The light was diminishing in the forests surrounding Belemby, but more slowly now, almost asymptotically, as if the night were unbreachable. Rutland searched for the thin branches he might light with the bark he’d scraped as kindling. Most lay in damp undergrowth, moss-covered, rotting. But in a small clearing he found the stones and barely singed wood of a fire that looked as if it had been made and unmade immediately after. He fingered the branches, wispy and abundant. He pulled twine from his pocket and tied some of them up in a bundle.
The monk appeared at the edge of the clearing, his rust robe catching in a gust of wind. Rutland rose, leaving the wood on the ground. His fire, perhaps. Beyond the monk, in the distance, Rutland made out a narrow, tall building in gray stone with a steep roof tiled in the Portuguese style. The village vehar, its Buddhist temple.
Belemby was small so the temple housed only a few priests, and most rotated from this site to others in the region. To mark its autonomy from the kingdom proper it was placed on the outskirts of the city, though by a centuries-old arrangement between the priesthood and the royal court, the king paid for its construction and upkeep, beyond what the locals provided through a temple tax.
Rutland raised his hand and the monk came forth. In a mix of English and Sinhalese he explained his bundling of the wood, the assumptions made. He started to untie the sticks but the monk, Darasa, held his hand out flat and received a nod in thanks.
Over the years, Rutland had picked up enough Sinhalese to survive on. For his part, Darasa knew substantial tracts of the invaders’ languages: Portuguese, Dutch, and already some English. He asked the Englishman if his needs went beyond wood, light, heat. Rutland scanned the undergrowth before seeing the stylus and the folded parchment next to it in the monk’s hand. Darasa unfolded the parchment, revealing the script, alien to Rutland. He gestured for him to follow him back to the temple, explaining he may have something he might like to read.
I cannot trouble you, Rutland said. He thought to return, with or without the branches. The villagers would soon wonder where he’d gone. The bending of patterns brought unease. Darasa smiled and explained that he would escort him back to the village himself afterward.
They walked toward the spot the priest had emerged from, making parallel prints—Darasa’s feet, Rutland’s boots—in the dirt. The monk had acquired more than a few books over the years from the foreigners: navigational works, texts describing proper seamanship, collections of maps, and a very recent account of a plague crippling Europe. There were also religious works, like the Gemara, portions of the Mishnah, the Koran, and two copies of the New Testament. At the mention of the Bible, Rutland’s eyes got large.
They came across a shack. Rutland recognized it at once—a covel, a temple of the jacco, the devil’s house. They dotted the country. The resident priest (jaddese), pious in his way though of low birth and little learning, was absent. A boy with neatly combed hair sat on the stone steps, looking faint and ashen. Darasa touched his head with an impersonal warmth.
The two men entered the front room of the covel. Plates of rice, loose betel leaves, and overripe mangos stretched across the floor. Along the walls men were drawn in reds and blacks. Lying behind the offerings were arrowheads of flint and bone, one affixed to a long branch. They found two poorly wrought shortswords next to a door leading on to a space with room only for a bed. The blades were so blunt and tarnished Rutland couldn’t tell if they were weapons or relics.
They crossed out of the opposite door and came to the yard. Four birds, all short-feathered and blood-red, moved about the pen, pecking at the grass. Each represented a healing, or anyway a patient’s recovery by one means or another, ague being the common malady. The birds would have been gathered for a mass sacrifice to the governing devils; or else for a sale, depending on the scruples of the jaddese.
In trips through the country selling caps, Rutland had seen red cocks of this sort sold in bulk by these lesser priests. A dozen years later, during one of several escape attempts, Knox and Loveland would bring six of these birds, gathered on a reconnaissance trip, back to camp. They’d got them from a jaddese for an iron pan and a few coins. Having lost their common blade fording a river, Knox twisted the necks of some of the birds, rotating them two revolutions until he heard the pop. Loveland, disturbed by the noise and feel of cleanly snapping bone, preferred to smash their heads with a rock. Rutland recalled the plucking vividly, the luster of the feathers, the patience involved. Once the birds were all gooseflesh, they tore out their bowels with their fingers and spiked the gutless creatures on long young branches, roasting them with only the salt they had for sale.
