Waves Across the South

Pacific islanders’ assertiveness and their attempt to forge a new politics for themselves is evident in the detail of Dillon’s life. Yet their voices and politics are difficult to extract because of the density of colonial rhetoric in these sources, including even in the names they were given. Telling here was how the people of Vanikoro (called Malicola in the commentary of the period) where La Pérouse disappeared, were racialised in press commentary. This offensive line comes from the Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser of 1827: ‘The Malicolans differ from almost all of the other islanders in the South Seas. They are as black as Negroes with wooly hair, and negro features.’[68]

The limitations of the sources and their ideological biases necessitate a different perspective to understand the history of this oceanic quarter in the age of revolutions.

PERSIAN WRITERS IN A WORLD OF WATER

South Asian writers and travellers who left accounts of voyaging across the south in this set of decades provide a good alternative lens, though they too were not without biases.[69] One such was Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani, who was styled in a colonial idiom by British observers as being a ‘Persian Prince’, like the so-called Māori Prince who travelled with Dillon. Abu Talib noted: ‘I never assumed the title’.[70] It was in 1799 and from Calcutta that Abu Talib departed for Britain. The ship he boarded was like the St Patrick in having an unusual registration and a diverse crew, including South Asian seamen. Abu Talib sought to distance himself from the band of sailors:

On the 1st of Ramzan, A.H. 1213 (Feb. 8. 1799), we took leave of our friends, and embarked at Calcutta … We found the ship [a Danish vessel] in the greatest disorder composed of indolent and inexperienced Bengal Lascars; and the cabins small, dark, and stinking, especially that allotted to me, the very recollection of which makes me melancholy … The Captain was a proud self-sufficient fellow. His first officer, who was by birth American, resembled an ill-tempered growling mastiff …[71]

Abu Talib left Calcutta on the advice of an Scottish friend, in a bid to visit the West to dispel his despondency. As a young man, he had lived in Lucknow, in northern India. Lucknow was a magnet for scholars and he was educated by them. Earlier in the eighteenth century, his ancestors had come to India from Persia; his father had worked for the ruling elite of both Oudh [Awadh] and Bengal. The later eighteenth century created yet another phase of uncertainty for these scholar officials who relied so heavily on patronage. This uncertainty arose from repeated regime changes and from the ascent of British power.

Abu Talib’s travel narrative in Persian, Masir-i Talibi fi bilad-i afranji or ‘Talib’s travels in the Land of the Franks’, needs to be understood in this light. For his is an unsettled voice, that of an elite man trying to find his way in the midst of the age of revolutions, which was changing the world as he knew it. According to some authorities, these texts may have been encouraged by the British, though Abu Talib’s view of Britain ‘was not always flattering to the English, but congenial enough’.[72] After being dismissed from his work as revenue officer or amildar in Oudh, Abu Talib had taken up work under the British, serving as assistant to Colonel Alexander Hannay, who was in charge of revenue at Gorakhpur. He had also worked in Lucknow, once again for the British, tasked for instance with the suppression of a rebellion. He had been out of work for about a decade when he boarded the Danish ship in 1799 and all kinds of mishaps had overtaken him by this time: ‘all my dependants and adherents, seeing my distress, left me; and even some of my children, and the domestics brought up in my father’s family, abandoned me.’[73] His story did not end well. After returning from his travels in 1803, he died in 1806 without seeing a substantial change in his lot.

His writings reflect his literary skills as a poet; he was known for his recitation and writing of poetry. Note for instance his comparison of whales with elephants, from his sea journey to London:

Several fishes called whales approached so close to the ship, that we could view them distinctly. They were four times the size of the largest elephant, and had immense nostrils, whence they threw up the water to the height of fifteen yards.[74]

Abu Talib was close to the Cape of Good Hope when he observed these creatures. At this point in the voyage, the ‘sight of land brought tears to [his] eyes.’ Meanwhile in the next paragraph, he described how he felt being confined on board, in terms which were contrasted with those he used for the roaming whales:

In short, we passed our time like dead bodies shut up in dark and confined cells; and had it not been for the incessant noise and jarring elements, we might have supposed ourselves inhabitants of the nether world.[75]

