December 10th they sighted for the first time the ice-fringe of what we
know now to be the _true_ Terra Incognita Australis.
The landsmen on board seem to have had a dreadful time during this part
of the voyage and Foster, one of the naturalists of the expedition,
bewails “the gloomy uniformity with which they had slowly passed dull
hours, days and months in this desolate part of the world.” What a
change it must have been from the rigours and horrors of Antarctica to
the paradisaical delights of Tahiti, which, after surveying the coast
of New Zealand and deciding that it consisted of two islands and not
one, the expedition reached on the 16th of the following August.
There is perhaps no other spot on earth which so completely fulfils
one’s ideas of what Paradise ought to be as this same island of
Tahiti even now, but what must it have been in those days, when white
men first saw it in all the beauty and simplicity of its primeval
innocence. Now, alas, it is very different, cursed by the diseases and
vices of civilisation and afflicted by a cast-iron _régime_ which the
people seem to think a little worse than death, since they are dying as
fast as they can to get away from it.
After this again New Zealand was visited, and once more the two ships
plunged into the icy solitudes of Antarctica, only to return again,
baffled by the impenetrable ice-wall. From here the ships steered
northwards for Easter Island and Crusoe’s Island. It is noteworthy
that on the way Captain Cook, the great Medicine Man of the sailors,
himself fell sick, and that, for want of anything better, “a dog was
killed to make soup for him”--from which it will be seen that voyages
of discovery were not exactly picnics in his time.
From Juan Fernandez he steered for the Marquesas again, once more
visited New Zealand, and once more his sea-worn crews revelled in the
unrestrained delights of Tahiti. Then again to the south, this time
not to rest until the whole circle of the Southern hemisphere had been
made without the finding of any other southern continent than the
unapproachable Antarctica, and so in due course and without mishap
came the Sunday morning, July 30, 1775, when the _Resolution_ and the
_Adventure_, having well vindicated their names, dropped their willing
anchors into the waters of Spithead.
More honours, though not of the nineteenth-century-boom order, were
now most justly bestowed on the Circumnavigator. He was promoted to
the rank of Post-Captain in the Navy, and made a Captain of Greenwich
Hospital, a post which carried with it a home and honourable retirement
for the rest of his life--of which he was the very last man in the
world to avail himself. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal
Society, and presented with the gold medal for his treatment of scurvy.
Captain Cook as sailor, as scientific navigator, and as explorer was
now at the height of his fame. He was forty-eight years old, and had
spent thirty-four years at sea, and it is no exaggeration to say
that during this time he had added more geographical knowledge to
the history of the world than any one had ever done before, and had
probably covered a larger portion of its surface. He had at once proved
and disproved the dream of the Southern Continent, and, potentially
speaking, he had added enormous areas to the ever-growing realms of
Greater Britain.
He might well have rested on such laurels as these, but there was more
work for him to do, and he went to do it. One of the greatest questions
of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was the
possibility of the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
So far every attempt had ended in failure, and generally in disaster,
but now, when men’s minds were full of the wonders Captain Cook had
achieved, there arose another question: Might not a _North-East_
passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, who
better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? An expedition was
promptly decided on. Captain Cook was not offered the command, as the
Government probably and rightly thought he had won his laurels. But
one fatal evening he dined with Lord Sandwich, the promoter of the
expedition, and at table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and
his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Ostensibly the
object of the dinner was to consult him as to the best leader for the
new venture, but the moment the subject was broached the unquenchable
passion for travel blazed up again, and the great Navigator rose to his
feet and said gravely:
“My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I will go myself.”
So was decided the fatal voyage which was destined to end a glorious
and almost blameless career by an ignoble and unworthy death.
The expedition consisted of the old _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_,
a vessel of three hundred tons. The voyage lasted four years and nine
months, but the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of whom
three were ill when they started. A good deal of the old ground was
gone over, more islands were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed.
Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedition, so far as its
principal object was concerned, came to an end, as the search for the
Southern Continent had done, in a way blocked by impenetrable barriers
of ice--this time the ice of the North.
Thus turned back, they steered southward, and on December 1, 1778,
they discovered Hawai, which discovery the great Navigator in his last
written words somewhat strangely says, “seemed in many respects to be
the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout
the extent of the Pacific Ocean.”
It was here, as all the world knows, that he met his death, and the
story of it is, unhappily, at sad variance with that of his life.
The one blemish on Captain Cook’s otherwise noble character was a
liability to outbursts of ungovernable temper, and during these he
seems to have behaved on more occasions than one in a manner almost
befitting one of the old buccaneers. For instance, he would punish
paltry thefts by cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small
shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing them in boats, and
ordering his men to strike and stab them with boat-hooks as they
struggled out of the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka who had
pilfered some trifle by “making two cuts upon his arm to the bone, one
across and the other close below his shoulder.”
Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat was stolen, he landed
thirty-five armed men, blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt
every house and canoe that he came across, and, as an eye-witness
says, “several women and old men still remained by the houses, whose
lamentations were very great, but all their tears and entreaties could
not move Captain Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those cruel
ravages.”
Now it was undoubtedly this anger-madness of his, combined with an
equally incomprehensible act of duplicity, which cost him his life.
When he returned from his attempt to find the North-East passage and
landed at Hawai, he was hailed by the natives as Lono, a god who had
disappeared ages before, saying that he would return in huge canoes
with cocoa-nut trees for masts. Now unhappily there is no doubt that
Captain Cook, for some reason or other, took advantage of this belief.
Not only did he not undeceive the natives, but he permitted divine
honours to be paid to him.
From personal knowledge of the Pacific Islanders I am able to say that
in their pristine state they look upon deception and lying as the
gravest of crimes, and usually punish them with death, and Captain
Cook, with his vast experience of them, must have known this also,
and therefore he must have been fully aware that the moment anything
happened to show the natives that he was _not_ a god, his life would
not be worth a moment’s purchase.
Shortly after this the ships sailed, and it would have been well for
Cook, who had been guilty of some very high-handed acts, if he had
never returned. But they came back a week afterwards to find the
island under the mysterious _tabu_--which is the Kanaka equivalent
for an interdict, and by far the most sacred institution known to the
Polynesians. Some of his marines broke this _tabu_ in the most flagrant
fashion. In revenge one of the _Discovery’s_ cutters was stolen. When
anything of this sort happened Captain Cook was accustomed to inveigle
a chief or two on board his ship and keep them there till the thing
stolen was restored. He tried to do this with the King of Hawai, but
the people suspected his design, and at the critical moment news came
that a canoe had been burnt and a chief killed. The King refused to go
another step, and then Captain Cook, who was armed with a hanger and a
double-barrelled gun, did a terribly foolish thing for such a man to
do.
[Illustration: MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM.]
He began to walk away to his boat, turning his back on the armed and
angry natives. To do so was to invite certain death, and one of the
warriors attacked him with his spear. He turned and shot at the man,
missed him, and killed another man behind him. A shower of stones
followed, and the marines fired on the natives.
Cook appears now to have seen the seriousness of the situation, and
signalled to those in the boat to stop firing. While he was doing this
a chief ran up and drove his spear through his body. Some accounts
say that it was an iron dagger, others that he was clubbed on the
head simultaneously. At any rate he staggered forward and fell face
downwards in the water, on which the natives “immediately leapt in
after and kept him under for a few minutes, then hauled him out upon
the rocks and beat his head against them several times, so that there
is no doubt but that he quickly expired.”
Such was the end of the great Circumnavigator, the greatest seaman of
his time, and a man honoured wherever the science of navigation was
known. It was a miserable end to such a brilliant career, miserable as
was that of the great Magellan, who lost his life and the deathless
honour of being the first sea-captain to sail round the world in just
such a petty and ignoble squabble on the beach of a lonely islet in the
Phillipines.
But though his death was ignoble, it can detract nothing from the
splendour of his life’s work. He was not perfect--no great man
is--and it is only the mournful truth to say that the meanest and most
unlovable trait in his character was the direct and culpable cause
of his death. Among sailors this is already forgotten, and they only
remember him, as they are well warranted in doing, as the greatest of
English mariners, and the man who conquered their most terrible enemy
and their deadliest destroyer.
VII
_LORD CLIVE_,
_QUILL-DRIVER AND CONQUEROR_
VII
LORD CLIVE
It is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to be at once the model
of all bad boys and the forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He
was probably the very worst boy that ever became a really great man.
Of his early youth there is absolutely nothing good to be said, saving
only the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bulldog courage
which thousands of English boys, whose names have never been heard
beyond their native towns, have possessed in common with him.
He was idle, passionate, aggressive, not over truthful, and of a
distinctly turbulent, not to say piratical disposition. For instance,
he had not reached his teens before he established a sort of juvenile
reign of terror in the sleepy old town of Market Drayton, which had at
once the misfortune and the honour of being his birthplace.
Even the school-books have not omitted to tell us how the boy became
the father of the future pirate and Empire-Maker, by organising the
kindred spirits of the town into a buccaneering band, as captain of
which he levied blackmail in the shape of nuts, apples, sweetmeats, and
even coin of the realm on the shopkeepers.
If the tribute were punctually paid, well and good; but if one rebelled
or defaulted, the odds were that he very soon had a heavy bill to pay
for window-repairing, or else there would be sudden deaths in his
fowl-house, or, peradventure, his errand-boy, if not an accomplice
of the gang, would return prematurely from his rounds with his goods
missing and undelivered, and his person in a somewhat battered and
dishevelled condition.
