Greater Britain Part 39

It is true that the Indus line will be no easy one to make. To bridge the river at Mithun Kote or even at Kotree would be difficult enough, and were it to be bridged at Sukkur, where there is rock, and a narrow pa.s.s upon the river, the line from Sukkur to Kurrachee would be exposed to depredation from the frontier tribes. The difficulties are great, but the need is greater, and the argument of the heavy cost of river-side railroads should not weigh with us in the case of lines required for the safety of the country. The Lah.o.r.e and Peshawur, the Kotree and Moultan, the Kotree and Baroda, and the Baroda and Delhi lines, instead of being set one against the other for comparison, should be simultaneously completed as necessary for the defense of the empire, and as forming the trunk lines for innumerable branches into the cotton-and wheat-growing districts.

One of the branches of the Indus line will have to be constructed from the Bholan Pa.s.s to Sukkur, where we lay some days embarking cotton.

Sukkur lies on the Beloochistan side; Roree fort--known as the "Key of Scinde," the seizure of which by us provoked the great war with the Ameers--on an island in mid-stream; and Bukkur City on the eastern or left bank; and the river, here narrowed to a width of a quarter of a mile, runs with the violence of a mountain torrent.

Sukkur is one of the most ancient of Indian cities, and was mentioned as time-worn by the Greek geographers, while tradition says that its antiquities attracted Alexander; but towns grow old with great rapidity in India, and, once ancient in their look, never to the eye become in the slightest degree older.

In Sukkur I first saw the Scindee cap, which may be described as a tall hat with the brim atop; but the Scindees were not the only strangely-dressed traders in Sukkur and Roree: there were high-capped Persians, and lean Afghans with long gaunt faces and high cheek-bones, and furred merchants from Central Asia. It is even said that goods find their way overland from China to Sukkur, through Eastern Persia and Beloochistan, the traders preferring to come round four thousand miles than to cross the main chain of the Himalayas or pa.s.s through the country of the Afghans.

In ancient times there was considerable intercourse between China and Hindostan; at the end of the seventh century, indeed, the Chinese invaded India through Nepaul, and captured five hundred cities. It is to be hoped that the next few years may see a railway built from Rangoon to Southern China, and from Calcutta to the Yang-tse-Kiang, a river upon which there are ample stores of coal, which would supply the manufacturing wants of India.

After viewing from a lofty tower the flat country in the direction of Shikapore, we spent one of our Sukkur evenings upon the island of Roree watching the natives fishing. Casting themselves into the river on the top of skins full of air, or more commonly on great earthenware pitchers, they floated at a rapid pace down with the whirling stream, pushing before them a sunken net which they could close and lift by the drawing of a string. About twice a minute they would strike a fish, and, lifting their head, would impale the captive on a stick slung behind their back, and at once lower again the net in readiness for further action.

Sukkur, like seven other places that I had visited within a year, has the reputation of being the hottest city in the world, and the joke on the boats of the Indus flotilla is that Moultan is too hot to bear, and Sukkur much hotter; but that Jacobabad, on the Beloochee frontier, near Sukkur, is so hot that the people come down thence to Sukkur for the hot season, and find its coolness as refreshing as ordinary mortals do that of Simla. Hot as is Sukkur, it is fairly beaten by a spot at the foot of the Ibex Hills, near Sehwan. I was sleeping on the bridge with an officer from Peshawur, when the crew were preparing to put off from the bank for the day's journey. We were awakened by the noise; but, as we sat up and rubbed our eyes, a blast of hot wind came down from the burnt-up hills, laden with fine sand, and of such a character that I got a lantern--for it was not fully light--and made my way to the deck thermometer. I found it standing at 104, although the hour was 415 A.M. At breakfast-time, it had fallen to 100, from which it slowly rose, until at 1 P.M. it registered 116 in the shade. The next night, it never fell below 100. This was the highest temperature I experienced in India during the hot weather, and it was, singularly enough, the same as the highest which I recorded in Australia. No part of the course of the Indus is within the tropics, but it is not in the tropics that the days are hottest, although the nights are generally unbearable on sea-level near the equator.