They gorged on the pink meat, the skin sweating fat and blood. They dug out the marrow from steaming bones. There was too much. Two of the birds were tossed into the marsh. Their crisp bodies, their taut, charred skin shrunk tight over bony scaffolds, their gaping bellies, they watched it all sink in brackish waters. Manaar, the northernmost province where entry and exit were possible, was close now, and they had the full stomachs that might carry them through this time.
But the king’s men had not been far behind. They were soon overtaken in the swamps. Their lead had been lost roasting birds. The Englishmen saved their lives by playing off the dash as an especially wide merchant wander.
Darasa took Rutland through the covel only for contrast with the proper Buddhist temple they were headed to. He related how the jaddeses sometimes appeared mad, and it was then that they were taken for gods, not devils. Advice was sought. The people would pose questions of many sorts, practical, metaphysical, political, personal. The priest would answer all in the same tone, riddling and frenzied by turns, and his words would achieve a gravitas they could not approach in saner moments.
Unlike the jaddeses, Darasa said, the people could be inhabited only by devils, not gods. But they talked much the same as the priests then. Rutland had seen a man in the forest writhing and shaking. First he thought it a case of the sacred disease—epilepsy—or snakebite, perhaps; but as he approached to give succor, the man started mixing local sayings and proverbs, and indeed some European ones too, into novel, unimagined maxims, deforming and inventing meanings, so much so that though the grammar of sense remained, Rutland could not follow him.
He was convinced that something intelligible was said, if only his capacity to comprehend could keep pace with the man’s capacity to pronounce. He couldn’t call them ravings. Rutland had heard those many times, in Yorkshire and St. Andrews, by his ostensibly possessed countrymen. Maybe it was they who merely had the sacred disease. For the Sinhalese man’s speech did not bear much resemblance. In the British cases, there was just the simpleminded repetition of a few phrases, invocations of the Devil and of God: nothing nearly so complex and creative as what he was hearing from this man.
He wondered whether the Sinhalese possession, then, was the genuine sort, and what had come before, in his homeland, were merely the babblings of the mentally deficient. Or could it be that the devils possessing the Sinhalese were simply cleverer than Satan? Perhaps this was owed to their multiplicity, their regional grounding, each devil having his province and jurisdiction. Might there be spiritual specialties, smaller expertises exceeding any single intelligence, ones that issued not in universal claims, but in both ones tailored to the region of origin and ones that were crossbred, the most fertile of all, which correlated to the various routes one might traverse the country by?
Rutland conveyed to Darasa what he could of these thoughts, which put the monk in mind immediately of the prophet of the god without name. The god, or anyway the prophet, first made himself known by a trail of fallen dewals, temples of the gods, which were bound to the covels by a common commitment to idolatry (both sorts were held in less regard than the vehars, the proper Buddhist temples). The prophet claimed, through his messengers—he, like his god, was never seen—that the nameless one had commanded that the other gods’ temples be razed.
Over several months, collapsed temples appeared across the north, from Trincomalee through Anuradhapura. Chunks of clay with branches running through them lay scattered about, no less than the people’s offerings. The relics included arms (some of them European), clay figures (some of them Virgin Marys), and collections of household objects that were also the symbols of embedded gods. These were all carefully defaced, the clay figures dismembered, the swords bent in two and displayed in their abasement.
The people shrugged off the nameless one at first, but as his destructive powers grew, and the wreckage accumulated, their allegiances shifted. Next to the rubble of the dewals the villagers would leave fresh victuals and new items to be enchanted by the god.
The prophet, finding so much success, thought he might be not only a god but a king. Through his messengers, prophets of the prophet, he declared his intentions to establish a northern kingdom that would overlap Rajasingha’s.
The king had been happy enough for the prophet to rule over the next world. But not this one too. He dispatched soldiers to the north to monitor the remaining dewals. Eventually, in the night, the prophet and several of his disciples were discovered undermining a temple. The squat Dravidian and his assistants were brought before the king, who asked his name. Munjan. This incarnated god was bisected. The resulting aspects of the man-god were incinerated in the center of town, just outside the royal court. In the morning, in front of the smoldering pit of Munjan’s bones, there were flowers, victuals, and relics.
