Birds of Passage Read online

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  In November 1797 the East India Company offered Lord Edward Clive the Governorship of Madras. An elated Henrietta felt herself to be on the threshold of ‘all sorts of things – like the Arabian Nights’. On April 2nd 1798, Lord Clive, Henrietta, their daughters, Harry and Charly, along with the girls’ governess, the Italian artist Signora Anna Tonelli, embarked on the East Indiaman, the Dover Castle. The Clive sons, Edward and Robert, remained behind in England at school and under the supervision of Henrietta’s brother. An arduous journey to India was made doubly difficult by the fact that England was at war with France. Foul weather and an attempted mutiny on one of the ships in the convoy added to the hardships. In June 1798 the Dover Castle sprang a leak and called in at the Cape of Good Hope for repairs.

  Henrietta delighted in being once again on land and took enormous pleasure in the proliferation of flora and fauna in South Africa. Lady Anne Barnard, an old acquaintance of Henrietta, offers a glimpse of the Clives during this stop-over to India. ‘She [Henrietta] had a mind open to receive pleasure from everything, to please as far as she can, is incapable of offending and will not tire, I am sure, of any situation she is placed in.’ Of Lord Clive, Lady Anne raised a question: ‘… how comes it that they are going at all? People so wealthy – a man apparently so little ambitious! By implication though not by direct words, I had a reason to think the matter was offered to him, and I did not think Administration – any Administration I mean – was so rich in great appointments as to give without the boon being solicited. Perhaps his name is held to be a lucky one to go to India. He seems in good spirits, but says little … we talked of everything but Madras.’

  On reaching Madras on August 21st 1798, the travellers found to their surprise that nothing was as they had expected. Preparations for war were underway against the legendary Tipu Sultan. The engaging, physically fit and strong-willed Colonel Arthur Wellesley of the King’s 33rd Regiment was soon to make his presence known on stage in Madras. Though newly arrived in India, he understood that the Mysore campaign would be extremely risky and that a division of counsel (political as well as military) would impede it. Despite their differences in age and social status, Colonel Wellesley wasted little time in assessing the capabilities of the son of the famous Clive senior. He wrote to his brother, Lord Mornington, the newly appointed Governor General of India in Calcutta, that he found Lord Edward Clive to be ‘a mild moderate man, remarkably reserved, having a bad delivery, and apparently a heavy understanding’. He then amended his description by adding, ‘I doubt whether he is as dull as he appears, or as people think he is.’ A month later in September, Colonel Wellesley followed up his earlier observations in another letter to Lord Mornington saying, ‘Lord Clive opens his mind to me freely upon all subjects. I give him my opinion and talk as I would to Mornington. The truth is he does not want talents, but he is very diffident of himself. Now that he has begun to find out that he has no difficulty in transacting the business of Government, he improves daily, takes more upon himself, and will very shortly have less need for the opinions and abilities of those who have long done the business of the country. A violent or harsh letter from Fort William [Calcutta] would spoil all.’

  With Lord Mornington’s entrance on to the Madras scene on December 31st 1798, Lord Clive was relegated to the role of being Governor in name only for the duration of the war. Pragmatically, he summed up his initial relationship with the Governor General as ‘a Awkward but a right one’. Henrietta was considerably harsher in her assessment of Lord Mornington’s usurpation of centre stage. She described him to her brother as ‘extremely pompous … and bringing his authority to bear on me, and everybody in conversation. Lord Clive likes him very well, but you know he does not mind many things, which I confess, disturb my Welsh Spirit.’ She found it ‘entirely an awkward thing to have a Supremo to come over us’. Likewise, she considered Lord Clive’s loss of authority to be unjust, ‘a great mortification’, even though her status in society was not affected, since Lady Mornington had not accompanied her husband to India. Regarding the people of the Madras social scene as ‘not much enlightened’, she declared herself to be ‘most outrageously civil’ in letters to her brother and Lady Douglas.

