It was before the time of the Suez Canal, and before the time of big liners. The ship that carried me to Alexandria was called one of the finest in the fleet of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. She was a paddle-wheel of twelve hundred tons, named the Indus. It was before the time of competitive companies. The P. and O. managed things their own way; their rates were high, but they treated the passengers like guests in a country house. There was no drinking on board, but at lunch and dinner bottled beer and wine were put on the table, as at a gentleman’s house. After dinner the wine remained on the table for a short time; in the evening whiskey and brandy were put out for half an hour only. A band was on board, which played every afternoon; the passengers danced on deck; the ship ploughed her way slowly through the waters; in the cabins all lights were out at nine—or ten—I forget which. As a junior, I had a bunk in a cabin below the main deck. There were five berths assigned to young fellows going out to India; the place was dark at mid-day, and at night the darkness was Egyptian. The weather, however, was fine, and one was on deck from early morning till nightfall, and one was young, and small discomforts mattered nothing. Besides, were we not seeing the world?
I seem to remember everyday of that voyage; the coast of Portugal; the headlands of Spain; the Rock; Malta, where we all went ashore and saw the town of Valetta, the Cathedral, and the Palace of the Knights.
We landed at Alexandria and went on by train to Cairo, where we stayed, I think, two nights, and saw an eastern city—it was really eastern then.
Then we went on by a shaky railway across the desert to Suez. It was a great joy actually to see the rolling grey sand of the desert. Half way over we stopped at a desert station, where they gave us luncheon. Then we got to Suez, and here we divided. The passengers for Mauritius and Réunion went on board their little boat, and the Bombay people went on board their big boat.
Our boat, in fact, was a little steamer of seven hundred tons, quite unfit for bad weather. Fortunately we had none. But it was in May, and the Red Sea was beginning to assert itself. In the cabins the heat was stifling; and they were infested with flying cockroaches and other creatures of prey. Therefore the whole company slept on deck. The mattresses were lugged up and spread out, and we lay side by side, with faces muffled to keep off the moonshine. It was curious to wake in the night and to see by the light of the moon the sleeping figures, and to watch the waves in the white light, and the jagged outline of the mountains of Arabia. In the evening, when we were near enough to see them, the rocks assumed all colours, purple, blue, crimson, golden. Among them the mountain they call Sinai reared its rugged head, painted by the western glow.
We put in at Aden, and saw the native village and the water-works. Then we coasted round the rockbound Socotra and steered south for the Seychelles. I suppose there are other islands in the world as beautiful as these, but I have seen none that could approach them for the wonderful magic of the hills, which slope down to the water’s edge, covered with trees and clothed in colour. The hot sun of the tropics, that knows no change, and has no season but one, makes a long summer of the year; the sea that washes the feet of the hills is aglow with a warm light that makes it transparent; fathoms below the ship one could see the tangled forest of weed lying still and motionless; above the weed rolled slowly an enormous shark.
I believe the islanders have no energy; no ambitions are left to them after a year or two in the place; they have no desire for wealth; they leave nature to grow a few things for them to send away; they want very little money; they care nothing for the outside world; they lie in the shade, warmed through and through; the air is never scorching and the heat never kills, for there is always a sea breeze, cool and sweet, morning and evening. There is a resident Commissioner, who has nothing to do; there is a magistrate; there are one or two priests. There was an Anglican missionary, but in such a climate no one troubles to think about religion, no one wants a change; life comes unasked, it lasts awhile, it goes away. Where does it go? Nobody asks; nobody cares. On the verandah one sits with feet up and looks out into the forest beyond the bananas and the palms. Life is. What more does one want? Why should one inquire?
From Seychelles, a run of some 1,500 miles brings us to Mauritius. It is forty years since I landed at Port Louis. I believe there have been great changes. In 1867 a malarious fever declared itself, which has been endemic ever since. Port Louis was a gay and a sociable place in 1861. The wealthy quarter contained large and handsome houses, with gardens and deep verandahs. There was an open “Place,” where the band played in the afternoon, while the carriages went round and round. There was a great deal of dinner giving; there were dances in the cool season; there was an Opera House, maintained by subscription; there were two regiments in the place, besides artillery and engineers. What was more important to me was that I arrived at a time when everybody was young. In such a colony the merchants and planters in the good old times got rich and went home, leaving their affairs in the hands of younger men. It so happened that the houses of business were at this time nearly all in the hands of the younger men, consequently they were lively. Moreover, a railway was about to be constructed, and we received a large addition to the Englishmen by the arrival of the engineers who were to construct it.
In this place, then, I lived for six years and a half. There was a good deal of monotony, but the general tone was one of great cheerfulness. After a while I found the air of Port Louis, which is surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills from 1,200 to 2,500 feet high, confined and relaxing. I therefore joined a mess of bachelors and lived for a time three or four miles out. We had a series of changes, for the men in the mess came and went. They were railway engineers; they were Civil servants; they were managers and accountants of the banks; they were partners in mercantile houses. Finally, and for the last two years, I settled in a charming little bungalow ten miles from town, with a garden growing most of the English and all the tropical vegetables, a mountain stream at the back, and a pool for bathing, and within reach of the central forests.
