THE

ENGLISHMAN IN INDIA.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Ir was the month of May-a month, as we all know, full of sweet sounds, pleasant sights, and budding joys in England, but in the plains of India a season of heat, glare, and dust, when the earth is baked, and the air on fire. Instead of the song of the thrush, you have the husky note of the crow, who, with open beak, sits protesting against the weather. Instead of the burst of buds and flowers, there is a general drought, and a brown parched world out of doors.

Such a day as this, in Upper India, a young Englishman seated under the punkah,* and within the influence

* Punkah, a large light frame, generally covered with calico and fringed, suspended from the ceiling, and pulled so as to swing backwards and forwards, and agitate the air. In private houses the man who pulls the punkah rope is usually not in the room, but in a passage or virandah, the rope passing through the wall. The night punkah, which secures sleep and banishes musquitoes, has, of late years, contributed much to the health of Europeans in India.

B

of the wetted mats* of fragrant grass, which make the Indian bungalow pleasant enough during the hot winds, was in earnest conversation with a Mahomedan gentleman, a native of Lucknow. After a pause the Mahomedan rose to take leave, the Englishman politely walking through the anteroom to the door, and escorting his guest into the virandah.

As he left the house door the open air struck like the blast from a furnace. The Mahomedan, before he got into his palanquin, made sundry polite salaams to the young magistrate, for that was the Englishman's office, then glancing at his fair complexion and waving brown hair, and pointing to the howling waste beyond, said,

'Did the Almighty ever intend that you English gentlemen should come to live in such a climate as this?'

The question, especially for a Mahomedan, was a natural one. The physical contrast between the climate of India and the English temperament is striking; greater still the distance between the Anglo-Saxon and the Asiatic morale. However, as it has pleased the Almighty to place the men of England in direct sway over some 150 millions of Indian souls, we may believe that it is for no small or temporary object that so great a revolution has taken place. My purpose is to show the gradual development of this great fact, the British Government of India, and to enquire what lessons for the future may be gained from the experience of the past.

* Tatties or mats, of the kus-kus grass, thoroughly wetted and exposed to the wind, will reduce the thermometer some fifteen or twenty degrees.

CHAPTER II.

DISCOVERY OF THE SEA ROAD TO INDIA, BY VASCO DE GAMA.

To understand the early history of British India, we must first, for a few moments, watch the dawn of European power on the coast of Malabar. Foolish people. sometimes look slightingly at trade, forgetting that commerce is the pioneer, not only of civilisation, but even of religion. It was trade that opened out India to Europe. The silks, the ivory, the spices, drugs, and other rich produce, whether of the Indian peninsula, or of the islands in the Indian seas, have for ages past dazzled the merchants of Europe, and led them into communication with the traders of Asia.

Το go back to the sixth century of the Christian era and the reign of the Roman emperor, Justinian. The pious Christian merchant of Alexandria, Cosmas,* describes in those days the ships of Persia laden with the pepper, the cinnamon, the precious gems, and flowered silks of India, covering the seas between the Persian Gulf and the coast of Malabar. For many centuries the Arabs and these Persian fire-worshippers held a monopoly of this Indian trade. The furious zeal with which they eventually took up the narrow bigotry of their false prophet, Mahomed, checked but did not sus

* Surnamed Indico-pleustes, owing to his Indian voyages.

pend the trade between the Persians and the merchant princes of Europe. Arabs and Persians brought the produce of India from the Malabar coast to the Egyptian ports of the Red Sea. Here the Egyptian factors purchased, and transported to Alexandria. To the bazaars of Alexandria flocked the merchants of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, who, buying at high rates, carried their precious wares across the Mediterranean Sea, and dispersed over Europe the produce of India.

But every bale of drugs, silks, and spices, whether sold in the bazaar of Alexandria, or sent away to the warehouses of Italy, Lubeck, Bruges, Antwerp, or London, had been carried on camels, mules, or porters, across the plains of Asia, and the sands of the Desert. Indian goods were rare and costly, owing to the difficulties of land transit, and the monopoly of the Indian sea trade. A skein of silk, in the days of Justinian, brought its weight in gold, and other Eastern produce was dear in proportion. Even in the fifteenth century the prices of Indian goods were enormous. There was first the Arab, then the Egyptian, then the Italian, all these merchants to take each their share of profit, besides inland duties and inland carriage to be paid, before a bag of spice, or bale of silks, could find vent in the European market.

Such was the state of affairs when, on May 20, 1498, three ships of strange rig bore up for Calicut, on the Malabar coast, and cast anchor within sight of the land. It was Vasco de Gama, with his brave Portuguese, who had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and shown the Western World the sea road to India. This was his little fleet. Boldly leaping into his boat, with twelve. stout men, he pulled straight to the shore, and marched off to salute the astonished native chief, or Zamorin, of

Calicut. His reception* was civil, presents were interchanged, and thus direct communication by sea between Europe and India had begun.

The rude shouts of the Portuguese sailors, who welcomed their chief on his return to the fleet, sounded the death knell of the great commercial republics of Genoa and Venice. The trade, which for fourteen hundred years had passed through Italian hands into Europe, was now to diverge. The Portuguese, the Dutch, and eventually the English, were henceforth to carry round the Cape of Good Hope the riches of India. The merchant kings of Venice and Genoa, in the West, were to give way to a grand empire of merchants in the East.

* In 1808, Dr. Claudius Buchanan saw the ruins of the palace of the Zamorin, in which Vasco de Gama was first received. He remarks, with his usual pious and earnest feeling, 'The empire of the Zamorin has passed away; and the empire of his conquerors has passed away; and now imperial Britain exercises dominion. May imperial Britain be prepared to give a good account of her stewardship when it shall be said unto her, "Thou mayest be no longer steward."'