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

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He was buried at sea on his way home. He was forty-three.

      It was a sad story but a predictable one. The ship’s company that saw Lewis over the side were lucky not to have followed him. Even on Jamaica, in country that had been cultivated for 150 years, there was something impermanent about affairs, something of the stage set. Young Sam Baker came to realise that while there might be honest men on the island, there was no one of any great merit. (Monk Lewis was surely the only man ever to have visited Jamaica who had also shaken Goethe by the hand.) Most of the time was taken up with mere survival. Better to be a good shot and a two-bottle man than any learned gentleman. It was an incurably eighteenth-century point of view and – for a young man with eyes in his head – the society that supported it was dangerously moribund.

      But then, as Sam Baker realised, Jamaican men and manners were not there to please but to make people like himself wealthy. It was this, as much as the thick red rum that lubricated every meeting, that proved so intoxicating. Perhaps, in the very crudity of the island’s leading figures, their brutal jollity along with their lack of principles, there was an additional frisson. He was being given a lesson in ruthlessness. The missionaries could say what they liked about the rights of man but how were empires made unless by some cruder, less reflective set of ideas?

      Samuel Baker came home and married Miss Dobson, the daughter of another industrious and acquisitive merchant, Thomas Dobson of Enfield in Middlesex. She gave him five children, all named for existing or former members of the family and all raised in a hearty, rumbustious and almost careless way that left them – like their father – not specially well educated but quick. They were also fearless. University, the professions, a parliamentary seat – none of these things was held out to the Baker boys as worthwhile. Samuel Baker intended his sons to be doers, and makers. A generation after he himself stood at his Jamaican windows, looking out on the empty ocean, the world had shrunk, but only a little. The greatest parts of it were still wide open. For a determined and resourceful man there was nothing in it to fear. Life, if it was conducted in the right way, was an adventure. The trick was not to be tied by convention, never to apologise for being rich, always to seize the main chance. The young Bakers knew this by family example. God the Englishman had helped their father do exactly what he wished in life. Samuel Baker, Esq., was the owner of Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire, chairman of his own bank and an honoured member of the board of Great Western Railways. Now it was the children’s turn.

       ONE

      On 3 August 1843 the Reverend Charles Martin married two of his daughters, Henrietta and Elizabeth, to the two eldest boys of Samuel Baker. The double wedding took place in the parish church of St Giles, Maisemore, then a small village just outside Gloucester. Across the river was a handsome stone-built property called Highnam Court, formerly the Baker home. After a boisterous reception the two sets of newly-weds were driven away on the road to Bristol, each in their own carriage and four. As he watched them go, Mr Martin could reflect with pleasure on his daughters’ good fortune. John Baker, who had married Elizabeth, was a steady young man and a warm friend to his younger brother Sam. The boys – the entire family – were hearty in an old-fashioned way but that was no bad thing either. If there was a cloud over the day’s proceedings it was that John and Elizabeth, after a honeymoon in Clifton, would take ship the very next month for the island of Mauritius. For them it was an adventure, but for Mr Martin and his wife a considerable wrench. The couple were to sail in one of old Sam Baker’s vessels, the Jack, and it did not seem to bother anyone that this flea of a ship, a mere 100 tons, was to carry them on a passage that commonly lasted three months.

      John Baker was being sent to Mauritius to manage the family sugar estate there, which was called, encouragingly, Fairfund. Yet who in Maisemore knew much of anything about Mauritius before this happy day? Wedding guests learned there was a newly installed governor, Sir William Maynard Gomm, a Waterloo veteran (it went almost without saying), a man who had been gazetted a lieutenant in the army before he was ten years old. (He ended up a field marshal and died in 1875 at the ripe old age of ninety-one.) Both Sir William and his predecessor on Mauritius, Sir Lionel Smith, had Jamaica connections that Mr Martin might secretly reprehend: it was not exactly a blot on the character of his new in-laws that they were sugar merchants, though recent Jamaican politics did speak of a rough and brutal society such as the rector himself had never met with in the calmer waters of the Bristol diocese.

      Though the story was hard to follow in detail, the bones of the matter were simple enough: the distant and unlovely Jamaican Assembly had taken the recent law enacting the full emancipation of slaves extremely badly and refused to ratify it until pressed to do so upon pain of dissolution by the mother country. This insult by a gang of ruffians was surely an affront to the new queen’s dignity. Mr Martin did not insist upon the matter – how could he with a man as deeply involved in sugar as old Sam Baker? However, he was gratified to hear that Mauritius was a very different case and Gomm the pleasantest man imaginable. It was also some comfort to Mr and Mrs Martin that their second daughter, Henrietta, would go no further than London after the wedding, where young Sam Baker was to be placed in his father’s office in Fenchurch Street.

      Of the two brothers, Sam was far the better candidate for a life in the colonies. Not especially tall, he was barrel-chested, muscular and loud. All the Bakers were jolly but, though he was only twenty-two, Sam was the epitome of an old-fashioned squire. He could ride, botanise after a fashion – and he could shoot. He loved shooting. It was the wonder of the family that he had gone to Gibbs of Bristol for a muzzle-loading rifle made to his own design, requiring a massive charge and firing a three-ounce bullet of pure lead. As he pointed out with delight, this whole set-up was ‘preposterous to the professional opinions of the trade’. The great weapon weighed twenty-one pounds and could knock down animals not to be found in the New Forest, or anywhere else in England. Sam was a prime shot, and slaughter, it seemed, was never very far from his mind.

      His father had lately sent him into Germany to be tutored. It was one of the peculiarities of the family that old Sam Baker distrusted public schools and had raised all his children at the local grammar school and then, as necessary, with the assistance of tutors. As a consequence none of them was markedly bookish. This was not considered a failing. One of the best stories at the wedding breakfast told how Sam had persuaded his brother John to pay court to the Martin girls by sailing across the river that separated the two parishes in a bath tub. These were two self-willed and, to a certain extent, self-educated young men with a fine disregard for convention. John was the more biddable, but the exuberance of his brother Sam was a joy to everyone who met him. It was by no means clear how an office in Fenchurch Street could contain him.

      It did not. The following year, after presenting the rector and his wife with a grandson and with Henrietta pregnant a second time, Sam set off with his family to join his brother. An important part of his luggage was his collection of guns and sporting rifles.

      The Portuguese first discovered Mauritius in 1505. Ninety years later the Dutch conquered it without too much trouble and then, when they saw a superior advantage in occupying the Cape of Good Hope, abandoned it just as lightly. In 1715 the arrival of de la Bourdonnais’ fleet made it French. It was swiftly garrisoned and the lowlands cultivated. On its westerly side the island is guarded by steep cliffs leading to mountains the French colons dismissed with a Gallic shrug as being inaccessible. The value of Mauritius was in its handsome anchorage. From Port Louis royal ships and many rapacious privateers harried the lumbering East India trade. Following the capture of one such vessel, the Osterley, bound for Calcutta, the governor emptied the hold of its cargo of blue and yellow cloth and ran up fetching new uniforms for his black garrison. They marched about some impressive fortifications, for Port Louis had anchorage for fifty men-of-war and was comfortably considered impregnable to attack by sea.

      The French called their island, with justifiable pride, the Île de France. One of the curiosities

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