Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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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.