Pax Britannica (41 page)

In the last three decades of the century much of the Empire was mapped for the first time, generally by soldiers, sometimes by road-builders and railwaymen. No such slabs of empty territory had been so thoroughly surveyed before, and London was the world centre of cartography, just as geographers in most countries reckoned their longtitude from Greenwich. Strategy was the chief impulse of the work. The very first British official maps were of Ireland, and were drawn (in 1653) when the British wished to distribute the lands of rebellious Irishmen among their soldiers and settlers. Ever since the British had been mapping those countries they wished to subdue or occupy, and generally the more determined the local resistance the more thorough the maps. This made for a patchy system. Canada, which was mostly empty, was covered by a hodge-podge of boundary maps, railway maps, exploration maps, geological maps for speculators and sketch maps drawn up by adventurers in the Rockies. In Australia, where there had been virtually no local resistance, there were virtually no topographical maps. India, on the other hand, was very thoroughly mapped—all of it on the scale of ¼” to the mile, most of it on an inch to the mile. South Africa was oddly neglected,
1
but Rhodesia had been well mapped from the start, if only to make sure the gold reefs would be properly located.
Elsewhere in Africa most colonies and protectorates had accurately surveyed frontiers, with less accurate surveys around the chief settlements and along the coastlines, while the interior of the continent remained, for the most part, a smudge on the map, delineated only from guesswork or the imprecise observations of explorers. Kitchener, himself a skilful surveyor, had taken a large mapping mission with him into the Sudan, busy even then surveying a million square miles of potential Empire: but Africa was still the dark continent, and part of the excitement of the New Imperialism was the lure of the uncharted—‘the other side of the moon’, was Salisbury’s simile for the Upper Nile Valley, and the systematic reduction of the Empire to grids and projections was, for the men of those days, a task akin to the mapping of space. Napoleon, surveying the Great Pyramid of Giza, is supposed to have cried to his veterans: ‘Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you!’ The British, almost as soon as they arrived in Egypt, lugged a theodolite to the pyramid’s summit and made it a triangulation point.

They were making a start with tropical medicine. The first school in the world exclusively concerned with the subject was being built that year in Liverpool, home port for the West Africa trade. In many parts of the world the British were the first heralds of the message that cleanliness and health went together, and they were just beginning to understand a few of the hitherto intractable tropical diseases. They knew that beri-beri was caused by rice from which the outer grain layers had been stripped. They knew that leprosy and cholera were bacterial, and that the filaria worm was the cause of elephantiasis. Sir Ronald Ross, in India, was pursuing the theory that malaria was caused by the anopheles mosquito, and Patrick Manson, medical adviser to the Colonial Office, had convinced all but the most rigid devotee of spine pad and siesta that the health hazards of the tropics were seldom due simply to heat.
1

Yet the work that remained to be done was staggering, and perhaps not even the most sanguine New Imperialists really thought they could raise the health standards of the overseas possessions to the level of those at home. The filth and ignorance of so much of the Empire made a mockery of preventive medicine, and it was only in 1897 that the Colonial Office, under Manson’s inspiration, seriously bothered about tropical disease—until then its administrators had gone out heedless of causes and uninformed of cures. The new town of Nairobi, starting absolutely from scratch beside the Uganda Railway, blindly reproduced all the insanitary horrors of the ancient East, hundreds of cramped, dark, unventilated houses just made for disease, evil-smelling and damp with sewage. Literally millions of Indians died of the plague in an average decade: almost every great religious assembly led to an outbreak of cholera, and when, during the Bombay plague of 1897, the police and the Army took over, forcibly clearing houses and establishing sanitary zones, the people rioted in protest. In Malta, where they had not yet discovered that the goat was the carrier of Malta fever, an average of 600 British servicemen went to hospital with the disease each year, and within three years of their arrival in India more than 80 per cent of Europeans were attacked by enteric fever. During the five years it took to build the railway from the Indian Ocean to Umtali, in Rhodesia, nearly 500 Indians and 400 Europeans died: they used to run sweepstakes on the temperatures of the sick, the man with the highest fever winning the pool—if he lived.

The average Empire-builder seemed to accept these miseries fatalistically. A young man called T. E. Fell sailed out to the Gold Coast in the summer of 1897, to take up his duties with the Government, and wrote a series of letters home during the voyage. He is much concerned, poor boy, with the coming torments of the climate. He is sure to get the fever, he says, but Mama is not to worry, because everybody gets it. Still, he does wonder what it will be like, and how long it will last—though dear Mama must remember that

