Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (46 page)

Riel had one last try, in 1885. He had escaped over the frontier before Wolseley’s approach, had spent some time in a lunatic asylum, and was a much stranger and less stable man than he had been in 1870. Called back to their forlorn leadership by the Metis of Saskatchewan, he allied himself with dissident Indians of the prairies, under Poundmaker and Big Bear, and fought a pitched battle with the Canadian forces—sent there, in sad symbolism, in wagons of the C.P.R. He lost of course, and this time the Empire-builders did not spare him. They put him on trial at Regina, formerly known as Pile o’Bones, and hanged him in the winter of 1885. He was buried in Winnipeg in the churchyard of St Boniface, his coffin being covered with three feet of masonry to deter body-snatchers, and ‘no murderer’, commented Wolseley, voicing the imperial conviction, ‘ever better deserved his fate’.
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S
TILL the British as a nation were not conscious expansionists. Power for power’s sake had not yet seized the public imagination. Painting the world red was not a popular purpose. British industry, commerce and finance remained supreme, and did not seem to need new imperial markets—Free Trade still worked well enough in the British interest, and British investors found plenty of scope in the developing economies of Europe and the United States. Considerations of prudence, of expense and of morality restrained the nation, and made its empire-building still a fitful, unpremeditated and often reluctant process.

In particular we sense this restraint in the Pacific Ocean, where the British were always conscious of another grand dynamic on their flanks or over their shoulders: the growing power, still half-flexed and half-realized, of that incorrigible ex-colony, the United States.

To many Englishmen the United States was still hardly a foreign country at all. When the young politician Charles Dilke travelled through the republic in 1866, he thought of it essentially as a projection of England, and all its phenomena, from Manhattan to the Mormons, seemed to him only new extensions of the English genius.
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The
Illustrated
London
News
‚ in its Christmas issue for 1849, said that though the British race would undoubtedly continue to rule the world, it would presently be from the other side of the Atlantic—
‘the genius of our people can exert itself as well on the banks of the Ohio, or the Mississippi, as on the banks of the Thames, and rule the world from the White House at Washington with as much propriety as from the Palace of St James’. Romantics often foresaw a reconciliation between the two peoples, even a reunion, to form an Anglo-Saxon super-power of limitless potential, and if travellers like Dickens or Trollope did not much take to the Americans in practice, British spokesmen generally lauded the American ideal in principle. ‘Our American cousins’ were frequently buttered up at banquets, or fed with snobbism and Scotch whiskey in Royal Navy-wardrooms.

Yet the Great Republic was the chief foreign threat to the well-being of the British Empire—more immediate by far than the Russian bogey which so haunted addicts of the Eastern Question, let alone the impotent rebellions of sepoys and Riels. The Empire remained the hereditary enemy of the United States, and throughout the century good little Americans had been taught, in history book or fireside tale, embroidery sampler or handwriting text, never to forget their revolutionary origins: 

Time and again since Victoria’s accession the two Powers had quarrelled. They had quarrelled over the sovereignty of Oregon, over British naval supremacy during the American Civil War, repeatedly over Newfoundland fishing rights, incessantly over Canadian frontier issues—Canada sometimes seemed to be nothing
but
frontier, as the Duke of Wellington had expostulated long before. Twice Irish dissidents had invaded Canada from American territory, and often the U.S. cavalry crossed the Canadian line in pursuit of
warlike Indians, who knew they were safe on the northern side of the frontier, and called it ‘the medicine line’. At the inaugural dinner of the Royal Colonial Society, in London in 1869, the American Ambassador made a distinctly improper joke about Canada’s future within the United States, and in Washington the Secretary of State himself, W. H. Seward, declared that ‘Nature designs this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union’.

The magnetic pull of the United States, too, perpetually disturbed the imperial rotations. Most British emigrants to Canada presently moved on to the States, and even British capital tended to prefer American to colonial investment—the risks might be greater, but so were the profits. Before the abolition of American slavery, the dispossessed slave owners of the Empire looked to the southern States as last exemplars of a crippled civilization, and the American Civil War had drastic effects upon the Empire. Cotton was first planted in Fiji because of it, refugees emigrated to several imperial possessions, and more than once Great Britain came precariously near involvement herself. Lord Palmerston hoped the Confederates would win, so that the united republic would no longer be a threat to the Empire: Gladstone was glad they lost, because he thought a defeated North might grab Canada instead.

