‘I know you will think me mad’
After describing the weather and how he had overcome his aversion to the smell of durian fruits and now thought them delicious, Lieutenant Stuart Corbett’s letter to his father in England continued:
‘You must not be surprised when I tell you that I am going to be married on the thirteenth of next month to Miss Charlotte Britten who has got a Brother in the 20th and is of a very respectable family, who reside at Forest Hill in Kent. I shall be able by this step to lead a regular and steady life which I have not been able to do for the last 4 months, the Officers of the 2nd Battn being all single and fond of sitting up till 3 or 4 in the morning which I do not like and still as a single man am not able to avoid it.’
Surprise might well have been the reaction of the Reverend Stuart Corbett in his vicarage in the West Riding of Yorkshire when he received his son’s letter, as the boy was a mere nineteen years old, even though young Stuart continued reassuringly:
‘I have been considering on the important step I am about to take and I really think I shall be much more comfortable and be able to lead a life more after the manner in which I have been brought up and be better able to take care of my health which is one of the most important considerations in the world as I have now had 3 attacks of fever the last of which was very severe and obliged me to come round to this place [Penang, then known as Prince of Wales Island] for the recovery of my health.’
The year was 1822 and Corbett, a young officer of the East India Company, had snapped up one of the girls then known as the Fishing Fleet – young women who travelled out to India in search of a husband. Trade with India, the jewel in Britain’s burgeoning commercial Empire, was vast and the promise of wealth and success – if they survived disease and peril – beckoned the young men of the Company. Once, they had formed marriages or liaisons with Indian beauties but by Corbett’s time these days were past – and most British girls stayed at home. So, for both parties, marriage was not so much about passion and romance as a matter-of-fact life choice, sealed by a contract, that had to be arrived at briskly or the prize would be lost to someone who was quicker off the mark.
The story of Charlotte Britten and Stuart Corbett is typical both of how the Fishing Fleet became an established phenomenon and of the magnetic pull exercised by India. It also shows the courage and adventurous readiness to take risks then inherent in the British character. How many parents these days would send a sixteen-year-old daughter on a six-month voyage that might easily end in death by disease or drowning* to a country from which she might never return, even though the golden apple at the end of the journey was that essential commodity, a husband? And how many daughters would consent to go? As did Charlotte and Mary Britten, respectively twenty and sixteen.
In the days of sail, the men who worked for the Company seldom got leave as the only possible route to the subcontinent was via the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage that took several months, sometimes a year. With these travel difficulties, Company employees could expect to return home perhaps only once before retirement, so that finding a British bride was difficult.
To make this quest easier for their employees, from time to time the Company paid the passage out to India of a number of willing women; the first record is of twenty women sent out to Bombay in 1671. Such husbands were desirable as the Company provided an allowance of £300 a year – wealth indeed in those days – for girls who made a Company-approved match and this payment continued for life even if the woman was widowed.
Each shipload of prospective brides was divided into ‘gentlewomen’ and ‘others’; the Company gave them one set of clothing each and maintained them in India for a year, during which time they were expected to have found a mate. They were warned that if they misbehaved they would be put on a diet of bread and water, and shipped back to England. Women who were rejected by even the most desperate Company men also had to return home, and were known as ‘Returned Empties’.
In those early Fishing Fleet days, marriage was often undertaken with the sort of rapidity usually confined to spotting a business opportunity and pouncing on it, a kind of matrimonial bran tub where it was in the interests of both parties to make up their minds quickly – the girls because they did not wish to go home to probable spinsterhood and the men in case someone else seized the prize.
Charlotte Britten and her sister Mary were part of the 1821 Fishing Fleet; among the civilian passengers on the ship they sailed on were several other single young women, all off in search of husbands. The Britten girls were coming to India at the instigation of their brother George, the eldest of the thirteen children of Thomas Britten, a wealthy merchant, and his wife Anna, who lived in Forest Hill, Kent.