  Indeed, to Henrietta’s disappointment, everything about Madras soon became military: ‘There is nothing but business and solitude,’ she noted. She was not alone, however, in her eagerness for things Oriental. Colonel Wellesley’s own scholarly bent caused him to pursue his continuing studies of India and the Persian language. He had even gone into further debt on his voyage out to add to his library of books on the East. Napoleon Bonaparte’s fervour for the glory of the Orient caused him to include scholars and artists in his expedition to Egypt in June 1798. It was there, en route to aid Tipu Sultan in overthrowing ‘the iron yoke of England’, that he lost his entire fleet to Admiral Horatio Nelson at Aboukir Bay on August 1st 1798. News of Bonaparte’s defeat did not reach Madras until October. If aid had arrived from France, Tipu Sultan would have been an even more dangerous adversary. Fears that the French might have captured the overland trading route, much used by the British for supplies and mail, prompted Henrietta to quip: ‘perhaps Bonaparte has got some of my manuscripts.’

  Not willing to be upstaged by ‘the fidgety’, Oxford-educated Lord Mornington, Henrietta asserted her own scholarly identity by immediately ‘building a room in the garden and a laboratory for all sorts of odd rocks and works’. Her pursuit of Persian, the language of Indian courts, was well underway, as she had begun her studies shortly after learning that she would travel to India. In Madras she wasted no time in acquiring two tutors: one for Persian and the other for spoken Hindustani. She also carried on a correspondence with young Captain Malcolm assigned to the British diplomatic service in Persia.

  Having early shouldered the responsibility for her eclectic education, Henrietta was deeply committed to overseeing the instruction of her daughters. In Henrietta’s world, women were not allowed many legal rights; nor could they be educated at universities. Perhaps Henrietta gave her girls boys’ names because on one level she wanted to treat them as such. More likely, she simply thought it fun to do so. In India she encouraged Harry and Charly to be open towards the astonishing world unfolding around them and saw to it that they experienced as many levels of Indian culture as possible: meeting Armenian merchants, Muslim Nawabs and Hindu Maharajahs; attending a variety of religious festivals, as well as nautchs; visiting markets, mosques, temples, forts, palaces and zenanas. In their daily lessons they studied Indian plants, rocks and shells, as well as animals, birds and butterflies. Hindustani and Persian became part of their curriculum. The girls were also tutored in conversational Italian and read Dante. They played harp and pianoforte and were skilful at drawing. Even in such tasks as writing letters or keeping a journal, Henrietta did not have written examples set for them to follow. Indeed, her own independent attitude must have served continuously as a lesson to them. Above all else, Henrietta emboldened Harry and Charly to make decisions. Lord Clive wrote to his brother-in-law, expressing his satisfaction with their education, ‘The girls will not, I believe, suffer any loss of accomplishment from residing in India except in their dancing.’

  As a woman of her time, Henrietta was all too aware of the discrepancies in what was allowed for English men but unacceptable for English women. It was her wont to point out such inequalities. In a letter written to Lord Clive after he had assumed in full his assignment as Governor of Madras and she was on her magnificent trek, she noted: ‘If you want collectors or collectoresses I think I should like to extremely … and grab over strange countries, particularly near Hyderabad. I should delight in it above all things. It is hard that we poor females are not to get anything in this Asiatic world.’

  Henrietta’s dedication in seeking to know India was that of a highly motivated and disciplined amateur. From England she brought with her Robert Orme’s A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Ind
ostan from the year MDCCXLV, whose detailed accounts of Lord Robert Clive’s courageous acts in India underscored Henrietta’s visits to the scenes of his triumphs. Thomas Macaulay characterised Orme’s accounts as ‘minute even to tediousness’, but nonetheless had a high regard for his writings. The more charmingly readable Madame de Sévigné’s Lettres also went with Henrietta to India. In her will, Henrietta would later bequeath her copy of Lettres to Charly. For her Persian studies, Henrietta acquired in India some of the lines of the Diwan written by one of the greatest Sufi poets, Khaja Shamsuddin Hafiz, hoping ‘in all due time to be able to read Hafiz and all the learned books’.

