Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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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
FOR MOST OF THE PERIOD, British troops – and many British civilians – arriving in India disembarked at Calcutta. Relief at the sight of land was tempered by the fact that safe landing was still some way off, because the Hooghly River estuary, with its shifting sandbanks, was notoriously difficult to navigate. The distinctive James and Mary shoal, near the mouth of the river, was named after a 1690s shipwreck there. Smaller vessels were conned up the river by Hooghly pilots, while larger ones would anchor at the mouth of the river and passengers would be disembarked into tenders for the last leg of the voyage. John Luard’s troop sergeant major summed up his first impressions of India as they made their way upstream, declaring that it was: ‘Hotter than Hades, and a damned sight less interesting.’49
William Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd, diverted to India because of the outbreak of the Mutiny, recalled how:
We had two tug steamers, and the pilot and tug commanders all sent bundles of the latest Calcutta papers on board, from which we learnt the first news of the sieges of Delhi and Lucknow, of the horrible massacre at Cawnpore, and of the gallant advance of the small force under generals Havelock, Neill and Outram for the relief of Lucknow. When passing Garden Reach, every balcony, verandah and housetop was crowded with ladies and gentlemen waving their handkerchiefs and cheering us, all our men being in full Highland dress and the pipes playing on the poop. In passing the present No 46 Garden Reach … we anchored for an hour just opposite … Frank Henderson said to me, ‘Forbes-Mitchell, how would you like to be owner of a palace like that?’ When I, on the spur of the moment without any thought replied, ‘I’ll be master of that house and garden yet before I leave India.’ … Just thirty two years after, I took possession of the house No 46, where I have established the Bon Accord Rope Works.
When his regiment disembarked, Forbes-Mitchell was pleased to see that fellow Scots ‘who had long been exiled from home’ forced beer on the thirsty warriors, ‘and the Highlanders required but little pressing, for the sun was hot, and, to use their own vernacular, the exercise “made them gey an drauthy”’.50
Calcutta, the capital of British India until its replacement by New Delhi in 1911, became the liveliest of Indian cities. Captain Alexander Hamilton complained, however, that its origins were unpropitious:
The English settled there about the year 1690 … Mr Job Charnock, then being the Company’s agent in Bengal, had liberty to settle an Emporium in any part of the River’s side below Hughly [Hooghly], and for the sake of a large shady tree chose that place, tho’ he could not have chosen a more unhealthful place on the whole river; for three miles to the North Eastward is a saltwater lake that overflows in September and October and then prodigious numbers of fish resort thither, but in November and December, when the floods are dissipated these fish are left dry and with their putrefaction affect the air with stinking vapours, which the North-East Winds bring with them to Fort William, that they cause a yearly Mortality.
The fort itself, in the most literal sense of one of the key bastions of British rule in India, followed the best principles of artillery fortification:
Fort William was built in a regular Tetraon of brick and mortar called Puckah, which is a composition of brick-dust, Lime Molasses and cut hemp and is as hard and tougher than firm stone or brick, and the town was built without Order as the Builders thought most convenient for their own Affairs, everyone