As regards the college, I would say as little as possible, because it was a time of continual fight between the rector and the professors. The former is now dead, but probably there are living those who would be hurt by certain reminiscences. Suffice it to say, therefore, that he was a very clever and able man in the wrong place. He had been in the Austrian army, and retained a good deal of the Austrian ideas as to duty and discipline, which did not suit either an English public school, such as the Government, which kept up the college at a heavy loss, desired, or a French lycée, which it was, to all intents and purposes. He spoke French and English fluently, but both with a strong German accent, which made him look ridiculous; he was not a scholar in any sense of the word; he knew nothing that I could ever discover—certainly neither Latin, nor Greek, nor mathematics, nor history. His only notions of teaching were those of an army crammer; as for subjects to be taught, or text-books to be used, he knew absolutely nothing. His fitness for the post is illustrated by the fact that he wanted English history to be studied by young men of nineteen or twenty out of a miserable little book compiled for candidates for German cavalry and infantry! I do not know who was responsible for sending the poor man to the place; but imagine the wisdom of the Colonial Office, and its profound knowledge of the Colonies, when it selected for a post of so much importance an Austrian for a colony almost entirely French, a man who had thrown over his religion for a Roman Catholic community, and an ex-lieutenant of the Austrian army in the very year when the French were driving the Austrians out of Italy! At the same time he was distinctly a clever man, full of vast projects, not one of which could he carry out; and incapable of treating his staff save as a sergeant treats the private soldier.
When I landed, there were exactly eleven paying students in the college; the rector had detached all the rest. I found the papers screaming against him everyday, I found the whole of the French population in open hostility, and I found the staff of the college in a spirit of sullen obstruction. We got along, however, somehow. More men came out from England, and, despite the chief, we managed to put things in some order. The pupils began to come back again; scholarships of £200 a year, tenable for four years in England, attracted them, and perhaps the new staff was more approved than the old. But the rector continued to quarrel with everybody. For a long time I succeeded in getting things carried on with some semblance of English order; but amicable relations were gradually dropped, for he was always intensely jealous of my authority and my popularity. Yet he could not manage without me, though he suspected, quite without any foundation, that I was the instigator of many of the attacks upon him. At last he ventured to attack me openly. It was the final act, and it was suicidal. For I took the very strong step of addressing a letter to the Governor, in which I accused my chief of a great many things which there is no need to repeat. It meant, of course, that these things had to be proved, or that I should be turned out of the service.
The Governor appointed a commission, and the rector was suspended during its sitting. It lasted nearly a year; at the end of that time two of the three commissioners reported that the charges wanted clearer proof, and the third commissioner refused to sign this report. The rector returned, but his rule was really over. I, who had been acting in command during the sitting of the commission, now claimed a year’s furlough, and got it. Observe that there was no question of charging me with insubordination for attacking my chief; the facts were too obviously proved, as everybody could read for himself. I came home for a year’s leave. Six months later the Legislative Council flatly refused supplies so long as the rector remained at the college. He was therefore sent home, and had influence enough to get a pension. They offered the rectorship to me; but I had had enough of educational work, and I declined it. At the end of my furlough, I stepped out into the world, without a pension, to begin all over again.
So much of my official life. The continual struggle worried me all the time, but perhaps it kept me alive. The rector had at least the power of making his enemies “sit up.” In a tropical country it must be confessed that it is a great thing to be kept on the alert.
The staff of the college was a mixed lot; it consisted nominally of four or five “professors” and a dozen “junior masters.” Among the former was my friend Frederick Guthrie, late Professor of Physics in the Royal School of Mines and founder of the Physical Society of London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a man of infinite good qualities. He was my most intimate friend from our first meeting in 1861 to his death in 1887. It is difficult to speak of him in terms adequate. He was a humourist in an odd, indescribable way; he did strange things gravely; he was a delightful donkey in money matters; when he drew his salary—£50 a month—he prepaid his mess expenses, and then stuffed the rest into his pocket and gave it to whoever asked for it, or they took it. Hence he was popular with the broken down Englishmen of shady antecedents who hung about Port Louis. He never had any money; never saved any; always muddled it away. Like many such men, he was not satisfied with his scientific reputation; he wanted to be a poet. He published two volumes of poetry, both with the same result. He was also clever as a modeller, but he neglected this gift. He did some good work in the colony in connection with the chemistry of the sugar-cane; he maintained a steady attitude of resistance to the rector, who could do nothing with him; and he resigned his post and came away from Mauritius at the same time as myself.
