Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum

His son Samuel had good reason to thank his father, for had the good captain stayed in the Royal Navy he might have bequeathed the family a modest house in Hampshire, a few medals and the esteem of the service. As a privateer he had done very much better. When Mauritius – in another ocean altogether – was captured from the French in 1810, family money had been swiftly invested in plantations there too. Just as thirty years earlier Captain Baker had seized the chance to invest in sugar and shipping, now his son was positioning himself to exploit that initial advantage. Eighteen fifteen was an excellent year for Samuel to contemplate such good fortune because no sooner had the war with Napoleon ended than the Navy Estimates were ruthlessly pruned and many a captain was cast up on the beach with thirteen shillings a day, never to be employed again. The banks of white sail that indicated the naval squadrons and their enemies disappeared from the Jamaican horizon like snow in May. Now there was no greater redundancy to be had anywhere on earth than to be a military officer marooned in some ruined West Indies fort, looking out on to an empty ocean. The lizards ran across the rusting cannon and a deep, almost druggy somnolence blurred the passage of one day into another. Lucky the man who had a return passage.

The youthfully cocky Samuel Baker was just such a person. He was not on Jamaica to settle but to inspect. Rum, sunshine and a superfluity of servants made his Christmas agreeable but when the talk turned to how badly the planters were being treated, he had nothing much to say. His hosts were exactly what they said they were – social pariahs. For all the hearty eating and loyal toasts, the embarrassingly vulgar balls and calamitous routs, Jamaican society always had something about it that was skulking and ill-tempered. It came out over the Christmas churchgoing. Church attendance was encouraged for the ‘good’ blacks – the house servants and the superstitious elderly, anyone who did not walk habitually with a cutlass dangling from one hand. They and their beaux dressed in a mockery of their masters’ clothes and paid each other elaborate address at the lych gate – ‘Howd’di do, Missy?’ ‘Am fine, jes’ fine, tankah, Massa’ – all under the noses of their lobster-red owners. Each set of worshippers thought the other incurably stupid.

Baker kept a lock and key on his tongue. His Jamaican hosts saw with approval that he accepted what he found without comment and certainly without any mumping wringing of hands. He was an agreeable young man with a calm mind and a penchant for outdoor activities. He rode well and drank hard. They learned that he had been sent out ‘to improve his health’ and this they easily and cheerfully rephrased. He was there to learn some discipline and discover where his money came from. A secondary reason was undoubtedly to check the accounts – proprietors were commonly robbed blind by their agents. Here too Baker was a quick study. He was polite and non-committal but showed a liking for ledgers. Like his father before him, he had his feet set firmly on the ground. When one day he inherited and became master of the land over which he now rode, things would go on much as before, though perhaps with greater attention to accurate book-keeping. As for his slaves, his attitude to them was hearty and dismissive. Much given to singing, they had recently been taught words to celebrate a distant victory:

Ay! Heyday! Waterloo!

Waterloo! Ho! Ho! Ho!

Only a few months earlier Samuel Baker was a genial and unquestioning young man riding about Bristol with nothing more on his mind than the cut of a boot or a pair of breeches. Now, he was startled to find himself at the rim of civilisation, staring into the dark. He was not in the slightest bit reflective by temperament. All the same, what he was witnessing was life lived at the edge, the junction between everything that was familiar and recoverable; and fathomless ignorance. It was exhilarating to peer into this chasm. When they were in the fields and out of sight of the main house, young Mr Baker’s slaves habitually worked naked. The crop they tended was three times the height of anything he had ever seen in England, just as the spiders their cutlasses disturbed were monsters set beside their English cousins. There was a kind of surrealism about the view from his jalousie window that was Swiftian in its savagery. That sea of black faces and glistening flesh was occasionally traversed by white women in broad hats, on their way by carriage to neighbours in the next parish, there to dawdle the afternoon away in idle conversation. Their speech was heavily inflected by the Creole they used towards their servants.