Rutland and Darasa came to another clearing, this one with rice paddies, clusters of coconut trees, and livestock, all managed by local farmers. They paid their taxes in harvests, Darasa said, and not to the king but to the vehar, where they maintained its monks. The king provided men to help collect the produce, look after the livestock, cook the meals, and serve the food as needed, when the farmers themselves could not.
At the center of Ratukela, holy satellite partner of Belemby, was the vehar, just as the administration was at the center of the king’s townships. None but the townsmen were admitted to pray. Women, even the best of them, were thought in some way unfit to affirm the destruction of want, the prime doctrine of the Buddha.
At noon the townsmen would serve the monks food and give offerings to paintings or drawings of past ones. The monks arranged themselves in a row, with space for the likenesses that were interspersed among them. The men would move down the row, ladle in hand, each offering a different dish to the monks. With a nod a monk accepted, with an extended hand he declined. The plates of the likenesses were always piled highest, as only they never refused.
Rutland and Darasa regarded the stone vehar, sober yet grand. The roof’s lime-whitened edge was inlaid with onyx in a pleasing but inscrutable pattern. The temple dated back centuries at least, and the current Sinhalese builders could not match the skill of the originals, which meant that every renovation was also a defacement, an aesthetic and perhaps spiritual diminishment. So the Buddhist priests, the senior ones especially, liked the vehars restored as little as possible. As long as the walls didn’t collapse, and the roof mostly held the rains at bay, they preferred the unreconstructed shelter, vulnerable though it was. Rajasingha was pleased to go along with this, as it came at a savings to him.
They entered the temple from a side entrance and went up a set of stairs to a long, narrow room full of loose papers and bound books stacked on the tables, the benches, and the floor. Darasa headed toward the back, but just inside the door, Rutland saw what looked like an Arabic scroll with a set of calculations in familiar numerals at its center. A trader’s tally sheet. Next to that was a small book of recipes in a Germanic language, probably Dutch, he couldn’t tell.
Beyond the stacks were several sea charts laid out on benches, the oddest of them being a map buried in the face of a jester. A hood—the left half yellow, the right orange, with belled tassels—was pulled tight around the world-face. It merged with the jester’s suit, which was in the same colors, trimmed with gold piping, and decorated with medallions at the shoulder, as a ranking army officer’s might be. There was an inscription to the jester’s right:
Democritus laughed at the world,
Heraclitus wept over it,
Epichthonius Cosmopolites portrayed it.
Epichthonius Cosmopolites—“Everyman”—a name that did not name. The picture didn’t give away its tragic element easily, though Rutland’s heart sank infinitesimally the longer he stood over it, studying the geography of a clown’s face.
Mercator’s map, from decades before, was there too, up on a table opposite the main stacks of books. Next to it was a kind of update of the mappa mundi, Desceliers’ plane-chart of 1550, but with significant interior detail, beyond the coastal outlines and seaports. In this way it was more than a mere sea chart.
On the table near Darasa Rutland found the double-hemisphere of Jean Rotz. On one corner of it lay a small atlas with further maps: the charts, Rutland knew, of Battiste Agnese.
There were more, and it astonished him to see them all here. Beneath the Mercator was Martin Waldseemuller’s Carta Marina: A Portuguese Navigational Sea Chart of the Known Earth and Oceans. A true mariner’s map. Unlike the Ptolemaic map he’d made earlier, the Universalis Cosmographia—Rutland wondered if there was also a copy of this in the room—with its scholarly deductions, this was a deeply empirical depiction, which meant there was an unruliness to its lines. There were the tensions thrown up by conflicting records coming in from so many sailors. A priori maps elided that sort of complexity, or more likely never knew it.
Rutland recognized all but the jester map (the Fool’s Cap). His grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the English army, was something of an amateur mapmaker, not only collecting copies of all the watershed maps from Ptolemy onward but drafting his own. In doing so he would conjoin rational and empirical principles, thinking this was the key to definitive cartography. Most of his creations, in fact, were composites of ones in his collection. The results were as visually interesting as they were unusable, by sailor and scholar alike. The principles, it turned out, were incongruent. Still, he’d managed to pass his grasp of the history of the discipline to his grandson. It was some part of the reason Rutland had taken a sailor’s path.
