LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      He was drunk when the accident happened. One horse had to be destroyed and another died the next day. They had been sent from Australia expressly to weather the climate. Perkes then excelled himself. Sent down the mountain to the accident site with an elephant, he overcame the protests of the mahout and took him off at a fine gallop. Refreshed by brandy and water, and finding his offers of help declined, the groom took off again back up the pass. In his own words, he ‘tooled the old elephant along until he came to a standstill’. Shortly afterwards, the beast keeled over and died. Perkes was, as Baker grimly observed, ‘one of the few men in the world who had ridden an elephant to death’. When he finally caught up with him, the groom was being pushed round the nascent plantation in a wheelbarrow, his mate as drunk as he.

      There is a clue to Baker’s unique temperament in a couple of lines of Eight Years in Ceylon. Apart from the damage done by Perkes (whom he quixotically describes as ‘honest and industrious’) there was an early mini-revolt of his tiny colony against the authority of the bailiff, Mr Fowler. It reached a climax when the white men refused to obey orders in front of the 150 natives Baker had hired to uproot the trees. ‘I was obliged to send two of them to jail as an example to the others,’ Baker remarks. ‘This produced the desired effect and we soon got regularly to work.’ One can make too much of this incident but it demonstrates Baker’s supreme self-possession.

      Most of Eight Years in Ceylon was written by palm-oil lamp at the end of Sam Baker’s stay on the island. It is not a blueprint for how to set up and manage a model farm – as with the earlier partnership on Mauritius, John, the older brother, assumed most of the day-today responsibilities. Nevertheless, it was Sam’s energy that transformed the plateau. The soil was bad, the rats ate all his first crops; and his two rams, on which he depended for a flock, fought a bad-tempered duel to the death. The bull, cheated of his Durham mate, was put to serve the puny local cattle and produced a strange hybrid, easily outstripped in strength by the elephants Baker trained to drag a plough or trundle not one but three harrows. However, the crossbred cattle showed some surprising qualities. A leopard got into Fowler’s byre through the thatched roof and the poor man went out by lantern light to evict it armed only with a pistol, to be chased out of the place by an enraged cow well up to the challenge from a mere big cat.

      Both John and Elizabeth Baker were, years later, buried at Newera Eliya and the Baker family did not sell the prosperous tea estate the original farm finally became until 1947. Even then, the head of the family retained the freehold on the ruined old houses which his grandparents had built. If there is a spirit of the hearth that still dwells there it is assuredly that of Sam Baker. He would not have been human if he had not preened himself a little on his sang-froid. What gave him the calm to face down beasts intent on killing him was indivisible from his general manner.

      There cannot be a more beautiful sight than the view of the sunrise from the summit of Pedrotallagalla, the highest mountain in Ceylon, which, rising to the height of 8,300 feet, looks down on Newera Ellya some two thousand feet below on one side, and upon the interminable depths of countless ravines and valleys at its base.

      This is the language of the proprietor, which Baker certainly was. The passage places him alone on his eminence, for though he loved his family, he was still a young man and in the whole of his narrative his wife Henrietta scarcely merits a mention. It continues:

      There is a feeling approaching the sublime when a solitary man thus stands upon the highest point of earth, before the dawn of day, and waits for the first rising of the sun. Nothing above him but the dusky arch of heaven. Nothing on his level but empty space – all beneath, deep beneath his feet. From childhood he has looked to heaven as the dwelling place of the Almighty, and he now stands upon that lofty summit in the silence of utter solitude: his hand, as he raises it above his head, the highest mark upon the sea-girt land: his form above all mortals upon this land the nearest to his God.

      The greater part of Eight Years in Ceylon concerns the sport he had set out to find there, but it does include this lyrical passage:

      Comparatively but a few years ago, Newera Ellia was undiscovered – a secluded plain among the mountain tops, tenanted by the elk and the boar. The wind swept over it, and the mists hung around the mountains, and the bright summer with its spotless sky succeeded, but still it was unknown and unseen except by the native bee-hunter in his rambles for wild honey. How changed! The road encircles the plain, and the carts are busy in removing the produce of the land. Here, where wild forest stood, are gardens teeming with English flowers: rosy faced children and ruddy countrymen are about the cottage doors; equestrians of both sexes are galloping round the plain and the cry of hounds is ringing on the mountain-side.

      A little over thirty years after his father gazed out on his cane fields in Jamaica, the young Sam Baker had performed a double trick, of creating an Arcadia equal to Saint-Pierre’s in Paul et Virginie, but almost wholly independent of the colony in which it stood. Towards colonial government in general Baker exhibited a fine contempt. Its dilatoriness was exhibited, Baker thought, in such obvious matters as the Botanical Gardens in Colombo, which had been set up as a cultural attraction – the jungle tamed – and which also doubled as a handy site for flirtation and intrigue. Baker pointed out that since most settlers came out to make their fortunes and had no capital to spare for experiment, the government would do much better by using its gardens as a base for scientific investigations. (He was proved right: the introduction of tea to Ceylon eventually came about from crop trials made there.)

      Very few men inside or out of any of the colonial governments of the day had gathered so comprehensive an understanding of a land, its indigenous inhabitants and its potential. Eight Years in Ceylon is teasingly short on domestic detail but cannot be faulted otherwise. Sam Baker took as his canvas not just his own estate, nor the game he found, but the whole island. He saw everything with an explorer’s eye.

      Then, in 1854, something truly unexpected happened. Racked with fever, Sam staggered down from the mountains without his horse and having buried his gun-bearer. With as much suddenness as he had shown in his original impulse to buy his thousand acres, he now quit. The little community was astonished to learn that all four of the Bakers, with Sam and Henrietta’s four surviving children, had decided to return to England, leaving Mr Fowler in place as manager. Poor Fowler. His wife had died on the plain and was one of the first tenants in the graveyard of the new church. She joined Sam’s own baby son.

      There is an old tree standing upon a hill whose gnarled trunk has been twisted by the winter’s wind for many an age, and so screwed is its old stem that the axe has spared it, out of pity, when its companions were all swept away, and the forest felled … The eagle has roosted in its top, the monkeys have

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