All this was exciting and there was even an element of delirium about such a crudely obvious society. Lady Nugent, who kept a far better diary than Samuel Baker, was astonished at the number of ‘mulatto levees’ she was obliged to attend. It dawned on her at last who these spiteful and fractious hostesses were – ‘they are all daughters of Members of the Assembly’. Baker kept his counsel. There was one aspect of the Jamaica journey that was impossible to ignore. If he raised his eyes a little, away from the sex with slaves and the endless schooners of rum punch, he could see enticingly blue and green waters stretching all the way home to Bristol. For the first time in a generation, they were free of warfare. The whole great ocean – and every other ocean – would be under British dominion for a hundred years, just as men of his own class and wealth would be the envy and despair of the entire world.

Victory in Europe and undisputed sea power handed Britain a trading advantage that would last out the century. Baker might listen to old Jamaica hands who prophesied doom for the sugar industry and rebellion among the former slaves – both of which things happened all too soon – but when he looked over the heads of his blacks and the rustling canes in which they worked he could see, for himself and his children, possibilities yet to be articulated, in areas far more demanding and profitable. To seize these chances, a man did not need to be university-educated, or, come to that, the scion of a noble house. Dangerous money, bloodstained money, had its own savour. If Jamaica taught him anything, it taught him this.

It happened that the poet Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis had properties adjacent to Baker that he had inherited in 1812. He was visiting Jamaica at exactly the same time. Lewis was a friend of Walter Scott and Byron. He gave his slaves a day’s holiday when he arrived and another when he left. He also declared, to black mystification and the irritation of the overseers, an annual holiday to honour the birthday of the Duchess of York. In Jamaica’s brutal atmosphere Lewis was an effete curiosity. Tainted by his supposed friendship with the abolitionist Wilberforce, ridiculously sentimental in his dealings with his workers, and undermined by his references to friends – mere writers – the planters had never heard of and had no wish to meet, Lewis cut a sorry figure. He rode right round the island and what he saw dismayed him. As soon as he got back to Europe he amended his will, with the intention of ‘protecting’ his black workers. (One of its provisions was that his inheritors should be made to live on Jamaica for three months once every three years, simply to keep abreast of what was happening.) The new will was witnessed one brandy-soaked night in the Villa Diodati by Byron, Shelley and Polidori. True to his intentions, Lewis returned to his properties in 1818. More holidays, more idealistic promises and more contempt from the planters. At the end of this second visit, like many another before him, he contracted yellow fever. He was buried at sea on his way home. He was forty-three.

It was a sad story but a predictable one. The ship’s company that saw Lewis over the side were lucky not to have followed him. Even on Jamaica, in country that had been cultivated for 150 years, there was something impermanent about affairs, something of the stage set. Young Sam Baker came to realise that while there might be honest men on the island, there was no one of any great merit. (Monk Lewis was surely the only man ever to have visited Jamaica who had also shaken Goethe by the hand.) Most of the time was taken up with mere survival. Better to be a good shot and a two-bottle man than any learned gentleman. It was an incurably eighteenth-century point of view and – for a young man with eyes in his head – the society that supported it was dangerously moribund.

But then, as Sam Baker realised, Jamaican men and manners were not there to please but to make people like himself wealthy. It was this, as much as the thick red rum that lubricated every meeting, that proved so intoxicating. Perhaps, in the very crudity of the island’s leading figures, their brutal jollity along with their lack of principles, there was an additional frisson. He was being given a lesson in ruthlessness. The missionaries could say what they liked about the rights of man but how were empires made unless by some cruder, less reflective set of ideas?

Samuel Baker came home and married Miss Dobson, the daughter of another industrious and acquisitive merchant, Thomas Dobson of Enfield in Middlesex. She gave him five children, all named for existing or former members of the family and all raised in a hearty, rumbustious and almost careless way that left them – like their father – not specially well educated but quick. They were also fearless. University, the professions, a parliamentary seat – none of these things was held out to the Baker boys as worthwhile. Samuel Baker intended his sons to be doers, and makers. A generation after he himself stood at his Jamaican windows, looking out on the empty ocean, the world had shrunk, but only a little. The greatest parts of it were still wide open. For a determined and resourceful man there was nothing in it to fear. Life, if it was conducted in the right way, was an adventure. The trick was not to be tied by convention, never to apologise for being rich, always to seize the main chance. The young Bakers knew this by family example. God the Englishman had helped their father do exactly what he wished in life. Samuel Baker, Esq., was the owner of Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire, chairman of his own bank and an honoured member of the board of Great Western Railways. Now it was the children’s turn.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.