While on his journey, Abu Talib paid a lot of attention to nature. This is unsurprising, for in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people everywhere were changing their ideas of natural history. He tasted flying fish: ‘I thought them good food, and fancied they had somewhat the flavour of a bird.’[76] At the Cape, he commented on the horses and their ‘Arab blood’, dogs and cats ‘which run wild in the woods’ and ostriches. He also wrote of coastlines and places, for instance noting that St Helena, where Napoleon was later to be buried, had cliffs which appeared ‘black and burnt up’.[77] In the course of his voyage, Abu Talib was also very much aware of the stars. Close to the Nicobar Islands he was puzzled when he looked through a telescope and saw an island at sea, even though it was below the horizon.[78]

This interest in nature worked itself out in a commitment to classifying animals, landscapes and geography. All these were tabulated one against the other. On the classification of geography, he set out the following rules in keeping with how strips of the world’s ocean were being defined on the globe in this period of expansive and regular globe-spanning navigation:

A Channel means a narrow part of the sea, confined between two lands, but open at both ends.

A Bay extends far into the land, is of circular form, and open only on one side.

A Sea (sometimes called a Gulf) is a large extent of the ocean, but nearly surrounded by land; as the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Persia, the Red Sea etc.[79]

And even as places and other creatures were tabulated and located like this, people were too. Abu Talib was interested in skin colour, in origin and descent and in status and he was especially interested in women. In Cape Town, he wrote disapprovingly that ‘all the European Dutch women’ were ‘very fat, gross, and insipid’, but then added, ‘but the girls are well-made, handsome, and sprightly; they are also good natured, but require costly presents.’ He flirted with these younger women at Cape Town, wishing to give his handkerchief to the handsomest at a party. On his own account, in doing this he was attempting to adopt the practice of the ‘rich Turks of Constantinople’ who ‘throw their handkerchief to the lady with whom they wish to pass the night’.[80] When in Britain, he wrote of a ‘Miss Combe’ to whom he took a particular fancy to and whom he once met at a masquerade. She was ‘like the bright moon surrounded with brilliant stars’.[81]

Regardless of how these women interpreted his interest, Abu Talib’s narrative is framed by the biases of status, rank, race and gender and their active defence. When describing Nicobar islanders, he wrote that they were ‘very muscular’ and resembled the ‘Peguers [of Burma] and Chinese in features but [that these Nicobar islanders] are of a wheat colour, with scarcely any beard’. He showed no empathy, however, for South Asian seamen despite the fact that these sailors were ‘much disgusted with the treatment they received on board’. While at these islands, these seamen deserted the ship and hid themselves in the woods.[82] Lascar revolt was a common feature of these years in the Indian Ocean during the age of revolutions.[83] But this revolt was pushed to the margins in Abu Talib’s prose. On this particular occasion at the Nicobar islands, the deserting sailors were caught and brought back on board.

Despite his starting point as a non-European Abu Talib’s writing, as with Dillon’s, needs to be teased and taken apart in order to see the conflicts of the age. We see this with an intriguing argument that he penned about the ‘liberty’ of Asian women. It was written during his time in Britain and was first published in the Asiatic Annual Register in 1801 and then in other places.[84] He explained the origin of this essay:

An English lady, addressing herself to me, observed, that the women of Asia have no liberty at all, but live like slaves, without honour and authority, in the houses of their husbands; and she censured the men for their unkindness, and the women, also, for submitting to be so undervalued.[85]

In response Abul Talib insisted on the greater liberties enjoyed by Asian women when compared with British women, but his reasoning fell back on patriarchal ideas and his position as an elite man. He reasoned that there were far fewer servants in houses in Britain due to the higher cost of labour. However, Asian women could have their own apartments and households and they could be released from their husband’s company for several days and ‘send [the husband’s] victuals to him in the murdannah (or male apartments)’. In Abu Talib’s view there were ‘people of various nations’ dwelling in the same cities in Asia, much more so than in Britain, and this necessitated segregated living arrangements between men and women; for to ‘allow the women such a liberty [to live with their husband], where there is such a danger of corruption [from foreigners], would be an encroachment upon the liberty of the men’. Women in Asia were said to have more leisure, ‘repose from the fatigue of motion’ and the ability to preserve ‘their honour, by not mixing with the vulgar’. On polygamy, Abu Talib wrote that it increased the freedom of the first wife. On those who didn’t have the privilege of being the first wife, he wrote: ‘those women who submit to marry with a married man are never of high or wealthy families’.

