Greater Britain

Although chokedars were silent and tomtom-ing subdued during the daytime, there were plenty of other sounds. Lizards chirped from the walls of my room, and sparrows twittered from every beam and rafter of the roof. When I told a Kurrachee friend that my slippers, my brushes, and soldier‘s writing-case had all been thrown by me on to the chief beam during an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the enemy, he replied that for his part he paraded his drawing-room every morning with a double-barreled gun, and frequently fired into the rafters, to the horror of his wife.

In a small lateen-rigged yacht lent us by a fellow-traveler from Moultan, some of us visited the works which have long been in progress for the improvement of the harbor of Kurrachee, and which form the sole topic of conversation among the residents in the town. The works have for object the removal of the bar which obstructs the entrance to the harbor, with a view to permit the entry of larger ships than can at present find an anchorage at Kurrachee.

The most serious question under discussion is that of whether the bar is formed by the Indus silt or merely by local causes, as, if the former supposition is correct, the ultimate disposition of the ten thousand millions of cubic feet of mud which the Indus annually brings down is not likely to be affected by such works as those in progress at Kurrachee. When a thousand sealed bottles were lately thrown into the Indus for it to be seen whether they would reach the bar, the result of the “great bottle trick,” as Kurrachee people called it, was that only one bottle reached and not one weathered a point six miles to the southward of the harbor. The bar is improving every year, and has now some twenty feet of water, so that ships of 1000 tons can enter except in the monsoon, and the general belief of engineers is that the completion of the present works will materially increase the depth of water.

The question of this bar is not one of merely local interest: a single glance at the map is sufficient to show the importance of Kurrachee. Already rising at an unprecedented pace, having trebled her shipping and quadrupled her trade in ten years, she is destined to make still greater strides as soon as the Indus Railway is completed, and finally – when the Persian Gulf route becomes a fact – to be the greatest of the ports of India.

That a railway must one day be completed from Constantinople or from some port on the Mediterranean to Bussorah on the Persian Gulf is a point which scarcely admits of doubt. From Kurrachee or Bombay to London by the Euphrates valley and Constantinople is all-but a straight line, while from Bombay to London by Aden and Alexandria is a wasteful curve. The so-called “Overland Route” is half as long again as would be the direct line. The Red Sea and Isthmus route has neither the advantage of unbroken sea nor of unbroken land transit; the direct route with a bridge near Constantinople might be extended into a land road from India to Calais or Rotterdam. The Red Sea line passes along the shores of Arabia, where there is comparatively little local trade; the Persian Gulf route would develop the remarkable wealth of Persia, and would carry to Europe a local commerce already great. At the entrance of the Persian Gulf, near Cape Mussendoom or Ormuz, we should establish a free port on the plan of Singapore. In 1000 A.D., the spot now known as Ormuz was a barren rock, but a few years of permanent occupation of the spot as a free port changed the barren islet into one of the wealthiest cities in the world. The Red Sea route crosses Egypt, the direct route crosses Turkey; and it cannot be too strongly urged that in war time “Egypt” means Russia or France, while “Turkey” means Great Britain.

In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf railroad, Kurrachee would play a leading part. Not only the wheat and the cotton of the Punjaub and of the then irrigated Scinde, but the trade of Central Asia would flow down the Indus, and it is hardly too much to believe that the silks of China, the teas of Northern India, and the shawls of Cashmere will all of them one day find in Kurrachee their chief port. The earliest known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf. Chinese ships traded to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh centuries, bringing silk and iron, and it may be doubted whether any of the Russian routes will be able to compete with the more ancient Euphrates valley line of trade. Shorter, passing through countries well known and comparatively civilized, admitting at once of the use of land and water transport side by side, it is far superior in commercial and political advantages to any of the Russian desert roads. A route through Upper Persia has been proposed, but merchants of experience will tell you that greater facilities for trade are extended to Europeans in even the “closed” ports of China than upon the coasts of Persia, and the prospect of the freedom of trade upon a Persian railroad would be but a bad one, it may be feared.