Above the books, hanging from the wall, was the 1502 Cantino World Chart, an accretion of hard-won Portuguese seafaring knowledge from which the Carta Marina was derived. For its martial and commercial value, the Portuguese royals had carefully guarded it. The Italian spy Alberto Cantino, Rutland recalled, was sent by the Duke of Ferrara to find a copy of the map. Ultimately he did, by an unknown hand, and smuggled it out of Lisbon. The Italians’ worldview immediately grew: the Cantino map of 1502 depicted outlying areas unknown to most other Europeans, regions that might serve as trading posts to bring mineral wealth and exotic foodstuffs into Lisbon—or else be annexed outright in the name of the empire.
As the priest continued to search the stacks, Rutland examined the depiction of Ceylon on the map, the tiny teardrop, here more of a circle. The Cantino was published just three years before the Portuguese arrived on the island. It was this map that many of their sailors would have helped create, contributing fresh details, improving its fidelity bit by bit.
Later generations would have steered here with its help; hence its presence in the temple. It was fitted to a wooden board, to preserve it, Darasa would tell him. The deep yellow of the map contrasted with the stark line drawings of the shores in brown ink. Mostly seaports were noted. The interiors were largely voids. They had not been much explored at the time, as it mattered little to merchant sailors how exactly the interior was arranged. They needed only to understand the edges of continents, where exchange was conducted. They would oversee the loading and unloading of cargo, and occasionally help military personnel secure the port. But they spent their time thinking of the ocean, or of home, not of the lands they found themselves in, or the precise origins of the goods they carried. Martial sailors and the explorers too held different maps, different thoughts, ones that traced their inward steps.
Darasa set a copy of the King James Bible on top of the Carta Marina’s Africa. Rutland half-bowed to the monk as gratitude washed over him. The book’s burgundy covers were worn so smooth the leather appeared grainless, though the vellum stock had stood up quite well to the marine air it would have seen in transit.
He fingered the slices of calfskin inscribed with the word of God, but strangely, without quite the conviction he expected to feel, given the many months since he had last seen a Bible. Carrying the residue of vast terrestrial movements, their geometries and schemata sketching historical trajectories without meaning to, the maps gave little ground, in his mind, to the Word. Most stubborn was the Fool’s Cap, at once a simple guide to the world and a shaping of it, an inscrutable transfiguration of history and futurity, both, into geography.
The Bible was something different. Cartography enforced a leanness of meaning; a coastline, a bay, or a mountain range could carry only so much sense. The Book, holy poem, was a thicket of sense, making it impossible to read its implications off cleanly.
The air had gone blue-black outside. Rutland insisted he would make his way back alone, and asked only if he might have use of a lantern, which he would return the next day. Darasa pulled a sheet of paper from the shelf. It was decorated with the emblem common to the temples, which resembled those of the kingdom: the seal of the lion, descending from the ancient north-Indian kingdom of Kalinga, where the Sinhalese, it was held, originated.
He inscribed a few lines, signed and folded it, and held it out to Rutland. He was to present it to anyone in the village, especially the village councilors, who might be suspicious of the evening excursion. He walked Rutland back down to the vehar’s side entrance and took up an unlit lantern, its twine wick poking out of yellow goat fat.
Rutland took the ball of twine from his pocket and dipped the end of it in the flame coming off the hanging temple lantern. He lit the one Darasa held with it and left through the tall grass, the letter tucked in the book.
When he reached the clearing with the abandoned fire—he’d never asked the monk why he’d made it, or why he put it out, or even if it was in fact his—he set the lamp down and opened the Bible to the page of the letter. It had settled in Leviticus. He opened the letter, and though he could read bits of Sinhalese now, he found the characters strange.
Later he would learn the letters were Pali. Understood only by the Buddhist monks, the characters would be recognized by the town’s officers as Pali, but they, like Rutland, would have no sense of its meaning except for the numerals indicating time and date. Its meaning, then, was effectively just its form. If he presented a letter in Pali with the right date and time, and with his name on it—he could see that much, as it was written in English—on temple paper with a senior priest’s signature, the officer would not bother to have another priest decipher it, and Rutland would be left alone.