Abu Talib wrote in this way of liberty, a key concept of the age of revolutions. But like other writers of the time he twisted it in order to justify rather than tear down differences of gender, class and race. His argument about the women of Britain and Asia was an attempt to relativise liberty and to make it subjective and culturally particular. Whereas his interlocutor, ‘the English lady’ perhaps, held that Asian women did not have the liberty to choose their husbands, Abu Talib replied:

On this head nothing need be said, for in Europe this liberty is merely nominal, as without the will of the father and mother, the daughter’s choice is of no avail; and whatever choice they make for her, she must submit to; and in its effects, it serves only to encourage running away (as the male and female slaves in India do).

Abu Talib’s travel narrative and his interactions in London and India were an attempt to insert himself within British class hierarchy even as he sought to defend the social structures and customary practices of South Asia.[86] It is important to note that he sold an enslaved person while in Cape Town whose ‘manners and disposition’, he wrote, ‘had been so much corrupted on board ship’.[87] If his analysis of society, nature and the globe itself is in keeping with the times, this is also the case for his account of law and government. Here too were the characteristic contradictions of the time. He praised the use of trial by jury but had a generally negative view of British laws which often ‘overruled equity’, so that ‘a well-meaning honest man was frequently made the dupe of an artful knave’. The law was a means, in this telling, of making money. He feared the insolence of Englishmen, exemplified in the assembly of ‘mobs’ in London, and was incensed at the increase in taxes and the price of provisions, seeing it as akin to that seen in France before the revolution.[88]

Abu Talib presented an account of the French Revolution: people ‘disgusted with the tyranny of government, sent petitions and remonstrances to their King’. The king became a ‘useless member’ as is typical of a ‘republican form of government’:

After this event, a complete revolution of affairs took place in France. The powerful were reduced to weakness, and the base raised to power. The common people elected representatives from the lowest classes; and appointed officers of their own choice, to defend their territories.[89]

If indigenous politics lay beneath the surface of Dillon and Bayly’s accounts, Abu Talib’s writing bears the evidence of European politics and Anglo-French tensions. Before the Danish vessel set off from Calcutta, it was delayed by more than twenty days when a French frigate was found cruising outside the port. The firing of cannons was heard. An English ship fell to the French. An Arab vessel flying French colours ‘suspended under the English’ was also spotted. The end of this contest was determined by an English ship from Madras which captured the French frigate.[90] Close to Mauritius, there was the fear that the ship would fall to the French. Abu Talib found that Cape Town had just been taken by the British, with sixteen vessels protecting the harbour from the French, and he wrote of five thousand soldiers garrisoned under General Dundas.[91]

The link to the age of revolutions lies in how Abu Talib narrated and interpreted these events of European politics and also in how he took on board and internalised the new knowledge and ideas of this time. The age of revolution’s unprecedented globalisation is evident in the possibilities of travel which Abu Talib’s journey exemplifies. But other clues to the fundamental changes of this era followed later. On his return journey, Abu Talib travelled overland from Britain to India. In the Middle East, Abu Talib described the Wahhabi movement, and noted that ‘people could talk of nothing else’. At the hands of the Wahhabi, in his words, there had been ‘sacrilegious plunder’ of the cities of Mecca and Medina with the aim of eliminating idolatry. This Wahhabi reform of Islam was connected with the political changes across the Middle East, as we will soon see. It had within it a sense of revolution which was different to the European sense of revolution even as Europeans cast it as revolutionary. The concept of ‘Wahhabism’ as used today still carries with it a series of stereotypes about Islamic purism and fundamentalism. It is problematically traced back to the age of revolutions in an uninterrupted story of continuity. Abu Talib described the movement:

