The Tiger Warrior (12 page)

“Cool telescope.” Rebecca had come quietly into the room and was standing beside Jack. He passed it to her, and she peered through it. “That was your great-great-great-grandfather’s,” he said. “He brought it back from India, where he used it in a war in the jungle not far from the Roman site we’re visiting tomorrow morning.”

Rebecca looked at the pictures. “That’s him, isn’t it, and his family? I can see you in him. I can really feel his presence, holding this. Whenever we do school trips to museums, I always want to touch things. I got into a lot of trouble at the Metropolitan Museum once. They don’t have to be great works of art, just little things. They seem to take me back into the past.”

Jack smiled at her. “Look around this room. There are artifacts from almost every expedition I’ve been on. Most of them are little things, just as you say, shards of pottery, worn old coins. But they’re what makes it real for me. When I sit here and write, I always have something in my hands.”

“Uncle Costas says you’re a magpie. He says you’re really a treasure hunter.” She passed back the telescope and traced her finger over the coat of arms carved into the front of the chest, an anchor over a shield with the Latin words
Depressus Extollor
carved underneath.

Jack laughed. “Uncle Costas had better watch what he says.”

“Uncle Costas says that without him, you’d be going nowhere in a rowboat.”

“And without me, Uncle Costas would be sailing a desk to nowhere in some technology park in California.”

“No, he says without you, he’d be on holiday in Hawaii.”

“Ever since we planned the Pacific trip, he’s had Hawaii on the brain. Everything else on the way, Egypt, India, is just a distraction, and he’s tolerating it only because I’m his dive buddy and I save his life occasionally.”

“We’ve already talked about it. He says he’s giving you two days, and then he’s going to ask to be dropped at the nearest international airport. He needs a week before we arrive to get everything set up for the submersible testing.”

“He means he needs a week to test the lounge chairs at Waikiki. He’s just a beach bum.”

At that moment Costas bounded in, wearing a garish flowery shirt over baggy shorts, with wraparound sunglasses pushed up his forehead. “Aloha!”

“Aloha!” Rebecca replied, grinning mischievously at Jack.

“Thought I may as well get ready,” Costas said. “We may not have time to change.”

“I hear you,” Jack said.

Costas spied the object Jack had just finished unwrapping. “An elephant! I was getting withdrawal symptoms.”

Jack passed it over, and Costas held it up carefully to the light. “It’s made of lapis lazuli,” Jack said. “The same stone as that fragment you found at Berenikê. It’s the highest grade too, from the mines in Afghanistan. You can see the sparkle of pyrites in the layers of blue. It’s been handled a lot, played with. It was among my great-great-grandfather’s possessions, given to him when he was a child. He had wanted to give it to his own son, his firstborn, on his second birthday. But that never happened.”

“It’s beautiful,” Rebecca said reverently, taking it from Costas and stroking the trunk. “Can I have it? I mean, can I borrow it and keep it in my cabin? It’s kind of a shame to have it stuffed away in that old chest.”

Costas wagged a finger at Rebecca. “Careful what you say about that chest. It follows him everywhere. It makes him feel like an old sea dog. Whenever he’s got some downtime, he comes and sits with it.”

Hiebermeyer and Aysha came in, and they all sat down on the chairs Jack had arranged in an arc around the chest. Costas peered in the open drawer and gestured at another object inside, an old revolver. “The Wild West?”

Jack gave a wry smile. “Right period, wrong continent. The period we’re talking about, the 1870s, saw major international confrontations—the Franco-Prussian War which nearly destroyed Europe, the Afghan War which brought Britain head-to-head with Russia. But it was also a flashpoint for colonial conflict. Within a few years you’ve got Custer’s Last Stand in America, the Zulu War in South Africa, and jungle rebellion in India. And in each case it’s unclear which side got off best.”

“Your ancestor John Howard,” Aysha said, as Costas carefully lifted the revolver out of the drawer to inspect it more closely. “He was a British army officer?”

