TO INDIA AND THE HOLY LAND
1856
I sailed from Hongkong on Jardine's opium steamer, Fiery Cross. As the
course we took had been gone over by me in the voyage to Hongkong from
Singapore, I was not especially interested in it until we had passed the
Straits and got into Indian waters. The Andaman Islands, where dwells
one of the lowest races of mankind, interested me greatly. We saw only a
little of these curious people, the Veddahs, but I learned of a very
interesting custom followed by the widows of the islands to commemorate
their deceased husbands. This consists in wearing the skull of the dead
man on the shoulder as a sort of ornament and memento. It is considered
a delicate way of perpetuating the memory of the husband.
I had a letter of introduction from Robert Sturgis to George Ashburner,
at Calcutta, and the moment I arrived Mr. Ashburner insisted upon my
becoming his guest. I spent three days with him, and have never partaken
of such luxurious hospitality elsewhere. It is only man in the Orient
who knows how to live fast and furious and get every enjoyment out of
his little span of life. I was surrounded by a retinue of servants, who
stood ready to answer every beck and call. Service in India being highly
specialized, there was a servant for everything. I had a little army of
fourteen serving men, four of whom carried my chair, or palanquin, with
a relay, a man to serve me specially at table, a punka man, and a man
for every other detail of living.
There was something to do and to see every moment of the time. I was
taken to all the show-places of the city. The first sight shown to me
was the famous Black Hole, where John Z. Holwell and one hundred and
forty-six men were incarcerated in a dungeon twelve feet square. One can
not escape being told the horrible story, if he visits Calcutta, and I
suppose that every one hears the narrative with added adornment, after
the true Hindu style. The special point of the story that was thrust at
me was the orgy and heavy sleep of the rajah, while his servitors were
trying to arouse him to answer the screams of the dying men in the Hole.
In the morning, after the rajah had had his beauty sleep, he was told of
the little difficulty the English had in breathing in the foul and heavy
air of the dungeon, and he ordered them released; but death, lingering,
and as heavy-handed and heavy-hearted as the brutal prince, had already
released most of them.
One is glad to be told for the ten thousandth time, after hearing this
ghastly tale, of the clerk Clive leaving his ledgers and pens and
leading an army to crush the wretches at Plassy. But, like most things
of the kind, the horrors of the Black Hole have been exaggerated, until
sympathy, palled, refuses longer to be torn and bled over imaginary as
well as real terrors. There have been many worse catastrophes, and of a
nature that should appeal more strongly to the heart. Men, women, and
children have gone down in flood and pestilence, free from any stain of
wrong, which can not be said of the victims of the Black Hole. We can
not forget altogether that they were in India not of right, but as
conquerors, and that they were originally, at least, in the wrong. But
the sufferers in the Johnstown flood, the thousands who died in the
Lisbon, Krakatoa, and Martinique disasters, and other thousands that go
down in ships at sea--these innocent victims demand sympathy much more.
It seemed that most of my sight-seeing in Calcutta was to be limited to
horrible things. Indeed, the visitor is often hurried from horror to
horror, as if he were in some "chamber of horrors" in a museum. I was
taken to the burning ghaut, where dead bodies are cremated. I saw some
five hundred little fires, which were so many pyres for the dead. I had
heard much of the burning of live women in order that they should
accompany their dead masters, and out of sheer curiosity asked the guard
if there were men only in the fires. For answer, he took a long hook,
thrust it into one of the fires, pulled it back and on its prongs
brought the charred leg of a man. Immediately birds of prey (adjutants)
pounced down upon the smoking flesh and bore it away. These birds are
the scavengers of Calcutta, and the special guardians of the ghaut.
Cremation is a great economy in India. It costs only half a cent to burn
a body.
Another horror shall complete this gruesome part of my story. Being very
fond of shrimps, one day I inquired, in a moment of forgetfulness--for
it is a safe rule not to ask the source of anything in the East--where
and how they got these shrimps. I was taken to the fishing grounds in
the mouth of the river, and there saw millions of these prawns flocking,
like petty scavengers, about the dead bodies that continually float down
the Ganges. Human flesh was their favorite food. This was enough for me.