But what did it mean, in Pali? Was it nonsense? Perhaps the priest had a sense of humor. Or maybe it was meant to be deciphered someday, when his descendants found it among his papers, in England, God willing.
Rutland tucked the letter back into the book and held it with the lantern in one hand. He picked up the bundle of sticks and headed home.
■■■
Stagg closed the laptop and drank deeply from a coffee mug full of flat champagne so cheap that it was hardly worse for having lost its life. He shut his eyes and blotted out the light of afternoon.
Rutland would truly head home, Stagg thought, only many years later, in 1680. But the London he fled to would be two-thirds the size by then, hollowed out by the bubonic plague, and with a king, not Rajasingha II but Charles II, the Stuart, restored. The Lord Protector and master Roundhead Oliver Cromwell had lost the confidence of his people and left them longing for the comforts of monarchy.
Rutland’s father, Harold, a prominent Royalist, had relished the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, though Stephen himself was always more cavalier than Cavalier. Certainly he was at the time he’d left London, in 1658, after a military training, for a life at sea, ostensibly in the name of the commercial interests of the East India Company but really more for the adventuring. The conflicts he’d been enmeshed in on the island had altered his politics, his sense of justice, though he couldn’t say just how, except to say he could be neither Royalist nor Roundhead now.
Stagg’s own predicament, the inchoate strife that surrounded him, how different was it, finally, from what Rutland had experienced abroad? It must be making his politics mutate too in unknown ways. Officially he stood with Penerin and the ruling order. But if the elections, or else a less peaceful force, were to undo it, there was no saying in advance which of the competing actors might earn his sympathy, or what new attachments he might form. This mercenary instinct seemed to be growing in Stagg, and he had to consider whether, beyond the turmoil all around him, his research too might be a catalyst, just as its object, a long-lost Sri Lanka, had been for Rutland.
A century and a half later, as if to revenge his captivity, the Rutland line would return to the island. Lt. General Andrew Philip Bartley Rutland led the final thrust into Kandy and was a leading signatory, in 1815, to the Kandyan Convention, that British treaty of annexation.
In the Uva rebellion that followed, he brought an end to several leading Sinhalese bloodlines, ones very much like his own back in England. He was always of the view that Bulwer-Lytton would articulate years later, and Disraeli would endorse: an “aristocracy of shopkeepers” was not to be preferred to an oligarchy of nobles. Abroad, of course, these English shopkeepers were out of sight, so A. P. B. Rutland was less dispirited by them than by the killing of nobles here in Ceylon, swiftly, brutally, knowing it could only speed the conquest of the commercial classes, however exactly they chose to dispose of the island.
Later, around 1900, Andrew’s grandnephew Gareth Robbins Rutland would serve as deputy governor of Ceylon. He had been an Apostle at Cambridge, at Peterhouse, in fact, where Stagg had been a doctoral student. Gareth’s ascendancy was swift. His family name virtually assured this.
Stagg himself was nearly tapped to be an Apostle, before he told the would-be tapper, in the sincerest tones, how important it was to follow your dreams. His friend readily agreed to the platitude. Then Stagg told him he’d dreamed the night before he’d pushed a child down a flight of stairs. What to do then? Baffled laughter came back. It was a fine joke, but Stagg had to pursue it. Would he help him memorialize the realization of his dreams, by filming it? he asked. And where would they find the right child? After a surreal debate over the meaning of the platitude, whether dreams in the clinical sense could possibly count, Stagg held firm to his position, his tone never straying from earnest. It froze his friend’s face in the end, stunned him into silence. At that point Stagg patted him on the shoulder and laughed, left him to watch Arsenal F.C. finish off Chelsea in the middle common room of Jesus College. There would be no tap. The friendship was finished too.
Where to trace this taste for terror? Probably the question itself was a dodge. Yet he liked to think he was finding the form of an answer in Haas, a commander who seemed as much at war with his own squad as with the enemy, who seemed to need to visit arbitrary cruelties on those around him to keep his mind level. In a diluted way Stagg’s father seemed to share in this unknowable need, at least when Stagg had been younger and more fully part of his squad. The family had disbanded now, or retired maybe, on neutral terms. The old wars had been too much. The mother remained in California, the father in Vienna. The child was still finding a territory of his own.