Several colonies seemed half-American anyway. The Bahamas, for instance, which lay less than 100 miles from Florida, were very dose in spirit to the southern States—easy-going, stylish, corrupt. Any Southern planter would feel at home there still, and the colony’s Assembly buildings were actually modelled upon the public buildings at New Bern, in North Carolina—small shuttered buildings of coral limestone, grouped around lawns and palm trees on Bay Street in the centre of Nassau. Down by the shore the Nassau merchants in their wide straws, smoking Havanas and tilting their kitchen chairs outside their office doorways, talked island politics with the authentic rasp of Charleston or Newport News, and the most exciting thing that ever happened to the colony was the Civil War, when the blockade-runners slipped dashingly in and out of harbour, when Lancashire cotton men outbid each other for the Carolina cotton crop, and in the Royal Victoria Hotel, whose buffet was open
night and day, Union and Confederate officers eyed each other warily across the lobby, or engaged in enjoyable skull-duggeries of espionage and peculation.

Bermuda, too, which had once been a dependency of Virginia, was strongly American still. Many of its colonists had supported the American Revolution, and their loyalties had been shaken again during the War of 1812. The colony’s colour-washed houses had wrought iron lattice-work, like New Orleans, and white jalousies like Charleston, and scattered around the island all the paraphernalia of Puritanism reminded one constantly of the Old Thirteen—the stocks, the pillory, the ducking-stool enclosure at Hamilton.
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New York was the principal market for Bermuda’s spring vegetables, and Americans provided most of the island’s tourist trade, the Britishness of the place being a principal attraction—travel brochures assured intending visitors that ‘British officers, in all finery, frequently attended Social Functions from their Barracks’.

But it was in the Pacific that American power pressed most insistently upon the British Empire. The American West had been won by the later 1860s, the Pacific shore from Oregon to southern California was ruled and settled by the Americans: but stolidly sence stood, and the two expanding Powers, each with its own style, ethos and method, constantly bumped and circumvented each other in Pacific climes. Let us recreate two episodes, as representative of many more: the reluctant British acquisition of Fiji, the perilous farce of a long-forgotten Anglo-American imbroglio, the Pig War of San Juan.

The Pacific was, in imperialist terms, almost virgin territory. It was littered with a thousand islands, many of them rich in copra, breadfruit or potential labour, many more admirably suited for imperial purposes like sugar plantations, naval bases or penal settlements, and nearly all governed only by picturesque local chiefs of distasteful
custom. The British had been sailing these waters for a century and more, and the further shorts of the Pacific, Hong Kong to New Zealand, had long been familiar with British power. The ocean as a whole, however, seemed destined to become an American preserve. As Dilke wrote in 1868, ‘the power of America is now predominant in the Pacific: the Sandwich Islands are all but annexed, Japan is all but ruled by her, while the occupation of British Columbia is but a matter of time, and a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is already planned’.

To the British the island groups had seemed irrelevant, for they were utterly detached from the great imperial trade routes, and seemed to offer neither threat nor promise to the imperial aspirations. Successive British Governments had declined to assume new responsibilities there, though urged to do so by Australians and New Zealanders, and repeatedly supplicated by island kings and queens. In many parts British missionaries had converted the islanders to Christianity and western civilization, more or less; in many others British traders had been active and influential for generations; but to provide administrations for these remote and infinitesimal communities, to be saddled with the cost of garrisons or the bore of moral responsibility, to take on yet another rivalry with the Americans, was the last thing British Governments had desired. It wa3 not until the late 1860s that a kind of despairing conscience compelled the British Empire towards its first possessions in the American ocean.

The most important island group of Melanesia, and one of the most beautiful, was the archipelago called collectively Fiji. There were at least 300 Fijian islands, about 100 of them inhabited—islands majestic and islands insubstantial, islands deep in forest or bare of all foliage, mountainous islands, flat islands, shimmering half-submerged coral reef islands, islands palm-fringed, surf-washed or soggy with mangrove swamp. A full-blooded sensual beauty was splashed across these scenes, in the evening especially, when the island outlines blurred and melted, when the sea looked an unguent blue and the sun sank in a diffusion of pinks and crimsons; but the rainfall was heavy, too, and Fiji was often steamy and puddly, water dripping from its thatched roofs, gleaming tropical insects crawling
through its grasses, and a mouldy fibrous smell emanating, when the sun came out again, from the drying undergrowth of its woods.