I stopped eating shrimps in India, as I had stopped eating Canton ginger
preserves in China.
On the second day of my stay in Calcutta I received cards to the
reception given by Lord Dalhousie to Lord Canning, the new
Governor-General. Lord Dalhousie, the retiring Governor-General, was
dying. In fact he had been dying for months. I shall not go into any
description of the exceedingly brilliant reception. It made an
ineffaceable impression upon me because of the grouping on that occasion
of some of the most splendid of the British administrators and of some
of the most daring of their enemies, who were even then plotting
revolution and bloodshed. I was introduced to both the passing and the
coming Governor-General and to General Havelock, afterwards the gallant
fighter at Lucknow. I had the rare privilege of seeing these three men
talking amicably with the great Nana Sahib, the leader of the Hindus at
Cawnpore.
The voyage from Calcutta to Suez was almost devoid of incident. We put
into Madras, a barren, flat, and dismal place, to take on passengers,
and then sailed for Point de Galle, Ceylon. At this place I saw, for the
first time, elephants employed in carrying and piling heavy timbers.
They go about their task with an intelligence that is nearly human,
lifting heavy teak timbers and placing them in regular order in great
piles. I had not before supposed that any animals possessed so much
sense.
Coming down to Aden, two thousand miles from Galle, sleeping with the
bulkhead open opposite my berth, one night I felt something slap me in
the face. As I was all alone, I did not know what to make of it. There
was no light, and I could not see. As soon as I fell asleep another
slap came. I had heard about the insects of the tropics, but had no idea
they were of such size as to cause these slaps. In the morning, I found
out what had been the matter. Nine flying-fish lay dead in my berth.
At Aden, the most barren and gloomy place I have ever seen, we went out
to the cantonments, which must have been built thousands of years ago.
We hurried up the Red Sea to Suez, and then crossed over by land from
Suez, eighty-four miles, to Cairo, with six hundred camels in the
caravan. We had coaches carrying six passengers. I have a good idea of
what the Sahara Desert is from having seen this desert between Suez and
Cairo. Just before we reached Cairo, there was a cry from one of the
coaches for us to look up at the sky. There were masts, minarets, and
the whole city, in fact, painted on the sky. It was my first sight of
the mirage I had heard so much about. We were then half-way from Suez to
Cairo.
I put up at Shepheard's Hotel, and immediately arranged to go out to the
pyramids, ten miles from Cairo. Fifty donkey boys rivaled one another to
get my custom. My donkey started off, and the first thing I knew he was
rolling over me in the sand. He had stepped in a gopher-hole, and down
he went. Travelers now go out in trolley-cars, eat ice-cream and drink
champagne under the shade of the pyramids, and a splendid hotel stands
alongside the Sphinx.
In going up the pyramids it took three Arabs, two to push and one to
pull, to get me to the top. When we got half-way up, an Arab wanted more
bakshish. I talked to him pretty loud in something he didn't understand,
and he consented to take me farther. The top of the pyramid of Ghizeh
has been taken away, and the pyramid is now about fifteen feet square at
the summit. I made up my mind, the moment I saw the pyramids, that these
gigantic blocks were not stone, but had been produced by one of the lost
arts in preparing concrete. It occurred to me, as the pyramids were
hollow to the base, that they had been storehouses for grain, and were
not built as tombs for the Rameses and Ptolemies. Humane kings had built
them, I thought, in order to employ labor in time of dearth.
As all travelers are told, it was said that a man would go down one
pyramid and come up on another in so many minutes. I had seen such a
number of "fakes" in my travels that, as I could not tell one Chinaman
from another, how should I be able to tell one Arab from another? When
this trick was done for me I thought it did not follow that the man on
the other pyramid was the man who had been with me.
I was surprised when I left Cairo to find a modern railway, that had
been built by Said Pasha. We took the train for Alexandria. At
Alexandria we took passage for the Holy Land. The Rev. J. R. MacFarlane,
chaplain of Madras, wanted to see Jerusalem and landed at Joppa, or
Jaffa, which has become famous for Napoleon's massacre.
