Pax Britannica (7 page)

As for the flora and fauna, in many parts the existence of the British Empire had literally changed the face of the earth, by means which to some fundamentalists flew in the face of nature. Ever since Captain Bligh set sail from Tahiti with bread-fruit trees for the West Indies, the British had been busy, like so many fanatic geneticists, taking cuttings, crossing strains or transplanting hopeful hybrids. One of the several rationales of Empire was the theory that its complete range of climate must enable the One Race, beneath the One Flag, to make itself self-sufficient in foodstuffs. John Wilson of
Blackwood’s
Magazine
had observed seventy years before that the sun never set on the British Empire. Now the concept of imperialism was wider still, and the theorists had realized that somewhere in the Empire it was always summer, too, so that the imperial harvest might last the whole year through. Inspired partly
by such stately insights, and partly by the need to live and make a profit, the British had freely experimented with the transfers of crops and animals from one territory to another, sometimes with great success, sometimes disastrously.

The most ubiquitous of these transplantations was the Australian gum-tree—the eucalyptus, which first left Australia in 1854, but which by the 1890s had been scattered across the world. It was supposed to prevent malaria; some thought the smell of its leaves did it, others the drainage of marshy soils by its roots. The British took it everywhere, and especially to India, where they planted it along thousands of miles of roads, around a hundred cantonments, in countless bungalow gardens, until it seemed to have been part of the landscape always, and the grey shine of its leaves appeared only to be a coating of immemorial Indian dust. Another great success was the rubber plant. This the British imported from Brazil to India, and they were the first to make a regular crop of it, the Brazilians having merely tapped the wild tree. They began with plantations in Ceylon, and later transplanted it triumphantly to Malaya, where it transformed the economy and the landscape, too. The British took tropical crops like pineapples, tea, bananas and sugar to newly exploited tropical countries—South Africa, northern Australia, Rhodesia, Nyasaland. They took familiar temperate crops to unfamiliar temperate zones—notably the potato to Nepal, where it probably spread from the garden of the British Resident in Katmandu to become the staple diet of the Sherpas. It was the Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens who introduced tea-cultivation to Sikkim and Assam, and quinine was first grown in India, in 1862, from cuttings from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. English furze and blackberry bushes had overgrown the Atlantic island of St Helena, while weeping willows
from
St Helena, reputedly cuttings from those that shaded Napoleon’s grave, flourished in Australia. The Empire had introduced rice to British Guiana; coconuts to the Bahamas; cinnamon to the Seychelles; lilies to Bermuda; English grass, Kaffir corn, vines, apples, pears and wheat to Australia.

The entire domestic livestock of New Zealand was first shipped to those islands by the British. The only indigenous mammals were
dogs, bats and rats, and the Maoris were originally either vegetarians or cannibals: yet by 1897 there were 2½
sheep, 1½
head of cattle, nearly half a horse and three-tenths of a pig for every human. Most of Fiji’s livestock was also taken there by the British, and in the remote and windswept Falklands Welsh farmers had re-created the sheep-runs of Caernarvonshire and Merioneth. Australia had been stocked with millions of English sheep and cattle, not to speak of blackbirds, and in the 1880s Indian camels had been shipped down there as desert transport: often their Indian or Afghan drivers went with them, and a familiar sight of the Outback was the camel-wagon, heaped high with provisions, with a couple of camels dispiritedly hauling it across the waste, and an oriental in musty draperies huddled on the high driving-seat.
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Camels were also taken to the goldfields of the Cariboo in British Columbia, and some of them were once shipped up the Fraser River by stern-wheeler.

The Indian Army was a great market for Australian and Arab horses—one of the sights of Bombay was the Arab stables, in the Bendhi bazaar, where dealers from the Persian Gulf sold their horses. Frogs and rats followed the Empire to St Helena, Irish donkeys emigrated to South Africa. On Robben Island in Table Bay were deposited, at one time or another, not only lepers, lunatics and convicts, but a herd of English sheep and a colony of English rabbits—nowhere to be found on the mainland of Africa.
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The sporting instincts of the British distributed across the Empire every manner of shootable, huntable and fishable creature—hares, salmon, trout and deer to hunting-grounds as varied as Tasmania, Ceylon and the Andaman Islands. It was the British, in one of their less-publicized works of usefulness, who took the toad to Bermuda.

