Begums, Thugs & White Mughals E-Book

Fanny Parkes

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Fanny Parkes lived in India between 1822 and 1846 and was the ideal travel writer -courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her journals trace her transformation from prim memsahib to eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate in her appreciation of Indian culture. Fanny is fascinated by the trial of thugs, the adorning of a Hindu bride and swears by the efficacy of opium on headaches. To read her is to get as close as one can to a true picture of early colonial India -the sacred and the profane, the violent and the beautiful, the straight-laced sahibs and the 'White Mughals' who fell in love with India, married Indian wives and built bridges between the two cultures.

Leseprobe

BEGUMS, THUGS AND WHITE MUGHALS

FANNY PARKES

INTRODUCTION

‘WE ARE RATHER OPPRESSED just now by a lady, Mrs Parkes, who insists on belonging to our camp,’ wrote Fanny Eden in January 1838. ‘She has a husband who always goes mad in the cold season, so she says it is her duty to herself to leave him and travel about. She has been a beauty and has remains of it, and is abundantly fat and lively. At Benares, where we fell in with her she informed us she was an Independent Woman.’

Fanny Eden was the sister of the Governor General, Lord Auckland, and the First Lady of British India. Fanny Parkes was the wife of a mentally unstable junior official in charge of ice making in Allahabad. The different status of the two women made friendship between them impossible, and posterity has been far kinder to the Eden sisters than to Fanny: Emily Eden’s Up the Country has long been regarded as one of the great classics of British Imperial literature and has rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1866; the critic Lord David Cecil went as far as placing the author ‘in the first flight of English women letter writers’. Fanny Eden’s Journals (recently republished as Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals, 1837–1838) are also much read and much reprinted, though they have never had the celebrity of her sister’s work. In comparison Fanny Parkes’ Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque had no second edition, and has only recently re-emerged into print. In contrast to the fame of Emily and Fanny Eden, few have ever heard of Fanny Parkes. Fewer still have read her.

Yet anyone who today reads the work of these three women together can hardly fail but to prefer Parkes’ writing to that of her two more famous contemporaries and rivals. While the Edens are witty and intelligent but waspish, haughty and conceited, Parkes is an enthusiast and an eccentric with a burning love of India that imprints itself on almost every page of her book. From her first arrival in Calcutta, she writes how ‘I was charmed with the climate; the weather was delicious; and … I thought India a most delightful country, and could I have gathered around me the dear ones I had left in England, my happiness would have been complete.’ The initial intuition was only reinforced the longer she stayed in South Asia. In the twenty four years she lived in India, the country never ceased to surprise, intrigue and delight her, and she was never happier than when off on another journey under canvas exploring new parts of the country: ‘Oh! the pleasure,’ she writes, ‘of vagabondizing over India!’

Partly it was the sheer beauty of the country that hypnotised her. Indian men she found ‘remarkably handsome’, while her response to Indian nature was no less admiring: ‘The evenings are cool and refreshing … the foliage of the trees, so luxuriously beautiful and so novel, is to me a source of constant admiration.’ But it was not just the way the place looked. The longer she stayed in India, the more Fanny grew to be fascinated by the culture, history, flowers, trees, religions, languages and peoples of the country, the more she felt possessed by an overpowering urge just to pack her bags and set off and explore: ‘With the Neapolitan saying, “Vedi Napoli, e poi mori,” I beg to differ entirely,’ she wrote, ‘and would rather offer this advice – “See the Taj Mahal, and then – see the Ruins of Delhi.” How much there is to delight the eye in this bright, this beautiful world! Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab [horse], one might be happy for ever in India.’

It is this sheer joy, excitement and even liberation in travel that Fanny Parkes manages so well to communicate. In the same way, it is her wild, devil-may-care enthusiasm, insatiable curiosity and love of the country that immediately engages the reader and carries him or her with Fanny as she bumbles her way across India on her own, wilfully dismissive of the dangers of dacoits or thugs or tigers, learning the sitar, enquiring about the intricacies of Hindu mythology, trying opium, taking down recipes for scented tobacco, talking her way into harems, befriending Maratha princesses and collecting Hindu statuary, fossils, butterflies, zoological specimens preserved in spirits, Indian aphorisms and Persian proverbs – all with an unstoppable, gleeful excitement. Even when she dislikes a particular Indian custom, she often finds herself engaged intellectually. Watching the Churuk Puja, or ‘hook swinging’, when pious Hindus attached hooks into the flesh of their backs and were swung about on ropes hanging from great cranes for the amusement of the crowds below, ‘some in penance for their own sins, some for those of others, richer men, who reward their deputies and thus do penance by proxy’, Fanny wrote that: ‘I was much disgusted, but greatly interested.’

No wonder the Eden sisters turned their noses up at Fanny Parkes, complaining that she clung onto their party, taking advantage of their protection while touring the lawless roads of Northern India and taking the liberty of pitching her tent next to theirs: she was a free spirit and an independent mind in an age of imperial conformity. Behind the jibes of the Eden sisters (‘There is something very horrid and unearthly in all this,’ wrote Fanny Eden on March 17th, ‘nobody ever had a fat attendant spirit before …’) lies a clear uneasiness that ‘Bibi Parkes’ (as they call her) is a woman whom they would like instinctively to look down upon, but who is clearly having more fun – and getting to know India much better – than they are.

The mental gap between the world of the Eden sisters and that of Fanny Parkes widened as time went on. The longer she stayed in India, the more Fanny Parkes became slowly Indianised. At one point in December 1837, after visiting an Indian Rani where Parkes acts as interpreter for the Eden sisters, Parkes urges ‘with considerable vehemence’ that the Eden sisters should conform to Indian custom and accept the symbolic gifts offered to them as they leave, thus pleasing the Rani and avoiding giving offence. The Eden sisters worry that this might be seen as corruption and want to follow Company regulations and refuse the presents. There is a standoff, and eventually the Edens do turn down the gifts so giving huge offence to their host. Already Fanny Parkes is instinctively embracing Indian custom and trying to adapt herself to the Indian scene, trying to avoid rudeness and unpleasantness. The Eden sisters are more worried about what others will think: instinctively they want to play by the imperial rules, to keep within the accepted boundaries.