The most respectable feat that he appears to have accomplished in
these days would, after all, appear to be the climbing of the lofty
church steeple, and his enjoyment on that dizzy eminence of the horror
and consternation of the townsfolk. This feat was, in its way, as
characteristic of the man that was to be as was his first essay in
world-piracy, for later on we shall see how he reached a far more dizzy
eminence than this and kept his head as few others would have done.
His school life appears to have been as unsatisfactory as his home
life. He was sent to academy after academy, and at each, ushers and
pedagogues struggled with him in vain--although of itself this fact was
not greatly to his discredit, since the methods of alleged education in
the first half of the eighteenth century were even more unnatural than
they are now. Still, the fact remains that he was a hopeless dunce,
self-willed and idle, and of an unlovable disposition, redeemed only by
the one good quality of intrepid pluck.
One of his uncles, in a family letter, says, semi-prophetically of him:
“Fighting, to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his temper
such a fierceness and imperiousness that it flies out on every trifling
occasion.”
It is also said that one of his schoolmasters saw signs of future
greatness in the dullard of whom neither he nor any of his brethren
could make even a presentable schoolboy, but this is probably a story
of the “I told you so” order, possibly invented by the worthy pedagogue
some time after the event. Be this, however, as it may, the fact is
that in the end the last of the pedagogues seems to have thrown the
job up in despair and returned him back on his father’s hands as a
hopelessly hard case.
Now it so happened that in those days there was a refuge for
the destitute, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the
ne’er-do-well, which in these days is hardly represented by any portion
of our Colonial Empire.
If there appeared to be no chance of a lad doing anything decent at
home; if his parents were too poor to buy him a commission in the Army,
and hadn’t interest enough to get him into the Navy, and if he were,
as Clive undoubtedly was, too much of a dunce to have a chance in
any other respectable profession, the last thing that could be done
for him was to get him a writership in the service of the East India
Company.
If this could be done, two prospects were open to him. He would die
of fever in a year or two, after a hard struggle to live upon his
miserable pay, or he would “shake the Pagoda Tree,” and come home a
wealthy nabob, with a brick-dust complexion, a sun-dried and somewhat
shrivelled conscience, and a liver perpetually on strike. As it
happened, however, Robert Clive availed himself of neither of these
prospects, since the mysterious Fates had a third one in store for him.
Certainly they were _very_ mysterious Fates which presided over the
early fortunes of the future Conqueror of India, and upon none of their
darlings have they frowned so blackly and then suddenly turned round
and smiled so brightly as upon the scapegrace of Market Drayton.
To begin with, the voyage to India in those days, even for people with
large means, was a weary and miserable business. Ocean greyhounds, the
Suez Canal, and the Peninsular Railway, were undreamt of; and the heavy
Indiamen lumbered toilfully round the Cape, across the Indian Ocean,
and up the Bay of Bengal, taking their time about it--sometimes six
months, sometimes a year, or more. In Clive’s case it was more, for
his ship first crossed the Atlantic to the Brazils, and stopped there
for some months. Here he spent all his money, and got in return a
smattering of Portuguese, which he afterwards found useful.
When he eventually landed on the surf-beaten beach of Madras, he was
not only penniless but in debt. The only person of influence to whom
he had an introduction had left for England. His duties were both
laborious and distasteful. He had no friends and was too shy and
awkwardly proud to make any, and for months he was veritably a stranger
in a strange land, and, to crown all, he became wretchedly ill.
How mournful he really felt his position to be, and how far the stern
discipline of misery had already softened his intractable disposition,
may be seen from one of his letters home, in which he says:
“I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country. If
I should be so far blest as to revisit it again, but more especially
Manchester” (this, by the way, was his mother’s native place) “the
centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be
presented before me in one view.”
How little did the despairing lad dream as he wrote thus in some
interval of his weary drudgery that when he did revisit his native land
it would be as a conqueror, laurel-crowned, and hailed as one worthy to
rank with the first soldiers of his age!
But, bright as his fortune was to be, he appears just now to have been
doing very little to deserve it. Macaulay tells us, in that brilliant
essay of his, that he behaved just as badly to his official superiors
as he had done to his schoolmasters, and came several times very near
to being dismissed, and at length, so heavily did sickness of body
and weariness of soul lie upon him, that twice in quick succession he
attempted to blow his brains out, and twice the pistol missed fire.
If those had been the days of central-fire, self-cocking revolvers,
instead of flint-lock pistols, the history of Asia would have been
changed, and what is now our Indian Empire would probably have been a
French possession.
It will be necessary just here to quote a little history with a view
to seeing how matters stood in India at the time when Clive, as it is
said, flung away the second useless pistol, and, like Wallenstein,
exclaimed that after all he must have been born for something great.
