Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (38 page)

E
MPIRE was not yet a popular enthusiasm. The British public was still half-illiterate, imperialism was seldom an electoral issue, and there was nothing gaudy or flamboyant yet to the idea of imperial dominion. Grave authority was the keynote of the British Empire in the fifties and sixties, and the piety of the old reformers had become institutionalized. Here is one Colonial Secretary’s formula for the elevation of the backward peoples: ‘The policy which I believe to be best adapted to promote civilization is that of raising the revenue required for the support of those institutions which distinguish a civilized from a barbarous society, by such taxes as may tend the most to render a mere subsistence difficult to be obtained without exertion….’ At the same time the old liberalism of the Colonial Office itself, though still alive and active, was acquiring a coarsening dogmatism too, a trace of arrogance and contempt, which one can trace to the terrible disillusionments of the Mutiny.

These processes were sadly illustrated in the life story of Edward John Eyre, the equivocal hero of this chapter.

Eyre, whose father was vicar of Hornsea and Long Riston in Yorkshire, was born in 1815, and at 17 had emigrated alone to Australia, whose empty immensities strangely suited him. Apprenticed to a sheep farmer, he became an explorer, and was the first white man to travel along the Great Australian Bight, the desolate and empty southern coastline of the continent. His expedition was one of the most terrible in the annals of adventure. Setting out with his white
overseer Baxter and three aborigines, Wylie, Joey and Yarry, in the New Year of 1841, he reached the settlement of Albany, a thousand miles to the east, in July. In those six months every kind of calamity occurred, and fearful episodes of the journey had entered the Australian folklore—the moment when Joey and Yarry shot Baxter dead and decamped with almost all the stores—the nightmare hours of hazed heat through which the renegades shadowed Eyre and Wylie eerily at a distance through the bush—the ghastly days and nights of thirst, when they lived by mopping up the morning dew—the eagle stew they gorged upon one day, the penguin Wylie ate upon a beach, skin and all. At Lucky Bay, half-way along the coast, a traumatic moment occurred, for when he was very nearly dead, Eyre discovered a French whaler moored off-shore, and was offered a passage to Albany: but a fanatic energy drove him on, he would not abandon his journey, and after twelve days he set off implacably once again, alone with the patient Wylie, for the last few hundred miles through rainstorms and misery to King George’s Sound.

He made several other famous Australian journeys, sometimes with herds of sheep, and seems to have felt an unexplained affinity for the aborigines, those shadow-characters of the never-never. He treated them with a kindness rare among Australian pioneers, and presently became an exceptionally humane Protector of Aborigines on the Murray River—‘it is a lamentable thing’, he once wrote, ‘to think that the progress and prosperity of one race should conduce to the downfall and decay of another’. In Australia he was always remembered as a benevolent hero, and there was a Mount Eyre named for him, and an Eyre Peninsula, and a salt lake as big as Cyprus.

In New Zealand his reputation was less straightforward. In 1846 he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor there, and again showed a particular empathy for the natives: his marriage at Auckland in 1850 was a double ceremony with a Maori couple. In other ways, though, something blighted seems now to have emerged in his character, as though the Australian wasteland had drained him of warmth and colour. He quarrelled incessantly, haggled about his salary, showed a preposterous fondness for gold braid and consequence while sanctimoniously refusing to receive social calls on Sundays. His superior officer, the Governor, finally declined to
answer his endless litigious letters, and deprived him of all official responsibilities. Eyre left the colony in 1853 for a post in the West Indies, leaving a memory behind him still courageous (there was an Eyre Peak in Otago), but petulant and obstinate too.

A hero in Australia; a prosy squabbler in New Zealand; it was in the Caribbean that Edward Eyre, in his fifty-first year, achieved the most unexpected of his reputations. For there as Governor of Jamaica, in the year 1865, he became known as a murderer.