Although the Vahabies possess great power, and have collected immense wealth, they still retain the greatest simplicity of manners, and moderation in their desires. They sit down on the ground without ceremony, content themselves with a few dates for their food, and a coarse large cloak serves them for clothing and bed for three years. Their horses are of the genuine Nejib breed, of well-known pedigrees; none of which will they permit to be taken out of the country.[92]

The idea of revolution also appeared in the writings of the class of Persianate chroniclers to which Abu Talib belonged. The word inquilab appeared frequently among Persian writers of this age, to mean ‘revolution’ or ‘subversion’; it was used to describe the changes brought about by the invasion of the British too. According to one authority on these texts, this word ‘literally meant turning’.[93] This means that these writings sit very squarely within the compass of the age of revolutions. In summary, the world around Abu Talib was turning in political terms; but there was also a churning in what it meant to live life. This was evident in his commentary on so many spheres, from nature to society and from gender to cultural difference.

This engagement with the turning of the times is also evident among those who may be seen as his compatriots. For instance there is the epic and valuable history of eighteenth-century India penned by Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba‘i, Sair al-muta’akkhirin. It stretched from the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the advance of the British in the early 1780s. Published in English translation in Calcutta, in the year prior to the French Revolution, it was written by a politician and landholder, whose aristocratic family hailed from Persia and who had served as a clerk to the East India Company.[94] Ghulam Husain presented an account of the American Revolution: settlers joined forces to resist the authority of the king of England, ‘spreading full open the standard of rebellion and defiance’. In turn they called in the French, upon whom the English declared war.[95] Another writer, Mirza I‘tisam al-Din, from a line of Muslim service gentry in Bengal, described the American revolution as the rise of the wealthy nobility of America against the English, and interpreted it as part of a broader conflict between the English and the French.[96] Ghulam Husain meanwhile wrote that the Spanish and the Dutch joined against the English. ‘Time alone will point out what may be the final intention of providence in this diversity of concerns and interests; and time alone will discover what it has ultimately predestined on those obstruse points.’[97]

Yet before closing his story with this resort to a long view of time Ghulam Husain paused for another revealing reason. He gave his readers a lesson in astronomy. This was in keeping with Abu Talib’s interest in the stars and seas. ‘The circumstance and figure of land and water in our globe are not as they were thought heretofore. They say that the latter seems to encompass the former as a girdle.’[98] According to Ghulam Husain, the New World was a hemisphere that had yet to be fully explored and examined. He was aware of how medicinal drugs, fine woods and gold and silver were to be found there. Would the feet of the inhabitants of the two hemispheres meet ‘sole to sole’, if the earth were taken away from them, he pondered. Even as their feet met like this, would their heads still face the heavens? For this Persian chronicler, the changes of the world sat together with changing knowledge of it; the rise of Britain in India and its wars with France were tied together with events on a further hemisphere. At the same time as these changes were unfolding, Ghulam Husain was trying to find his own place in a world that was shifting, and where new norms of patronage, government and rule were emerging in India. For this reason, his voice, like Abu Talib’s, was an unsettled one that moved between old and new.

This uncertainty is clear yet again in the account of I‘tisam al-Din’s journey to Britain. He too had moved between employment for Indian and British masters. He had fought for the British in wars which led to the 1765 grant to the British of the diwani of Bengal, the right to collect taxes and decide civil cases. This was a key moment in the consolidation of British expansion in India. He helped the British with the suppression of unrest, just as Abu Talib would do. He left on a voyage to England in 1767 as part of a diplomatic mission sent to the British king by the Mughal emperor.