The days pass, though; the weather seems very pleasant; young Mr Fell, though overworked, is quite enjoying himself, and the premonitions of disease grow fewer—he is sure to get it sooner or later, of course, but in the meantime the company is agreeable enough (except for Mrs What’s-Her-Name, who is, ‘altho’ a lady, not my style, large, bouncy, slangy, colonial and drinks cocktails’). By the end of the year he seems to have forgotten about the fever, and writes cheerfully of the small black insects that infest his dinner table: ‘The more I squash the more arrive and each one squashed emits the exact odour of Worcester Sauce, so I am thinking of bringing out a patent.’
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One gets the unfortunate impression, from the records of the time, that the British were more interested in the physical welfare of their own people than of their native subjects. It is true that they proudly claimed to have eliminated famine in India, by irrigation and by better transport. ‘If we had a complete record of the fortunes of an Indian village during the last three hundred years’, wrote Sir T. W. Holdernesse of the Indian Civil Service, ‘we should probably find that its population had ever and anon been blotted out by some terrible drought. A famine in this sense is no longer possible in India.’ But we seem to read more about the health of the British Army overseas, or the British settlers of the temperate zones, than we do of the poor natives, who were generally supposed, perhaps, to be used to it all, or beyond hygienic redemption. Kipling classed the improvement of health among the categories of the White Man’s Burden—

—but generally it was the Christian missionaries who seemed to care most about the bodily well-being of the tropical peoples. There were no women in the colonial services of the Empire. Compassion was not its strong point.

It was a man’s Raj, and it did much of its work simply by virile example—by putting on display the glitter, punch and profit of the scientific civilization. In everything they did the British demonstrated to their simpler subjects the power that was given man by the mastery of technique, whether it be expressed in the range of a Lee-Enfield or the tripling of crops by proper irrigation. Technical formulae, laboratory precision had been introduced for the first time into many aspects of tropical life. The standard Indian opium cake, made at the Government factory near Benares, was defined as ‘Pure opium 70 consistence, poppy petal pancakes,
lewa
of 52.50 consistence, and a powdering of poppy trash’—a prescription soon to be smoked away, by heathen Chinamen in fetid alcoves, into clouds of methodless delight.

The mere sight of the technical civilization was enough to stir a stagnant culture—the very fact of ice-boxes, telephones, telegraph offices, Empire No.1 ‘Incomparable’ Folding Baths. One of the symbolic scenes of Empire was that of the wondering native, confronted for the first time in his life by one of these modern marvels, and thus jolted into the realization that, though his tribal capital might indeed be the centre of the universe, and his native king the Lord of the East, West and Sunrise Peoples, still there might be something to be learnt from the white man after all. We see the aborigines of New South Wales, for instance, stopped in their tracks, as well they might be, by their first glimpse of Sydney’s double-decker steam trams—towering steel vehicles with scalloped awnings, wreathed in smoke from their traction engines. We see the Indians of the Six Nations dazed among the conifers as the coaches of the Canadian Pacific sweep by with a wail of the steam-whistle towards the Pacific. The white-robed Egyptians flutter down to Boulak, the ancient river port of Cairo, to see Mr Cook’s new
steamer,
Rameses
the
Great
,
bolted together from its component parts and launched into the Nile. The baffled Bechuanas, face down on their kopjes, peer to the plains below as the steam engine of the Matabele Expedition starts to chug in the middle of its laager, and the electric bulbs mysteriously flicker and light up in the officers’ mess-tent.

Often such marvels seemed to arrive miraculously packaged direct from the Great White Queen, for the British were specialists in prefabricated structures. The south-east bank of the Mersey at Liverpool was known as the Cast-Iron Shore, because so many prefabricated iron buildings were made there for markets abroad, and the catalogue of Hemming’s, the Bristol ironworks, offered a completely prefabricated hotel, with a veranda, and a substantial Gothic-style church, with tower—a popular item in Australia—at
£
1,000. In Salisbury, Rhodesia, the Senior Judge lived in a prefabricated house of papiermâché boards on wooden beams, imported from England and called the Paper House. It had gables and pleasant verandas, stood on brick piles, and looked comfortable enough, if a little wobbly.

The natives saw this millennium, and it worked. As a random example take the statistics of Ceylon. It had been unified under British rule in 1815, and in the eighty-odd years since then the British had impregnated it with the material signs and values of the West. They had built 2,300 miles of road and 2,900 miles of railway. They had raised the cultivated area from 400,000 acres to 3,200,000, the livestock from 230,000 head to 1.5 million, the post offices from four to 250, the telegraph lines from nil to 1,600 miles, the schools from 170 to 2,900, the school pupils from 2,000 to 170,000, the hospitals from none to 65, the annual tonnage of shipping cleared from 75,000 tons to 7 million. They had opened 12 banks, started 35 periodicals, launched a Government savings scheme with 18,000 depositors and a Post Office Savings Bank with 38,000 depositors.

In the deepest mountain jungles of Ceylon there lived the Rock Veddahs, bow-and-arrow aborigines with straggled hair and
bushy beards, who had never mastered the simplest arts of cultivation, and conducted their frugal barter incognito, leaving their honeycombs on a stone in a clearing, and only returning for their scraps of cotton cloth when there was nobody else in the forest.