Conditions in Jamaica had not greatly changed since that day in 1838 when Mr Knibb had watched the hands of the clock turn in his church at Falmouth. The colony was still half-destitute, never having recovered from the shock of emancipation, and was also suffering from high prices because of the American Civil War. Many of the old estates were abandoned now, or run by the listless and corrupt agents of absentee landlords. The negroes, who were mostly reluctant to work for wages, coveted the lands thus left idle, and often squatted on them; the whites preserved a colour bar more rigidly than ever, living lavishly but often in debt surrounded by servants in their Great Houses. The colony was fearfully run down. Roads were impassable, bridges were broken, plantations had reverted to bush. Kingston, the commercial centre, was full of filth and vice, and violent crime was common everywhere. In the inaccessible interior of the island a British garrison kept perpetual watch upon the Maroons, an inner nation of ex-slaves who had never been subdued by the British, but lived indignantly autonomous in treaty relationship with the Empire. Jamaica was riddled with queer religious revivals, Christian, pagan and sometimes a combination of the two; it was embittered by racial grievance; and it was periodically ravaged by epidemics of cholera and smallpox—the stink of Kingston was said to be detectable several miles out at sea.

Above all the shadow of slavery fell across the island still, darkening the demagoguery of the agitators and the revivalists. Some negroes still thought emancipation had given them a statutory right to the ownership of land. Others were easily persuaded that the
whites were preparing to make slaves of them again. The pattern of life had not much changed, for all the fact of freedom, and the Great Houses were still figures of absolute white supremacy, their myriad servants merely managing to be, so Trollope found in 1858, servile and insolent at the same time.

The capital of Jamaica was Spanish Town, a dingy little metropolis in the southern plain, redeemed only by a few fairly dilapidated colonial houses, a small dignified cathedral and the buildings of Government. ‘Stricken with eternal death’, Trollope thought it. Its centre was an imposing eighteenth century square, deliberately designed to exalt the fact of British power. Dominating it on the north side was a memorial to Admiral Rodney, created by the London sculptor John Bacon and erected in 1783 to honour the victory of The Saints, which saved Jamaica from the French: flanked by captured cannon, ornamented with banners, unicorns, tritons and sculptured battle-scenes, the Admiral stood dressed as a Roman grandee pointing his baton imperiously into the square, and had a small hole in his back which was really the mark of some joist or pulley, but was taken by simpler citizens to represent the bullet-hole that killed him.
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To Rodney’s right was the Governor’s Palace, King’s House, monumentally pillared. To his left was the Assembly Hall, the home of the Jamaican legislature.

The colony was still governed under one of the old pre-1787 constitutions, unreformed by the Durham Report. The Assembly was elected, was responsible for most of the island’s internal affairs, and was composed largely of coloured men. But the electorate was infinitesimal—about one in every 200 citizens, the qualification being a sizeable land ownership—and the members represented above all the interests of the planters and businessmen. Though they were divided upon party lines, and squabbled and intrigued, in cabals and caucuses, along the best Parliamentary lines, they were generally united in opposition to the Governor and his nominated council, and they were backed off-stage by the high-spirited and irresponsible elite of the white landed gentry, often the fifth generation of English settlers in the island. The Governor in his palace represented the traditionally moderate authority of London: the
Assembly members across the square spoke for the Great Houses of Jamaica, or the graft-ridden commerce of Kingston: and over the intervening garden executive and legislature metaphorically and sometimes physically (for one could easily see from window to window) glared.

Into this arena of resentment stepped E. J. Eyre, in the summer of 1862.

The whites were afraid of a general negro insurrection. They remembered always the example of Haiti, whose declaration of independence in 1804 had been celebrated with a massacre of all the white inhabitants. There were rumours of smuggled arms, seditious meetings, the drilling of armed negroes in the mountains. Revivalist preachers, sometimes no more than Christianized Obeah men, were thought to be drumming up discontent—in particular the ministers of a sect called the Native Baptists, who had gained the support of the Baptist Missionary Society in England. The negroes, though pathetically loyal to the person of Queen Victoria, certainly distrusted British justice in Jamaica, and resented the colony’s high taxes, and they were thought by the whites to be capable of any enormity. A half-caste minister of the Native Baptists, William Gordon, was their most articulate leader, and was represented to Eyre as a prime mover of sedition: he was a man of property and a member of the Assembly, was prone to inflammatory racialist speeches, and had quarreled so violently with his white fellow-magistrates in his home parish, St Thomas-in-the-East, that he had been removed from office.