Gareth Robbins Rutland came to Ceylon with a fellow Apostle, Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s future husband. Soon after, though, Woolf returned to London, and Bloomsbury, troubled by the mechanics of colonial administration. He wrote a novel about it: The Village in the Jungle.
It was a bad novel, narratively clumsy and evincing nearly as much contempt for the Ceylonese as for the British administration. Still, like the best undistinguished novels, it remained useful to the historian mapping the shape of an era.
Robert Knox, who escaped to England with Rutland on a Dutch military vessel, composed a chronicle of his experience in the mode of the traveler’s tale: An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies. It was published in 1681, sold very well, and unlike Woolf’s book centuries later, managed to have some literary merit as well. Though roughly formed in places, there were affinities with Gargantua and Pantagruel and Moby Dick. It’s said to have exerted a direct influence on the writing of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.
But for Stagg there was much more to admire in it. It can be called a traveler’s tale, but the records from other merchants and soldiers, and from the monks and statesmen of the island, corroborate large portions of it: the native habits and customs, the horticultural explanations, the translations of pregnant Sinhalese phrases. It was closer to a travel memoir, really, than a tale.
Detailed records of daily life in the 1600s are few on the subcontinent generally. It forced you to rely on imperfect foreign reports like Knox’s. Of course, there were the clerical records, the Great and Lesser Chronicles. They did offer a continuous history of Sri Lanka of a sort, from the time of its settlement in 543 B.C.E., when Prince Vijaya, it attests, sailed to the island from Kalinga, in the north of India, with seven hundred men and women, through to 1815, when Kandy finally fell. But, being composed and maintained solely by the priesthood, the account was profoundly incomplete.
For one, the customs and practices of ordinary people go almost entirely unrecorded, as do any matters of neither practical nor metaphysical interest to the monks. Instead, the Chronicles give you the evolution of successive royal orders, the unfurling of aristocratic lines, in tandem with a history of the priesthood, its influential scholar-monks—the tirinanxes, as Knox and Rutland called them—and how they related to the successive regimes. Their record of the royal court, though, was of less value, as it was known, from other surviving documents, especially those of dissident priests, to be written in a manner unduly favorable to kings who were concessive to the priesthood.
The Chronicles, then, are a history, and in the main a panegyrical one, of two institutions, church and state. What doesn’t bear directly on either or casts them in too harsh a light would have been left out, or even redacted by later generations.
Centralization was partly the source of its unreliability. Each change of regime seems to have forced rhetorical and substantive shifts on the two books. So it fell to documents like Knox’s, composed by the marauders, the imperial and commercial outfits, and to the few surviving private journals of monks and distinguished members of the court, to give ballast to the official domestic record, a fraught task, the difficulties of which, it was growing ever clearer, Stagg had probably undersold to Kames.
For one, the copious notes Stagg had collected of Darasa’s spoke to a narrow range of issues, or at least spoke about matters from a narrow angle: metaphysical, or philological. Not that they weren’t fascinating to Stagg. Probably he studied them most closely of all, but as much for historiographical as for historical reasons. At those times he felt more kinship with the monk than with his less cerebral blood relations, Rutland and Haas.
As for the history itself, sometimes he suspected he was only checking falsehoods against further falsehoods. Even less than Darasa’s writings could he take the European records from Rutland and Haas and Knox at face value. Beyond the usual problems of transcultural interpretation confronting any historical anthropology, there were several more: the literary license taken in some of them, like Knox’s book; the commercial and imperial ambitions, latent and nascent, that lay behind these documents; and the religious coloration, the apparent sight of moral inferiors, heathens, everywhere.
A greater range of representations might have eased the problem. Stagg could then have started to solve more precisely for the nature of the history itself, the properties inhering in the world that might explain how these various impressions came about: a meta-representation that could account, possibly uniquely, for the more partial ones, just as the Cantino map systematized the observations of generations of sailors.
But the data sometimes seemed to Stagg too impoverished for that. Too many frames could comfortably accommodate it. Reconciling the inconsistencies was no less difficult. Often there was simply the word of one against another, or the preponderance of evidence would come down to a single datum leaning ever so slightly one way. The outcome could be that precarious.