Another professor was a learned Frenchman named Léon Doyen. He had amassed an immense pile of notes for a history of the colony, but he died, and I know not what became of them. He lent me once a MS. book full of notes, taken by himself as a student in Paris, of the lectures of Ampère on the formation and history of the French language. I copied all these notes, and used them for reading old French, in which language he lent me all the books he had. Some years later a book was published in England which contained these notes almost verbatim. I have often wondered whether Doyen’s MS. book furnished the material.
The masters were a wonderful scratch lot. There were two or three mulattos; one or two Frenchmen down on their luck; and the rest were broken Englishmen. One man had been a digger in Victoria; two had been in the army; another, it was discovered, had “served time” at Cape Town—him the Colonial Secretary put on board a sugar ship and sent back to his native country. I have often wondered who this man was, and what was his history; he had good manners—too good to be genuine; he was a fine and audacious liar; he had a good name. Fifteen years later I saw his death in the paper; he was then living in chambers in Pall Mall East.
The secretary of the college was a French Creole. His grandfather, who was still living in 1862 or 1863, an old man nearly ninety, was the Marquis de la Roche du Rouzit, and had formerly been page to Marie Antoinette. I once found him out, and talked with him, but he was too old—his memory was gone. He lived in a cottage, beside a most lovely bay among hills and woods; his principal occupation was angling for ecrevisses in the stream, and fishing in the bay from a dug-out. Yes—he remembered Antoinette. What was she like to look at? She was the Queen; they cut off her head; it was an infamy. Very little historical information was to be obtained from the old man; but he was very venerable of aspect, and looked, what he had always been, a gentleman of the old school.
There was another ancient person in the colony. He was the serving brother of the Masonic Lodges—the outer guard. At our dinners after lodge I used to get the old man to sit beside me and to talk. He had been in the roar of La Vendée; drummer-boy to La Roche Jaquelin. He grew animated when he talked of the battles and his escapes, and his precious drum. His daughters lived in the Seychelles, and made lovely fans from a certain palm leaf, I think. I have one still; that is, my daughter has it. I suppose that the good old drummer—“Aha! M’sieu—j’étais le tambour, de La Roche Jaquelin—Oui—oui, M’sieu’, moi qui vous le dis—le tambour”—is dead long ago.
It was a strange, confused, picturesque kind of life that one led there. The younger partners of the mercantile houses lived over their offices; one or two of the bank officials lived in the banks; the officers were in the barracks, always ready to come out and dine with the civilians; the Anglican bishop formed a centre of quiet life which was, to tell the truth, useful as an example; some of the Roman Catholic priests were very good fellows. Of course we made the great mistake of not seeing more of the French creoles, many of whom were highly cultivated and pleasant people; but they did not like the English rule, and they made no secret of their dislike. Nous sommes un pays conquis was the echo of their paper about once a week. And there were the planters.
There was one mercantile house where I was a frequent visitor. Two of the partners, both quite young men, ran a mess over their offices; there I met many of the skippers of the ships which brought out cargo to this firm. Sea-captains are an honest, frank and confiding folk. They have no suspicion or jealousies of their brother man, they have no private axe to grind, and they have a good many things to talk about. It was pleasant to call upon one on board his own ship and have him all to oneself in his cabin. One of them was a poet, he read me yards of his own poetry; another confided to me the miseries he endured at being separated from his wife; another told me yarns of things that he had witnessed—things tacenda. One, I remember, commanded a fine four-masted clipper which put in for repairs. She was bound for Trinidad with a cargo of Chinese coolies. The quarter deck was defended by four small cannonades loaded with grape; the captain’s cabin had a fine stand of arms; every sailor carried a weapon of some kind; every officer had a revolver and could use it—and, mind, it takes a great deal of practice to use a revolver. They admitted up the hatchways about twenty coolies at a time and only for a few minutes; then they were driven below and another twenty came up; and so on all day. The captain told me that the coolies had knives; that there were women among them, for whom they fought; that the women were sick of it, and had mostly got through the port-holes and so drowned themselves; and that he was most anxious to get his repairs done and be off again, because every night some of the coolies got out and tried to swim ashore—which, he said, was a dead loss to everybody, including themselves, because the sharks got them all. In the little saloon of this ship was sitting a young Chinese lady, apparently all alone, but I suppose she had someone to look after her; she was beautifully dressed in thick silk, gleaming with gold thread.
Another man told me how, being then a mate, cholera broke out on board a ship bringing coolies from Calicut to Mauritius. All the patients either died or got well except one man. Now, if no one was down with cholera, the captain and the Indian apothecary, who served for doctor, could pretend that there was no sickness, and so get a clean bill of health. But if there was a single case on board, or anything to show that there had been an outbreak of cholera, they would have to go to Quarantine Island and there stay for six weeks after the last case. So, to make everything snug, they chucked the last patient overboard. After all, they did not get a clean bill, because the skipper and the apothecary quarrelled, and the latter split. Such were the tales they told.