At Kootree, near Hydrabad, the capital of Scinde, where the tombs of the Ameers are imposing, if far from beautiful, we left the Indus for the railway, and, after a night's journey, found ourselves upon the sea-sh.o.r.e at Kurrachee.

CHAPTER XVI.

OVERLAND ROUTES.

Of all the towns in India, Kurrachee is the least Indian. With its strong southwesterly breeze, its open sea and dancing waves, it is to one coming from the Indus valley a pleasant place enough; and the climate is as good as that of Alexandria, though there is at Kurrachee all the dust of Cairo. For a stranger detained against his will to find Kurrachee bearable there must be something refreshing in its breezes: the town stands on a treeless plain, and of sights there are none, unless it be the sacred alligators at Muggur Peer, where the tame "man-eaters" spring at a goat for the visitor's amus.e.m.e.nt as freely as the Wolfsbrunnen trout jump at the gudgeon.

There is no reason given why the alligators' pool should be reputed holy, but in India places easily acquire sacred fame. About Peshawur there dwell many hill-fanatics, whose sole religion appears to consist in stalking British sentries. So many of them have been locked up in the Peshawur jail that it has become a holy place, and men are said to steal and riot in the streets of the bazaar in order that they may be consigned to this sacred temple.

The nights were noisy in Kurrachee, for the great Mohammedan feast of the Mohurrum had commenced, and my bungalow was close to the lines of the police, who are mostly Belooch Mohammedans. Every evening, at dusk, fires were lighted in the police-lines and the bazaar, and then the tomtom-ing gradually increased from the gentle drone of the daytime until a perfect storm of "tom-a-tom, tomtom, tom-a-tom, tomtom," burst from all quarters of the town, and continued the whole night long, relieved only by blasts from conch-sh.e.l.ls and shouts of "Shah Ha.s.san!

Shah Hoosein! Wah Allah! Wah Allah!" as the performers danced round the flames. I heartily wished myself in the State of Bhawulpore, where there is a license-tax on the beating of drums at feasts. The first night of the festival I called up a native servant who "spoke English," to make him take me to the fires and explain the matter. His only explanation was a continual repet.i.tion of "Dat Mohurrum, Mohammedan Christmas-day."

When each night, about dawn, the tomtom-ing died away once more, the chokedars--or night watchmen--woke up from their sound sleep, and began to shout "Ha ha!" into every room to show that they were awake.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The chokedars are well-known characters in every Indian station: always either sleepy and useless, or else in league with the thieves, they are nevertheless a recognized cla.s.s, and are everywhere employed. At Rawul-Pindee and Peshawar, the chokedars are armed with guns, and it is said that a newly-arrived English officer at the former place was lately returning from a dinner-party, when he was challenged by the chokedar of the first house he had to pa.s.s. Not knowing what reply to make, he took to his heels, when the chokedar fired at him as he ran. The shot woke all the chokedars of the parade, and the unfortunate officer received the fire of every man as he pa.s.sed along to his house at the farther end of the lines, which he reached, however, in perfect safety. It has been suggested that, for the purpose of excluding all natives from the lines at night, there should be a shibboleth or standing parole of some word which no native can p.r.o.nounce. The word suggested is "s...o...b..ryness."

Although chokedars were silent and tomtom-ing subdued during the daytime, there were plenty of other sounds. Lizards chirped from the walls of my room, and sparrows twittered from every beam and rafter of the roof. When I told a Kurrachee friend that my slippers, my brushes, and soldier's writing-case had all been thrown by me on to the chief beam during an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the enemy, he replied that for his part he paraded his drawing-room every morning with a double-barreled gun, and frequently fired into the rafters, to the horror of his wife.

In a small lateen-rigged yacht lent us by a fellow-traveler from Moultan, some of us visited the works which have long been in progress for the improvement of the harbor of Kurrachee, and which form the sole topic of conversation among the residents in the town. The works have for object the removal of the bar which obstructs the entrance to the harbor, with a view to permit the entry of larger ships than can at present find an anchorage at Kurrachee.

