What pleasure to see over there the negro from Guinea growing his bananas, there a black from Madagascar gathering in the grain, while in another plantation a girl from Bengal cuts the sugar cane, as a kaffir shepherd leads his flocks out into the forests, singing. Here we may see a Malabar woman spin cotton under the shade of the bananas, there a Bengali weaves and the little valleys resound with the singing of these different nations, repeated in their echoes. Ah, if the concerts of different birds in the forest are so charming, by how much more the voices of different nations in the same countryside!
Saint-Pierre may have had a sentimental eye but he was reflecting a general truth about the calm and prosperity of the island. He set the enormously popular novel Paul et Virginie in an enchanted glade overlooking Port Louis. The two lovers grow up in a state of nature – Virginie serves a not very sympathetically drawn de la Bourdonnais at table wearing a skirt made from banana leaves – and are only parted by money and the implacable demands of social position. Saint-Pierre was a gifted disciple of Rousseau. There are slaves in his story but they are benign. Like Paul and Virginie, they too are closer to nature than their masters. Saint-Pierre makes a sly point in depicting how Virginie celebrated her mother’s birthday every year. The night before, she ground and baked wheaten cakes
that she sent to the poor white families born on the island, who had never tasted European bread and who without any help from the blacks were reduced to living on manioc in the middle of the forests, having, to support their poverty, neither the stupidity that comes with slavery nor the courage that flows from education.
The possession was noted for its tranquillity and the docility and loyalty of its workers. They were relatively well looked after. Governor Dumas reported in 1767:
The black here is almost like a Polish peasant in the Russian Pale and is commonly content with his lot. We are speaking generally of a more humane attitude towards the slaves than at St Domingo or Martinique. Every creole thinks of himself as a citizen and is not humiliated by the inferiority of his colour.
However, the idyll was not made to last. On 29 November 1810 the British invaded the island with a combined operation mounted from India. Three infantry divisions under General Abercrombie were landed on an open beach and, marching inland to attack on the land side, easily secured the capitulation of Port Louis and its 200 cannons, all of them facing the wrong way. Bottled up in the harbour by Admiral Bertie’s fleet were six frigates and another thirty smaller vessels, while in the arsenals and go-downs below the ramparts the victors discovered a huge quantity of stores. All this had been won for a loss of only twenty-nine lives, as swift and complete a victory as any in the war against the French.
There was an unexpected bonus to the victory. As the conquering heroes fanned out into the countryside, they discovered, setting aside an understandable surliness on the part of the conquered French plantation managers, an ambiance as unlike that of the Caribbean slave islands as it was possible to imagine. Governor Dumas had been right. Mauritius was a calm and unbloody model of the plantation system that was – on the part of the whites at any rate – difficult to fault.
Under the second British governor, Robert Farquhar, the island began its struggle with the slavery issue. Back in 1807, Farquhar, a devout Christian, had published a pamphlet which suggested ameliorating the effects of abolition in the West Indies plantations by importing indentured Chinese labourers. (When the experiment was tried, it was greeted with dismay. In such a brutal environment the Chinese seemed effete beyond words. Locals took exception to their pattering manner of walking and unconscious air of superiority. Farquhar had asserted that it would not be necessary to import women, since the Chinese did not much care with whom they co-habited. He was wrong about this, too.) Here on Mauritius the governor found, in a different setting, pretty much the policy he had advocated in the West Indies.
The island’s principal export was, like Jamaica’s, sugar: though the soil was not specially fertile, the crop did very well. The climate was good and Europeans considered the air particularly healthy. The only real town, Port Louis, had a stock of several thousand stone-built houses. De la Bourdonnais’ residence, built in 1738, filled one side of the tree-lined Place d’Armes and from its windows a gentle succession of British governors looked out on a view that breathed style and sophistication. Altogether, Mauritius was not at all an unpleasant posting, an English possession where the common language was French. Colonel Draper, for example, a lackadaisical adornment to colonial rule, was at one time commissioner of Mauritius police. He had got himself into no end of trouble in Trinidad in the bad old days but on Mauritius things went better. He married a Creole beauty and contributed to the island’s amenities by inaugurating horse-racing. Left alone – and the home government’s hold on affairs was tenuous – the British might have succumbed completely to the island’s charms.
An instance of the ambling pace of life was the introduction of Indian convicts to build the roads and connect the scattered hamlets. They lived in unsupervised camps and no power on earth could prevent them from co-habiting with the Indian women they found in the plantations. Though they were prevented by law from owning property, many of them found work in the evening and at the weekends. These convicts joined a rainbow of races – to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s euphoric picture of the concert of voices in the forest could now be added Tamil, Chinese, French and hallooing English. Officially there was a strict separation of races and classes. Unofficially things muddled along.
The only fly in the ointment was the falling price of sugar and the fate of the former slaves, now converted to indentured labourers and what were euphemistically designated ‘apprentices’. Mauritius had a taste of how difficult this last issue was in the appointment of John Jeremie as procureur-général in 1832. Jeremie had previously been chief justice on the West Indies island of St Lucia, where his high moral tone and pronounced abolitionist views incensed the local planters and led to his resignation. When he brought the same opinions to Mauritius, he found his reputation had preceded him. Colonel Draper was one among many who found him objectionably narrow-minded on the troubled subject of total emancipation.
In his capacity as chief of police, Draper prepared the new chief justice less than a hero’s welcome. Jeremie’s ship made its gun salute to the governor and dropped anchor. Fussing with his baggage, anxious to go ashore and make his first good impression, Jeremie ran slap into farce. For two days he was prevented by the chief of police from landing at all, despite furious representations. This was done, Draper explained suavely, out of consideration for his personal safety. Poor Jeremie. He rightly concluded that he did not have a friend on the island. He was finally taken ashore with a file of marines to protect him and marched – a terrible moment, this – past shuttered houses through the empty streets of Port Louis. A fortnight later he presented himself for his swearing-in. Not one of the judges on the island would come forward to conduct the ceremony.
Stoned by the mob and without a friend to help his cause, Jeremie was advised by the governor to go back home. After a twelve-week passage, he arrived in England and posted at once to London. If he was looking for sympathy, he got none. An infuriated Secretary for War and the Colonies ordered him to turn round and go straight back. This time, as soon as he was successfully sworn in, he set about his fellow judges, accusing them of complicity in illegal slave dealings and of irregularities in sentencing. This proved too much for the governor. Mauritius was not to be dictated to by some blue-light double-shotted canting lawyer, nor was a veteran of Waterloo and a god-damned general to be told how to run his administration. After less than a year in office Jeremie quit. With a gallows sense of humour, London first knighted him and then posted him to Sierra Leone to reflect on slavery at its source. The fever took him off in 1841. (By coincidence, his arch-enemy, Colonel Draper, had died in post on Mauritius the previous night.)
The Baker brothers arrived in more peaceable times, John in 1843, Sam a year later. Sir William and Lady Sophia Gomm were every bit as pleasant as they had been advertised. Now that the threat of war, or war on the scale the world had known it, had receded, the more ferocious military cast of mind had gone, too. There were schools and colleges for the white population, a Protestant cemetery, excellent Botanical Gardens; and a large theatre building,