Among my friends were two planters, whose hospitality to me was unbounded. The first was a gentleman—I use the word in its old and narrow sense—an Oxford man, a man of the finest manners, full of dignity and courtesy, a patriarch in his house. He used to invite me every year to spend Christmas with the party he got together. This party consisted of himself and madame, his three daughters, and his two sons. The bachelors all slept in a pavilion apart from the main house, where we had mattresses laid on the floor. Early in the morning, about half-past five, we were awakened, and after a cup of tea had a ramble in the woods and a bathe in the ravine. After breakfast, in the heat of the day, protected by big pith helmets, we went fishing in the stream. We fished for a large and very toothsome river fish called the gourami, and gourami à la béchamel is one of the finest preparations of fish that can be set before the most accomplished and finished gourmet. And the way of fishing was this. The river ran over and under boulders, at intervals opening into a small deep pool. We had a net and we all went into the water, swimming and pushing the net before us. When we got to the end of the pool one man dived down and pulled the fish out of the meshes of the net. We got back in the afternoon, and some of us slept off the fatigues and the heat of the morning. When the sun got low we walked about the lawns and among the flowers. At seven or so we sat down to dinner, and at ten we were all in bed.
The other planter was a Scotchman. I am ashamed when I think of the way I abused his hospitality; but it was his own fault, he always made me welcome and more than welcome. His estate—he belonged to the Clan Macpherson, and therefore the estate was called Cluny—lay on the other side of the island, not the Port Louis side. It was high up—about 1,600 feet above the sea level; it was always cool at night, and was carved out of the silent forest which lay all round it and shut it in. The place was most secluded and retired. The house was large and rambling, all on one floor, with half-a-dozen bedrooms, a dining-room, a salon, and a broad verandah. In the garden there were peach-trees—but the peaches would never ripen, strawberries—kept in the shade, green peas, celery, bananas, guavas—in short, all kinds of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. There was also a swimming-bath. In the morning I went out with the planter or his nephew, Mackintosh, on his daily visit to the fields. If we passed beyond the estate into the forest we came upon ravines, waterfalls, hanging woods, chattering monkeys, and deer in herds. The deer knew very well when it was close time; they would let you get near enough to see them clearly, then with a sudden alarm they would bound away, the graceful creatures. Two or three times I went shooting the deer; I am really grateful that I never got a shot at one, although I should certainly never have hit one had he been only a dozen yards away, because in all kinds of sport I have always been the worst of duffers. How can one be a good shot with eyes which are not only short-sighted but also slow-sighted?
There was a range of hills, on one side of which part of the estate lay. Macpherson planted the hill-side with coffee; but then came the heavy rains and washed his plants away, and there was an end of coffee planting on the island. Macpherson was too enterprising, however, and there were too many hurricanes, so he had to give up his estate. Mackintosh, his nephew, was put into another estate by one of the banks, and did well for a time; then his luck failed him, and he, too, had to resign. He was an asthmatic, and died at the age of five-and-thirty or so.
The most remarkable of the men I met in the island was my old friend James Longridge. He was the constructor of the railway; a Cambridge man, formerly articled to George Stephenson, a good mathematician, and a man full of inventions. His principal invention was the wire gun. A model of this gun he had mounted beside a quiet bay, where no one ever went, and he would make up small parties to experiment with it, firing across the bay. He offered the gun to the English Government; they kept him hanging on and off for some twenty years; at last, when he was past seventy years of age, they accepted it and gave him, in mockery, a pension of £200 a year—a pension at the age of seventy in return for a new gun, light, easily handled, and capable of any amount of development! I do not think that they have even called it the Longridge gun.
I have mentioned Quarantine Island. This was an island about thirty miles from Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. It was provided with a lighthouse, and a medical man was always stationed there. If a ship put in with fever or cholera on board, she had to go to Quarantine Island, land her passengers, and wait there for the disease to work itself out. On one occasion a coolie ship was taken there with a frightful outbreak of cholera on board. Then one of the English doctors in Mauritius did a fine thing, for he volunteered to go and help the quarantine officer. Some hundreds died during this outbreak, but a great many were saved by the self-devotion of this man.
I knew the quarantine officer, who had been an army doctor. He once asked me to spend a fortnight with him. I accepted, taking the risk of a cholera ship being brought there, in which case I should have had to stay there and see it out. None came, however. It was a most curious experience. The island is about a mile and a half in circumference, surrounded by a kind of natural sea wall; a coral bank runs out all round except in two places. The doctor had a very good house all to himself. There were two men in charge of the lighthouse, there were a few Indian servants, and no one else was on the island except the ghosts of the dead who lie all over it. At sunset the Indians hastened to take refuge in their cottages; if they looked out after dark they saw white things moving about; there was no kind of doubt in their minds that they actually did see white things. I myself looked for them but saw nothing. How my friend could exist in such a solitude, with the unseen presence of the white things, was most amazing; it was, however, a great joy to him if he could catch a visitor. It was a very quiet fortnight. One day was exactly like another. We got up at six, before sunrise; we walked round the island twice, on the sea wall; we then bathed, but leisurely; bathing was only possible in very shallow water on account of “things.” There was an astonishing quantity of “things” directly the water got a bit deeper. One had to keep on shoes on account of the laff, a small fish which lurks about the rocks with a poisonous backbone, which he sticks into the bather’s foot and lames him for six months. There was also the tazar, a kind of sea-pike, which delights in biting a large piece out of a man’s leg if he can get at him; there are young sharks; there are also the great sea slugs—the bêche de mer, which are not nice to step upon.
