This decision, so swiftly arrived at, discussed with no one else, was an act of social rebellion. Newera Eliya was about as remote from the governing class of Ceylon as it was possible to get. To buy land there was almost as exotic as purchasing a desert island, yet Sam Baker was not planning to run away from existence. Instead, he would show the world how a life in action should be lived, on a site the colonial government had practically forgotten. It was a challenge much more appealing than watching sugar cane grow back on Mauritius. The naturally combative side to him was stirred into a fine indignation.
Why should this place lie idle? Why should this great tract of country in such a lovely climate be untenanted and uncultivated? How often I have stood upon the hills and asked myself this question when gazing over the wide extent of undulating forest and plain! How often I have thought of the thousands of starving wretches at home who here might earn a comfortable livelihood!
He stayed no more than a fortnight before setting out for the coast and a ship to take him home. Once things were under way in London, he easily persuaded John and the womenfolk that their destiny also lay in Ceylon. His son Charles had died an infant’s death on Mauritius; his second child was a girl called Jane who had not taken to a tropical climate. There was another new-born son who was the apple of his eye. His brother’s wife was still childless: maybe the miraculously invigorating air would do for everyone else what it had done for him. It seems they thought so too. A jubilant Sam went down to Lypiatt Park and communicated the same torrential enthusiasm to his younger brother, Valentine, a stocky and rather gloomy boy of nineteen. Then he looked around him for servants to the enterprise.
His first hiring – and he was to rue the day he made it – was a one-eyed groom from his father’s estate called Henry Perkes. Perkes had the unfailing confidence that came from being a pub wit. Sam may not have noticed at first that he was more often drunk than sober. As bailiff Baker chose another West Country man, a tenant farmer called Fowler, who came with a homely wife and a beautiful daughter. He found a local blacksmith willing to follow him. This man had as his wife ‘a cheerful knockabout woman’ perfect for the job in hand – she could swing an eighteen-pound hammer as powerfully as her husband. Since the whole of the Gloucestershire countryside was talking about the repeal of the Corn Laws and the coming ruination of agriculture, Baker had arrived at an opportune moment. Altogether, excluding family members, Sam persuaded nine others to join him.
We can get some idea of what was in play from Charles Kingsley’s novel, Yeast. The story commenced publication in serial form in 1846 and has the distinction to be among the worst constructed novels of any century; all the same it has strong resonance with the scheme Sam Baker had taken into his head. What Kingsley was trying to dramatise was the disaffection and intellectual confusion of the governing class – or at least their young – set beside the sharply observed miseries of the rural population in a time of agricultural slump. Kingsley’s hero, Lancelot Smith, learns from the honest poor how to be a man. He has a university education and £2000 a year at his disposal but no purpose. Love is not the answer to his problems, nor is rick-burning or radical politics. The true path lies in the search for the Kingdom of God. His first steps are guided by the giant gamekeeper and hedge philosopher, Tregarva. Then, towards the end of the book, he meets the mysterious Barnakill, who proposes the two of them desert England altogether and retire to some utopian community ‘in the land of Prester John’. (Barnakill does not mean Ethiopia but Russia. In a very necessary epilogue Kingsley modifies this startling proposal further by suggesting that the location of this earthly paradise is more metaphorical than geographical.)
Educated at Cambridge, Kingsley was deeply influenced by the Christian socialism of F. D. Maurice and a great admirer of Carlyle. Yeast, as it unfolded, suggested to some people a dangerous radicalism. It was published in book form in the revolutionary year of 1848 and its author attracted some passing notoriety. However, Kingsley was no more a firebrand than his fictional hero. He was in fact a country parson of donnish tastes who saw nothing noble in the lives of his own parishioners and made no great inroads towards their well-being. By 1860 he was appointed professor of Modern History at his old university and was for a brief time tutor to the Prince of Wales. Even a modest amount of bourgeois comfort was enough to placate the Lancelot Smith in him. In the last fifteen years of his life he became an ardent naturalist and reconciler of faith with science: he became, in short, a representative Victorian, genial, a little muddled and, when called upon, a friend to the established order.
Sam Baker needed no Barnakill to show him the way out and, unlike Kingsley, he was first and foremost a man of action. To go and settle halfway up a mountain on an island very few of his followers could have found on a map was a colossal undertaking for such a young man, given that he was remembered in his home county as nothing more than a jolly young giant with a passion for shooting. Moreover, as everyone knew, he had recently inherited a small fortune from his grandmother and could if he chose buy almost any property in the west of England. From there he could indulge his taste for adventure by expedition. That would have been his father’s advice, for old Sam Baker risked very little in his life and was perfectly aware that the honours and dignity he sought in his old age had to be purchased. He was, when it came down to it, only a merchant – a rich and generous one, but famous only in Gloucestershire and among other London merchants. It was true the family had Tudor courtiers in its background, but in early Victorian England such an ancestry needed to be refurbished with sons who had been to university and made political connections that would last them through life.
Sam Baker’s indifference to such a world and such a career is marked. His father’s ramshackle way of educating him aggravated this but it was not the cause – he was an outsider by temperament. In later life, when he had proved himself a great explorer, he was fond of defending his eminence in stiff little sentences like this: ‘I do not love to dwell upon geographical theories, as I believe in nothing but actual observation.’ This is a vain man speaking.
It was soon clear to the farm workers he recruited that he had very great organising abilities. The colonists were to take ship in the Earl of Hardwicke with many tons of equipment, including a newfangled power saw and a patented compost-maker. There was a small ark of animals to be stowed before the mast. If he minimised the element of risk – and he had already discovered several different ways of suffering injury and sudden death on the Royal Plains – that was only in his nature. As the plans went forward, he paid a visit to Beattie’s, the gunsmiths in Regent Street, and ordered from the firm not one but four double-barrelled rifles. From there he walked down to Paget’s of Piccadilly and bought an impressive knife. ‘The blade is one foot in length and two inches broad at its widest point and slightly concave in the middle. The steel is of the most exquisite quality and the knife weighs three pounds.’ In due course, Baker used it to dispatch at a single blow a charging wild boar weighing 300 pounds. The knife split the animal open from the spine to its pizzle.
In the book he wrote about the Ceylon venture, Eight Years in Ceylon, Sam Baker says he did all this merely to have the pleasures of a country estate without the harassment of his neighbours’ gamekeepers, which may have been the echo of a jocular family accusation. Young though he was, he had a very clear view of what he must do to get what he wanted – and the wit to set out in advance of his little band of colonists to prepare for their arrival. He built them all handsome little cottages with wood cut from the enclosing jungle and began the laborious business of clearing his land. He was wide-eyed about this, too. Every root, every stump was dug out. He knew that the soil, which looked so promising on the surface, would never amount to anything without manure. It lay on a bed of pure white clay. Baker was undeterred. He was