Jack nodded. “Now that we’re all here, I want to tell you about him. In 1879 he was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, recently posted out to India as a subaltern in the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners. That was one of the premier regiments in the Indian army, based in Bangalore in south India but used on expeditions all around India and the frontiers. They were surveyors and builders, but they also trained as infantry, so were about the most useful troops around. Each of the ten companies had two British officers and several British NCOs, but the sappers were all Madrasis, including the native officers—the jemadars and subadars— and the native NCOs, the havildars and naiks. The Madrasis were proud men, a warrior caste. For a young British officer, service with a regiment like the Madras Sappers was about the best experience of soldiering you could have. Lieutenants commanded companies and the senior subalterns had the responsibilities a major would have today. All of the Royal Engineers officers had gone through the equivalent of a graduate degree program in engineering before coming out to India.”

“India must have been a shock to the system coming from cold and drizzly England,” Costas said.

Jack shook his head. “Not for Howard. He’d been schooled in England, but he was born in India in 1855 just before the Indian Mutiny, in the final years of the East India Company before the British crown took over. His father had been an indigo planter in Bihar, on the border with the Himalayas and Tibet, and his grandfather had been a colonel in the East India Company army. So India was in his blood. That helps to explain how he survived the jungle conditions of his first active deployment.”

“This place we’re going to,” Costas said.

“After more than two decades of peace following the mutiny, India was heating up,” Jack said. “There was war again in Afghanistan, for the first time in forty years. Most of the Madras Sapper officers were deployed there, but not Howard. The reason was another conflict, a tribal uprising that flared up in 1879 in the jungle of the northern Madras presidency, in the foothills of the Eastern Ghats Mountains along the Godavari River.” Jack pointed at the map above his desk. “Ever since the mutiny, the Indian government had put down any hint of internal uprising with an iron fist. A brigade-sized expedition was dispatched to the jungle, including two companies of sappers. But these revolts were regarded as civil disturbances, so there was little military glory and no medals for officers despite the hard campaigning involved. And this revolt, called the Rampa Rebellion after the local district, dragged on for almost two years, longer than the entire Afghan campaign. Howard was there almost from beginning to end.”

“It must have been pestilential, during the monsoon,” Hiebermeyer said.

Jack nodded. “Rampa had all the extremes of jungle warfare, in common with the jungle campaigns of the following century, in Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam. Malaria was a huge problem. A few years later, the surgeon-major of the Madras Sappers was Ronald Ross, later Sir Ronald Ross, the man who confirmed the link between mosquitoes and malaria. But at the time of the rebellion there was limited understanding of it and the men dropped like flies. And that’s where Howard’s Indian background comes into play. He had some resistance to the fever, and that must have been a factor in his continued deployment. He was the only officer fit enough to do the job.”

Costas pulled back the hammer and rotated the cylinder on the old revolver, a long, elegant piece which had turned a plum color where the blueing on the metal had come away. “Eighteen fifty-one Colt Navy, London make,” he said. “I used to shoot one of these with an uncle of mine in Vermont who was a black powder enthusiast.” He turned the pistol over and traced his fingers over the letters and numbers stamped into the wooden grips. “Army markings?”

“That’s UC, Upper Canada, the letter A for the Frontenac Troop, number fifty,” Jack explained. “This was one of a batch of revolvers bought from Colt’s London factory to arm cavalrymen of the Canadian militia, based in Kingston on Lake Ontario. The surgeon of the Madras Sappers, Dr. Walker, had grown up in Kingston, served in the militia himself and acquired this pistol as surplus in the 1870s when the militia converted to cartridge revolvers. Walker took it to India and gave it to Howard to complement an identical Colt revolver he’d inherited from his father, who used it during the Indian Mutiny. Always best to have a pair of cap-and-ball revolvers, as they took so long to reload.”

“Where’s the other one?”