In one place, where the coral reef stopped, there was a curious pillar of rock about forty feet above the water and twenty or thirty feet in diameter. It stood a few yards from the shore, and was covered with innumerable wild birds. My friend would never shoot them; we would sit down by the shore and watch this multitude flying, screaming, fishing, fighting all day long. I know nothing about birds and have not the least idea of the names of these specimens; but of their numbers I have a lively recollection. In the transparent water between the shore and the rock there were water-snakes. I have never seen anything more beautiful than the motions of these creatures, darting about in all directions; they were of many colours and mostly, as it seems to my memory, about three feet long.
After getting through our exercise and our bathing we went through a form of dressing without putting on too much, and were ready for breakfast. There was always fish caught that morning, always curried chicken with claret, always coffee afterwards. Those days—alas! How good it was to be six-and-twenty! and what a perpetual feast was always present at breakfast and dinner!
Then came the cigar—it was before the days of the cigarette. Then a little game of écarté for six-pences; then a little reading; then in the heat of the day a siesta; at five o’clock we had tea; then, the heat of the day over, we once more marched round this island, looked at the birds and the snakes, bathed on the coral reef and at sunset sat down to dinner, which was just like breakfast—but perhaps more so. After dinner my host would touch the guitar, which he did very pleasantly; there would be another game of écarté, a little more tobacco, a brandy and soda, and so to the friendly shelter of the mosquito curtains. The lonely life among the dead men and their ghosts; the sea outside—a sea without a boat or a ship or a sail ever within sight, a sea filled with creatures; the silence broken only by the screaming of the sea-birds and the lapping of the waves, made up a strange experience, one to be remembered.
To return to the college staff; there was on it a man of curious antecedents and somewhat singular personality. To begin with, he never concerned himself in the least about money. He was a Scot of Aberdeen University; a scholar in his own way, which was not the way of Cambridge; a man of large reading in one Book. He was at this time—the sixties—about forty years of age. He never told me of his beginnings, which were, however, as I gathered from his knowledge of the shifts by which the poorer undergraduates of Aberdeen contrived to live, of a humble character. His first important post was that of missionary for some Scotch society to Constantinople, or Asia Minor—somewhere among the Turks. This post he held for a few years, during which he travelled about among the islands and had a very good time. He made no converts, but he argued from the Book with any who would listen to him, either among Greeks or Mohammedans. Then two things happened unto him: first, his conscience smote him, for drawing pay and writing reports about promising cases, days of enlargement, and signs of encouragement; second, he found that he no longer believed in the letter of his creed or in the letter of the Book. Therefore he resigned his post and set forth on his travels about the world armed with his Book and nothing else. A Scotchman finds friends in every colony. This man had no fear; he cast himself upon a place, stayed there till he was tired, and then went on somewhere else. He always had the Book in his hand; he was principally engaged, as he himself said, “among the minor prophets.” I wish I could remember all the things he told me, but I know that according to his own account he was always making discoveries to the prejudice of Verbal Inspiration. “Obsairve” he said to me once, “Micah”—or was it Habakkuk?—“begins by saying ‘The Lord spoke to me saying’ … Now look here; later on he says, ‘And then I knew that it was the Lord who spake to me.’ So that the first words were only a formula.” He grew tired of the place and shifted on. When I last heard of him he was running a school in some town near Melbourne. If he is still living, he must be eighty years of age. Heaven knows what discoveries he has made among the minor prophets.
Another member of the staff was a tall, thin German. He wore spectacles, he was horribly shy and nervous, spoke to no one, and lived all by himself in a little pavilion which was bedroom and keeping-room in one, for an Indian cook and all his goods. It was no use making overtures to him, for there was no response. He died of fever in 1867, and then I learned his history. He too had been a missionary; his field had been India; and like the Scotchman, he had found it impossible to pretend that he believed his creed; he too had given it up. He was in English holy orders, and his great dread was that the bishop would find him out and learn his history.
I wonder how many such missionaries there are. Once in Berlin I met a man of great learning and intelligence who gave me a similar experience. He had been in China for an American missionary society of the strictest creed. He was sent into the interior, where he mastered Chinese literature and grew to understand—as I think—the Chinese character. He told strange tales of tribes and peoples—China is a country of which we know nothing. Among others he found a tribe of Jews who had preserved nothing, not even the sacred books of their religion, except one kosher rite with reference to food. He made no converts, and by his narrow creed all these millions were doomed to everlasting torments. Heavens! what a creed! Everlasting torment for these ignorant folk, these women, these children! Are we monsters of cruelty that we should believe such things? Living by himself among them he gradually cast away the dreadful horrors of his sect and ceased to believe in the creed which he was paid to preach. So he too came out of it.