Parkes’ slow ‘chutnification’ (to use Salman Rushdie’s excellent term) continued long after Parkes left the Eden’s camp. Over the following years, Parkes – the professional memsāhib, herself the daughter of a colonial official (Captain William Archer), who came to India to watch over her colonial administrator husband – was gradually transformed into a fluent Urdu speaker, and spent less and less of her time at her husband’s mofussil posting, and more and more of her time travelling around to visit her Indian friends and assimilating herself to the world she discovered. Aesthetically, for example, she grew slowly to prefer Indian dress to that of the English. At one point watching Id celebrations at the Tāj she notes how ‘crowds of gaily-dressed and most picturesque natives were seen in all directions passing through the avenue of fine trees and by the side of the fountains to the tomb: they added great beauty to the scene, whilst the eye of taste turned away pained and annoyed by the vile round hats and stiff attire of the European gentlemen, and the equally ugly bonnets and stiff and graceless dresses of the English ladies’.

Later, visiting the women in Colonel Gardner’s Khasgunge zenāna, she again raises Indian ways over those of Europe:

[Mulka Begum] walks very gracefully and is as straight as an arrow. In Europe how rarely – how very rarely does a woman walk gracefully! Bound up in stays, the body is as stiff as a lobster in its shell; that snake-like undulating movement – the poetry of motion – is lost, destroyed by the stiffness of the waist and hip, which impedes the free movement of the limbs. A lady in European attire gives me the idea of a German manikin; an Asiatic, in her flowing drapery, recalls the statues of antiquity.

She becomes increasingly unorthodox in her views and can barely believe the philistinism of the Government in Calcutta and recoils in horror when she sees what the English have done to the beautifully inlaid Mughal zenāna apartments in the Agra Fort: ‘Some wretches of European officers – to their disgrace be it said – made this beautiful room a cook-room! and the ceiling, the fine marbles and the inlaid work, are all one mass of blackness and defilement! Perhaps they cooked the sū’ar, the hog, the unclean beast, within the sleeping apartments of Noorahān – the proud, the beautiful Sultana!’

She is even more angry when she hears that the Turkish ‘baths in the apartments below the palace, which most probably belonged to the zenāna, were broken up by the Marquis of Hastings: he committed this sacrilege of the past … [Then] having destroyed the beauty of the baths of the palace, the remaining marble was afterwards sold on account of the Government; most happily the auction brought so small a sum, it put a stop to further depredations’.

Gradually, over the twenty-four years she lived in India, and as her Wanderings took shape, Fanny’s view begin to change. Having assumed at first that good taste was the defining characteristic of European civilisation and especially that of her own people, she finds her assumptions being challenged by what she comes to regard as the rampant philistinism of the English in India, and by the beauty of so much of Indian life, not least its architecture. (In this, incidentally, she would have agreed with Robert Byron who was equally horrified by what the English had done to India a hundred years later: ‘In a country full of good example,’ he wrote, ‘the English have left the mark of the beast.’ He also wrote with horror about ‘how the whole of [British] India is a gigantic conspiracy to make one imagine one is in Balham or Eastbourne … [as for Darjeeling] imagine Bognor or Southend roofed in corrugated iron and reassembled in the form of an Italian hill town …’)

Every bit as bad, in Fanny’s eyes, was the attitude of the British who employed a band at the Tāj so that visiting Company officials could have the opportunity to dance a jig in the marble platform in front of the tomb: ‘Can you imagine anything so detestable?’ she wrote. ‘European ladies and gentlemen dance quadrilles in front of the tomb! I cannot enter the Tāj without feelings of deep devotion: the sacredness of the place, the remembrance of the fallen grandeur of the family of the Emperor, the solemn echoes, the dim light, the beautiful architecture, the exquisite finish and delicacy of the whole… all produce deep and sacred feelings; and I could no more jest or indulge in levity beneath the dome of the Tāj, than I could in my prayers.’ On leaving the enclosure, she writes, movingly: ‘And now adieu! Beautiful Tāj – adieu! In the far, far West I shall rejoice that I have gazed upon your beauty; nor will the memory depart until the lowly tomb of an English gentlewoman closes on my remains.’

Over time, these emotional and aesthetic responses to India slowly consolidated themselves into something more structured, and in due course they profoundly altered Fanny’s political outlook. By the late 1830s she came to be increasingly critical of the East India Company her husband served. In her published work that criticism was by necessity muted, but her allegiances are clear. At a time when many of her contemporaries were calling for the British to annex the ‘degenerate’ Kingdom of Oude (or Avadh as it is more usually spelled today) Fanny was quite clear that, ‘the subjects of his Majesty of Oude are by no means desirous of participating in the blessings of British rule. They are a richer, sleeker, and merrier race than the natives in the territories of the Company.’ She rails against the authorities for failing to reward her friend William Gardner for his gallantry (largely, though she does not say this, because of the degree to which Gardner was believed to have ‘gone native’.) She points out how many have died painful, unnecessary deaths from smallpox as ‘Lord William Bentinck did away with the vaccine department, to save a few rupees; from which economy many have lost their lives.’

At the end of her travels, when Fanny finally looks forward to seeing her family in England again, she turns to a Persian aphorism to express the intensity her feelings: ‘The desire of the garden never leaves the heart of the nightingale.’ Yet when she finally sets foot on English soil again, her return is not a moment for rejoicing but for depression and disappointment: ‘We arrived at six o’clock. May-flowers and sunshine were in my thoughts. [But instead … ] it was bitterly cold walking up from the boat – rain, wind and sleet, mingled together, beat on my face. Everything on landing looked so wretchedly mean, especially the houses, which are built of slate stone, and also slated down the side; it was cold and gloomy … I felt a little disgusted.’

When she arrived home, her mother barely recognised her. It was as if the current of colonisation had somehow been reversed: the coloniser had been colonised. India had changed and transformed Fanny Parkes. She could never be the same again.

* * *

In 1822 when Fanny Parkes arrived in India, British attitudes to the country were undergoing a major transformation.