The most serious question under discussion is that of whether the bar is formed by the Indus silt or merely by local causes, as, if the former supposition is correct, the ultimate disposition of the ten thousand millions of cubic feet of mud which the Indus annually brings down is not likely to be affected by such works as those in progress at Kurrachee. When a thousand sealed bottles were lately thrown into the Indus for it to be seen whether they would reach the bar, the result of the "great bottle trick," as Kurrachee people called it, was that only one bottle reached and not one weathered a point six miles to the southward of the harbor. The bar is improving every year, and has now some twenty feet of water, so that ships of 1000 tons can enter except in the monsoon, and the general belief of engineers is that the completion of the present works will materially increase the depth of water.

The question of this bar is not one of merely local interest: a single glance at the map is sufficient to show the importance of Kurrachee.

Already rising at an unprecedented pace, having trebled her shipping and quadrupled her trade in ten years, she is destined to make still greater strides as soon as the Indus Railway is completed, and finally--when the Persian Gulf route becomes a fact--to be the greatest of the ports of India.

That a railway must one day be completed from Constantinople or from some port on the Mediterranean to Bussorah on the Persian Gulf is a point which scarcely admits of doubt. From Kurrachee or Bombay to London by the Euphrates valley and Constantinople is all-but a straight line, while from Bombay to London by Aden and Alexandria is a wasteful curve.

The so-called "Overland Route" is half as long again as would be the direct line. The Red Sea and Isthmus route has neither the advantage of unbroken sea nor of unbroken land transit; the direct route with a bridge near Constantinople might be extended into a land road from India to Calais or Rotterdam. The Red Sea line pa.s.ses along the sh.o.r.es of Arabia, where there is comparatively little local trade; the Persian Gulf route would develop the remarkable wealth of Persia, and would carry to Europe a local commerce already great. At the entrance of the Persian Gulf, near Cape Mussendoom or Ormuz, we should establish a free port on the plan of Singapore. In 1000 A.D., the spot now known as Ormuz was a barren rock, but a few years of permanent occupation of the spot as a free port changed the barren islet into one of the wealthiest cities in the world. The Red Sea route crosses Egypt, the direct route crosses Turkey; and it cannot be too strongly urged that in war time "Egypt" means Russia or France, while "Turkey" means Great Britain.

In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf railroad, Kurrachee would play a leading part. Not only the wheat and the cotton of the Punjaub and of the then irrigated Scinde, but the trade of Central Asia would flow down the Indus, and it is hardly too much to believe that the silks of China, the teas of Northern India, and the shawls of Cashmere will all of them one day find in Kurrachee their chief port. The earliest known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf. Chinese ships traded to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh centuries, bringing silk and iron, and it may be doubted whether any of the Russian routes will be able to compete with the more ancient Euphrates valley line of trade. Shorter, pa.s.sing through countries well known and comparatively civilized, admitting at once of the use of land and water transport side by side, it is far superior in commercial and political advantages to any of the Russian desert roads. A route through Upper Persia has been proposed, but merchants of experience will tell you that greater facilities for trade are extended to Europeans in even the "closed" ports of China than upon the coasts of Persia, and the prospect of the freedom of trade upon a Persian railroad would be but a bad one, it may be feared.

The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the glory of many fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuz and Antioch, Cyprus and Rhodes, have a second history before them; Crete, Brindisi, and Venice will each obtain a renewal of their ancient fame. Alexander of Macedon was the first man who took a scientific view of the importance of the Gulf route, but we have hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson contained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the coast from the Indus to the Euphrates. The advantage to be gained from the completion of the railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf will not fall only to the share of India and Great Britain. Holland and Belgium are, in proportion to their wealth, at the least as greatly interested in the Euphrates route as are we ourselves, and should join us in its construction. The Dutch trade with Java would be largely benefited, and Dutch ports would become the shipping-places for Eastern merchandise on its way to England and northeast America, while, to the cheap manufactures of Liege, India, China, and Central Asia would afford the best of markets. If the line were a double one, to the west and north of Aleppo, one branch running to Constantinople and the other to the Mediterranean at Scanderoon, the whole of Europe would benefit by the Persian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, would gain also the power of protecting Persia against Russia, and of thus preventing the dominance of a crushing despotism throughout the Eastern world. In a thousand ways, however, the advantages of the line to all Europe are so plainly manifest, that the only question worth discussing is the nature of the difficulties that hinder its completion.