For a young man nowadays to reach the age of five-and-twenty or so, and to pass through the university, without coming across that common variety of man, the agnostic, would be impossible. Agnostics were much rarer forty or more years ago, but I made the acquaintance of two or three. One of them was an agnostic pure and simple, who thought it was his duty to learn such of the secrets of Nature as he could, and not to trouble himself about speculations as to the secrets of life, either before the cradle or after the grave—this was my friend Guthrie. Another was a more aggressive infidel, D. H——, a Prussian, a tall, handsome young man, then about thirty years of age. He had been in the Russian Army Medical Service, and was in Sebastopol during the siege. I wish I had written down all the things he told me about that siege, and the infernal rain of shells that fell upon the place night and day, with the hospitals crammed, not only with the wounded, but with men by hundreds stricken with cholera. However, when one is young one listens and forgets to take note of things. He was, as I have said, an aggressive infidel. Guthrie only said that it was not his business to inquire into things called spiritual, and he went so far as to deny the power of the Padre to learn more about these things than anyone else. D. H—— went much farther; he denied the whole of religion, the miraculous history, the inspiration, the doctrine, everything. He denied without bitterness, without contempt, without pity, without hatred; he simply denied and went his own way. He was as scientific a physician as one would find in the sixties. About the year 1866 he went away, and I learned presently that he had gone to Buenos Ayres, and that he had died of yellow fever, working in the hospitals there.
There was yet another kindly unbeliever of my acquaintance; he was a medical man and a botanist, and in both capacities he had accompanied a certain High Church mission to Central Africa, being one of the few survivors of an unlucky enterprise. He brought away with him a fever which never left him, and caused insomnia; he would sometimes lie sleepless for a week together, suffering prolonged tortures. In the intervals he sat up and poured out stories about his friends the missionaries; he loved them, and he laughed at them. He went with Bishop Ryan to Madagascar, and brought back more stories, which I hope the good bishop never heard. He was sent on a mission to look into the sugar-cane culture in various places, and died at Rangoon. I have never met his equal for humour; he bubbled over with humour; everything had its humorous side, and in his speech, or in his heart, there was never the slightest bitterness, or gall, or envy, or malice.
Religion sat very lightly upon the good folks of the colony. The French and the mulattos went to church—they had a cathedral, and a good many churches. The English had their cathedral, but they made very little use of it; they had also two or three little churches in the country, but they were not much frequented. The Scotch, for their part, waking one day to the understanding that they had no church, built one, and imported a clergyman. On the first day of service they all attended, on the following Sunday there was no one; and there has never been anyone since, except a few skippers and people of the port. There were also half-a-dozen missionaries. One of them founded a home for leprous children. Another rode about on a pony among the plantations, and said a word in season before dinner in the camps of the coolies—it was pleasant to read his report of “journeyings,” and encouraging cases, and inquiries. The good man was not in the least a humbug; he only continued a perfunctory task, calling himself the sower of seed, long after the early enthusiasm of the outset had been chilled and destroyed. Another missionary of whom I have the liveliest recollection did gather round him a school of children, and a whole village, chiefly of negroes. He was a Swiss by birth, a cheery, hearty old man, very deaf, who talked in the simplest fashion to his flock. “Mes enfans,” he would say, “qu’y en a qui fit créé le monde? Le Père Éternel—Qu’y en a qui fit sauvé le monde? Son fils, mes enfans—son fils. Et comment ce qui fait? C’est moi qui va vous le dire,” and so on, in creole patois, while the shiny-faced blacks sat round him with open mouths. They never grew tired of hearing the old story, nor he of telling it. He made the Roman Catholics extremely jealous of his influence, especially over the children. Once one of their priests tried to draw the children away from his school. The pastor—he was a veritable pastor—sent him word that he would make a big gunny-bag and put him in it if he interfered. The Roman Catholic bishop, therefore, went to the Governor and laid a formal complaint and protest. “Did he really,” asked the Governor, “threaten to put Father X—— in a gunny-bag?” “He did, indeed.” “Then, my Lord Bishop,” said the Governor, “I assure you that he is a man of his word; and he’ll do it; he will indeed.” Once I met him on the road, and inquired after his wife, who had been ill. I have said he was very deaf. He nodded his head several times, and shook me warmly by the hand. “My dear sir,” he said, “I am always glad of a little conversation with you. That is precisely the view concerning Moses and geology which I have always taken.”