In the late eighteenth century, the more intelligent of the British in India tended to respond to their adopted country with amazement and fascination. Under the influence of Sir William Jones, the Chief Justice of the new Supreme Court at Calcutta, there was a sudden explosion of interest of what Jones called ‘this wonderful country’. In 1784, Jones had founded an Asiatick Society ‘for inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. Its patron was the most enlightened of all the British Governor Generals, Warren Hastings, who shared the new enthusiasm for Hinduism and who declared ‘in truth I love India a little more than my own country’. Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatick Society became the catalyst for a sudden explosion of interest in Hinduism, as it formed enduring relations with the local Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation. In India, Jones wrote that he had discovered Arcadia. Valmiki was the new Homer, the Ramayana the new Odyssey. The possibilities seemed endless.

Yet in the early years of the nineteenth century, this optimism and excitement began to wane, and senior figures in the Company became openly disdainful of all things Indian. Partly the reasons for this were political. In the eighteenth century the Company was a small, vulnerable coastal power that depended on the goodwill of Indian rulers. Many Indian armies were better equipped and better trained than those of the Company: the armies of Tipu Sultan for example had rifles and canon which were based on the latest French designs, and their artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company’s armies. But by the 1830s the British had become the paramount power in India. For the first time there was a feeling that technologically, economically and politically, the British had nothing to learn from India and much to teach. As with the contemporary US since the fall of the Soviet Union, it did not take long for imperial arrogance to set in.

Religion played a major role too. Perhaps the most powerful of the new breed of hard-line critics of Indian culture was one the Company’s directors, Charles Grant. Grant was among the first of the new Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company Boardroom. Writing that ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions,’ he proposed to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved.’ Within a few years, the missionaries – initially based at the Dutch settlement of Serampore – were beginning to fundamentally change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom as Jones and Hastings believed, but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.

It was at this period too that the first development of ideas of racial purity, of colour and ethnic hierarchy, and the beginnings of straightforward racialism emerged: ideas which would of course reach there most horrifying denouement in the middle years of the twentieth century, but whose roots can be traced to developments in European thought a century earlier, and at least partly to developments in British India.

These new racial attitudes affected all aspects of relations between the British and Indians. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century had produced many ‘White Mughals’ – characters like the British Resident at the Mughal court, Sir David Ochterlony. When in the Indian capital, Ochterlony liked to be addressed by his full Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (Defender of the State) and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman: every evening all thirteen of Ochterlony’s consorts used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a ‘choga and pagri’ while being fanned by servants holding peacock-feather punkhas.

Such people were few and far between by the 1830s, and their way of life was beginning to die out. The Bengal Wills show that it was at this time that the number of Indian wives or bibis being mentioned in wills and inventories begins to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in the 1780–85, the practice went into steep decline. Between 1805–10, bibis appear in only one in every four wills; by 1830 it is one in six; by the middle of the century they have all but disappeared.

Englishmen who had taken on Indian customs began to be objects of surprise even, on occasions, of derision in Calcutta. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was growing ‘ridicule’ of men ‘who allow whiskers to grow and who wear turbans &c in imitation of the Musulmans’. Curries were no longer acceptable dishes for parties, and pyjamas – common dress in eighteenth-century Calcutta and Madras – for the first time became something that an Englishman slept in rather than something he wore during the day. By 1813, Thomas Williamson was writing in The European in India how ‘The hookah, or pipe … was very nearly universally retained among Europeans. Time, however, has retrenched this luxury so much, that not one in three now smokes.’ Soon the hookah was to go the way of the bibi: into extinction.

Fanny stood in the middle of this process of change – this slow alienation of the British from the India they ruled – and was one of the last of the generation who was able to express unequivocal admiration for India. Even so her attitudes were subject to criticism from her peers. On her travels, she found that extreme Victorian religiosity was already beginning to make itself felt, and that attitudes were changing: ‘Methodism is gaining ground very fast in Cawnpore,’ she records. ‘Young ladies sometimes profess to believe it is highly incorrect to go to balls, plays, races, or to any party where it is possible there may be a quadrille. A number of the officers also profess these opinions, and set themselves up as new lights.’ In Calcutta she finds many of her contemporaries were ‘determined to be critical’ of anything Indian. When she visits an old Princess who was a cousin of the Gardners in the zenāna of the Red Fort in Delhi, British opposition to Fanny’s sympathies comes out into the open. She lets slip that she is clearly regarded as suspect by the British in Delhi for mixing with (or even taking an interest in) the sad, impoverished descendants of the Great Mughals, and fires back at the criticism, both of her and her Mughal hosts:

‘I heard that I was much blamed for visiting the princess … Look at the poverty, the wretched poverty of these descendants of the emperors! In former times strings of pearls and valuable jewels were placed on the necks of departing visitors. When the Princess Hyāt-ool-Nissa Begum in her fallen fortunes put the necklace of freshly-gathered white jasmine flowers over my head, I bowed with as much respect as if she had been the queen of the universe. Others may look upon these people with contempt, I cannot; look at what they are, what they have been!

‘One day a gentleman, speaking to me of the extravagance of one of the young princes, mentioned that he was always in debt, he could never live upon his allowance. The allowance of the prince was Rs 12 a month! – not more than the wages of a head servant.

‘With respect to my visit, I felt it hard to be judged by people who were ignorant of my being the friend of the relatives of those whom I visited in the zenāna. People who themselves had, perhaps, no curiosity respecting native life and manners, and who, even if they had the curiosity, might have been utterly unable to gratify it unless by an introduction which they were probably unable to obtain.’

With such criticism buzzing around her, it is hardly surprising that Fanny took refuge and found friendship among an older generation of Indianised Europeans, men who had to some extent crossed cultures in exactly the way that she was now beginning to do.

In Calcutta, she immediately fell for the dashing French General Allard, a Sergeant Major of Joseph Bonaparte’s bodyguard, who left St Tropez and ended up commanding two Regiments of dragoons and lancers for the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, marrying a beautiful Kashmiri girl and more or less becoming a Sikh himself. ‘He is the most picturesque person imaginable,’ wrote Fanny after meeting him. ‘His long forked beard, divided in the centre, hangs down on either side his face; at dinner time he passes one end of his beard over one ear, and the other end over the other ear. I was much delighted with the General: he asked me to visit him in Lahore, an invitation I told him I would accept with great pleasure, should I ever visit the hills, and he told me he would send an escort for me.’