“Howard took it with him when he disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“One day years later in northern India he packed his bag and left, never to return. No one knows for certain where he went or what happened to him. I’ve been obsessed with it ever since I heard the story as a boy. I used to read Kipling, and accounts of explorers on the Silk Road, and imagine him on some great final adventure. He’s always been there in my mind when I’ve gone off on quests of my own. Now that we’re so close to the jungle, to actually being on his trail, I’d love to get to the bottom of it. But more about that later. Let’s not jump the gun.”

“I’ve found something on the rebellion,” Rebecca said, holding up a notebook with Victorian marblized covers and faded ink handwriting on a label.
“The Rampa Expedition 1879, by John Howard, Lieutenant, R.E.”

“That’s his diary,” Jack said. “It’s the only personal account to survive from the rebellion. Almost everything else I’ve reconstructed from records in the India Office collections in the British Library, from the military and judicial proceedings of the Madras government which oversaw the jungle tracts. The rebellion was overshadowed by the Afghan War, and pretty well lost to history.”

Rebecca carefully opened a page, then began to read.
“The difficulties of surveying really begin when the mapping is being pushed forward into an unknown country, especially if the surveyors are hampered with having to keep with
troops, and their vision frequently obstructed by bad weather”

Jack nodded. “Survey was his specialty. He’d just come out of the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, two years of intensive training. There’s a lot of youthful enthusiasm in the first pages of the diary. But that soon changes.”

Rebecca read another section toward the end of the book.
“The causes of that outbreak have been fully described; the administration was slack; our officers turned a deaf ear to the complaints of an oppressed people, and the ancient spirit which appealed to the sword at length asserted itself, amongst a brave and hearty race of mountaineers. Once that spirit is roused, and we are forced into a campaign in a wild, difficult and malarious tract-no man can say how long the petty warfare will last, or what slumbering elements of disorder will be stirred up against us. All that can be predicted is that the enemy will seldom be seen, that fever will fill the regimental hospitals, and that when peace comes at last, it will be the peace of desolation. All that these hill clans require of us is that we shall protect them in the tranquil enjoyment of the few contracted and simple objects of personal liberty and comfort which constitute the main sources of their happiness”

“Love the language,” Costas murmured.

“That pretty well sums it up,” Jack said. “Years later the Indian nationalist movement tried to make out that the rebellion was part of a general uprising against the British, but that’s revisionist history at its worst. These were jungle people who basically wanted to be left alone. Most of them had never even seen a European face before. Their main contact with the outside world had been with lowland people, with corrupt Indian police constables and with traders who extorted them. There was little economic gain for the British in the jungle and they put less competent officials in charge, a lower grade of district officer who rarely bothered to inspect the tracts themselves. Then the Indian Forestry Act interfered with their traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. But the spark was some petty official in Calcutta failing to exempt the hill peoples from the
abkari
tax on alcohol. The jungle people lived for their toddy, the palm liquor which sustained them through the monsoon months when there was nothing else to do.”

“I see what you mean,” Costas murmured. “Not exactly a glorious war. A long way from the geopolitics of Afghanistan.”

“But war was still war,” Jack said. “Take away grand strategic purpose, and you question far more. And these officers were a long way from the closed-mind, stiff-upper-lip caricature. The Royal Engineers attracted men of high intellect and curiosity. Today they’d be scientists, civil engineers, explorers. Much of what we know about the anthropology and natural history of India comes from what these men did in their spare time. And much of their work was not spent soldiering, but in surveying and mapping, and building roads, bridges, dams, aqueducts and irrigation systems, railways, public monuments, the infrastructure of the nation today. You had to speak the language to operate effectively in India, and many of these officers were gifted linguists, empathetic with their soldiers and the people around them. You can see that in the diary. The tone may seem a little lofty to us today, but guys like Howard saw human beings in their gun sights, not primitive tribals. They were tough soldiers, unswervingly loyal to the British crown, and would kill without hesitation, but they knew they were not always on the moral high ground.”