Part of the poverty of information was induced by the island’s climate. The swelter quickly rotted any document that wasn’t expressly preserved. In the great vehars and the royal court, manuscripts would be stored in rooms lined with the spongy roots of a rare native shrub growing along the Highland mountain peaks. After a few months the roots would become fat with water, at which point they would be replaced. But the root’s scarcity meant that little was preserved that did not pertain to the priesthood or the court.
Most commoners didn’t believe the everyday was worthy of collective remembrance anyway. Crises, denouements, counted for more. So the quotidian, Stagg felt, went unrecorded and something like Freytag’s pyramid, its legs and vertices—the five acts of a classical drama, like his own recurrent dreams—were taken up into the space of myth through the gateway of meter and verse. That was the structure of the Chronicles.
Rutland’s letters and journals, which he’d kept religiously during his captivity, were Stagg’s primary British counterpoint to Knox’s book (Haas’s more fragmented diaries formed a Dutch one). For years the letters to Rutland’s wife had lain in the old country house in Canterbury, the one Stagg had spent half of June researching at with Renna; and the rest, the ones to Rutland’s father and to his invalid sister, along with most of the journals, in Rutland’s childhood home in Portsmouth, still owned by the family.
Some of these records, the ones relevant to legal matters surrounding missing cargo of the East India Company, say, or compensation for men lost on the Ann, were made available to the British courts. When their historical value came to trump their legal significance, some of the letters went to the British Library, others to the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. But there were many more that were neither needed by nor disclosed to the courts, and these came down through the generations almost as family heirlooms. Gareth Rutland had organized and archived them a century ago, and in fact considered undertaking the very study his descendant, Stagg, was now conducting.
Together, the letters and journals chronicled the unfolding of Stephen Rutland’s hopes. From them, Stagg thought, the scope of his talent for suffering might be recovered. There were over four hundred letters, not really so many given the many years of captivity. (Very few of his crew, just he and Knox, as far as Stagg knew, made it back to England in the end.)
The letters were carried back home mostly on English and Dutch trader ships, sometimes light military vessels. They were taken first to the Ceylonese ports on foot—Colombo, Manaar, Trincomalee, and Jaffna—by Dutch messengers, Arab traders, and French explorers. Rutland had sneaked many of them to Sinhalese villagers he’d befriended over the years of captivity, years correlating precisely with the Bubonic plague’s sweep through Europe. Captivity by God’s grace, he would write later. Taking pity on him, the Sinhalese would find ways to get his letters into the right hands when he himself could not.
The letters were generally five or six pages, written on a local paper, not palm, that was pressed by the Dutch. It was made from coarse plant fibers that flecked the cream of the paper with gray, black, and green. The imperfections distorted Rutland’s wide script, which he’d applied in a heavy ink with the feathers of those red cocks native to the island. His line jittered, being pushed to one side or the other by the topography of the pulp. His mind might have jittered too.
Each sheet was housed in polythene now, and stacks of them sat all around Stagg’s apartment. Most were in good shape, not only because of the efforts of various Rutlands over the centuries, but because the coarse pulp was naturally low in acid. A more refined stock might have been dust by now
They circled around just a few issues: the resolution of business matters back in England, with his father; how the affairs of his house should be handled in his absence; and, most important for Stagg, what his life was like in Ceylon, offered through small sharp glimpses of the island, as if they, more than anything more systematic Rutland might say, could most effectively close the distance between them.
Rarely were they explicit about the depth of his anxiety. Yet the only feelings he omitted were the ones he had about himself. His affection for his wife, father, and close friends was everywhere in evidence, always in the tone, and sometimes in closing paragraphs and postscripts, where he would describe an experience common to their lives he was particularly fond of, the contemplation of which now brought him pleasure.
Anxiety and despair, these were reserved for the journals, though even his lamentations were crosscut with precise physical description. Stagg had so far located only six of these books, in palm paper. Their pages tell that more were composed, probably too many to carry through the mangroves of Manaar in the escape.
That he carried any at all is a surprise. They were thick volumes, together weighing some twenty pounds. They would have compromised his chances of escape by some margin. But, Rutland writes, leaving without the journals would be like leaving twenty years behind, mercurial ones, and in all likelihood, he recognized even then, the most interesting ones, if also the most difficult, he would ever live. He’d kept them at the bottom of his rucksack on the escape through the midland swamps, not allowing Knox to know he hadn’t left them behind, as Knox had left his own.