Fanny forged a deeper relationship still with William Linnaeus Gardner, perhaps the single most intriguing character in Fanny’s entire book. Gardner was born into a prominent American loyalist family on the banks of the Hudson. He had fled America after the Patriot victory in the War of Independence, and finished his education in France and Holland, before sailing to India to make his fortune. There he inherited his father’s peerage, married a beautiful Mughal Princess of Cambay and, having fought for many years as a mercenary under a variety of Indian rulers, he eventually resumed his allegiance to the British Crown and formed his own irregular regiment, Gardner’s Horse.

Gardner was very much a family man, and in his private correspondence, now in the India Office Library, he talks proudly of his multi-racial family: ‘Man must have a companion,’ he wrote to his cousin, ‘and the older I get the more I am confirmed in this. An old age without something to love, and nourish and nurse you, must be cold and uncomfortable. The Begum and I, from twenty-two years constant contact, have smoothed off each other’s asperities and roll on peaceably and contentedly. Now I hope both my boys will get me lots of grandchildren, for I find the grandpapa is the greatest favourite they have. The shouts of joy when I return after an absence of any time can be heard for a mile. My house is filled with Brats, and the very thinking of them, from blue eyes and fair hair to ebony and wool makes me quite anxious to get back again … There’s no accounting for taste but I have more relish in playing with the little brats than for the First Society in the World … New books, a garden, a spade, nobody to obey, pyjamas, grandchildren, tranquillity: this is the summit of happiness, not only in the East but the West too.’

Gardner’s son James continued the family tradition by marrying Mulka Begum, who was the niece of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shāh as well as being the sister-in-law of the Nawāb of Avadh, and together they fathered an Anglo-Mughal dynasty, half of whose members were Muslim and half Christian; indeed some of them, such as James Jehangir Shikoh Gardner, seem to have been both at the same time. Even those Gardners who were straightforwardly Christian had alternative Muslim names: thus the Revd Bartholomew Gardner could also be addressed as Sabr, under which name he was a notable Urdu and Persian poet, shedding his clerical dress in favour of Avadhi pyjamas to declaim his achingly beautiful love poems at Lucknavi mushairas.

Fanny’s description of her visit to Gardner’s jagir, his estate, at Khāsganj, her detailed exposition of how an English nobleman lived in a culturally hybrid house with a Mughal zenāna, Mughal customs and mixed European and Mughal cuisine, and her account of Gardner’s strange Anglo-Mughal wedding celebrations, is the most fascinating section of her travel book, a unique record of an attractively multicultural world that was soon to vanish. Indeed Fanny was clearly a little in love with the dashing Colonel: ‘He must have been, and is, very handsome; such a high caste man! How he came to marry his Begum I know not. What a romance his love must have been! I wish I had his portrait, just as he now appears, so dignified and interesting. His partiality flatters me greatly!’

Even at this stage Gardner, though clearly a survivor – even a museum piece from a previous age – was nevertheless not alone in his tastes and sympathies. At the wedding of the Colonel’s granddaughter, Fanny describes how the European guests, like their host, were all in Mughal dress. Later, ‘two English gentlemen, who were fond of native life, and fascinated with Khāsganj, requested me to mention to Colonel Gardner their wish to become of his family; I did so.’ It was the last gasp maybe, but the old inter-cultural hybridity was not yet completely finished.

William Gardner died on his Khāsganj estate on the 29th July 1835, at the age of sixty-five. His Begum, whose dark eyes he had first glimpsed through the chinks of a curtain in Surat thirty-eight years earlier, could not live without him. According to Fanny’s account:

‘My beloved friend Colonel Gardner … was buried, according to his desire, near the [domed Mughal] tomb of his son Allan. From the time of his death the poor Begum pined and sank daily; just as he said she complained not, but she took his death to heart; she died one month and two days after his decease. Native ladies have a number of titles; her death, names and titles were thus announced in the papers: “On the 31st August, at her Residence at Khāsganj. Her Highness Furzund Azeza Azubdeh-tool Arrakeen Umdehtool Assateen Nawāb Mah Munzil ool Nissa Begum Dehlmi, relict of the late Colonel William Linnaeus Gardner. The sound of Nakaras and Dumanas [kettle drums and trumpets] have ceased.”’

The following year Fanny returned, broken-hearted, and paid her respects at the grave of her beloved friend: ‘I knelt at the grave of my kind, kind friend and wept and prayed in deep affliction.’

The family never recovered the position they held under William. Despite possessing a pukka peerage, the Barony of Uttoxeter, over time they squandered their wealth, became poorer and poorer and more and more provincial Indian, gradually losing touch with their aristocratic English relations. The penultimate Vicereine, Lady Halifax, had Gardner blood and records in her memoirs that she was a little surprised when alighting from the Viceregal train on her way up to Simla, to see the station master of Kalka break through the ceremonial guard and fight his way up to the red carpet. Shouldering his way through the ranks of aides and the viceregal retinue, he addressed Her Excellency the Vicereine:

‘Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘my name is Gardner.’

‘Of course,’ replied Lady Halifax, somewhat to the astonishment of the viceregal entourage. ‘We are therefore cousins.’

The Gardner dynasty, incidentally, still survives near Lucknow, today one of the most violent and backward parts of India. The present Lord Gardner, who has never been to England and speaks only faltering English, contents himself with farming his Indian acres and enjoying the prestige of being the village wrestling champion. Until he recently missed his chance, he threatened every so often to return ‘home’ and take up his seat in the House of Lords.

* * *

Fanny enjoyed travel books, and mentions those of several of her male contemporaries in her text. She was well aware that her sex made her vulnerable and so deprived her of opportunities open to them; but she also knew that she had one distinct advantage where she could trump her male rivals: her access to Indian zenānas. No Englishman could go into the quarters of Indian women, and Fanny was determined to make the most of the opportunity and to report from beyond a frontier that her rivals could not cross.

In Calcutta, in Lucknow, at Khāsganj and in Delhi, Fanny repeatedly visits the women of different harems and reports about the life, the pleasures and the sorrows of the women she encounters there. One women in particular she befriends, Bāiza Bāī, the dowager Maratha queen of Gwalior who had been deposed by her son and sent into exile at Fatehgar in British territory not far from Cawnpore.