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  On May 4th 1799 at 1:30 in the oppressive South Indian afternoon heat, the English Army attacked Seringapatam, the island capital of Tipu Sultan. The rains had not yet come and the waters of the River Cauvery (Kaveri) were low, allowing relatively easy access to the walls of the city. Some two hundred and fifty miles away from Seringapatam on the Coromandel Coast at Fort St George, Madras, Henrietta learned of the ‘Tyger of Mysore’s’ death and the end of what she termed ‘this abominable war’. With a keen interest, she followed the descriptions of the treasures found within Tipu’s Daria Daulat palace which included: sumptuous Persian carpets, extraordinary jewels, a golden throne, a book in which Tipu recorded his imaginative dreams of white elephants and emeralds, his gigantic collection of Persian books on diverse topics and engraved swords and guns. Decorative patterns of tiger stripes and jewelled tiger heads were on everything. There was as well a wooden mechanical tiger which with a turn of a handle made sounds of roaring, as a screaming Englishman feebly lifted an arm to protect himself.

  Having been confined to Madras for the duration of the final Mysore Campaign, Henrietta believed that now she would be able to realise her passion to wander amidst South India’s exotic landscapes, religions and peoples. Immediately following the battle, plans had been made for Lord Mornington and Lord Clive to travel to Seringapatam, with Henrietta to follow somewhat later. Even though their luggage had been sent ahead, Lord Mornington, ever fearful for his health, decided at the last minute that the party would remain in Madras for the victory celebration and forego the trip to Seringapatam altogether.

  Refusing to relinquish her schemes to travel, Henrietta simply bided her time, waiting for a more favourable opportunity. Undaunted by the difficulties of journeying in the interior of South India, Henrietta perused the maps and descriptions used by the military. Travel conditions were demanding; roads (when available) were primitive; bridges were non-existent. Polygars and unfriendly rogue military bands, such as that of Dhoondiah, threatened. There was, as well, a significant risk of contracting diseases such as dysentery, elephantiasis, cholera, smallpox, malaria, or other indigenous fevers.

  After spending eight months in Madras, the overbearing Lord Mornington left for Calcutta in September 1799. He was to say that he and Lord Clive had lived at Madras as brothers. Lord Clive now assumed his responsibilities in full as Governor of Madras, an area roughly the size of Great Britain. He had weathered the initial pitfalls related to his lack of experience in government affairs and had gained in self-confidence. Indeed, Lord Clive found that India afforded him the opportunity to develop his own capabilities.

  Although chafing at her confinement, Henrietta continuously offered her advice and support to her husband. She described hers and her husband’s relationship to her brother as being ‘perfectly comfortable in our selves’. Yet there remained an undercurrent of sadness as she noted that in Madras ‘our lives are so very dark and so really triste’. Exacerbated by her profound sense of ‘the terrible distance from one another’, in what she termed ‘the first year of our banishment’ she confided to her brother that ‘I sit alone and think like this and I make myself quite uncomfortable’. A miniature painted on ivory during his Madras sojourn (1798–1803) depicted Lord Edward Clive as a sturdy middle-aged man with a pleasant face wearing a uniform associated with his job. He appears to be something of a late bloomer and at no time a character of such dynamic depth and radiance as Henrietta. He did not join Henrietta in her South India travels, but remained in Madras to take care of his duties there.

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  With a host of furious fancies

  Whereof I am commander,

  With a burning spear and a horse of air

  To the wilderness I wander.