Knox’s Historical Relation was composed mostly from memory back in London. So, for all its texture, it had to be more abstract than Rutland’s contemporaneous chronicle. (It was unclear when Haas’s records were composed, or even how exactly they’d made their way to the Austrian library Stagg had found them in.) The density of detail in Rutland’s unpublished writings easily outstripped Knox’s work, whether about village architecture, the structure of the court, flora and fauna, hunting techniques, or trade with the Europeans.
Where events appeared in both accounts, how could Rutland’s not be given more weight? His words, after all, were temporally closer to the objects and events described, and conceptually closer as well, perhaps, in that Rutland gives us scenes, sequences of his experience, inner and outer, unfolding in ordinary time. Knox condenses and generalizes from his. Supposing their powers of observation were commensurate, and that neither had more reason than the other to distort matters, it seemed natural to give priority to Rutland’s words.
But the first assumption: How to measure their perceptual acuity without being, yourself, in a position to check it against your own, observing the same things, beyond the correspondences with other documentary evidence? And did aesthetics insinuate itself here, as it did in mathematics? Perhaps it had a place, and the great maligned classicist Richard Bentley and his heterodox approach to interpretation—really his gifts as an exegete were beyond question—was right, to a point at least. A great aesthetic intuition could recover the true and fullest form of a gap-ridden text, even when it was Paradise Lost, and the world snorted with laughter at the emendations.
There would also be immanent clues to consider. Too many inconsistencies in an account might suggest a weak eye. But too few might suggest the same, the missing of distinctions, of tensions, of the minute irreconcilability of events along their edge that every glassy text and tale polished away.
Even if the matter of priority couldn’t be settled, an equilibrium might be sought. Rutland’s words could light Knox’s, and Knox’s Rutland’s. Similarly for the rest—the Chronicles, the trader balance sheets, Haas’s and Darasa’s words—until everything was bright, light dawning “gradually over the whole,” as he’d read once in the carrels of the Wren library, in Cambridge (Bentley’s library, too). The pages of that original manuscript, Wittgenstein’s, were tinged blue, he recalled, by the light falling through the library’s tall lead panes.
In Berkeley, the preferred term was semantic holism: the fixing of the position of one term by the fixing of the position of others. Perhaps, then, Stagg’s work was just historiography as an extension of radical interpretation, recovering the past as one recovers the meaning of sounds leaving mouths, a world, an idiolect, on every tongue.
Then the second assumption: Beyond reconstructing the life of a nation, to what extent could Knox’s private view of the Sinhalese be discovered? There were far fewer letters to go on. Apparently he didn’t think there was much hope of their reaching home.
Rutland’s records, the journals and the letters, were private documents, which meant he would have had little reason to mold them for public effect. Historical Relation, on the other hand, was written to be widely read, and was.
As one of the first Britons to be so deeply acquainted with South Asia, Knox offered one of the first detailed reports on the land; there is an early mention of cinnamon, for instance, and other endemic spices. So he might well have been tempted to sculpt his account, in an effort to shape the dawning imperial consciousness of a nation. The irony being, though, that through the influence of his family through the generations, Rutland’s account almost certainly had a deeper effect on that consciousness than Knox’s in the long run.
Knox more than Rutland took an impersonal, quasi-anthropological approach, and this suppression of subjectivity created a further hurdle for Stagg. Knox was steeped for twenty years in the country’s atmosphere before writing the book, though. Whatever his aspirations toward being a dispassionate witness, time would have molded his sensibilities, structured his account.
But teasing out the normativity, uncovering the moral architecture of the book, and of the British Empire—all the things that interested Kames—how was that to be done with Historical Relation? The book rarely engaged with matters in a straightforwardly moral way, so Stagg would have to detect their subtextual operation. And then, as before, how far could the moral framework be prized apart from the reality it framed? A kind of notional separation of scheme and content, to whatever degree it could be effected, was required, a double interpretation, of Knox’s consciousness and of the world it embraced.
All this made him grateful for the private jottings of his ancestors.