George, who had been educated at the Reverend Dr Samuel’s school in Tooting, had successfully petitioned the Honourable Court of Directors of the East India Company to become a cadet in the Bengal Infantry and had left England in 1817. Fortunes could be made by those serving the Company in either a civilian or military capacity – if they survived India’s difficult climate and the diseases that could strike from nowhere, rendering a man who was healthy at breakfast dead by midnight. Those who did survive frequently became very rich; and most of these young men were in need of a wife.
By the nineteenth century, India was seen as a marriage market for girls neither pretty nor rich enough to make at home what was known as ‘a good match’, the aim of all respectable young women – indeed, perhaps not to make one at all. In India, where European men greatly outnumbered European women, they would be besieged by suitors, many of whom would be richer or have more prospects than anyone they could meet in England.
As the century progressed and with it India’s economic importance to Britain, so did the country’s desirability as a marital hunting ground. No longer did the East India Company send out and maintain young women; instead, they charged a premium to those wishing to go out. This ‘bond’ of £200* allowed passage (would-be travellers also had to pay their fare) on an Indiaman, as the Company’s ships were called, and ensured that the young woman would not be a charge on the Company once she arrived. In a sense, the bond became an affidavit of the girl’s social standing and, by extension, behaviour: if her parents could afford its cost, they were likely to be of a class that made their daughter a suitable bride for a high-up Company official.
George’s eight sisters fell into this category. They were well-born and would have been schooled in literature, art and the manners of polite society but certainly not in anything that might have helped them fend for themselves. Their father must have wondered how he was going to marry off so many of them, especially in a brief few years – girls were expected to marry young and, if possible, the elder ones first.
With his son George now firmly established with the Company, Thomas did not have to look far. George had himself married a Fishing Fleet girl, Margaret Goullet, in Calcutta in March 1820. No doubt he had told his parents that if some of his sisters came out they too would easily find husbands. It was decided to send two of them, Charlotte and Mary, respectively the fifth and seventh daughters in the family.
The Britten girls took passage on one of the largest and finest East Indiamen, the 1,506-ton Lowther Castle, a ship that would carry coal, European stores and manufactured goods and mail on the outward journey, returning with silk, cotton, jute, indigo, hardwoods, ivory, spices, jewels and even apes and peacocks.
For Thomas and Anna Britten the parting must have been sad: if the girls were successful in finding a mate, their parents might never see them again; with journeys taking a minimum of four months it would be up to a year before they could even learn whether their daughters had arrived safely – from time to time, ships were lost in storms or fell to pirates. To defend herself against these or other enemies, the Lowther Castle was heavily armed with twenty-six guns.
The Britten girls joined the Lowther Castle as she waited for a favourable wind off the coast of Kent. They set sail on 23 January 1821. Before they left the Channel the pilot, as was customary, brought them the latest newspapers. There was plenty in them to read and gossip over, including the topic du jour, of intense interest to everyone: Queen Caroline’s attempts to reassert her position as Queen in the teeth of the King’s resistance.* In The Times alone, amid the advertisements for domestic posts, Atkinson’s curling fluid and Balm of Gilead (‘for ladies who wish to remove wrinkles’) were polemical letters and loyal addresses on the subject.
The ship, just under 144 feet in length, was crammed. There were thirty-eight civilian passengers in all, and large drafts for three King’s regiments under only two officers, a colonel and a cornet. With them were their ‘authorised dependants’ – the wives and children that some of them were allowed to take with them – plus twenty Chinese sailors from other ships whom the Company was obliged to repatriate from England (after India, the Lowther Castle was going on to China).
The military draft would, as usual, have made the ship pretty crowded forward (the paying passengers would have shared the much more spacious accommodation aft). Mercifully the soldiers seem to have been mostly English – it had been feared they were to be Irish, known as ‘wild lads’, and unwelcome for both the savagery and the disease they brought aboard. One hundred and fifty-four officers and men crewed the ship and, in addition to its human cargo, there was plenty of livestock, the sound of moos, baas, clucks and snorts gradually decreasing as the animals were eaten during the long weeks of the journey.