Until recently the Fijians had been polygamous cannibals, and fearfully bloodthirsty. They had no central authority, and recognized no sovereign higher than their own tribal leaders. They fought each other constantly, tribe against tribe, island against island, and they sailed about the archipelago in terrible war canoes, and brandished huge clubs, and danced terrifying war dances, and cooked each other with a more than symbolic pleasure—one mid-century chief claimed to have eaten 999 human beings. Their pagan faith was inextricably enmeshed with sorcery, and expressed itself frightfully: unwanted old people might be buried alive, human sacrifice was common, shipwrecked sailors were assumed to have been discarded by the gods, and were accordingly eaten as a matter of course.

Other Pacific islanders stood understandably in awe of this alarming people, and among Europeans too their reputation was horrific—‘Feejee, or The Cannibal Islands’ is how early navigators habitually described the group. Even so, by the middle of the century a fair number of Europeans had drifted to Fiji. There were peripatetic traders of many nationalities, liberated convicts from Australia, adventurers like the Swede Charles Savage, mercenary commander to the Chief of Mbau, who introduced the Fijians to firearms, or the Irishman Paddy Connell, who was a favourite of the Chief of Rewa, and claimed to have a hundred wives. The first Christian missionaries had arrived in the 1830s (‘Ah well,’ said one eminent cannibal laconically when they told him about hell-fire, ‘it’s a fine thing to have a fire when the weather’s chilly.’) It was they who first put the Fijian language into writing,
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and in a remarkably short time they had converted almost the entire population to the Christian faith, some of them suffering in the task the most absolute form of martyrdom.
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All this made for a rag-bag, cosmopolitan society of aliens: a rakish, under-the-counter, no-questions-asked society, a haven for the beachcomber with the forgotten past, the remittance man, the easy-profit trader, the ‘blackbirder’ supplying plantation labour by methods not very different from slaving—the whole ironically completed by settlements of permanently horrified missionaries, and the by no means incorruptible representatives of the Powers.

Unredeemed squalor characterized the developing conflict between this gallimaufry of foreigners and the confused indigenes. Every kind of venality flourished. Consuls spent half the time making their own fortunes in land speculation, and the other half summoning warships for retributive visits. We read of the American consul drawing up his own land title deeds and officially registering them with himself of Australians acquiring 200,000 acres of land for
£
10,000, of kidnapped natives shipped in from the New Hebrides to work European-owned forms, of claims and counter-claims, swindles and double-crosses—all against the habitual Fijian background of inter-tribal conflict and intrigue. One loses count of the punitive expeditions by which the Powers vainly tried to protect their subjects, or more pertinently their stakes, in these tumultuous islands: events obscure enough even in their time, and now to be dimly recalled only by the sub-headings of old history books—
Americans storm the stronghold of the Waya murderers—French corvette seizes prisoner at Levuka—HMS ‘Challenger’ burns a hostile village up the Rewa river—HMS ‘Dodo’ restores order at Mbau.

But in 1867 there arose a Fijian king who claimed authority over most of the 300 islands. Off the coast of Vita Levu, the largest of the group, there lay a for smaller but much more holy islet, Mbau. This was the ancestral home of Cakobau, who had raised himself by war and conspiracy to be the most powerful of the Fijian chiefs, and who now claimed suzerainty over them all. It was a very queer place. No more than two miles round, and densely foliaged, it rose abruptly to a central hill, and was a kind of shrine or ark of Fijiness. The thatched temples of Fiji paganism still towered above its 
crowded houses and narrow muddy lanes, the great Fiji war-canoes lay ominously upon its beaches, and in the centre of the island stood the ancient killing stone of Mbau, upon which captive enemies of the tribe had traditionally been slaughtered.
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In this sinister and congested place, abetted by American adventurers and encouraged by dim visions of monarchies far away, Cakobau was proclaimed king. They made a crown for him, tin with gold paper and imitation jewels, and they designed a flag, and they encouraged him to sign his proclamations Cakobau R, and issue his own currencies in the royal name. One may still see in the stamp catalogues the postage stamps issued by his authority, with a big CR on them and a crown, in carmine rose and deep yellow-green.