The map of India then was very different to what it is now. There was
no red about it at all. In the East, France was practically mistress of
the seas, whatever she might be elsewhere. The British flag only flew
over one spot, and that only by sufferance. This was the little trading
settlement of Madras, which was rented from the Nabob of the Carnatic,
who was only the deputy of the deputy of the once mighty prince whom
Europe knew vaguely as the Great Mogul.
Fort St. George and Fort St. David were mere parodies of military
stations, and the nucleus of the army which was to conquer the whole
Peninsula consisted chiefly of half-trained natives, miscellaneously
armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, and here and there a
firelock. On the other hand, France possessed the Island of Mauritius
and the town and district of Pondicherry, the former governed by
Labourdonnais and the latter by Dupleix, both men of great capacity and
still greater ambition.
France and England were just then at war in Europe, and Labourdonnais
thought it a good time to crush English trade in India while it was yet
in its infancy, so, in spite of all the British East Indian fleet could
do to stop him, he appeared with his ships off Madras, landed a large
body of troops, forced Fort St. George to surrender, and hoisted the
French flag on its battlements.
Happily, this roused the jealousy of Dupleix. Labourdonnais had pledged
his honour that Madras should be restored on the payment of a moderate
ransom. Dupleix, who had already dreamt of being sole master of India,
was determined that it should be wiped off the map altogether, so he
accused his fellow Governor of trespassing on his preserves, and in the
end succeeded in annulling his conditions and marching the Governor of
Fort St. George, with the principal servants of the Company, in triumph
off to Pondicherry.
Unfortunately for him, there was one whom he did not take, not a
principal servant by any means, only an insignificant, underpaid
quill-driver, who had slipped out of the town disguised as a Mussulman,
and yet Dupleix would have made a very good bargain if he could have
exchanged all his other prisoners of war for him.
Clive reached Fort St. David, a dependency of Fort St. George, in
safety, and there, taking advantage of the anger roused by this gross
breach of faith, he exchanged the pen for the sword, and the writer
became an ensign in the East India Company’s army, such as it was.
Scarcely, however, had he done so than peace was made in Europe, and
therefore in India. Clive, no doubt in great disgust, was sent back to
his desk, but, happily for him and the British Empire, not for long.
Fortunately, too, submarine telegraphs had not been invented then, and
India was almost always a year behind Europe, so Governor Dupleix made
up his mind to have a war on his own account, and the prize of this
war was to be, as Macaulay puts it, “nothing less than the magnificent
inheritance of the House of Tamerlane.”
To this end he took such skilful advantage of the disputes of the
pretenders to the throne of Nizam al Mulk, the last of the great
Viceroys of the Deccan, that within a very short time he secured the
triumph of Mirzapha Jung, his _protégé_, and rose himself to such a
position that, in the name of this puppet, he was the virtual ruler
of thirty millions of people, and master of the whole Carnatic,
saving only the city of Trichinopoly, which was all that was left to
Mohammed Ali, the candidate with whom the English Company had sided in
a half-hearted and wholly futile fashion.
At this juncture, Clive, who was now twenty-five years old, and who
occupied a sort of hybrid post with the title of Commissary of the
forces, took upon himself to represent to his superiors that unless
something very decided was done, the French must invariably become
Lords Paramount of the whole Peninsula. They hadn’t a notion what was
to be done, but Clive had, and the brazen effrontery of his plan seems
to have paralysed the authorities into giving him a free hand.
The situation was this: The triumphant Frenchman, believing his
quickly-acquired dominion a permanent one, had raised a tall pillar to
his own glory on the site of his greatest victory, and round this was
growing up a city, the name of which in English meant the City of the
Victory of Dupleix. Chunda Sahib, successor of Mirzapha, was besieging
Trichinopoly, supported by several hundred trained French soldiers.
Major Lawrence, commander of the English garrison at Madras, had gone
to England, and the English Company possessed no officer of proved
ability. The natives, dazzled by the rapid and brilliant triumphs of
Dupleix, and remembering the times when they had seen his colours
flying over Fort St. George, looked with contemptuous pity on the
English as a remnant of feeble shopkeepers who were soon to be cast
into the sea. And so, in all probability, they would have been if that
historic pistol had gone off a few years before.
Clive, viewing the situation with true military genius, saw two facts:
first, that it would be ridiculous with the force at his disposal to
attack the besiegers of Trichinopoly; and second, that, if a dash were
made at Arcot, the capital and favourite residence of the Nabobs of the
Carnatic, which is rather less than a hundred miles inland from Madras,
the siege of Trichinopoly would probably be raised, and so this he
determined to do.
His army consisted of two hundred English soldiers and three hundred
Sepoys, with eight English officers, of whom only two had ever seen an
action. He made the journey by forced marches through the thunder and
lightning and rain of the wet season, and so astounded the garrison of
Arcot by his utterly unexpected appearance before the gates that they
ran without striking a blow.