I must get on with my gallery of colonials. Among them were the late Sir Edward Newton, afterwards Colonial Secretary of Jamaica; Sir William Marsh, Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, Auditor-General of Cyprus, and Acting Governor of Hong Kong; Sir John Douglas, afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of Ceylon. The Governors in my time were Sir William Stevenson, who died there, and Sir Henry Barkly, who lived to a great age and died only the other day. Dr. Ryan was the Anglican Bishop, a good scholar, a man of many gifts, but somewhat narrow in his views. The Chief Justice was a Scotchman named Shand; I believe that he was a good lawyer and a good judge. He was a cousin of one of the Scottish judges—Lord Shand. The Puisne judges were for the most part, if I remember aright, creoles of the island. The master of the Supreme Court was a man who had the reputation of a good lawyer, and was also a gourmet. It was a great thing to dine with him, because he used to stay at home all day in anxious consultation with the cook; it was informing to sit next to him at a public dinner, because he would discourse learnedly on the great art and science of dining. He once told me a little story about his own skill. “I was with a fishing party,” he said, “in Scotland, being then a young man. I met with a slight accident and sprained my ankle. ‘Go without me,’ I told my friends. ‘This evening you shall have a surprise.’ ” He stopped with a sigh. “Twenty years after,” he continued, “I was in Westminster Hall when a man accosted me. ‘Mr.——,’ he said. ‘That, sir,’ I told him, ‘is my name, but for the moment I do not recollect yours.’ ‘Never mind the name,’ he said. ‘Eh! man! That surprise! That saumon soup!’ ”
We had among us a great light in meteorology—the place was a most important meteorological station—named Charles Meldrum; he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, to his infinite gratification. There was a merchant, also, whom I remember. He was already an old man in the sixties. His distinctive point was that he was a friend of Carlyle, and I heard the other day that he was dead at a very great age, having gone to Ecclefechan to spend his last days. There was a charming and delightful bank manager named Anderson, who in London as a young man had been one of an interesting circle of Bohemians—the later Bohemians. The circle is described in a novel or a series of chapters, called Friends of Bohemia, by one of them, Edward M. Whitty. Anderson was a man of great culture; an early worshipper of Browning, Holman Hunt, and Burne Jones. He himself once produced a small volume of Browning-esque verse, but somehow did not like to be reminded of it. He came home and was made a Director of the Oriental Bank. He was also a member of the Savile Club, where I met him later.
One more figure, this time one better known to fame. Among the younger merchants was a man named Dykes Campbell. He was one of those who have literary proclivities without any particular gifts of imagination or expression. Most men of this kind try the impossible and produce bad verse and bad fiction. Campbell did nothing of the kind; he kept up his reading, he went on with his work, and at the age of forty or so he found he could retire with a competence. Then he came to England and devoted himself for ten years to the investigation of everything relating to Coleridge; and he ended by producing the best life of Coleridge that we have, and the best, I suppose, that we shall ever have. So this simple colonial merchant has made an enduring mark in the literature of the century. It is really a remarkable story. Campbell did nothing else worth mentioning. He wrote a little towards the end of his life for the Athenæum, but he formed no other project of serious work, and he died at the age of fifty-five.
On the intellectual side of the colony one need not linger long; nor need we press the matter too hardly. For without stimulus, without papers and journals, without new books, and without learned bodies, how can there be any intellectual life? The newspapers of the colony were contemptible; there was a so-called “Royal Society,” which had a museum and a curator, but there was no life in it; there was a Meteorological Society, which had a committee, and a secretary, Meldrum, but the secretary alone did all the work, which was, as I have said, of great importance. There were no lectures, partly because no one would go out in the evening except to dinner, while no one would go to a lecture before dinner, and partly because everybody knew everybody else, and could get any information that he might want without the trouble of going to a lecture. A few private persons had small collections of books, but there was not much reading. There was a circulating library, which was very poorly supported; there was a subscription library, which fell to pieces, and what became of the books I could never learn. The college had a library containing a very fine collection of historical works.
For my own part, as a full quarter of the year was vacation, I naturally fell back upon work. In fact I did a great deal of work of a desultory kind. I filled up many important gaps. The most important part of my reading was in French. My friend Léon Doyen introduced me to the study of old French, and gave me the key; he also lent me certain books of old French. Then I found a man who had a complete edition of Balzac, and another who had a complete edition of Georges Sand. I worked through all these books. And I found another man with a collection of old numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes. I do not think that any English magazine contains so many articles of enduring interest as this review. And I was writing all the time. I wrote essays for the most part, which have long since been torn up. In truth I was not in the least precocious, and I spent these years in getting control over my pen, which at first ran along of its own accord, discursive, rambling, and losing its original purpose. No one would believe the trouble I had in making the pen a servant instead of a master; in other words, in forcing the brain to concentration. I had by this time quite abandoned higher mathematics, which from this point of view was a loss, because there is nothing that fixes and concentrates the attention more than mathematics. I found, however, that the writing of verse was useful in the same direction, and I wrote a good deal of verse, none of which have I ever ventured to publish.