The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are political and financial, and both have been exaggerated without limit. The project for a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf has been compared to that for the construction of a railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific. In 1858, the American line was looked on as a mere speculator's dream, while the Euphrates Railway was to be commenced at once; ten years have pa.s.sed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact, while the Indian line has been forgotten.

It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a more difficult matter than that of crossing the Plains and Rocky Mountains. The distance from St. Louis to San Francisco is 1600 miles, that from Constantinople to Bussorah is but 1100 miles; or from Scanderoon to Bussorah only 700 miles. From London to the Persian Gulf is not so far as from New York to San Francisco. The American line had to cross two great snowy chains and a waterless tract of considerable width: the Indian route crosses no pa.s.ses so lofty as those of the Rocky Mountains or so difficult as those of the Sierra Nevada, and is well watered in its whole length. On the American line there is little coal, if any, while the Euphrates route would be plentifully supplied with coal from the neighborhood of Bagdad. When the American line was commenced, the proposed track lay across unknown wilds: the Constantinople and Persian Gulf route pa.s.ses through venerable towns, the most ancient of all the cities of the world, and the route itself is the oldest known highway of trade. The chief of all the advantages possessed by the Indian line which is wanting in America is the presence of ample labor on all parts of the road. Steamers are already running from Bombay and Kurrachee to the Persian Gulf; others on the Tigris, and a portion of the Euphrates; there is a much-used road from Bagdad to Aleppo; and a Turkish military road from Aleppo to Constantinople, to which city a direct railroad will soon be opened; and a telegraph-line belonging to an English company already crosses Asian Turkey from end to end. Notwithstanding the facilities, the Euphrates Railway is still a project, while the Atlantic and Pacific line will be opened in 1870.

Were the financial difficulties those which the supporters of the line have in reality to meet, it might be urged that there will be a great local traffic between Bussorah, Bagdad, and Aleppo, and from all these cities to the sea, and that the government mail subsidies will be huge, and the Indian trade, even in the worst of years, considerable. Were the indifference of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they should refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line, its importance would amply warrant a moderate addition to the debt of India.

The real difficulties that have to be encountered are political rather than financial; the covert opposition of France and Egypt is not less powerful for evil than is the open hostility of Russia. Happily for India, however, the territories of our ally Turkey extend to the Persian Gulf, for it must be remembered that for railway purposes Turkish rule, if we so please, is equivalent to English rule. As it happens, no active measures are needed to advance our line; but, were it otherwise, such intervention as might be necessary to secure the safety of the great highway for Eastern trade with Europe would be defensible were it exerted toward a purely independent government.

The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte must be direct and governmental. For a private company to conduct a great enterprise to a successful conclusion in Eastern countries is always difficult; but when the matter is political in its nature, or, if commercial, at least hindered on political grounds, a private company is powerless. It is, moreover, the practice of Eastern governments to grant concessions of important works which they cannot openly oppose, but which in truth they wish to hinder, to companies so formed as to be incapable of proceeding with the undertaking. When others apply, the government answers them that nothing further can be done: "the concession is already granted."

Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed. It might even be advisable that we should declare that the Euphrates Valley Railway through the Turkish territory from Constantinople and Scanderoon through Aleppo to Bagdad and Bussorah, and sufficient military posts to insure its security in time of war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and that we should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to commence our work, on pain of the withdrawal of our protection.

Our general principle of non-interference is always liable to be set aside on proof of the existence of a higher necessity for intervention than for adherence to our golden rule, and it may be contended that sufficient proof has been shown in the present instance. Whether public action is to be taken, or the matter to be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the Direct Route to India is one of the most pressing of the questions of the day.

