In the mid-eighteenth century the East India Company was still a purely commercial company, importing and exporting goods from its bases at Bombay on the west coast, Madras on the east coast and Calcutta on the Hooghly River in the north-east. So successful was its business that it was able to loan money to the British government, but all this began to change, because conflict with the French and the crumbling of the Mughal Empire provoked the Company’s intervention in political and military struggles in India, initially in the south and east. In 1756 the new nawab (ruler) of Bengal captured Calcutta, where scores of his prisoners suffocated in an airless room, an incident dubbed ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’. In revenge, the Company’s army, led by Robert Clive, recovered Calcutta and took control of the entire province of Bengal. The land tax revenue from this new territory enabled the Company to build up a sophisticated civil service and an extensive army, which gave them the means to conquer further territory and defeat the French.
By this time, many Company employees found themselves able to amass huge fortunes, often by unscrupulous means, while soldiers and officers were eager for further military campaigns because of the resulting opportunities to acquire loot and prize money. These ‘nabobs’ (a corruption of nawab) would retire to Britain with their new wealth, causing much resentment of their lavish lifestyles and their efforts to gain political advancement. Perceived as being answerable only to its shareholders, the Company was the target of several hostile government reports, and with mounting debts, the Company’s Board of Directors was obliged to accept a degree of government control under Acts of Parliament in 1773 and 1784.
The East India Company, also known as John Company, became primarily an administrative rather than a commercial body, acting as an agent of the government and no longer relying on trade, but on the collection of land taxes from the territories it ruled. The Governor of the Bengal Presidency, based at Calcutta, was now also the Governor-General of India, exercising superiority over the Bombay and Madras presidencies. By the time Henry arrived in India, large swathes of the area now divided into India and Pakistan were ruled by the Company through conquest, or indirectly through alliances with hundreds of small states ruled by Indian princes. The Company’s army was 300,000 strong and was split between the three presidencies; it accounted for over three-quarters of the Company’s expenditure. Most of the East India Company troops were native sepoys (from the Persian word sipahi, ‘soldier’) and their officers were mainly British, but all were regarded as inferior to the regular British army, a judgement based on class rather than efficiency.
Having been nominated directly, Henry could have sailed for India immediately, as he was not obliged to attend the Company’s Military Seminary at Addiscombe, near Croydon. Instead, he chose to receive private tuition from Thomas Myers, a mathematician and geographer and formerly a professor at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. Myers was now living and teaching at Blackheath village, a small and affluent suburb just over 5 miles south-east of London. ‘Here’, Henry noted, ‘I learned Hindestanee and Persian, surveying, advance Mathematics, Military drawing, fencing and all other requisites for an Indian soldier’s life.’10 Numerous languages were spoken throughout India, but it was important to have some knowledge of the Hindustani language (known today as Urdu), because it was the main language of communication between East India Company officials and the natives. It had its origins in the Muslim courts and cities of northern India. For hundreds of years Persian had been the language of administration in India, although by the nineteenth century the version of Persian used in India was very different to the language used in Persia. In Persian, Hindustan meant ‘land of the Hindus’.
Impatient to embark on his new career, Henry regarded the six months spent at Blackheath with Myers as wasted. By the end of 1826 he was ready to leave on the first available ship for India, but was destined to be disappointed, because early in the new year he fell ill of typhus fever during an epidemic at Bristol when he was staying with his aunt and uncle. He was looked after by his beloved sister Maria and for that reason he later remembered this moment as one of his happiest. Spring and summer 1827 were spent in convalescence at Chadlington in the continuous company of his three younger brothers George, Richard and Edward, who were also home from school following a bout of the fever. Henry ordered them to do constant broadsword exercises, while he entertained them with tales of the war with Burma and graphically hacked the trunk and lower branches of a tree near the house in imitation of the terrible wounds he intended inflicting on his barbarian opponents. This was an idyllic time for Henry and his younger brothers, all innocent of the fact that one of them would be dead and the rest grown men before Henry set foot in England again.
After the long months of waiting, the seventeen-year-old nearly missed setting sail for India. Thinking there was time to spare, he had gone to see one of his father’s horses win in the races at Cheltenham, but a messenger rushed up to him with the news that the ship was about to leave London Docks for Portsmouth. Hurrying back to London, Henry managed to get kitted out and rapidly purchased around one hundred books. Even without the necessity of buying a commission, it was still an expensive undertaking to send Henry as a cadet to India, as his passage alone cost over £100, while his father spent a further £500 on his kit, and he himself would only be paid from his arrival at Bombay. Henry managed to reach the south coast just before the 644-ton chartered ship Neptune set sail for Bombay from Portsmouth harbour on 6 July 1827. An old East Indiaman vessel built in 1815, it was captained by its owner John Cumberlege.
The Neptune followed the fastest route available, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but even so the journey lasted four months. From the outset Henry was desperately homesick, missing above all else his two surviving sisters, Maria and Georgiana. Having promised Maria that he would keep a journal to send home, he often recorded his adolescent feelings of misery and anxiety in a style that was intimate, spontaneous, often poetic and lacking the polished structure and formality of his later writing. He began the journal on his very first day: ‘Shook hands with my brother Abram and stept into the boat at Portsmouth which was about to bear me from my native shore, to exchange the society of parents, friends, brothers and sisters whom I love with an affection never to be shaken for a life of misery and sorrow among strangers and barbarians. During my crossing over to the ship the beautiful blue waves, glittering beneath a July sun and placid as the calm I once enjoyed, lulled my feelings into something like repose, and I reached the ship Neptune in a species of mental stupefaction … The calling of the sea makes any head so giddy that I can hardly tell what I am about, and my fellow passengers so disturb my attention that it is only when I sit by myself on the poop and view the moon beams glancing on the silvery sea that I can believe I am wretched, miserable, alone, in one word that I am an exile.’11
Three days later, he felt no better: ‘It is now Saturday July 7th 6 o’clock in the evening and I am sitting alone in my cabin writing this commencement to my journal. Maria, if your bright blue eyes should ever chance to rest on these promised pages, know that I am now thinking of your lovely face which, perchance, I never may behold again, and I swear that I may be destined to pass the remainder of my days in banishment and misery. Whenever the natural instability of my disposition may bring me to engage in a quarrel, I will think of your angelic form, and I shall be the coolest of the cool, and though you seem to think that I shall never remember you, be informed that not a day or an hour will ever elapse without your sweet face being presented to my memory, and whatever may be my fate, prosperous or unhappy, good or bad, I never never will forget you. I think I have been writing a great deal of nonsense which can be of no interest to anyone, but I was alone, I was unhappy, the bitterness of my feelings seemed to overpower my understanding, and I have shed tears of the bitterest