The Tiger Warrior Part 24

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea survives as a tenth-century AD ma.n.u.script in a library in Heidelberg, copied from an original written in Greek about a thousand years earlier. It is one of the most remarkable doc.u.ments from antiquity, detailing maritime trade from Roman Egypt down the African coast as far as Zanzibar, and across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. In recent decades there has been an explosion of interest in the archaeology of the Periplus, especially with the excavation of the Red Sea port sites of Berenike and Myos Hormos. The merchant's house in this novel is fictional, but the finds are representative of actual discoveries at these sites, including Italian wine amphoras reused as water containers, thousands of peppercorns from India, ballast stones from Arabia and India, Indian hardwood - reused ship's timbers, including teak - and south Indian pottery. One sherd had a Tamil graffito bearing a personal name also attested in south India. Many other potsherds with inscriptions - ostraka - are known, including part of the archive at Myos Hormos of a man named Maximus Priscus. In this novel, the ostraka with the text of the Periplus, and the previously unknown section - mentioning Cra.s.sus' legionaries - are fictional. Nevertheless, potsherds would have been a sensible writing material for a draft, before copying the final text onto papyrus.

The ancient site of Arikamedu, south of Pondicherry, was first extensively excavated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s, and has been the subject of renewed investigations since the early 1980s. Many still believe, as Wheeler did, that the sherds of Roman amphoras and fineware at the site indicate the presence of merchants from Egyptian ports such as Berenike - or their local agents - who traded with merchants coming across the Bay of Bengal and down from central Asia, bringing exotic goods such as silk and lapis lazuli. Divers from the Archaeological Survey of India have begun to investigate the waters off Arikamedu and other sites mentioned in the Periplus. As more archaeologists see Roman involvement with India as a two-way cultural process - with as much Indian influence on the west as the other way around - we can look forward to the discovery of more sites that represent the trade in the Periplus, one of the most extraordinary episodes of maritime endeavor the world has ever seen.

Some thirty nautical miles southeast of Cape Ras Banas in the Red Sea lies St. John's Island (Arabic Zeberged), the only source in antiquity of the gem peridot, undoubtedly the topazai mentioned by Strabo and Pliny as the product of an island close to Berenike. One Red Sea port mentioned in the Periplus that has yet to be conclusively identified is Ptolemais Theren, "Ptolemy of the Hunts," nor has a seagoing elephant-carrier - an elephantegos-yet been found. Neverthless, several Roman wrecks containing wine amphoras are known in the Red Sea, very possibly ships destined for Arabia and India. The Periplus specifically mentions gold and silver coins as the main Roman export - for trade on the Malabar coast we are exhorted to take coin, "a great deal of it" - and this is consistent with the emperor Tiberius' lament about the bullion drain (Tacitus, Annals, iii, 54; also Pliny, Natural History vi, 101; xii, 84), as well as with the discovery of many thousands of gold and silver coins in south India. There can be no doubt that a Roman wreck will one day be discovered in the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean with a wealth of gold to rival the treasure wrecks of the Spanish Main.

The Rampa Rebellion of 1879-81 was the largest uprising of tribal people to occur in central India during the period of the British Raj, and was put down by a brigade-sized expedition of the Indian army. The immediate cause of the rebellion was a tax on toddy, the alcoholic drink made from palm sap, though the backdrop included discontent over forestry regulations and the corruption of the native police. It was a protracted campaign, beset by the terrible "jungle fever," and its history has never been properly written. The picture here is based on daily reports in the Madras Military Proceedings and Madras Judicial Proceedings, private correspondence, regimental records and biographical information on the British officers involved (in some contemporary accounts, "Rampa" appears as "Rumpa," a more phonetical spelling). There are no known personal reminiscences of the campaign, though a sense of the language and outlook of a Royal Engineers officer on a jungle campaign in the 1870s can be gleaned from Lieutenant R G. Woodthorpe's The Lushai Expedition 1871-1872, describing a punitive expedition into Burma. The dramatic events early in the Rampa Rebellion were reported in the London Times and The New York Times, including the attack on the steamer Shamrock by over one thousand rebels and Lieutenant Hamilton's fight in the jungle, but interest waned as the rebellion dragged on and became mired in disease and monsoon. The wording of Hamilton's account is taken from his report of 20 August 1879 in the Madras Military Proceedings, showing that his sappers expended 1050 rounds and killed at least ten rebels. Surgeon Walker's description of the jungle fever in chapter 5 is taken from a report by Surgeon-Major J. Bilderbeck, Thirty-sixth Madras Native Infantry, in May 1880, when all of the British officers and three-fifths of the sepoys in his regiment were struck down. The Koya treated fever with the remedy described in chapter 9 (Note on the Rampa Agency, East G.o.davari District, Madras, 1931, p. 31). Rampa district today remains little changed from the 1880s, and the jungles of eastern India are a haven for Maoist terrorists as well as attracting mining prospectors backed by foreign investment.