Fanny found a common love of riding with the Queen, and describes learning to ride Maratha style, while trying to teach Bāzai Bāī’s women how to ride side-saddle. Always impatient with Western notions of feminine decorum, Fanny records how ‘I thought of Queen Elizabeth, and her stupidity in changing the style of riding for women’.

Far from fantasising the sensual pleasures to be had in the Eastern harem, as was the wont of many of the male painters and writers of her time, Fanny reports on her perceptions of the reality of the lives of Indian women, and especially the restrictions which she felt women in both East and West suffered in common: ‘We spoke of the severity of the laws of England with respect to married women, how completely by law they are the slaves of their husbands, and how little hope there is of redress.’ It is at such points that Fanny’s Wanderings becomes an explicitly feminist text. In fact it is one of the great pleasures of the book that the more Fanny wanders, free of her husband, the more outspoken, sympathetic and independent she becomes.

If Fanny was able to break some contemporary stereotypes about the life led by the inhabitants of Indian zenānas, she was less perceptive with her passages on Thuggee: the strangling and robbery of travellers by what the British came to believe was an Indian-wide brotherhood of Kali worshippers. Fanny devotes a great deal of space to the sensational reports then being circulated in the British press about the prevalence of thugs who were said to take the lives of literally tens of thousands of travellers every year. Today few would dispute that merchants and pilgrim bands were indeed very vulnerable to attack and robbery during this period; but most modern historians now believe that the British officials put in charge of the ‘Suppression of Thuggee’ hugely exaggerated the scale of the problem and created a mythical All-India Thug Conspiracy where in reality there were only scattered groups of robbers and impoverished highwaymen. Some historians also allege that the British used the suppression of Thuggee as an excuse and a justification for widening their area of rule: it was no coincidence that James Sleeman, the man who led the British campaign against the Thugs, was also the man who wrote most insistently for the annexation of the Kingdom of Avadh.

Yet even here, while clearly fascinated by the threat and spectacle of thuggee, and excited by the idea of a conspiracy of sacred stranglers, Fanny sounds a note of caution, remarking on hearing about the mass execution of a group of twenty-five thugs that, ‘it cannot but be lamented that the course of justice is so slow; as these men, who were this day executed, have been in prison more than eight years for want of sufficient evidence’. So saying, she leaves a question hanging in the air. If the thugs were so guilty, how come there was so little evidence? It was certainly an apposite query. In normal circumstances, courts in India did not accept the statements of informers who turned ‘King’s Evidence’ on their fellow captives; but in the case of thugs, the colonial laws were altered to allow the conviction of thugs on evidence which would in other circumstances be regarded as wholly suspect and inadequate. The result was that accused thugs hoping for a pardon would produce lengthy and dramatic testimonials, giving evidence against scores of men they alleged to be former colleagues. The parallels with the Salem witch trial are obvious – and alarming.

The same Evangelical Victorian colonial attitudes that wished to sell the Tāj Mahal for marble, and demolish the monuments of Agra, was also the world that dreamed up India-wide conspiracies involving vicious blood-thirsty thugs. It was not a world where Indian and English could cohabit on any terms of equality, and Fanny Parkes was one of the last English writers to believe – or even to want to believe – that mutually respectful relationships were possible and even desirable. The inevitable clash came in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the East India Company’s own troops finally rose in rebellion, joined in much of North India by great swathes of the civilian population. Nowhere was this more the case than in the supposedly ‘degenerate’ and ‘effeminate’ towns of Mughal Delhi and Lucknow, where the British only defeated the rebels with the very greatest difficulty and with unimaginable casualties on both sides.

The world beloved of William Gardner and General Allard, and indeed of Fanny herself, was swept away by the Mutiny. During the fighting, Gardner’s Anglo-Indian descendants, like those of all the other White Mughals, were forced to make a final choice between one or other of the two sides – though for many the choice was made for them. After an attack on their property, the Gardners were forced to take refuge first in Aligarh then in the Fort of Agra, and so also ended up on the side of the British – though given a free hand they might just as easily have lined up behind their Mughal cousins in Delhi and Lucknow.

Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was. With the British victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that followed, the entire top rank of the Mughal aristocracy was swept away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India; at the same time the wholesale arrival of the memsāhibs ended all open sexual contact between the two nations. White Mughals like Ochterlony and Gardner died out, and their very existence was later delicately erased from embarrassed Victorian history books. Only now is their existence beginning to be unearthed. Moreover, at a time when respectable journalists and academics are again talking of the Clash of Civilisations, and when East and West, Islam and Christianity are again engaged in a major confrontation, Fanny’s record of this fragile hybrid world has never been more important.

* * *

At the time of her travels, Fanny Parkes was criticised by her contemporaries for ‘going native’, for her over-developed sympathies for the cultures, religions and peoples of North India. Today she is under assault from the opposite direction.

Following the success of Edward Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism, a school of criticism has attempted to apply Said’s ideas to the whole range of colonial writings and art. Some of these applications have proved more suitable than others, and there sometimes seems to be an assumption at work in academia – especially in the US – that all writings of the colonial period exhibit the same sets of prejudices: a monolithic, modern, academic Occidentalism which seems to match uncannily the monolithic stereotypes perceived in the original Orientalism.

Fanny has not escaped this academic pigeon-holing, and has recently been the subject of two academic articles which would have her implicated in the project of gathering ‘Colonial knowledge’ and ‘imbricated with the project of Orientalism’ – in other words an unwitting outrider of colonialism, attempting to ‘appropriate’ Indian learning and demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by ‘imagining’ India as decayed and degenerate, fit only to be colonised and ‘civilised’. Anyone who reads Fanny’s writing with an open mind cannot but see this as a wilful misreading of the whole thrust of her text, an attempt to fit her book into a mould which it simply does not fit. There are many writers of the period to which such strictures could be applied, but it seems misguided in the extreme to see Parkes as any sort of gung-ho colonialist. Fanny was a passionate lover of India and, though a woman of her time, in her writing and her travels did her best to understand and build bridges across the colonial divide.

