As the story opens out, little by little a seemingly solid picture arises, in which elements that have no clear immediate purpose bend and unfold until, when the covers are finally laid flat, a man in uniform stands at the steps to a Governor’s palace. One hand is drawn across his chest in a gesture of fidelity to God and in the other a revolver dangles. Many intricate pleats and folds of coloured paper have brought him to life. By the strange compulsion we have to know about these things, the moment that is illustrated is also the moment of his death.
Nothing can make the little cardboard figure turn away, any more than the rush of all those turbanned men can be halted. The death of General Gordon had, for Victorians, all the elements of terror and pity evoked for us in a later age by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Among Gordon’s contemporaries, for months, then years, the flux of history seemed, as it were, to shudder in its course. And then, inevitably, the story dwindled, along with the vanities that brought it into being. The two Baker brothers and Charles Gordon, who they were to each other and what constituted their life achievements, the joy they had of the world and its sorrows, fell like stones into the waters of the Nile.
I should like to thank Yvonne and Anthony Hands for many hours of genial encouragement in the writing of this book; John Crouch and Thomas Howard for some helpful pieces of research; an exemplary literary agent, David Miller, and not least Arabella Pike, an editor whose zestful enthusiasm for a good human interest story never sleeps. Finally, the work is dedicated, not without an element of apprehension, to a writer I have greatly admired for more than thirty years, whose good opinion is always worth having.
In 1815 a specially severe hurricane hit the island of Jamaica, tearing hundreds of houses and shanties from their foundations and dumping them in the sea. Over a thousand people were drowned or simply disappeared from the face of the earth. When the news was carried back to England, the only anxiety raised was what consequences there might be for the sugar plantations, for the Bristol and Liverpool merchants who controlled the trade realised at once that the victims of the hurricane were for the most part black. Jamaica was a slave island – the most ruthless and successful of them all – and the death of so many people was counted simply as additional loss of property. There was a verb much used whenever disaster of this magnitude occurred among the black population: the agents of the great plantations talked calmly about the need to ‘restock’.
To be British in Jamaica at that time was to live at the edge of things, almost but not quite beyond the reach of Europe’s civilising virtues. Whatever law that was enacted at Westminster touching the island’s affairs arrived in the Caribbean like ship’s biscuit, in a weevilly condition. For example, when it was seen that Parliament intended, after unrelenting effort by William Wilberforce and his parliamentary supporters, to bring about the abolition of slavery, one response of the planters was to encourage their women slaves to marry and end the common practice of abortion. They were looking ahead. If they could not at some time in the future import slaves, they would need to factory farm them on site.
After the Act of 1807 it was a crime for a Briton to buy a slave or transport one on a ship bearing the British flag. Nothing much changed locally. Beautiful though the islands might be, seen as a landfall after a wearisome Atlantic crossing, a miasma of ignorance and stupidity hung over them all. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had already provided the most telling example of how difficult it was to think straight in the West Indies. In slavery’s heyday it was quite usual to brand newly acquired human animals as one would cattle and the SPG asserted its ownership and high purpose at one and the same time. Its slaves were seared across the chest with a white-hot iron bearing the word SOCIETY, without causing the slightest intellectual or moral embarrassment to anyone. For many years those who defended the institution of slavery held to the opinion that its victims were happier and better looked after than the poor of Europe. This point of view was one readily adopted by visitors to the islands, who confined their acquaintanceship to house slaves, whose servitude was – at any rate on the surface – uncomplaining.
The irrepressible memoirist William Hickey made a false start on Jamaica when he was a young man. Sent out by his father in 1775 and speedily frustrated in his attempt to be admitted to the Jamaica Bar, he whiled away his time at parties and drinking sessions, making visits to plantations and reporting what he saw with an uncritical eye. On arriving at a Mr Richards’s estate he was greeted by 500 slaves in an apparent ecstasy of happiness. ‘They all looked fat and sleek, seeming as contented a set of mortals as could be,’ he commented. This was something his host ascribed to a particular style of management. ‘He was convinced by his own experience that more was to be effected by moderation and gentleness than ever was accomplished by the whip or punishments of any sort.’ Hickey was easily persuaded but agreed to go with Richards next day to a neighbouring estate nine miles distant. There they found a girl of sixteen tied to a post being whipped half to death by a young manager. She had refused his sexual advances. Mr Richards’s indignation was great. Such brutality was bad for business and it showed in the ledgers.
‘The annual produce until the last five years was five hundred hogsheads of the very best sugar and four hundred puncheons of rum [he explained to Hickey], whereas now it yields not one third of either and is every year becoming worse, the mortality among the slaves being unparalleled, and all this owing to a system of the most dreadful tyranny and severity practised by a scoundrel overseer.’
Though the two unexpected visitors intervened before the girl could be killed and the story ended with the arrest and death of her tormentor (he was shot trying to escape from his soldier escort while on his way to Kingston), it did not occur to Hickey to question, then or ever, whether slavery under any guise, benign or not, was acceptable. This sprang not from ignorance but a socially conditioned indifference. Hickey was no stranger to foreign parts. He had already sailed as a cadet in the East India Company army to Madras, found he did not like it, and came home again via Canton and Macao. Nothing he saw of other countries and peoples made a mark on him. His patriotism was of the hearty, negligent sort common to the age – he was most at his ease with his own kind, which he found in the guise of ships’ captains, bleak old soldiers and the better sort of commercial agent. As for the rest of the world, it was no more than a passingly interesting puppet show; in the end a tedious exhibition of local colour. Here, racketing round Jamaica, the ownership of one human being by another was as unremarkable and obvious as the weather. Only the most incendiary sort of crank would draw attention to it.
Very few Europeans had ever seen or could picture a free African. The ones who escaped their bondage on Jamaica and ran away into the mountains were not free, but criminal. Up there the dreaded Maroons held sway, their lives a reversion to their previous existence in Africa – simple and, when necessary, invisible. They lived in lean-to shacks deep in the forest, the sites indicated only by the smoke from their fires rising above the tree canopy and – from time to time – the eerie sound of signal drums. The white planters hired these Maroons to hunt down escaped slaves. When the most persistent of these were caught and executed, it was customary to display the severed heads on pikes set in some prominent place, to discourage crime and reassure the more nervous of the white population. It was just another part of the landscape.
There was an echo on the island of better things. Many plantations taught their more biddable house servants music and ate to the wailing of string quartets, or danced to the accompaniment of a black band got up in velvet livery, wearing powdered wigs. Several times a year the great houses would be a blaze of light, with patriotic bonfires and the discharge of fireworks to honour some royal birthday or distant feat of arms. The planters liked to celebrate and raise hell in this way for the same reason they might whistle crossing a graveyard. Death was very near. A major player in the affairs of the islands was yellow fever. In the three-year campaign that began in 1794 to capture Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe, 16,000 European soldiers died of the fever and were buried in the rags of their uniforms.
Yellow Jack knew no boundaries. It was swift and remorseless. Seized with a chill,