The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the glory of many fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuz and Antioch, Cyprus and Rhodes, have a second history before them; Crete, Brindisi, and Venice will each obtain a renewal of their ancient fame. Alexander of Macedon was the first man who took a scientific view of the importance of the Gulf route, but we have hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson contained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the coast from the Indus to the Euphrates. The advantage to be gained from the completion of the railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf will not fall only to the share of India and Great Britain. Holland and Belgium are, in proportion to their wealth, at the least as greatly interested in the Euphrates route as are we ourselves, and should join us in its construction. The Dutch trade with Java would be largely benefited, and Dutch ports would become the shipping-places for Eastern merchandise on its way to England and northeast America, while, to the cheap manufactures of Liège, India, China, and Central Asia would afford the best of markets. If the line were a double one, to the west and north of Aleppo, one branch running to Constantinople and the other to the Mediterranean at Scanderoon, the whole of Europe would benefit by the Persian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, would gain also the power of protecting Persia against Russia, and of thus preventing the dominance of a crushing despotism throughout the Eastern world. In a thousand ways, however, the advantages of the line to all Europe are so plainly manifest, that the only question worth discussing is the nature of the difficulties that hinder its completion.

The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are political and financial, and both have been exaggerated without limit. The project for a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf has been compared to that for the construction of a railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific. In 1858, the American line was looked on as a mere speculator‘s dream, while the Euphrates Railway was to be commenced at once; ten years have passed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact, while the Indian line has been forgotten.

It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a more difficult matter than that of crossing the Plains and Rocky Mountains. The distance from St. Louis to San Francisco is 1600 miles, that from Constantinople to Bussorah is but 1100 miles; or from Scanderoon to Bussorah only 700 miles. From London to the Persian Gulf is not so far as from New York to San Francisco. The American line had to cross two great snowy chains and a waterless tract of considerable width: the Indian route crosses no passes so lofty as those of the Rocky Mountains or so difficult as those of the Sierra Nevada, and is well watered in its whole length. On the American line there is little coal, if any, while the Euphrates route would be plentifully supplied with coal from the neighborhood of Bagdad. When the American line was commenced, the proposed track lay across unknown wilds: the Constantinople and Persian Gulf route passes through venerable towns, the most ancient of all the cities of the world, and the route itself is the oldest known highway of trade. The chief of all the advantages possessed by the Indian line which is wanting in America is the presence of ample labor on all parts of the road. Steamers are already running from Bombay and Kurrachee to the Persian Gulf; others on the Tigris, and a portion of the Euphrates; there is a much-used road from Bagdad to Aleppo; and a Turkish military road from Aleppo to Constantinople, to which city a direct railroad will soon be opened; and a telegraph-line belonging to an English company already crosses Asian Turkey from end to end. Notwithstanding the facilities, the Euphrates Railway is still a project, while the Atlantic and Pacific line will be opened in 1870.

Were the financial difficulties those which the supporters of the line have in reality to meet, it might be urged that there will be a great local traffic between Bussorah, Bagdad, and Aleppo, and from all these cities to the sea, and that the government mail subsidies will be huge, and the Indian trade, even in the worst of years, considerable. Were the indifference of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they should refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line, its importance would amply warrant a moderate addition to the debt of India.

The real difficulties that have to be encountered are political rather than financial; the covert opposition of France and Egypt is not less powerful for evil than is the open hostility of Russia. Happily for India, however, the territories of our ally Turkey extend to the Persian Gulf, for it must be remembered that for railway purposes Turkish rule, if we so please, is equivalent to English rule. As it happens, no active measures are needed to advance our line; but, were it otherwise, such intervention as might be necessary to secure the safety of the great highway for Eastern trade with Europe would be defensible were it exerted toward a purely independent government.

The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte must be direct and governmental. For a private company to conduct a great enterprise to a successful conclusion in Eastern countries is always difficult; but when the matter is political in its nature, or, if commercial, at least hindered on political grounds, a private company is powerless. It is, moreover, the practice of Eastern governments to grant concessions of important works which they cannot openly oppose, but which in truth they wish to hinder, to companies so formed as to be incapable of proceeding with the undertaking. When others apply, the government answers them that nothing further can be done: “the concession is already granted.”

Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed. It might even be advisable that we should declare that the Euphrates Valley Railway through the Turkish territory from Constantinople and Scanderoon through Aleppo to Bagdad and Bussorah, and sufficient military posts to insure its security in time of war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and that we should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to commence our work, on pain of the withdrawal of our protection.

Our general principle of non-interference is always liable to be set aside on proof of the existence of a higher necessity for intervention than for adherence to our golden rule, and it may be contended that sufficient proof has been shown in the present instance. Whether public action is to be taken, or the matter to be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the Direct Route to India is one of the most pressing of the questions of the day.

When, in company with my fellow-passengers from Moultan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on board the then Commissioner of Scinde, who was on his way to take his seat as a member of Council at Bombay. A number of the leading men of Scinde came on board to bid farewell to him before he sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but for our annexation of the country, would be the reigning Ameers at this moment.

Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, surpassed in glittering pomp the caps and baldrics of these Scindee chieftains; neither could anything be stranger than their dress. One had on a silk coat of pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet slippers with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of dark amber with flowers in white lace. A third was clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber; and the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk and gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the strange-shaped Scindian hat; all had jeweled dirks, with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold their swords, and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them. The sight, however, of no number of sapphires, turquoises, and gold clothes could have reconciled me to a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced when our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship‘s side to the sound of the Lascars’ anchor-tripping chorus, and left the deck to the “Proconsul” and ourselves.

CHAPTER XVII.

BOMBAY

CROSSING the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept on board.

I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rippled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming down in rich green masses into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the Swedish to the Greek.

The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even mass of green is broken here and there by the crimson cones of the “gold mohur” trees, resembles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain islands and the Western Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; as it is, the distances are over-great.

Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of defense is singularly weak. The absence of batteries from the entrance to so great a trading port strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-balls of the African admirals of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to which can easily be cut off, and its people starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of batteries at the harbor‘s mouth would be, that the present fort might be pulled down, unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half might be partly built on.

The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bombay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be said that she has “not one merchant solvent,” was chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which the shares in a land-reclamation company which never commenced its operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was intensified by the passage of the English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round the world.

Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely king than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hundred steamers and the thousands of native boats that are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon; cotton has built the great offices and stores of seven and eight stories high; cotton has furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers’ cottages on Staten Island.

The export of cotton from India rose from five millions’ worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions’ worth in 1864, and the total exports of Bombay increased in the same proportion, while the population of the city rose from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed to look at the East as standing still, but Chicago itself never took a grander leap than did Bombay between 1860 and 1864. The rebellion in America gave the impetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity; and the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the only Indian raw products the export of which has increased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased twentyfold, of tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold in the last six years; and the export of Indian tea increased in five years from nothing to three or four hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports, those which we associate with the term “Eastern trade,” are standing still, while the raw produce trade is thus increasing: – spices, elephants’ teeth, pearls, jewels, bandannas, shellac, dates, and gum are all decreasing, although the total exports of the country have trebled in five years.

India needs but railroads to enable her to compete successfully with America in the growth of cotton, but the development of the one raw product will open out her hitherto unknown resources.

While staying at one of the great merchant-houses in the Fort, I was able to see that the commerce of Bombay has not grown up of itself. With some experience among hard workers in the English towns, I was, nevertheless, astonished at the work got through by senior clerks and junior partners at Bombay. Although at first led away by the idea that men who wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking-chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast, cannot be said to get through much work, I soon found that men in merchants’ houses at Bombay work harder than they would be likely to do at home. Their day begins at 6 A.M., and, as a rule, they work from then till dinner at 8 or 9 P.M., taking an hour for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve hours’ work in the day, with the thermometer never under 90° all the night, is an exhausting life. Englishmen could not long survive the work, but the Bombay merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.

Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is not always May or June, and from November to March the climate is all-but perfect. Even in the hottest weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar is close at hand, for short excursions, whenever the time is found; while the Bombay mango is a fruit which may bear comparison with the peaches of Salt Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The Bombay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the beauties of their city, any more than Londoners have to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower; and as for “tropical indolence,” or “Anglo-Indian luxury,” the bull-dogs are the only members of the English community in India who can discover anything but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and, knowing this, the cunning brute always makes the boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead to the private rooms over the merchants’ houses in the Fort.

Bombay bazaar is the gayest of gay scenes. Besides the ordinary crowd of any “native town,” there are solemn Jains, copper-colored Jews, white-coated Portuguese, Persians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespangled nautch girls, and grinning Seedees. The Parsees are strongest of all the merchant peoples of Bombay in numbers, in intelligence, and in wealth. Among the shopkeepers of their race, there is an over-prominence of trade shrewdness in the expression of the face, and in the shape even of the head. The Louvre bust of Richelieu, in which we have the idea of a wheedler, is a common type in the Parsee shops of the Bombay bazaar. The Parsee people, however, whatever their looks, are not only in complete possession of Bombay, but are the dark-skinned race to which we shall have to intrust the largest share in the regeneration of the East. Trading as they do in every city between Galle and Astrakan, but everywhere attached to the English rule, they bear to us the relative position that the Greeks occupy toward Russia.

Both in religion and in education, the Parsees are, as a community, far in advance of the Indian Mohammedans, and of the Hindoos. Their creed has become a pure deism, in which God‘s works are worshiped as the manifestations or visible representatives of God on earth, fire, the sun, and the sea taking the first places; although in the climate of Bombay prayers to the sun must be made up of more supplications than thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught, and there is not a pauper in the whole tribe. In the education and elevation of women, no Eastern race has as yet done much, but the Parsees have done the most, and have paved the way for further progress.

In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee movement has had some effect even upon others than Parsees, and the Hindoos of Bombay City stand far before even those of Calcutta in the earnestness and success of their endeavors to promote the moral elevation of women. Nothing can be done toward the regeneration of India so long as the women of all classes remain in their present degradation; and although many native gentlemen in Bombay already recognize the fact, and act upon it, progress is slow, since there is no basis upon which to begin. The Hindoos will not send their wives to schools where there are European lady teachers, for fear of proselytism taking place; and native women teachers are not yet to be found; hence all teaching must needs be left to men. Nothing, moreover, can be done with female children in Western India, where girls are married at from five to twelve years old.

I had not been two days in Bombay when a placard caught my eye, announcing a performance at the theater of “Romeo and Juliet, in the Maratta tongue;” but the play had no Friar Lawrence, no apothecary, and no nurse; it was nothing but a simple Maratta love-tale, followed by some religious tableaux. In the first piece an Englishman was introduced, and represented as kicking every native that crossed his path with the exclamation of “Damned fool:” at each repetition of which the whole house laughed. It is to be feared that this portion of the play was “founded upon fact.” On my way home through the native town at night, I came on a marriage procession better than any that I had seen. A band of fifers were screaming the most piercing of notes in front of an illuminated house, at which the horsemen and carriages were just arriving, both men and women clothed in jeweled robes, and silks of a hundred colors, that flashed and glittered in the blaze of the red torches. The procession, like the greater number of the most gorgeous ceremonials of Bombay, was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the marriage of one of their own people; but it is a curious fact that night marriages were forced upon the Parsees by the Hindoos, and one of the conditions upon which the Parsees were received into India was, that their marriage processions should take place at night.

The Caves of Elephanta have been many times described. The grandest sight of India, after the Taj, is the three-faced bust of the Hindoo Trinity, or God in his threefold character of Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. No Grecian sculpture that I have seen so well conveys the idea of Godhead. The Greeks could idealize man, the Italians can paint the saint, but the builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which distinguishes the heads of the Creator and Preserver is not the meditation of the saint, but the calm of unbounded power; and the Destroyer‘s head portends not destruction, so much as annihilation, to the world. The central head is, in its mysterious solemnity, that which the Sphinx should be, and is not, but one attribute alone is common to the expression of all three faces, – the presence of the Inscrutable.