  ‘Tom O’Bedlam’, Popular Ballads, c.1620

  In December 1799, shortly before her departure on her South India journey, ominous news of her brother’s illness arrived with the East Indiaman, the Eastern Magnificence. In spite of this, however, Henrietta got off to a good start on March 4th 1800. She was an adaptive traveller who appeared to thrive on the unpredictability of India. To avoid the heat Henrietta’s party was on its way each morning by four or four-thirty. Experiencing the before-sunrise freshness, the heat of midday and the after-sunset drop in temperature, she came to know the smells and tastes of India as never before. Depending on the terrain and the weather, she covered up to twenty-one miles a day. Most nights Henrietta camped in a tent; sometimes she stayed in an East India Company Collector’s house or in a bungalow belonging to a military officer. She visited the forts made famous by Clive of India – Arcot, Vellore and Trichinopoly; she crossed the ghauts and the Guzelhutty Pass. On the road, Henrietta was an active participant: controlling her pet lion with a whip; driving her bandy over rough surfaces; being jostled in a palanquin; ‘scrambling’ to the top of a ‘rock’; admiring the cattle of the Rajah of Tanjore; or lurching about on an elephant. Elephants were to figure prominently as she not only kept on the lookout for wild elephants in forests, but she had to contend with the deaths of several of her baggage-train elephants, whose rations had been purloined by their handlers. During her Bangalore stay Henrietta had followed avidly the Madras newspaper accounts of the Madras Lottery, whereby objects were raffled off to make funds for the native poor of Madras for such projects as hospitals and dispensaries. She wished, though seemingly without success, that she might get lucky and win.

  Certainly Henrietta’s wanderings in South India were diverse. At austere Ryacottah, she spent a month living up a mountain, dealing with monkeys and seven discontented sister goddesses. Later when Henrietta resided in Tipu’s abandoned Bangalore palace, Colonel Wellesley and Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Close arranged for Tipu’s munshi to become her Persian tutor. The munshi praised Henrietta’s accomplishment and suggested that the translation of Hafiz would be a worthy project for ‘an illustrious female oriental traveller’. Walking in Tipu’s still-beautiful classical gardens, now grown wild and filled with fragrant white rose trees, listening to the sounds of birdsong and flowing water, Henrietta applied herself to her studies of Persian. While in Bangalore, she translated a number of Hafiz’s ambiguous, multi-level lines that spoke to her of the inconstancy of fortune, of the transitory nature of the present moment.

  Throughout her journey, Henrietta pursued not only languages and poetic philosophy, but also continued to acquire plants, animals, birds, butterflies, shells and rocks. Unhesitatingly she queried any and every degree-holding naturalist she found along her way with all the chutzpah of one naturalist to another. During this period of the expansion of naturalistic knowledge all over the world, naturalists were fairly numerous in India. At Cape Town on her voyage out Henrietta had met Dr William Roxburgh, superintendent of a botanical garden established by the East India Company at Sibpu, near Calcutta, who reinforced her interest. At Tranquebar she met Danish naturalists with whom she discussed their acquisitions. Dr Benjamin Heyne, the superintendent of the company’s botanical garden in Madras, helped her to form ‘a complete collection of the Mysore, as well of the plants of the Carnatic, already described by Dr Roxburgh and of any Birds, likewise, Stones or Minerals’. In another age Henrietta might have become a botanist as her interests were particularly keen as a collector of botanical specimens. Lord Clive shared her interests in botany and she sent plants and t
rees to him as she travelled.

  In her letters and journal, Henrietta offered her readers a view of the ongoing drama of her life in India, enlivening her descriptions of place with her tales of ‘tygerish jungles’, alligator-infested rivers and nights spent in the dust and noise of Muslim and Hindu festivities. With perceptive and telling comments she depicted the variety of people she encountered: Ranees, Danish missionaries, Hindu priests, naturalists, Maharajahs, military officers and their wives, Pashas, East India Company Collectors, polygars and fakeers. Simultaneously she confronted a persistent undercurrent in her own bouts of sadness engendered by being, as she wrote to her brother, ‘at such a frightful distance from one another’. She worried, too, when she did not hear from Lord Clive, writing, at one point when there had been a long period in which she did not have a letter from him, that she waited ‘as much in vain I am afraid as for the rain. Perhaps both may come together’. In a letter to her husband she used the phrase, ‘the unpleasantness of absence’, a rather extraordinary understatement for her growing anxiety at his not having written during the last stages of her trek. On another occasion she scolded him by saying ‘I know as little of Madras as Japan’. Missing him she wrote on October 3rd that ‘I think when I see you again it will be one of my most happy days’. Much of her anxiety she invested in worrying about the health of her travelling party, and particularly of her girls.