There was certainly a problem with emancipated slaves, who showed not the slightest wish to continue in the cane fields as wage labourers, but this was offset by the importation, just at the time the Bakers arrived, of 45,000 indentured Indians. As a consequence sugar production jumped by a third in a single year. (In the three years from 1843 to 1846 it more than doubled.) On the Baker estate at Fairfund the refinery was working flat out and for the youthful managers everything about the colony had the attraction of the new.
The same was not quite so true for the wives, the rector’s girls. Mauritius was after all an island – or, as these young women might have thought of it, only an island. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 to bring the blessings of Christianity to the world at large, had been dismayed – and perhaps disappointed – by the religious fervour it discovered already pre-existing in this tight little community of Catholics, Hindus and Muslims. It withdrew in 1833 and there remained only two Anglican clergymen in the whole colony, both comfortably situated in Port Louis. One of the most agreeable companions to be had nowadays was the indefatigable surveyor-general, John Lloyd.
He was a man after Sam Baker’s heart. When he arrived in 1831 the Pieter Boitte Mountain was pointed out to him, the one the French colons considered unscalable. Lloyd cut his way through the jungle approaches and – aided by ladders – made the first ascent, which he celebrated by planting a Union Jack on the summit. The Victorians held this to be the origin of British rock-climbing. (One of the people to leave an impression of Lloyd’s affability is Charles Darwin, who called at Mauritius on the way home from his epic voyage in HMS Beagle. Lloyd had an elephant he let the delighted naturalist ride.)
For Sam Baker, the place had only one drawback: there was nothing worthwhile to shoot. He might have overcome this disappointment but there were also family problems to contend with. His sister-in-law Elizabeth miscarried twice after arriving on Mauritius and was unhappy. She was almost certainly homesick. Baker was acute enough to have noticed an essential difference between the French on the island and themselves.
You cannot convince an English settler that he will be abroad for an indefinite number of years [he wrote]. With his mind ever fixed upon his return, he does little for prosperity in the colony. He rarely even plants a fruit tree, hoping that his stay will not allow him to gather from it.
The remark might have been directed without rancour at Elizabeth Baker. By comparison, he noted, the French planter came to stay.
The word ‘Adieu’ once spoken, he sighs an eternal farewell to ‘La Belle France’ and, with the natural lightheartedness of the nation, he settles cheerfully in a colony as his adopted country. He lays out his grounds with taste, and plants groves of exquisite fruit trees, whose produce will, he hopes, be tasted by his children and grandchildren. Accordingly, in a French colony there is a tropical beauty in the cultivated trees and flowers which is seldom seen in our own possessions.
Sam soon came to believe that, pretty though the island was, the women were right and there was something of the second division about it. After a visit to Réunion did nothing to calm his wanderlust, he set off in 1847 for Ceylon, travelling alone, having awarded himself a year’s shooting.
He was going to the right place: recent report was that three gentlemen had killed 104 elephants there in three days of slaughter. The trusty Gibbs rifle was at his side when he landed at Colombo and hastened to introduce himself to two of the locals in the modest comforts of Seager’s Hotel. He explained that he was there for the sport. The reaction was totally unexpected. ‘Sport?’ one of them cried incredulously. When Sam mentioned elephants his companion was even more scathing. ‘There are no elephants in Ceylon. Maybe there used to be, but I have lived here years and never seen one.’ These two were what he called ‘Galle Face planters’ – men who hung around Colombo and the racecourse, whose land was farmed for them by managers in the hinterland. They must have been exceptionally stupid (or delivering a colossal snub) for there was an established trade in elephants, captured and trained in Ceylon and then exported to the mainland as draught animals. It seemed to Sam they took their cue for a life of ignorance and indolence from the governor himself. ‘The movements of the Governor cannot carry much weight,’ he commented acidly, ‘as he does not move at all, with the exception of an occasional drive from Colombo to Kandy. His knowledge of the Colony and its wants and resources must therefore, from his personal experience, be limited to the Kandy road.’
Though Colombo had a small harbour, the East Indiamen and those ships bound for China, including all Royal Navy vessels, were of too deep a draught to enter it and instead rode at anchor out beyond the surf. It was both commentary and metaphor for the faintly makeshift and dilatory atmosphere Baker thought he could discern. The sleepy and peaceable town, still with much of the Dutch influence about it, including its mouldering and unimproved fortifications, did nothing to rouse his spirits.
Instead of the bustling activity of the Port Louis harbour in Mauritius, there were a few vessels rolling about in the road-stead, and some forty or fifty fishing canoes hauled up on the sandy beach. There was a peculiar dullness throughout the town – a sort of something which seemed to say ‘coffee does not pay’. There was a want of spirit in everything. The ill-conditioned guns upon the fort looked as though intended not to defend it; the sentinels looked parboiled; the very natives sauntered rather than walked; the bullocks crawled along in the mid-day sun, listlessly dragging the native carts.
These observations left Sam Baker with the idea that Ceylon was a hundred years behind Mauritius in development. The island traded in palm-oil, cinnamon and tobacco as well as coffee, yet all with the same want of energy he found so offensive. Much larger than Mauritius in surface area and with a population estimated at a million and a half, its interior, with its dizzying gorges and granite peaks, was, he soon discovered, largely unexplored. Trade and government rested chiefly at sea-level. The Cinnamon Gardens, which suggested at the very least something worthwhile to inspect, turned out to be an untended forest of low scrub. The dense groves of palms stretching back from the shoreline were hardly more alluring. There were scarcely more than 25,000 Europeans in the whole colony: Ceylon was asleep and, as it seemed to this hyperactive and boisterous young man, it begged to be awakened.
His own movements were soon settled. Quite by chance he fell in with ‘an old Gloucester friend’, Captain Palliser of the 15th Foot, a regiment then stationed on the island. Palliser, who had something of Sam’s own tastes and energy, took him up-country and there the Gibbs soon came out of its case. The jungle ravines were teeming with game and there were elephants to be had in plenty. The newcomer blazed away and plunged enthusiastically into the greeny dark for days and sometimes weeks on end. At the same time he began to demonstrate his innate intellectual curiosity, for the loud and hearty sportsman he loved to personate was also a keen naturalist and, perhaps even more unusually for the British on Ceylon, a patient and thoughtful explorer.
Baker had a very sharp eye for landscape and was impressed with the ruins of an extensive civilisation buried beneath the lianas. In particular, he saw how water had once been gathered and stored. This led him to estimate the amount of land that had once been under cultivation and the size of the population it had supported. The tone in which he reported these reflections was robust – few other Europeans on the island at that time could have written this:
The ancient history of Ceylon is involved in much obscurity; but, nevertheless, we have sufficient data in the existing traces of its former population to form our opinions of the position and power which Ceylon occupied in the Eastern Hemisphere, when England was in a state of barbarism. The wonderful remains of ancient cities, tanks, and watercourses throughout the island all prove that the now desolate regions were tenanted by a multitude – not of savages, but of a race long since passed away, full of industry and intelligence.
A partial description of Ceylon had been published in 1821. The author was a credulous Dutchman called Haafner and the information contained in his Travels on Foot Through the Island of Ceylon