As Colin Thubron has pointed out, ‘To define the genre [of travel writing] as an act of domination – rather than of understanding, respect or even catharsis – is simplistic. If even the attempt to understand is seen as aggression or appropriation, then all human contact declines into paranoia.’ The point is well made, and the attacks made on Fanny highlight the problem with so much that has been written about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India: the temptation felt by so many critics to project back onto it the stereotypes of Victorian and Edwardian behaviour and attitudes with which we are so familiar.

Yet these attitudes were clearly at odds with the actual fears and hopes, anxieties and aspirations of many of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Company officials and their Indian wives. Their writings can be read with the greatest of ease in books such as Fanny Parkes’, and in the fifty miles of East India Company documents and letters stored in the India Office Library in London. It is as if Victorians succeeded in colonising not just India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo-British encounter.

The travel book, by its very nature, records the transitory moment: as Thubron puts it, a good travel book ‘catches the moment on the wing, and stops it in Time’. Fanny Parkes’ wonderful book is an important historical text for its record of the last moments of this very attractive (and largely forgotten) moment of cultural and sexual interaction, of crossover ‘chutnification’. The world described by Fanny – especially the syncretic culture of Lucknow and Delhi, and its satellite at Khāsganj – was far more hybrid, and had far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history books written in Britain before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography of post-Independence India. It was a world where British mercenaries married Mughal princesses and where Anglo-Indian women entered the harems of Nawabi Avadh, where Muslims attended Hindu ceremonies and vice versa.

This edition of Fanny Parkes’ writing represents my own personal selection of her work, but I hope it conveys the flavour of her writing and the largely forgotten world she so loved and enjoyed.

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Pages Yard, 17th September 2002

PUBLISHER’SNOTE

To make the book more manageable, we have made a number of changes to the text. The original edition, published in 1850 as Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, ran to over eight hundred pages. Several passages have been omitted, and are marked by ellipses within square brackets – [ … ] The original edition was also riddled with inconsistent spellings, both of place names and Indian words. These have been standardized so that they correspond with the newly-created glossary and map.

To give meaning to the prices mentioned, 1 rupee in Fanny’s day would have been worth roughly £6 today.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Illustrations