It multiplied so fast that its progeny became a plague, for sometimes this tinkering with the balance of nature ended disagreeably. The English foxes of Australia persecuted the enchanting lyre-bird and cruelly harassed the koala—the more highly evolved placental mammals, brought by the British, proving more formidable always than the native marsupials. The mongoose, imported to the Caribbean from India to deal with the rats, took to chicken-hunting and became a scourge itself; in Jamaica it attacked lambs, kids, piglets, dogs and cats, exterminated virtually all the game birds, decimated several species of snakes and lizards, practically abolished the tortoises by eating their eggs, and in twenty years totally upset the equilibrium of island life.

In 1859 a consignment of twenty-four wild rabbits arrived from England at a property near Geelong in Victoria. There had already been English rabbits elsewhere in Australia, but they had never spread like the Geelong tribe. Finding itself without natural enemies, and taking to bearing extra litters, the rabbit presently became one of Australia’s horrors, multiplying so appallingly that in many areas it actually seemed likely to defeat the human settlers, and take over for itself. By the 1870s rabbits were all over Victoria. By the 1880s they infested New South Wales. By the 1890s they had stormed right through Queensland almost to the Gulf of Carpentaria, in the extreme north. They ate everything, up to the flowers outside the farmhouse doors. Fences hundreds of miles long were erected in hopeless efforts to check them, and against the meshes thousands of rabbits could often be seen, dashing themselves in horrible frenzy. The New South Wales Government, blaming it all on Victoria, offered a prize of
£
25,000 for an effective remedy, and one grazier was said to have spent
£
40,000 of his own money, before he gave up and left the country. Rabbits were shot, trapped, poisoned with doctored carrots, assaulted by specially imported stoats and weasels: but they increased so fast that one traveller in the 1880s reported they scarcely bothered to move to let his carriage pass. ‘They frisked about in troops, ran after each other on the sands, and
could be seen by hundreds sitting at the entrance to their holes.’ Louis Pasteur suggested introducing chicken cholera, which he had used against rabbits in France, but the Australians fought shy of a virus, and at the end of the century much of Australia was still ravaged or threatened by the rabbit, in a more nightmarish plague than ever the Egyptians invited.
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Diseases were often spread by the energies of Empire. Sometimes the original explorers transferred them. In 1891 Frederick Lugard led a force of some five hundred African soldiers, with wives, children and followers, from the Congo into Uganda. With them he took the sleeping-sickness, never before known in those parts, but so deadly that by 1897 nearly two-thirds of the local population had died of it, and the British still had no idea how to counter it. Almost every year meningitis sailed from Calcutta with the coolie ships for the West Indies, and in return the jigger insect, indigenous to the Americas, found its way from Mombasa across the Indian Ocean to Bombay. Hookworm was taken all over the world by indentured labourers from India. British ships often took cholera to the Far East, hidden away in bottles of holy water from the well Zem Zem, one of the five holy places of the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Saddest of all, in their irrepressible impulse to control, instruct or exploit the simple peoples of the world, the British all too often introduced them to the ailments of the civilized condition. Cancer, appendicitis and tuberculosis appeared for the first time in such elysiums as the South Sea islands. The pleasures of sex were corrupted at last by fears of syphilis and gonorrhea. Stout confident peoples, ready to face any hazard of heat or jungle terror, found themselves impotent before enemies they could not understand. The Eskimos of northern Canada were slaughtered by measles and smallpox. The Maoris of New Zealand, introduced to firearms,
slaughtered each other, the death rate being compounded by ancient laws of blood-revenge. There were thought to be some 70,000 Indians in British Columbia in 1835: by 1897 there were 22,000.

The hierarchy of Britishness was extended. At one end of the Queen’s scale stood the British themselves, casting their shadows across the world. At the other end were the aborigines of the Australian Outback, ravaged by white men’s sicknesses, demoralized by white men’s examples, a people so debased and disinherited by the Pax Britannica that they seemed almost ready to dissolve into the dream-time that was their conception of the afterlife, where the unborn babies danced in the spirits of rocks and springs, or were supervised upon the shores of eternity by that homely governess, the turtle.
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