Two months into the voyage, at a time when there was little wind and the ship crawled over a flat sea, there could have been trouble when a seaman was disobedient and compounded his misconduct by using ‘disrespectful language’ to his captain. This was smartly dealt with by giving the miscreant four dozen lashes with the cat o’ nine tails, after which the cat was not further required. Eight weeks later, in May, there was a happier event: one of the ‘authorised dependants’ gave birth to a baby. Finally, on 25 August 1821, the ship reached Calcutta.
Here, Charlotte and Mary would have been surrounded. The arrival of a cargo of marriageable females was of intense interest to the numerous bachelors on the lookout for a wife and ready to snap one up at the first opportunity. There was, however, an established ritual for this instant selection. The captain of the ship and well-known ladies whose social credentials were beyond reproach would organise large parties at which the girls who hoped for a husband ‘sat up’, as it was called, for three or four nights in succession while the eligible bachelors, young and old, rushed there to look the cargo over and make an approach to the one who took their fancy. The church on Sundays was also a recognised venue for young men to try their luck.
What was left of the Fishing Fleet moved on to the mofussil (outlying districts) to scoop up husbands from the bunch of unmarried officials, soldiers, planters and businessmen who lived far from the great centres and, with less opportunity to find brides, were likely to be less choosy. With such a multitude of wife-seekers, a young woman had to be very plain or over-particular not to acquire a mate.
The demand for wives was so great that a woman who lost her husband had no difficulty in replacing him. There are accounts of widows being proposed to on the steps of the church after the burial of husbands. Marriage was undertaken at such speed, and illnesses were so often fatal that, according to one authority, there were even cases where a wife would affiance herself to a suitor as her husband lay desperately sick.
Stuart Corbett, who secured Charlotte Britten – at twenty-one, two years his senior – was the eldest of thirteen children born to the only son of Lady Augusta and the Reverend Corbett. He had entered the Honourable East India Company’s service at the age of sixteen and although his prospects were good he was naturally a little nervous as to how his family would take the news that he was tying himself for life to a girl older than himself whom he had only known for a few months. ‘My dear Louisa,’ he wrote to his sister at home in the Rectory near Sheffield a month before his wedding:
‘I have now a great piece of news to tell you I don’t [know] wether you will think it good or bad but I am going to be married in the middle of next month. I know you will think me mad but these things will happen, my wedding day is to be on the 13th March 1822 when I shall be married to Miss Charlotte Britten who I am sure you will like as she has a very excellent Temper, and is much superior in every respect to the generallity of the young ladies you meet in this country, and has a great stock of good sence.
‘One of her sisters who came out at the same time she did, is going home again in the same ship with this letter as the Country does not agree with her and she does not like it near as much as being at home.’ Mary, who had celebrated her seventeenth birthday on board the Lowther Castle, decided that she did not like either India or its climate and came back to England as a ‘returned empty’ as quickly as she could (a few years later she too married).
A letter from Stuart to his brother, an officer in the 10th Royal Hussars, stationed at Brighton, spent less time on his proposed nuptials than on the birds his brother wanted him to send. ‘I . . . have to inform you that I intend to be married on the 13th of this month to Miss Charlotte Britten, you may perhaps some day or other fall in with her father who lives at Forest Hill in Kent. I am sorry I cannot send you any parrots or monkeys by this ship, as the Captain says they drink water and will not take charge of them. I can get you five or six different sorts of Parrots some not larger than a Bullfinch quite green except a small red spek on the breast but I am affraid I shall be never able to find any one who will take sufficent care of them on the voyage home.’
Stuart, like many young men of his generation, was to serve forty years without a break, during which period, unusually, he never once had a day’s sick leave. Charlotte, whom he married in 1822, and who never returned to England, predeceased him, dying in India eighteen years later. Stuart finally came home on leave in 1859, returned to India three years later, and was appointed to the Divisional Command of Benares. Two years later he died, in the country where he and so many others had spent most of their lives.