In going through the Valley of Sharon, we saw orange and lemon groves,
and fruits of all kinds. It was a lovely valley, but all of a sudden we
struck into the most desolate country I had ever seen--a mountain, a
desert, a wilderness of rocks, ravines and canyons. There were rocks to
the right, rocks to the left, and rocks everywhere. My dragoman had
a mule and I a donkey. One of these mules had irreverently been
named Christ and the other Jesus. To the perfect horror of the
clergyman--until he understood that the men could say nothing else in
English--the names of the donkeys were spoken with every crack of the
whip all the way to Jerusalem. The lashing of those donkeys became a
medley of seeming profanity.
A few weeks before, several people had been killed by the Bedouins on
the desert. Every one was talking about the dangers of the journey.
After we got over this wild district, through the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
we came upon a plateau and saw Jerusalem in the distance. Beautiful is
that city for situation. Said my companions, at the same instant, "There
are the Bedouins!" A half dozen horsemen were coming from the direction
of Jerusalem. We feared danger, but Abram the dragoman showed no fear.
These men were really not dangerous, being only "barkers" for the hotels
of Jerusalem. Neither my companion nor myself had any idea that they
were employes of that kind.
One asked if we would go to "Smith's" near Mount Calvary, to "Jones's"
near the Via della Rosa, or to another house on the site of Solomon's
Temple. MacFarlane said, "Don't notice these people. Leave it to the
dragoman." He decided that we should go to Smith's. From that time,
until we left, for three days, I saw nothing but humbug and tinsel,
lying and cheating, ugly women, sand-fleas and dogs, from Joppa through
Ramlah. The one lovely place was an oasis where we stopped for luncheon.
Of course this was a long time before Mark Twain went there and wept
over the tomb of Adam.
In going through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, up the Mount of Olives, of
course I was impressed with what survived of my Biblical education. New
England training was still strong in me. The women of Bethlehem,
carrying baskets on their heads, with flowing robes of calico, were very
beautiful and healthy-looking; but when I got to Bethlehem, and with my
farm and cattle experience looked for stalls and mangers, I was, of
course, disgusted at being taken down two flights and shown an old wet
cave as the place where the Saviour was said to have been born. I have
kept the morals of the old Methodists, I hope, but my superstitious
notions were disappearing every minute I spent in Jerusalem.
Being in the Holy Land, all the stories I had heard in boyhood came back
to me. I thought of Moses's life. I had been taught to obey his
commandments, but as a child I saw that he had broken in his own life
those which say, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit
adultery--had told Aaron, his brother-in-law, to make a golden image,
and had got up a trust by means of which he might get all the gold.
"Thou shalt do no murder," says the law--but he killed an Egyptian and
hid him in the sand. "Thou shalt not commit adultery "--but he committed
that sin.
And so on to the end. These commandments were taught by the man who had
broken every one of them himself. Aaron, who wished to be included in
the gold-corner into which Moses had refused him admittance, sought to
make money in some other way, and said, "If we are going for forty years
into the wilderness, we shall want salt provisions," and so bought up
all the hogs he could find, without letting Moses into the corner. Then
Moses spoiled the whole game by the law that no Jews should eat pork! In
the Holy Land these things all came into my mind. You can imagine how I
felt sixteen years after, when arrested and detained for six months in
the Tombs for quoting three columns of the Bible (about which I shall
speak later).
At night I wanted my clergyman companion to gain an idea of night scenes
in the East. To make sure that we should not be disturbed, I went to the
chief of police for a guide to show us Jerusalem by candle-light. We
went into a dark alley, back of Mount Calvary and the Via della Rosa,
when the man's movements became suspicious. I could not see why a
policeman should be so careful where he went. My object had been to see
the demi-monde of Syria.
When we got to the door, the policeman tried to shut the door, but I put
my foot in the way. I asked MacFarlane if he was armed. He said he had a
Madras dagger. MacFarlane was already in the room and I drew him out.
"Those are Bedouins," said I; "I could see their pistols and swords."
Intuition told me they were murderers. Sixteen persons had been killed
in Nablus in '55-'56. The chief of police was the head of the gang. I
immediately saw our consul, and there was a meeting of representatives
of the foreign powers, and the whole traffic was exposed. In our case
they found the men, and after we left they were executed.