LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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