I‘tisam al-Din’s account of travel was titled Shigarf-nama-i vilayet or ‘Wonder Book of England’. It was written in 1785 two decades after his journey. It charted a history of exploration from the early attempts of the Portuguese to reach India. Now, the British had taken the lead on the seas above all the other ‘hat-wearing nations of Europe’.[99] His account of travel then proceeded with sections on the sea, the compass, ships and winds, indicating a consistent and deep curiosity throughout. The sea was the conduit of European expansion but a mysterious medium: ‘the blue of the sea is a reflection of the sky. A simple proof of this is that sea-water scooped up with the hand appears whitish, if not colourless.’[100] Contemplating the sea in turn brought with it the need to think of the earth itself, which was consistent with the prose of other Persian writers and in keeping with the nature of this age of revolutions and its concern with astronomy and other sciences. In poetic language, he wrote: ‘The earth is a floating egg amidst the sea’s immensity.’ There followed the story that a European king had sought to find the depth of the sea by dropping a rope: ‘millions of yards disappeared and yet the rope didn’t touch the bottom.’[101]

He embraced western technologies of navigation, writing in detail for instance of the use of the compass, and describing ships which generally had ‘five storeys’: ‘The topmost storey is aft and is occupied by the Captain and its officers.’ During high winds a ship could be assailed by waves that could ‘rise as high as palm trees’. In the midst of all this detail, I‘tisam al-Din’s refrain was to praise Allah. On the seabed ‘complete knowledge of the secrets of the sea’s depths belongs to Allah alone’.[102] In this way, there was a determined attachment to tradition and established ways despite his wide-ranging interest in the new. The twinning of these two, the old and the new, was beautifully expressed when he described European sailors climbing the masts during a storm as having the ‘agility of Hanuman’, the Hindu figure who appears in the epic Ramayana, and hanging from the masts ‘like bats’. ‘Their courage and industry’, he noted, ‘have made them the most powerful race on earth.’[103]

As for the voyage itself, his account of Mauritius, where the ship stopped, saw the appearance of Muslim lascars.[104] He was intrigued by how they had ‘married into slavery’, with wives who were enslaved to French masters. ‘These slaves are brought as adolescents from Bengal, Malabar, the Deccan [all in India] and other regions and sold for fifty to sixty rupees each.’ He benefited from the hospitality and advice of the lascars, who served as intermediaries in the market, enabling him to purchase ‘mangoes, water-melons, cucumbers, musk-melons and several other varieties of fruits peculiar to the Bengali summer’. But he ‘grieved inwardly’ that these Asian seamen had forsaken ‘their own land’. His description of Mauritius, an island that was taken by the British in 1810, partly in fear of republicanism and piracy, was attentive to people, settlement, history and nature.

I‘tisam al-Din set Mauritius within a broader view of Indian Ocean territories. His passage to Mauritius had taken him near many interesting ‘islands and coasts’. He incorrectly identified Batavia as Portuguese. Two months’ journey from Bengal, he reported that there was ‘an island, which is a part of the Chinese kingdom and is famous for its Chinaware’. There followed an account of Pegu in Burma. ‘As we sailed down the Bay of Bengal,’ he wrote, ‘Malacca showed as a thin black line on the horizon … South-west of Madras, at a distance of one-hundred miles – or a day’s sailing – from Pondicherry lies Ceylon, which Indians call Serendip.’ The Maldives came next in this account, ruled by someone who was less than a zamindar or landlord of Bengal, and yet who had the affectation of sovereignty. And then an island where the inhabitants were said to be ‘human’ and yet they ‘dress in the skins of wild beasts and eat half-raw meat’.

I‘tisam al-Din’s writing was as maritime as those of Pacific voyagers in its attention to ships, seas, islands, coasts and sailors; it also demonstrated some of the same predilections displayed by travellers like Dillon. He wrote of an island of cannibals:

The inhabitants of this island are human, yet their physiognomy is diabolical. They dress in the skins of the wild beasts and eat half-raw meat. They crave human flesh, and there being gold mines on the island, they will gladly barter gold for men. When they espy a vessel in the distance, they light a fire on a hill in order to lure the ship to their shores.[105]

It was not only the figure of the cannibal which united this travel account with colonial renditions of seaborne adventure. There were also mermaids in I‘tisam al-Din’s story: ‘May Allah in his infinite mercy prevent anyone from seeing a mermaid, for it is a kind of genii.’ And in keeping with Abu Talib’s prose, there were of course flying fish and whales too. Whales were described by I‘tisam al-Din in almost the same terms as were used by Abu Talib: