Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum

However, the idyll was not made to last. On 29 November 1810 the British invaded the island with a combined operation mounted from India. Three infantry divisions under General Abercrombie were landed on an open beach and, marching inland to attack on the land side, easily secured the capitulation of Port Louis and its 200 cannons, all of them facing the wrong way. Bottled up in the harbour by Admiral Bertie’s fleet were six frigates and another thirty smaller vessels, while in the arsenals and go-downs below the ramparts the victors discovered a huge quantity of stores. All this had been won for a loss of only twenty-nine lives, as swift and complete a victory as any in the war against the French.

There was an unexpected bonus to the victory. As the conquering heroes fanned out into the countryside, they discovered, setting aside an understandable surliness on the part of the conquered French plantation managers, an ambiance as unlike that of the Caribbean slave islands as it was possible to imagine. Governor Dumas had been right. Mauritius was a calm and unbloody model of the plantation system that was – on the part of the whites at any rate – difficult to fault.

Under the second British governor, Robert Farquhar, the island began its struggle with the slavery issue. Back in 1807, Farquhar, a devout Christian, had published a pamphlet which suggested ameliorating the effects of abolition in the West Indies plantations by importing indentured Chinese labourers. (When the experiment was tried, it was greeted with dismay. In such a brutal environment the Chinese seemed effete beyond words. Locals took exception to their pattering manner of walking and unconscious air of superiority. Farquhar had asserted that it would not be necessary to import women, since the Chinese did not much care with whom they co-habited. He was wrong about this, too.) Here on Mauritius the governor found, in a different setting, pretty much the policy he had advocated in the West Indies.

The island’s principal export was, like Jamaica’s, sugar: though the soil was not specially fertile, the crop did very well. The climate was good and Europeans considered the air particularly healthy. The only real town, Port Louis, had a stock of several thousand stone-built houses. De la Bourdonnais’ residence, built in 1738, filled one side of the tree-lined Place d’Armes and from its windows a gentle succession of British governors looked out on a view that breathed style and sophistication. Altogether, Mauritius was not at all an unpleasant posting, an English possession where the common language was French. Colonel Draper, for example, a lackadaisical adornment to colonial rule, was at one time commissioner of Mauritius police. He had got himself into no end of trouble in Trinidad in the bad old days but on Mauritius things went better. He married a Creole beauty and contributed to the island’s amenities by inaugurating horse-racing. Left alone – and the home government’s hold on affairs was tenuous – the British might have succumbed completely to the island’s charms.

An instance of the ambling pace of life was the introduction of Indian convicts to build the roads and connect the scattered hamlets. They lived in unsupervised camps and no power on earth could prevent them from co-habiting with the Indian women they found in the plantations. Though they were prevented by law from owning property, many of them found work in the evening and at the weekends. These convicts joined a rainbow of races – to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s euphoric picture of the concert of voices in the forest could now be added Tamil, Chinese, French and hallooing English. Officially there was a strict separation of races and classes. Unofficially things muddled along.

The only fly in the ointment was the falling price of sugar and the fate of the former slaves, now converted to indentured labourers and what were euphemistically designated ‘apprentices’. Mauritius had a taste of how difficult this last issue was in the appointment of John Jeremie as procureur-général in 1832. Jeremie had previously been chief justice on the West Indies island of St Lucia, where his high moral tone and pronounced abolitionist views incensed the local planters and led to his resignation. When he brought the same opinions to Mauritius, he found his reputation had preceded him. Colonel Draper was one among many who found him objectionably narrow-minded on the troubled subject of total emancipation.

In his capacity as chief of police, Draper prepared the new chief justice less than a hero’s welcome. Jeremie’s ship made its gun salute to the governor and dropped anchor. Fussing with his baggage, anxious to go ashore and make his first good impression, Jeremie ran slap into farce. For two days he was prevented by the chief of police from landing at all, despite furious representations. This was done, Draper explained suavely, out of consideration for his personal safety. Poor Jeremie. He rightly concluded that he did not have a friend on the island. He was finally taken ashore with a file of marines to protect him and marched – a terrible moment, this – past shuttered houses through the empty streets of Port Louis. A fortnight later he presented himself for his swearing-in. Not one of the judges on the island would come forward to conduct the ceremony.

Stoned by the mob and without a friend to help his cause, Jeremie was advised by the governor to go back home. After a twelve-week passage, he arrived in England and posted at once to London. If he was looking for sympathy, he got none. An infuriated Secretary for War and the Colonies ordered him to turn round and go straight back. This time, as soon as he was successfully sworn in, he set about his fellow judges, accusing them of complicity in illegal slave dealings and of irregularities in sentencing. This proved too much for the governor. Mauritius was not to be dictated to by some blue-light double-shotted canting lawyer, nor was a veteran of Waterloo and a god-damned general to be told how to run his administration. After less than a year in office Jeremie quit. With a gallows sense of humour, London first knighted him and then posted him to Sierra Leone to reflect on slavery at its source. The fever took him off in 1841. (By coincidence, his arch-enemy, Colonel Draper, had died in post on Mauritius the previous night.)

The Baker brothers arrived in more peaceable times, John in 1843, Sam a year later. Sir William and Lady Sophia Gomm were every bit as pleasant as they had been advertised. Now that the threat of war, or war on the scale the world had known it, had receded, the more ferocious military cast of mind had gone, too. There were schools and colleges for the white population, a Protestant cemetery, excellent Botanical Gardens; and a large theatre building, open every night for balls and other recreations. French bakers and pâtissiers, milliners and seamstresses added to the little elegances of life. There was talk of an observatory and Lady Gomm, with a delicate touch, had put herself at the head of a subscription list to build a statue and memorial to one of her husband’s French predecessors.

There was certainly a problem with emancipated slaves, who showed not the slightest wish to continue in the cane fields as wage labourers, but this was offset by the importation, just at the time the Bakers arrived, of 45,000 indentured Indians. As a consequence sugar production jumped by a third in a single year. (In the three years from 1843 to 1846 it more than doubled.) On the Baker estate at Fairfund the refinery was working flat out and for the youthful managers everything about the colony had the attraction of the new.

The same was not quite so true for the wives, the rector’s girls. Mauritius was after all an island – or, as these young women might have thought of it, only an island. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 to bring the blessings of Christianity to the world at large, had been dismayed – and perhaps disappointed – by the religious fervour it discovered already pre-existing in this tight little community of Catholics, Hindus and Muslims. It withdrew in 1833 and there remained only two Anglican clergymen in the whole colony, both comfortably situated in Port Louis. One of the most agreeable companions to be had nowadays was the indefatigable surveyor-general, John Lloyd.

He was a man after Sam Baker’s heart. When he arrived in 1831 the Pieter Boitte Mountain was pointed out to him, the one the French colons considered unscalable. Lloyd cut his way through the jungle approaches and – aided by ladders – made the first ascent, which he celebrated by planting a Union Jack on the summit. The Victorians held this to be the origin of British rock-climbing. (One of the people to leave an impression of Lloyd’s affability is Charles Darwin, who called at Mauritius on the way home from his epic voyage in HMS Beagle. Lloyd had an elephant he let the delighted naturalist ride.)

For Sam Baker, the place had only one drawback: there was nothing worthwhile to shoot. He might have overcome this disappointment but there were also family problems to contend with. His sister-in-law Elizabeth miscarried twice after arriving on Mauritius and was unhappy. She was almost certainly homesick. Baker was acute enough to have noticed an essential difference between the French on the island and themselves.

You cannot convince an English settler that he will be abroad for an indefinite number of years [he wrote]. With his mind ever fixed upon his return, he does little for prosperity in the colony. He rarely even plants a fruit tree, hoping that his stay will not allow him to gather from it.

The remark might have been directed without rancour at Elizabeth Baker. By comparison, he noted, the French planter came to stay.

The word ‘Adieu’ once spoken, he sighs an eternal farewell to ‘La Belle France’ and, with the natural lightheartedness of the nation, he settles cheerfully in a colony as his adopted country. He lays out his grounds with taste, and plants groves of exquisite fruit trees, whose produce will, he hopes, be tasted by his children and grandchildren. Accordingly, in a French colony there is a tropical beauty in the cultivated trees and flowers which is seldom seen in our own possessions.

Sam soon came to believe that, pretty though the island was, the women were right and there was something of the second division about it. After a visit to Réunion did nothing to calm his wanderlust, he set off in 1847 for Ceylon, travelling alone, having awarded himself a year’s shooting.

He was going to the right place: recent report was that three gentlemen had killed 104 elephants there in three days of slaughter. The trusty Gibbs rifle was at his side when he landed at Colombo and hastened to introduce himself to two of the locals in the modest comforts of Seager’s Hotel. He explained that he was there for the sport. The reaction was totally unexpected. ‘Sport?’ one of them cried incredulously. When Sam mentioned elephants his companion was even more scathing. ‘There are no elephants in Ceylon. Maybe there used to be, but I have lived here years and never seen one.’ These two were what he called ‘Galle Face planters’ – men who hung around Colombo and the racecourse, whose land was farmed for them by managers in the hinterland. They must have been exceptionally stupid (or delivering a colossal snub) for there was an established trade in elephants, captured and trained in Ceylon and then exported to the mainland as draught animals. It seemed to Sam they took their cue for a life of ignorance and indolence from the governor himself. ‘The movements of the Governor cannot carry much weight,’ he commented acidly, ‘as he does not move at all, with the exception of an occasional drive from Colombo to Kandy. His knowledge of the Colony and its wants and resources must therefore, from his personal experience, be limited to the Kandy road.’

Though Colombo had a small harbour, the East Indiamen and those ships bound for China, including all Royal Navy vessels, were of too deep a draught to enter it and instead rode at anchor out beyond the surf. It was both commentary and metaphor for the faintly makeshift and dilatory atmosphere Baker thought he could discern. The sleepy and peaceable town, still with much of the Dutch influence about it, including its mouldering and unimproved fortifications, did nothing to rouse his spirits.

Instead of the bustling activity of the Port Louis harbour in Mauritius, there were a few vessels rolling about in the road-stead, and some forty or fifty fishing canoes hauled up on the sandy beach. There was a peculiar dullness throughout the town – a sort of something which seemed to say ‘coffee does not pay’. There was a want of spirit in everything. The ill-conditioned guns upon the fort looked as though intended not to defend it; the sentinels looked parboiled; the very natives sauntered rather than walked; the bullocks crawled along in the mid-day sun, listlessly dragging the native carts.

These observations left Sam Baker with the idea that Ceylon was a hundred years behind Mauritius in development. The island traded in palm-oil, cinnamon and tobacco as well as coffee, yet all with the same want of energy he found so offensive. Much larger than Mauritius in surface area and with a population estimated at a million and a half, its interior, with its dizzying gorges and granite peaks, was, he soon discovered, largely unexplored. Trade and government rested chiefly at sea-level. The Cinnamon Gardens, which suggested at the very least something worthwhile to inspect, turned out to be an untended forest of low scrub. The dense groves of palms stretching back from the shoreline were hardly more alluring. There were scarcely more than 25,000 Europeans in the whole colony: Ceylon was asleep and, as it seemed to this hyperactive and boisterous young man, it begged to be awakened.

His own movements were soon settled. Quite by chance he fell in with ‘an old Gloucester friend’, Captain Palliser of the 15th Foot, a regiment then stationed on the island. Palliser, who had something of Sam’s own tastes and energy, took him up-country and there the Gibbs soon came out of its case. The jungle ravines were teeming with game and there were elephants to be had in plenty. The newcomer blazed away and plunged enthusiastically into the greeny dark for days and sometimes weeks on end. At the same time he began to demonstrate his innate intellectual curiosity, for the loud and hearty sportsman he loved to personate was also a keen naturalist and, perhaps even more unusually for the British on Ceylon, a patient and thoughtful explorer.

Baker had a very sharp eye for landscape and was impressed with the ruins of an extensive civilisation buried beneath the lianas. In particular, he saw how water had once been gathered and stored. This led him to estimate the amount of land that had once been under cultivation and the size of the population it had supported. The tone in which he reported these reflections was robust – few other Europeans on the island at that time could have written this:

The ancient history of Ceylon is involved in much obscurity; but, nevertheless, we have sufficient data in the existing traces of its former population to form our opinions of the position and power which Ceylon occupied in the Eastern Hemisphere, when England was in a state of barbarism. The wonderful remains of ancient cities, tanks, and watercourses throughout the island all prove that the now desolate regions were tenanted by a multitude – not of savages, but of a race long since passed away, full of industry and intelligence.

A partial description of Ceylon had been published in 1821. The author was a credulous Dutchman called Haafner and the information contained in his Travels on Foot Through the Island of Ceylon was already twenty years out of date when it was finally translated into English. Haafner came to the island at the turn of the century as an escaped prisoner of war from Madras; his travels, which were more like aimless wanderings, emphasised the awesome nature of the mountains Sam Baker was now exploring. Everything bad that could happen to the unwary white man happened to Haafner, sometimes to comic effect. In one incident, he set his lonely camp fire under a sheltering tree and was rewarded by a drenching shower of tiny frogs that tumbled out of the branches. Leaping up in disgust, he retreated to ground where he felt safer, only to sink in it past his ankles. He returned to his fire and built it up to a mighty blaze, with the intention of bringing down every last frog in the tree. They continued to fall, plopping into his food and making his life a misery.

The few other Europeans in Haafner’s story are, like him, overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of nature in the raw, so much so that they come to believe that no place in the interior is safe and no stick or stone is what it seems. Snakes, spiders, every kind of charging animal, including the rampaging elephant, are greeted for the most part with blind panic. As for the natives – the ‘koolies’ who carried Haafner’s kit and led him about in his wanderings – they are beings without personalities, human mud.

When it became necessary to bring water for preparing our supper, the Koolies were so terrified at the idea of being attacked by the crocodiles, that they with one voice refused to approach the river, though we offered to accompany them with torches and our pistols in our hands. What surprised us most, was that their obstinate and determined refusal inspired us with the same terror, so that instead of a supper, we were under the necessity of contenting ourselves with a glass of liquor and some biscuits.

Haafner’s sensibilities were essentially eighteenth century: what he could not name left him in superstitious dread. For him the world was huge and had no edges, the dark led into the dark; and only among other white men was there any sense of place or purpose. Adrift in the Ceylon jungle, Haafner always looked to a town as his ideal destination – somewhere furnishing lights, recognisable and familiar cuts of meat, wine and white men’s conversation. His feeble explorations had taken him to the foothills of what was later called the Great Wilderness of the Peak – that is, Adam’s Peak, the highest point on the island, where a rock was said to bear the imprint of the first man. Even in Sam Baker’s time, the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, founded in 1827, had in print a map of Ceylon in which the site of the supposed biblical Paradise was indicated, regretfully, as ‘unknown mountainous region’.

Having arrived to shoot big game, Sam found himself instead exploring the empty spaces of a map. It suited his personality to be first, to set his foot where no white man had been before. The Great Wilderness (which, after all, existed on an island only 280 miles long) held no fears for him but, rather, encouraged a native obstinacy. His explorations also cocked a snook at received opinion on the island. He had a young man’s pride of life, which included in his case a marked anti-authoritarianism; but there was more to him than this. Haafner could never have sat in patience beside a jungle track and let his mind wander as fruitfully as these words indicate:

How little can the inhabitant of a cold or temperate climate appreciate the vast amount of ‘life’ in a tropical country! The combined action of light, heat, and moisture calls into existence myriads of creeping things, the offspring of the decay in vegetation. ‘Life’ appears to emanate from ‘death’ – the destruction of one material seems to multiply the existence of another – the whole surface of the earth seems busied in one vast system of giving birth.

With the placing of those fastidious inverted commas, the big-game hunter and accidental explorer gives way to someone Huxley or Darwin could have understood and commended. Baker, though he did not yet know it, would find enemies enough in Victorian England, who mistook his unrepentant love of slaughter for a sign of the old brutalism that had animated their fathers. The thoughtful and enquiring side of him comes into view almost apologetically and at times is hidden by a lifetime penchant for schoolboy humour, as in this extract about the activities of a naturalist troubled by midges.

A cigar is a specific against these small plagues, and we will allow that the patient entomologist has just succeeded in putting them to flight, and has resumed the occupation of setting out his specimen. Ha! See him spring out of his chair as though electrified. Watch how, regardless of the laws of buttons, he frantically tears his trowsers from his limbs – he has him – no he hasn’t – yes he has – no, no, positively he cannot get him off. It is a tick, no bigger than a grain of sand, but his bite is like a redhot needle boring into the skin. If all the royal family had been present, he could not have refrained from tearing off his trowsers.

Sam roamed the high places for months on end, with no one but a Muslim bearer, Tamby, for company. It was an unusual and unpopular thing to do. To spend so much time in the unwelcoming and fever-ridden mountains – more baldly, to fail to ingratiate oneself with the society that clung to the littoral – was looked at askance in Colombo. Nobody likes a loner. In the colonial nineteenth century, standing apart from the rest was a particularly grievous social crime. Moreover, the administration of Ceylon, which Sam so cheerfully disparaged, was especially nervy, for it knew itself to be making a sorry contribution to trade statistics. It was not a very achieving sort of place at all.

The new seriousness that flowed down from the queen and her prosy little husband had spread into a lake that soon enough became a general style, extending to the furthest colony. It became the strident conventional wisdom that man and society could and must be improved. In 1845, for example, Ceylon installed its first bishop: he was not there to strike an amiable interdenominational balance, much less to dispense tea and sympathy, but rather to insist on the role of the church as evangelical crusader, the powerful auxiliary engine of change. Trade might follow the flag but it needed gingering. The scourge of colonial administration for many years was the permanent under-secretary for the colonies, James Stephen. His clerks referred to him fearfully as ‘King Stephen’, for he more than any political appointee ran the colonies. The verb is not excessive. Stephen’s wife was Harriet Venn, whose father was a leading member of the Clapham Sect, that group of evangelical Christians who gathered round Wilberforce. No colonial bishop – come to that no governor – could ignore this connection.

Sam Baker was never a reformer in this sense. Bishops bored him. He distrusted missionaries with a vengeance and parliamentary and church politics passed clean over his head. All he knew was what he saw for himself. As the weeks turned into months and he tramped the high jungles he realised he had found somewhere to challenge his restlessness. What was more, he had arrived just at the moment when there was a drive to attract settlers. Land was being offered by the government at £1 an acre. Nevertheless, he might never have thought seriously about staying on in Ceylon but for the accident of falling ill from what he calls ‘jungle fever’ after an orgy of shooting. He had probably contracted malaria. Weak and wasted, he took himself off to recuperate on a plateau called Newera Eliya, 6500 feet above sea-level and overlooked by Ceylon’s third highest peak. Immediately, he fell in love with the place.

It was not entirely virgin land. A former governor, the bullish Sir Edward Barnes, a Peninsular and Waterloo veteran, had built himself a stone house on the plain reputed to have cost £8000 and there was also a ruined sanatorium for the island’s troops. More romantically, the landscape was pitted with diggings, sometimes holes, sometimes deeper shafts, where the ancient kings of Kandy had searched for rubies. The place-names were evocative. The road up from Badulla was called the Valley of a Thousand Princes and the plateau itself was known as the Royal Plains. Barnes may have built his own house and the sanatorium so high up with the intention of replicating Ootacamund in India, the hill station to which the Madras presidency took itself in the summer months. This dream died with him. When Sam Baker first set eyes on it, Newera Eliya was no more than a forlorn relic.

He arrived more dead than alive and within a fortnight felt his strength returning. There was nothing under the plough and no stock to be seen. The few whites who lived there permanently ran hotels and rest-houses in a wildly romantic landscape where leopards were bold enough to snatch dogs from the veranda and rats ate any crop that was planted. The full bestiary of Newera was awesome, in fact, though not to a man who had spent a year wandering through ravines and climbing mountains, shooting game too heavy to carry and announcing his kills by tooting on a bugle to attract the indigenous Sinhalese in the rice paddies far below. Sam Baker found himself entranced. He plunged, and bought a thousand acres of this wild and uncultivated upland, jamming his walking stick into the turf at the eastern end of the plain. His scheme, cooked up in a fevered brain, was twice as grandiose as Governor Barnes’s desire to have his own hill station. On this remote plateau Baker intended to settle a model farm in the good old English style, to be staffed by stout-hearted Gloucestershire men and women and grazed by imported sheep and cattle. Coffee would not do: the site was too high for coffee and anyway he wanted nothing to do with the existing planter society. What he had in mind was a piece of the West Country set down in the tropics, with the added attraction of seemingly inexhaustible big-game shooting on the doorstep.

This decision, so swiftly arrived at, discussed with no one else, was an act of social rebellion. Newera Eliya was about as remote from the governing class of Ceylon as it was possible to get. To buy land there was almost as exotic as purchasing a desert island, yet Sam Baker was not planning to run away from existence. Instead, he would show the world how a life in action should be lived, on a site the colonial government had practically forgotten. It was a challenge much more appealing than watching sugar cane grow back on Mauritius. The naturally combative side to him was stirred into a fine indignation.

Why should this place lie idle? Why should this great tract of country in such a lovely climate be untenanted and uncultivated? How often I have stood upon the hills and asked myself this question when gazing over the wide extent of undulating forest and plain! How often I have thought of the thousands of starving wretches at home who here might earn a comfortable livelihood!

He stayed no more than a fortnight before setting out for the coast and a ship to take him home. Once things were under way in London, he easily persuaded John and the womenfolk that their destiny also lay in Ceylon. His son Charles had died an infant’s death on Mauritius; his second child was a girl called Jane who had not taken to a tropical climate. There was another new-born son who was the apple of his eye. His brother’s wife was still childless: maybe the miraculously invigorating air would do for everyone else what it had done for him. It seems they thought so too. A jubilant Sam went down to Lypiatt Park and communicated the same torrential enthusiasm to his younger brother, Valentine, a stocky and rather gloomy boy of nineteen. Then he looked around him for servants to the enterprise.

His first hiring – and he was to rue the day he made it – was a one-eyed groom from his father’s estate called Henry Perkes. Perkes had the unfailing confidence that came from being a pub wit. Sam may not have noticed at first that he was more often drunk than sober. As bailiff Baker chose another West Country man, a tenant farmer called Fowler, who came with a homely wife and a beautiful daughter. He found a local blacksmith willing to follow him. This man had as his wife ‘a cheerful knockabout woman’ perfect for the job in hand – she could swing an eighteen-pound hammer as powerfully as her husband. Since the whole of the Gloucestershire countryside was talking about the repeal of the Corn Laws and the coming ruination of agriculture, Baker had arrived at an opportune moment. Altogether, excluding family members, Sam persuaded nine others to join him.

We can get some idea of what was in play from Charles Kingsley’s novel, Yeast. The story commenced publication in serial form in 1846 and has the distinction to be among the worst constructed novels of any century; all the same it has strong resonance with the scheme Sam Baker had taken into his head. What Kingsley was trying to dramatise was the disaffection and intellectual confusion of the governing class – or at least their young – set beside the sharply observed miseries of the rural population in a time of agricultural slump. Kingsley’s hero, Lancelot Smith, learns from the honest poor how to be a man. He has a university education and £2000 a year at his disposal but no purpose. Love is not the answer to his problems, nor is rick-burning or radical politics. The true path lies in the search for the Kingdom of God. His first steps are guided by the giant gamekeeper and hedge philosopher, Tregarva. Then, towards the end of the book, he meets the mysterious Barnakill, who proposes the two of them desert England altogether and retire to some utopian community ‘in the land of Prester John’. (Barnakill does not mean Ethiopia but Russia. In a very necessary epilogue Kingsley modifies this startling proposal further by suggesting that the location of this earthly paradise is more metaphorical than geographical.)

Educated at Cambridge, Kingsley was deeply influenced by the Christian socialism of F. D. Maurice and a great admirer of Carlyle. Yeast, as it unfolded, suggested to some people a dangerous radicalism. It was published in book form in the revolutionary year of 1848 and its author attracted some passing notoriety. However, Kingsley was no more a firebrand than his fictional hero. He was in fact a country parson of donnish tastes who saw nothing noble in the lives of his own parishioners and made no great inroads towards their well-being. By 1860 he was appointed professor of Modern History at his old university and was for a brief time tutor to the Prince of Wales. Even a modest amount of bourgeois comfort was enough to placate the Lancelot Smith in him. In the last fifteen years of his life he became an ardent naturalist and reconciler of faith with science: he became, in short, a representative Victorian, genial, a little muddled and, when called upon, a friend to the established order.