Glossary

Map

Dedication

Invocation

IDeparture from England

IICarnicobar

IIILife in India

IVResidence in Calcutta

VResidence in Calcutta

VIResidence in Calcutta

VIIDeparture from the Presidency

VIIILife in the Mofussil

IXResidence at Allahabad

XLife in the Zenāna

XIResidence at Prāg

XIISketches of Allahabad

XIIIRemoval to Cawnpore – Confessions of a Thug

XIVResidence at Cawnpore

XVThe Thug’s Dice – Execution of Eleven Thugs

XVIResidence at Cawnpore – The Dewali

XVIIScenes in Oude

XVIIIRevelations of Life in the Zenāna

XIXThe Return to Allahabad – Execution of twenty-five Thugs

XXScenes at Allahabad

XXILife in the Zenāna

XXIIAdventures in the East

XXIIIThe Great Fair at Allahabad

XXIVThe Nut Log

XXVThe Cholera

XXVIThe Muharram

XXVIIWhite Ants and Cold Mornings for Hunting

XXVIIIPilgrimage to the Tāj

XXIXPilgrimage to the Tāj

XXXThe Tāj Mahal

XXXIPleasant Days at Agra

XXXIIRevelations of Life in the Zenāna

XXXIIILife in the Zenāna and Chīta Hunting

XXXIVFatehpur Sikri and Colonel Gardner

XXXVThe Marriage

XXXVIThe Barāt

XXXVIIThe Chāotree

XXXVIIIThe Mahratta Camp and Zenāna

XXXIXThe Nawāb Hakīm Mehndi and the City of Kannauj

XLThe Mahratta Camp and Scenes in the Zenāna

XLIThe Mahrattas at Allahabad

XLIITufāns in the East

XLIIIFrom Ghazipur to Ballia

XLIVSketches in Bengal – The Sunderbands

XLVThe Famine at Kannauj

XLVIPleasant Days in Camp

XLVIIRuins of Delhi

XLVIIIAncient Delhi – The Zenāna Ghar

XLIXDeparture for the Hills – Landowr

LPicturesque Scenes in the Hills

LILife in the Hills

LIIDeparture from the Hills

LIIIDeparture from Allahabad

LIVArrival in Calcutta – the Madagascar

LVDeparture from St Helena

The Farewell

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Sircār

The Chūrūk Poojaī

The Bengali Woman

The Ice Pits

The Barkandāz

The Darwān

The Gram Grinder

Pedigrees of Colonel William Linnaeus Gardner

GLOSSARY

ābdār water-cooler

amarī seat with canopy for riding on elephant

ānā copper coin

angiya native bodice

angriah pirates, robbers

arak alcoholic drink

atr perfume

ayah lady’s maid

baboo Hindu gentleman, Calcutta merchant

bahangī a stick with ropes, carried on the shoulder, used for carrying baggage

banglā a thatched house

baniyā a shop-keeper

barkandāz a policeman

batta extra pay

bibi a European woman, or the Indian wife of a European man

begum a lady

bihishtī a water-carrier

brahman a member of the priestly caste

burj tower

chaprāsī messenger

chārpāī four-legged bed

chaunrī fly-whisk

chītā hunting cheetah

churī bracelet

dāk mail coach, post service and bungalow

dāndī a boatman

darbār audience hall

darwān porter

darzee a tailor

dastūri payment over and above wages

dhobee a washerman

fakīr a religious beggar

gūnth Himalayan pony

hackery a bullock cart

hakīm a learned man, physician

harkāra running footman

hinnā henna, a dye

huqqa hookah, a water-pipe

howdah a seat on an elephant with no canopy

hākāk stone-cutter

hammām Turkish bath

jagir hereditary income from land

jamadār native officer, head of the running footmen

khānsāmān head table-servant

khas-khas root of a grass

khidmatgār table-servant

khraunchī a native carriage

kimkhwab silk brocade worked in gold and silver

lota a drinking vessel

lugoe to moor, attach

mahout elephant keeper, driver

Mahratta a famous Hindu warrior race

maidān a plain or square

mānjhī master of a boat

mashāl a torch

mashālchi a torch-bearer

mashk a water bag

masjid a mosque

masnad a throne, large cushion

mate assistant servant

mofussil countryside

mohur a gold coin

moonshee an educated Indian

mug people from Chittagong renowned for their cooking skills

mushāira evening of poetry and music

musulmān a Muslim

nāch a traditional Indian dance

nālā a small river, watercourse

nawāb a Nabob, a Muslim title of rank

nilgāi an antelope

omrāh grandees of a Muslim court

pālkee a palanquin

pān leaves of the betel pepper

pankhā a fan

pattū a kind of woollen cloth

pindāri a member of a band of plunderers

pitārā a basket

pukka substantial, permanent

pashmina fine wool shawl

pūtlī a small puppet

roomal a handkerchief

sā’is a groom

sāleb misree a medicine made from orchid root

sarāy a native inn

sawārī retinue of horsemen

shastra Hindu scripture

sholā a plant – aeschynomene paludosa

sipahī an Indian soldier

sircār a superintendent

surma eye make-up, kohl

sati a woman who burns herself on her husband’s funeral, or the act thereof

tamāshā fun, sport, spectacle

tanjan a chair carried by natives

tatti a screen or shutter

tattoo pony

tufān a hurricane

zenāna female apartments

Map of central India showing the region covered by FannyParkes’ travels

To the Memory of

MY BELOVED MOTHER

AT WHOSE REQUEST IT WAS WRITTEN,

THIS NARRATIVE IS DEDICATED:

AND IF ANY OF THE FRIENDS,

WHOSE KIND PARTIALITY HAS INDUCED THEM TO

URGE ITS PUBLICATION, SHOULD THINK I HAVE

DWELT TOO MUCH ON MYSELF, ON MY OWN

THOUGHTS, FEELINGS AND ADVENTURES,

LET THEM REMEMBER THAT THIS JOURNAL

WAS WRITTEN FOR THE AFFECTIONATE EYE

of her

TO WHOM NOTHING COULD BE SO GRATIFYING

AS THE SLIGHTEST INCIDENT CONNECTED

WITH HER BELOVED AND ABSENT CHILD,

[FANNY PARKES]

INVOCATION

Work-perfecting Ganésha! Salāmat.

Ganésh! – Ganésh!

Two-mothered! One-toothed!

Portly-paunched! Elephant-faced Ganésha!

Salām! !

Moon-crowned! Triple-eyed !

Thou who in all affairs claimest precedence in adoration!

Calamity averting Ganésh

Salām! !

Thou who art invoked on the commencement of a journey,

the writing of a book,

Salām! !

Oh ! Ganésh, ‘put not thine ears to sleep!

Encourage me, and then behold my bravery;

Call me your own fox, then will you see me perform

the exploits of a lion!’

‘What fear need he have of the waves of the sea,

who has Noah for a pilot?’

First born of Mahādēo and Parvatī!

God of Prudence and Policy!

Patron of Literature!

Salām! !

May it be said,

‘Ah ! she writes like Ganésh!’

CHAPTER I

DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND

IN APRIL, 1822, Monsieur mon mari took me to Switzerland. For the first time, I quitted England. How beautiful was the Valley of Chamonix! How delightful our expedition on the La Flegère! The guides pronounced it too early in the year to attempt the ascent of Mont Blanc. We quitted the valley with regret, and returned to Geneva: but our plans were frustrated, and our hopes disappointed; for, on reaching the hotel, we found a letter requiring our instant return to England. The Marchioness of Ely, in which we had taken our passage to Bengal, was reported to be ready to sail in a few days: no time was to be lost; we started immediately, travelled night and day incessantly, and arrived, greatly harassed, in town. The illness brought on by the over-fatigue of that journey never quitted me for years. The vessel, however, was merely preparing for her departure, and did not sail until long after.

Happily the pain of separation from the beloved home of my childhood was broken by the necessity of exertion in preparation for the voyage.

June 13th – We went to Gravesend, to see the ship: it was scarcely possible to enter our destined abode, the port stern cabin; so full was it to overflowing – boxes of clothes, hampers of soda water, crates of china and glass – a marvellous confusion! After a time the hampers and boxes were carried below, the furniture cleated and lashed, and some sort of order was established.

We had carefully selected a ship that was not to carry troops: we now found the Ely had been taken up to convey four troops of H. M. 16th Lancers; the remainder of the regiment was to sail in the General Hewitt. Some of our fellow-passengers were on board on the same errand as ourselves.

June 18th – We had lingered with our friends, and had deferred the sad farewell until the last moment: half uncertain if we should be in time to catch the ship in the Downs, we posted to Deal, took refuge at the Three Kings, and had the satisfaction of watching the Marchioness of Ely, and the Winchelsea her companion, as they bore down. At eleven o’clock we went on board, and sailed the next day. There was such a glorious confusion on deck, that those who were novices in military and naval affairs might deem, as they gazed around, it could never subside into anything approaching order. Everyone, however, was saying it would be very different when the ship was at sea; of which, indeed, there was little doubt, for to go on as we were would have been impossible. Off the Isle of Wight the pilot left us to our captain’s guidance; the breeze was favourable; we were sailing so smoothly, there was scarcely any motion. The last farewell tears dropped as I passed the Needles and the coast of Hampshire, whilst memory recalled the happy days I had spent there, and in the Forest, the beautiful Forest!

Such thoughts and feelings it was necessary to throw aside. I joined the party in the cuddy, scrutinised the strange faces, and retired to my cabin, with as solitary a feeling as if my husband and I had been exiles for ever.

The voyage began prosperously; I was satisfied with the captain, with my cabin, with my servant, and happy with my lord and master.

We regretted we had taken our passage in a ship full of troops, and anticipated we should be debarred taking exercise on the quarterdeck, and enjoying ourselves with walk and talk during the fine moonlight nights. In the Ely it appeared as if it would be impossible; were you to attempt it, you would be sure to blunder over some sleeping Lancer. However, the band was on board – some small consolation; and as the society was large, there was more chance of entertainment.

July 1st – Porto Santo looked beautiful, its head enveloped in clouds. The rocky island rises boldly out of the sea; its mountains are very picturesque. The sight of land and white châteaux was quite charming.