All this was happening at a particularly sensitive moment of imperial history. It was only seven years since the end of the Mutiny, and even in the distant Caribbean memories of its massacres and revenges were still horribly vivid. All over the Empire racial attitudes had hardened, and by now probably a majority of educated Britons had come to sympathize with Carlyle, who once described the emancipated West Indian negroes as ‘our beautiful black darlings … sitting yonder with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices … while the
sugar-crops rot around them uncut, because labour cannot be hired, so cheap are the pumpkins’.

Certainly Eyre, a stiffly orthodox Anglican, believed that the Jamaican negro was his own worst enemy. The real cause of discontent, he reported to the Colonial Office after a few months as Governor, was ‘the incorrigible indolence, apathy and improvidence of all ages, and the degraded and immoral social existence which they all but universally lead’. When a negro petition was sent to the Queen asking for economic help, it was answered on Eyre’s advice by an unctuous proclamation presented to the public as ‘The Queen’s Letter’. It was by their own industry and prudence that the negroes must improve their conditions, said this repellant exhortation; ‘Her Majesty will regard with interest and satisfaction their advancement through their own merits and efforts’.

Eyre very soon made an enemy of Gordon. By now the Governor had matured into an inflexible man, prone to self-pity, and he was in no mood to be defied by a population of immoral and indolent peasants. He doubtless felt secure not only in the assurance of his own rectitude, but also in assuming that all the authority of the post-Mutiny Empire would stand beside him, if he dealt severely withblack subversion. One day in August 1865 a small deputation of negroes plodded into the square at Spanish Town. They had walked some forty-five miles from the hill country of St Thomas-in-the-East, the other side of Kingston, and they wished to lay before the Governor the grievances of their community. They presented themselves at the palace door, above whose portico the flambeaux flared, and through whose portals there presently appeared, one supposes, some lofty and liveried attendant. The petitioners explained themselves and waited: but presently the servant returned to say that His Excellency would not receive them, so back they walked into the mountains again.

The leader of the delegation was Paul Bogle of Stony Gut, a settlement in the mountains north of Morant Bay. Bogle was a prosperous farmer, an ordained deacon of the Native Baptist Church, and a
protégé of Gordon. His smallholding at Stony Gut was buried inaccessibly in the southern flanks of the Blue Mountains, approachable only by a maze of steep little lanes. Around it dense woods grew, often dripping and aromatic, for the rainfall there was heavy, and there was no town nearer than Morant Bay, twenty miles away on the coast.

At Stony Gut, in the autumn of 1865, a religio-military cult thrived. The settlement consisted of a house, a yard, and a heavily-built chapel which served also as a fort: and there Bogle assembled several hundred militant black supporters determined to right their wrongs by force. Armed with machetes, pikes and bludgeons, they drilled assiduously among the woods, sang their hymns discordantly in the chapel, administered their own justice, swore death to the white men, marched and counter-marched among the forest trees, blew their conch shells, played their fifes and beat their drums—insulated there secretly among the woodlands, so that only the neighbouring villagers could hear their arcane preparations. They were very simple men, concerned chiefly with local grievances, and inspired as much perhaps by their gimcrack brand of Christianity as by any coherent political philosophy. They were, however, in touch with militants elsewhere in the island. ‘Blow your shells,’ ran one of their almost incantatory recruiting letters, ‘roule your drums! house to house; take out every man; march them down to Stony Gut; any that you find take them in the way; take them down with their arms; war is at my black skin, war is at hand…. Cheer, men! Cheer in heart! … When you do come to Stony Gut … blow your shells and tell what place you is from before entered.’

Bogle was already at odds with the white magistrates who represented law and order at Morant Bay, and one day in October 1865 a squad of negro policemen was sent up to Stony Gut to arrest him, and twenty-eight of his followers, for sedition. Bogle’s men promptly beat them up and threw them out, except for three who were temporarily taken prisoner and made to swear, upon pain of death, to ‘join their colour’. Two days later the little army, waving its weapons, shouting its pious slogans and trumpeting its conchs, set off itself for Morant Bay to attack the citadel of white reaction in the parish of St Thomas-in-the-East, the Court House.