When, in company with my fellow-pa.s.sengers from Moultan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on board the then Commissioner of Scinde, who was on his way to take his seat as a member of Council at Bombay. A number of the leading men of Scinde came on board to bid farewell to him before he sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but for our annexation of the country, would be the reigning Ameers at this moment.

Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur, surpa.s.sed in glittering pomp the caps and baldrics of these Scindee chieftains; neither could anything be stranger than their dress. One had on a silk coat of pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet slippers with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of dark amber with flowers in white lace. A third was clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber; and the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk and gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the strange-shaped Scindian hat; all had jeweled dirks, with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold their swords, and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them. The sight, however, of no number of sapphires, turquoises, and gold clothes could have reconciled me to a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced when our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship's side to the sound of the Lascars' anchor-tripping chorus, and left the deck to the "Proconsul" and ourselves.

CHAPTER XVII.

BOMBAY.

Crossing the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept on board.

I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rippled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming down in rich green ma.s.ses into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the Swedish to the Greek.

The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even ma.s.s of green is broken here and there by the crimson cones of the "gold mohur" trees, resembles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain islands and the Western Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; as it is, the distances are over-great.

Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of defense is singularly weak. The absence of batteries from the entrance to so great a trading port strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-b.a.l.l.s of the African admirals of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to which can easily be cut off, and its people starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of batteries at the harbor's mouth would be, that the present fort might be pulled down, unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the broad s.p.a.ce of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half might be partly built on.

The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bombay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be said that she has "not one merchant solvent," was chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which the shares in a land-reclamation company which never commenced its operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was intensified by the pa.s.sage of the English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round the world.

Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely king than in Bombay.

Cotton has collected the hundred steamers and the thousands of native boats that are anch.o.r.ed between the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon; cotton has built the great offices and stores of seven and eight stories high; cotton has furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers' cottages on Staten Island.

The export of cotton from India rose from five millions' worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions' worth in 1864, and the total exports of Bombay increased in the same proportion, while the population of the city rose from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed to look at the East as standing still, but Chicago itself never took a grander leap than did Bombay between 1860 and 1864. The rebellion in America gave the impetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity; and the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the only Indian raw products the export of which has increased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased twentyfold, of tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold in the last six years; and the export of Indian tea increased in five years from nothing to three or four hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports, those which we a.s.sociate with the term "Eastern trade," are standing still, while the raw produce trade is thus increasing:--spices, elephants' teeth, pearls, jewels, bandannas, sh.e.l.lac, dates, and gum are all decreasing, although the total exports of the country have trebled in five years.

India needs but railroads to enable her to compete successfully with America in the growth of cotton, but the development of the one raw product will open out her hitherto unknown resources.

While staying at one of the great merchant-houses in the Fort, I was able to see that the commerce of Bombay has not grown up of itself. With some experience among hard workers in the English towns, I was, nevertheless, astonished at the work got through by senior clerks and junior partners at Bombay. Although at first led away by the idea that men who wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking-chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast, cannot be said to get through much work, I soon found that men in merchants' houses at Bombay work harder than they would be likely to do at home. Their day begins at 6 A.M., and, as a rule, they work from then till dinner at 8 or 9 P.M., taking an hour for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve hours' work in the day, with the thermometer never under 90 all the night, is an exhausting life. Englishmen could not long survive the work, but the Bombay merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.

Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is not always May or June, and from November to March the climate is all-but perfect. Even in the hottest weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar is close at hand, for short excursions, whenever the time is found; while the Bombay mango is a fruit which may bear comparison with the peaches of Salt Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The Bombay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the beauties of their city, any more than Londoners have to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower; and as for "tropical indolence," or "Anglo-Indian luxury," the bull-dogs are the only members of the English community in India who can discover anything but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and, knowing this, the cunning brute always makes the boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead to the private rooms over the merchants' houses in the Fort.