I now began to recover from the maladie de mer, and to regain my usual good spirits. Creatures of habit, we soon grew accustomed to the small space. The stern cabin, twelve feet by ten, at first sight appeared most extremely inconvenient; but now it seemed to have enlarged itself, and we were more comfortable. Still sleep would scarcely visit me, until a swinging cot was procured. From that time I slept calmly and quietly, whatever pranks the old Ely might choose to play.

The comfort or discomfort of a voyage greatly depends upon your fellow-passengers. In this respect we were most fortunate; one-half the officers of the 16th Lancers were in the Ely. The old 16th to me were friends; my father, who had been many years in the regiment, was forced to quit it, in consequence of a severe wound he received in action in the Pays Bas, under the command of the Duke of York. My uncle had commanded the gallant regiment in Spain, and other relatives had also been many years with the regiment. Chance had thrown us amongst friends.

Perhaps no friendships are stronger than those formed on board ship, where the tempers and dispositions are so much set forth in their true colours.

[ … ]

July 22nd – What a strange, bustling life! This is baggage day; all the trunks are on deck – such a confusion! I am suffering from maladie de mer; the wind is contrary; we tack and veer most tiresomely; the ship pitches; we cling about like cats, and are at our wits’ end, striving to endure our miseries with patience

The Bristol water is invaluable, the ship water very black, and it smells vilely. I knew not before the value of good water; and, were it not for the shower bath, should be apt to wish myself where Truth is – at the bottom of a well.

Yesterday such a noise arose on deck, it brought me to the scene of action in a minute: ‘Come here! Come here! Look! Look! There they go, like a pack of hounds in full cry!’ I did come, and I did look; and there were some hundred of skipjacks leaping out of the water, and following each other with great rapidity across the head of the ship. When many fish leaped up together, there was such laughing, shouting, pointing, and gazing, from four hundred full-grown people, it was absurd to see how much amusement the poor fish occasioned. I looked alternately at the fish and the people, and laughed at both.

A kind of rash teases me; in these latitudes they call it prickly heat, vow you cannot be healthy without it, and affirm that everyone ought to be glad to have it. So am not I.

Having beaten about the line for a fortnight, with a contrary wind, at length we entertained hopes of crossing it, and letters were received on board from Neptune and Amphitrite, requesting to be supplied with clothes, having lost their own in a gale of wind.

July 30th – Neptune and his lady came on board to acquaint the captain they would visit him in form the next day. The captain wished the god good-night, when instantly the deck was deluged with showers of water from the main-top, while a flaming tar-barrel was thrown overboard, in which Neptune was supposed to have vanished in flame and water.

July 31st – At nine o’clock the private soldiers who were not to be shaved were stationed on the poop with their wives; on the quarterdeck the officers and ladies awaited the arrival of the ocean-god. First in procession marched the band, playing ‘God save the King’; several grotesque figures followed; then came the car of Neptune – a gun-carriage – with such a creature for a coachman! The carriage was drawn by six half-naked seamen, painted to represent tritons, who were chained to the vehicle. We beheld the monarch and his bride, seated in the car, with a lovely girl, whom he called his tender offspring. These ladies were represented by the most brawny, muscular, ugly and powerful fellows in the ship; the letters requesting female attire having procured an abundance of finery. The boatswain’s mate, a powerful man, naked to the waist, with a pasteboard crown upon his head and his speaking-trumpet in his hand, who represented Neptune, descended from his car, and offered the captain two fowls as tropical birds, and a salted fish on the end of a trident, lamenting that the late boisterous weather had prevented his bringing any fresh. A doctor, a barber with a notched razor, a sea-bear and its keeper, closed the procession.

Re-ascending the car, they took their station in front of the poop, and a rope was drawn across the deck to represent the line. Neptune then summoned the colonel-commandant of the Lancers to his presence, who informed him he had before entered his dominions. The major was then conducted, by a fellow calling himself a constable, to the foot of the car: he went up, expecting to be shaved, but the sea god desired him to present his wife to Amphitrite. After the introduction they were both dismissed.

My husband and myself were then summoned: he pleaded having crossed the line before. Neptune said that would not avail, as his lady had entered the small latitudes for the first time. After a laughable discussion, of to be shaved or not to be shaved, we were allowed to retire. The remainder of the passengers were summoned in turn. The sentence of shaving was passed upon all who had not crossed the line, but not carried into execution on the officers of the ship. The crew were shaved and ducked in form, and in all good humour. In the meantime the fire-engine drenched every body on deck, and the officers and passengers amused themselves for hours throwing water over each other from buckets. Imagine four hundred people ducking one another, and you may have some idea of the frolic. In the evening the sailors danced, sang, recited verses, and spliced the main brace (drank grog), until very late and the day ended as jovially as it began. Several times they charmed us with an appropriate song, roared at the utmost pitch of their stentorian lungs, to the tune of ‘There’s na luck about the house’.

We’ll lather away, and shave away,

And lather away so fine,

We always have a shaving day

Whenever we cross the line.

With sorrow I confess to having forgotten the remainder of the ditty, which ended –

There’s nothing half so sweet in life

As crossing of the line.

‘Rule Britannia’ with a subscription for the ruler of the seas, was the finale, leaving everyone perfectly satisfied with his portion of salt water. It was agreed the rites and ceremonies had never been better performed or with greater good humour.

[ … ]

Neptune was accompanied on board by a flying-fish that came in at one of the ports, perhaps to escape from an albicore: a lucky omen. The gentlemen amuse themselves with firing at the albatross, as they fly round and round the vessel; as yet, no damage has been done – the great birds shake their thick plumage, and laugh at the shot.

The favourite game is pitch-and-toss for dollars. Boxing is another method of spending time. Chess and backgammon boards are in high request; when the evenings are not calm enough for a quadrille or a waltz on deck, the passengers retire to the cuddy, to whist or blind hookey, and dollars are brought to table in cases that formerly contained Gamble’s most excellent portable soup! On the very general introduction of caoutchouc into every department of the arts and sciences, some of the principal shipbuilders proposed to form the keels of their vessels of indian-rubber, but abandoned the project apprehending the entire effacement of the equinoctial line.

August 1st