I also wrote a novel. It was a long novel, intended for the then orthodox three volumes. I wrote it with great enjoyment, and I persuaded myself that it was good. Finally I sent it to England and had it submitted to a publisher. His verdict was in plain language—“Won’t do; but has promise.” When I got home I received back the MS., and I agreed with the verdict; it was a happy thing for me that the MS. was not published. The papers lay in my chambers for a long time afterwards in a corner covered with dust. They got upon my nerves. I used to see a goblin sitting on the pile; an amorphous goblin, with tearful eyes, big head, shapeless body, long arms and short legs. He would wag his head mournfully. “Don’t make another like me,” he said. “Not like me. I couldn’t bear to meet another like me.” At last I plucked up courage and burned the whole pile. Then my goblin vanished and I saw him no more. I expected him sometime after, if only to thank me for not making another like him. But he came not, and I have often wondered whither that goblin went for rest and consolation.
It was, I think, in 1864 that I became aware of an increased tendency to a form of melancholia which made me uneasy at first. Gradually the symptom became a burden to me. I suppose it was caused partly by over-work; partly by worry on account of my exasperating chief; and partly by the monotony of a climate which was sometimes much too hot, and sometimes a little too wet, but never cold. Some men are so constituted that they enjoy this eternal summer; some cannot stand it. I was one of the latter class. As the thing grew worse, I took advice of my German friend. He advised an immediate change of scenery, if not of climate. Accordingly I took the first opportunity of a vacation to visit the Island of Réunion, formerly called Bourbon. I recorded my impressions of the place in Once a Week (see Once a Week, Oct. 16th and Oct. 23rd, 1869), a circumstance to which I shall refer again.
My residence in Mauritius of six years was full of experiences. In 1862 we had an attack of cholera, not, happily, very severe nor of long duration. It carried off, however a good many whites. It was the second attack that had visited the island, that of 1854, its predecessor, being far more virulent and lasting much longer. There was a hurricane one year, which wasted the whole island and destroyed an immense quantity of canes—but how sweet and pure was the air of the place after it! On another occasion a waterspout burst in the hills round the town, and floods of water five or six feet deep rushed through the streets, tearing up the cottages of wattle-and-daub, washing the town, and drowning more people than were ever counted.
The last experience was that of a city in a plague. In 1866–67 broke out for the first time the Mauritius fever. Up to that time the place was considered as healthy as any island or country in the temperate zone. There were no endemic disorders, and everybody lived to a green old age. Now my friend D. H——, when he went away in 1865, gave utterance to a medical prophecy. He said, “You have 250,000 coolies on this little island, without counting negroes, Malagasy men, Malays, and Chinese. None of them will obey any sanitary rules; the soil of the town, and even that of the cane-fields, is saturated. Sooner or later, there will be a great outbreak of fever or plague.”
This prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. The fever appeared; it ran through the Indian camps and the negro villages with frightful rapidity; it attacked white as well as coloured people in certain districts, especially low-lying or swampy places. It was not sporadic; it caught whole families and carried them off. For instance, the railway people wanted a party of coolies to be taken from one place to another. The sirdar who was entrusted with the business brought them, with their wives and children, to the town and lodged them in an old room formerly used for slaves. This done, he was taken with the fever and died. Then all the coolies were taken with it; no one knew they were in Port Louis, no doctor went near them, and they all died where they lay. All the quinine in the place was exhausted; that which had been ordered from Europe was by mistake sent out round the Cape instead of by the overland route; what there was sold for £30, and more, an ounce.
The number of deaths rose to three hundred a day for the whole island; in Port Louis alone to one hundred and more; the shops were closed; the streets were silent; the funerals went on all day long in the Roman Catholic churches, and in their cemetery the priests stood over open fosses communes, saying the last prayers for the dead without intermission as the coffins were brought in and laid side by side.
My residence was then about ten miles from town, on a plateau 1200 feet above the level of the sea. We had some fever, but not much; our servants’ camp contained a few patients, and we doctored them ourselves with good results. It was a strange experience. There were dreadful stories of suffering. The Chinese who had escaped the cholera were laid low with the fever, and of the mulattos no one knew who had died or how many. When the canes were cut, dead bodies were found among them of poor wretches who had crept in to die at peace under these waving plumes of grey. When all was over it was found that the savings bank had $30,000 lying in its hands which were never claimed; the investors with all their families had been wiped out. The worst was just over when I went away in June 1867. But fever still lingered, and is now endemic as one of the conditions of life in the colony as much as it is in Sierra Leone and on the West Coast of Africa.a
a A Fever Inquiry Commission was appointed by Sir Henry Barkly in 1867, and a sub-committee reported to this commission in 1868 upon the epidemic. The sub-committee decided that the epidemic was one of malarious fever, showing itself under various forms, and pointed out that on December 31st, 1866, when the epidemic was approaching, the number of immigrants from India alone had reached the enormous figure of 246,049. The report confirms Sir Walter Besant’s recollections. Estimating the population of Port Louis at 80,000 in 1867, it shows that the death-rate during the year amounted to 274 per thousand. The greatest mortality in one day, April 27th, was 234. It was established that many hundreds of lives were lost during the epidemic through the want of cleanliness and overcrowding in the Indian and creole camps.