasore Roads on 28 February 1799, the insurance office of Madras, and the Calcutta, Bengal and Amicable Insurance Companies presented two fine swords to Captain Lucius Ferdinand Hardiman. In gilt and ivory, the swords were at the very apogee of Georgian military elegance, and are evidence of the damage that La Forte was doing to trade.⁴⁷

Many ships containing India-bound troops were never heard of again, however. In January 1831, the Thames-built Guildford (521 tons) disappeared somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and was reported ‘lost at sea with all hands’. She probably went down in a tropical storm, but there is a chance that she was taken by pirates, for a European female – according to some sources a passenger named Ann Presgrave – was later sold to a Malay chief in Brunei.⁴⁸