Sam Baker needed no Barnakill to show him the way out and, unlike Kingsley, he was first and foremost a man of action. To go and settle halfway up a mountain on an island very few of his followers could have found on a map was a colossal undertaking for such a young man, given that he was remembered in his home county as nothing more than a jolly young giant with a passion for shooting. Moreover, as everyone knew, he had recently inherited a small fortune from his grandmother and could if he chose buy almost any property in the west of England. From there he could indulge his taste for adventure by expedition. That would have been his father’s advice, for old Sam Baker risked very little in his life and was perfectly aware that the honours and dignity he sought in his old age had to be purchased. He was, when it came down to it, only a merchant – a rich and generous one, but famous only in Gloucestershire and among other London merchants. It was true the family had Tudor courtiers in its background, but in early Victorian England such an ancestry needed to be refurbished with sons who had been to university and made political connections that would last them through life.

Sam Baker’s indifference to such a world and such a career is marked. His father’s ramshackle way of educating him aggravated this but it was not the cause – he was an outsider by temperament. In later life, when he had proved himself a great explorer, he was fond of defending his eminence in stiff little sentences like this: ‘I do not love to dwell upon geographical theories, as I believe in nothing but actual observation.’ This is a vain man speaking.

It was soon clear to the farm workers he recruited that he had very great organising abilities. The colonists were to take ship in the Earl of Hardwicke with many tons of equipment, including a newfangled power saw and a patented compost-maker. There was a small ark of animals to be stowed before the mast. If he minimised the element of risk – and he had already discovered several different ways of suffering injury and sudden death on the Royal Plains – that was only in his nature. As the plans went forward, he paid a visit to Beattie’s, the gunsmiths in Regent Street, and ordered from the firm not one but four double-barrelled rifles. From there he walked down to Paget’s of Piccadilly and bought an impressive knife. ‘The blade is one foot in length and two inches broad at its widest point and slightly concave in the middle. The steel is of the most exquisite quality and the knife weighs three pounds.’ In due course, Baker used it to dispatch at a single blow a charging wild boar weighing 300 pounds. The knife split the animal open from the spine to its pizzle.

In the book he wrote about the Ceylon venture, Eight Years in Ceylon, Sam Baker says he did all this merely to have the pleasures of a country estate without the harassment of his neighbours’ gamekeepers, which may have been the echo of a jocular family accusation. Young though he was, he had a very clear view of what he must do to get what he wanted – and the wit to set out in advance of his little band of colonists to prepare for their arrival. He built them all handsome little cottages with wood cut from the enclosing jungle and began the laborious business of clearing his land. He was wide-eyed about this, too. Every root, every stump was dug out. He knew that the soil, which looked so promising on the surface, would never amount to anything without manure. It lay on a bed of pure white clay. Baker was undeterred. He was prepared to add another £10 an acre in costs to clear and sweeten his land. Such long-sightedness was rare in Ceylon. The elevation of Newera and its exposure to the long months of the monsoon, when the rain and mist seemed to sit on the landscape for ever, made it an unappealing investment for the faint of heart. The real land-rush was lower down the mountain in lush grass country. Characteristically, Baker spent his money and energies on the more difficult option.

Things began badly. His daughter Jane died at sea on the passage from Mauritius and the toddler son on whom he doted was poisoned by a servant shortly after he set foot on Ceylon. The argosy from England arrived safely enough but trouble began immediately after debarkation. Among the animals fetched from England was a prize Durham cow, intended to mate with a half-bred Hereford bull. Sam arranged for it to be carried up in all its pomp in a cart that local craftsmen assured him would transport an elephant. The cow promptly fell through the floor. It was accordingly driven on foot and died of exhaustion halfway up the mountain. Perkes, whose official designation was that of groom, ran a brand-new carriage over the cliff. Baker reproduces an approximation of his letter of apology:

Honor’d Zurr,

I’m sorry to hinform you that the carriage and osses has met with an haccident and is tumbled down a preccipice and its a mussy as I didn’t go too. The preccipice isn’t very deep being not above heighty feet or thereabouts – the hosses is got up but is very bad – the carriage lies on its back and we can’t stir it nohow. Mr—is very kind and has lent above a hundred niggers, but they aint no more use than cats at liftin. Plese Zur come and see whats to be done.