An account from 1876 describes the sacred velpus, including the potent Lakkala (or Laka) Ramu. The velpus were bamboo tubes, kept hidden away. The animistic spirits of the jungle, the konda devata, included a tiger G.o.d. The G.o.davari volume of the Imperial Gazetteer of India notes that near Rampa village, "beside a waterfall about 25 feet high, is a shrine formed of three huge boulders, two of which make a kind of roof, and fitted with a doorway and one side-wall of cut stone. The water of the fall pours continually between the boulders. A rough lingam and other holy emblems have been carved out of the rock." In my fictional shrine, the Indian iconography is based on cave carvings at Badami and sculpture elsewhere in India, including the yaksas and yaksis figures. The Rampa shrine is where several police captives were executed in 1879. A native eyewitness described one "sacrifice": "Chendrayya himself cut off his head with a sword. They sacrificed him to Gudapu Mavili." (Madras Judicial Proceedings, 5 September 1879). Other accounts describe "meriahs" being sacrificed or rescued, and headless bodies being found. The riverside sacrifice scene is a fictional representation of these events, and derives further detail from eyewitness accounts of human sacrifices recorded in Major-General John Campbell's A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice (1864) - including Captain Frye's rescue of a meriah, quoted here in chapter 4 - and from Christoph and Elizabeth von Furer-Haimendorf's The Reddis of the Bison Hills: A Study of Acculturation (1945), one of few detailed anthropological studies of the hill tribes of the upper G.o.davari.

Several of the characters in this novel are based on actual individuals in the Rampa Field Force, some with names altered. Joseph Fawcett Beddy was a.s.sistant commissioner for the Central Provinces, and accompanied Hamilton during his affray in the jungle. The official report on the rebellion to the Government of India states that Beddy "died from fever" after the affray (Madras Judicial Proceedings, 14 December 1881); but his tomb inscription at Wuddagudem recorded that he was "shot in the late Rampa Rebellion" (H. Le Fanu, List of European Tombs in the G.o.daveri District with Inscriptions Thereon, Cocanada 1895). Dr. George Lemon Walker, Surgeon to D and G Companies, Madras Sappers and Miners, during the Rampa Rebellion, was indeed born in Kingston, Canada, and received his medical training at Queen's University in Belfast. From 1884 his superior in medical charge of the Madras Sappers was Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross - later Sir Ronald Ross, famous for identifying the Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of the malaria parasite, and whose patients would have included sapper veterans of Rampa suffering from the dreaded "jungle fever."

Of the Madras Sappers, the fictional Sergeant O'Connell is inspired by Sergeant John Brown, who embarked for India in 1860, served in the 1875-6 Perak campaign in Malaysia and was pensioned as a quartermaster sergeant in 1881. Sapper Narrainsamy served in Burma and the Chin Lushai expeditions in the late 1880s. Of the subalterns, Robert Ewen Hamilton died in 1885 from cholera, "his health shattered by continued attacks of malarial fever" during the Afghan war and the Rampa Rebellion. The fictional Lieutenant Wauchope is based on Robert Alexander Wahab (who later used the spelling Wauhope for his Irish name); he was indeed from an Irish family with American connections. His health was also eventually broken by malaria, causing his early retirement in 1905, though by then he was a colonel with a distinguished record in almost all of the northwest frontier military expeditions of the period.

The fictional Lieutenant Howard is based on Lieutenant Walter Andrew Gale, my great-great-grandfather, the longest-serving of all the Madras Sapper officers in the Rampa Field Force. He had been detailed for the second phase of the Afghan war in late 1879, but remained in Rampa as the deployment there dragged on through 1880. His son Edward died in Bangalore in April that year, aged one year and five months. After leaving the Madras Sappers in 1881 both he and Wahab became specialists in survey, developing skills honed in the Rampa jungle. Gale returned with his young family to England in 1885 and became an instructor in Survey at the School of Military Engineering, Chatham, where he edited the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers. As Secretary of the R.E. Inst.i.tute he was fully involved in the academic life of the Royal Engineers, and would have attended lectures on subjects ranging beyond purely military matters-including archaeology, which had developed in India as an offshoot of survey. The topic of Howard's fictional lecture at the Royal United Service Inst.i.tution in London would have been in keeping with the remarkable range of interests pursued by engineer officers at this period. The Inst.i.tution housed the only known collection of artifacts from the Rampa Rebellion - two matchlock muskets, two swords and a scabbard, two bamboo arrows, a bird arrow, a shield and four arrowheads - donated by a fellow Madras Sapper officer and Rampa veteran, Lieutenant A. C. Macdonnell, R.E. in 1882 (Journal of the Royal United Service Inst.i.tution, xxv, p. x.x.xi); the museum was closed in 1962, when any of these artifacts still in the collection would have been dispersed.

Gale and Wahab were together again in 1889, when Wahab returned to Chatham for courses of training. The final disappearance of the two retired colonels into Afghanistan is fictional. However, both men were intensely familiar with the Afghan frontier region, and would have been poised for such an adventure. Wahab spent almost twenty years with the Survey of India demarking the boundary with Afghanistan, from Baluchistan to the Khyber Pa.s.s and beyond. He was famous as a mountaineer, and his boundary markers still survive on the frontier today. Gale returned to India and became Commanding Royal Engineer of the Quetta Division of the Indian army and Supervising Engineer in Baluchistan, responsible for the entire province including the volatile frontier region. One of his colleagues in the Baluchistan administration was Aurel Stein, the famous Silk Route explorer, then employed as archaeological surveyor by the government; his and Colonel Gale's reports appear together in the Administration Report of the Baluchistan Agency for 1904-1905. Stein was also a personal friend of Robert Wahab, who shared his pa.s.sion for cla.s.sical history and was responsible for the most likely identification of Aornos, the mountain spur that Alexander the Great famously captured; Wauhope (as he became) is acknowledged warmly in Stein's cla.s.sic On Alexander's Track to the Indus (1929). Twenty years before that book was published, there were still parts of Afghanistan so remote that hardly any Europeans had ever visited them, including the fabled lapis lazuli mines described in Lieutenant John Wood's A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus (1841), quoted here in chapters 13, 15 (including the Pashtun verse), 18 and 19. At different times in their careers, and possibly together, Gale and Wahab must have stood before the Bolan Pa.s.s on the route to Afghanistan, gazing at the awesome cleft in the mountains that had lured so many soldiers and adventurers to the land beyond, in search of glory and treasure but so often ending in death.

Royal Engineers officers were exhorted to be "soldiers first and engineers afterwards" in an instructional paper edited by Captain W. A. Gale in the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers for 1889 (Colonel E. Wood, C.B., R.E., "The duties of Royal Engineers in the Field," vol xv, 69-96), and were fully trained to act as infantry. In India, officers not on campaign spent a great deal of time hunting, so were closely familiar with firearms and were often expert marksmen. In this novel, the 1851 Colt revolver with Upper Canada markings is a genuine piece that I have fired, as are the Snider-Enfield and Lee-Enfield rifles. Colt revolvers were used extensively by British officers during the 1857-8 Indian Mutiny, and cap-and-ball revolvers were still favored decades later by adventurers such as Sir Richard Burton in areas where cartridge ammunition was not readily available. The Madras Sappers were armed in 1879 with the Snider-Enfield rifle, though the British army had converted to the Martini-Henry several years earlier. Many old service rifles found their way to the north-west frontier and Afghanistan, where British rifles still used today include Lee-Enfields made at Long Branch in Canada. Scoped Lee-Enfields and Mosin-Nagants made highly effective sniper rifles during the Second World War. The Mosin-Nagant was used by the Soviet female snipers called zaichata, "little hares," after their mentor, Vasiliy Zaitsev; one of them, Lyudmila Pavli-chenko, had more than 300 kills, and is the basis for the sniper in this novel.

The quotes from the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea are my translations of the original Greek, based on the text in Frisk, H., Le Periple de la mer Erythree (Goteborgs Hogskolas Arsskrif -, 33, 1927); these are extracts from Frisk, chapter 63-6 for the front quote, and chapters 41 and 63 in chapter 3. The second front quote is from Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (Columbia University Press, 1993, trans. Burton Watson), Shi ji 6; this is also the source of the verse on the virtue of the emperor in chapter 4 - a version of a stone inscription raised by Shihuangdi on Mount Langye - and the quote in chapter 15. In chapter 3, the quote from Cosmas on Sri Lanka is from J. W McCrindle, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (Hakluyt Society series 1, vol. 97, 1987), 365-8. In chapter 4, the extract from Lieutenant Howard's fictional diary on the problems of survey is from Captain W A. Gale's preface to volume XIV (1888) of the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers, a comment undoubtedly influenced by his Rampa experience; the quote following that is from the report of the Hon. David F. Carmichael, who was deputed to tour the Rampa tract after the rebellion and make recommendations (Madras Judicial Proceedings, 14 December 1881, 1027-53).

One of the artifacts brought back by Colonel Gale from India was the bra.s.s pata gauntlet sword described in this novel. A similar bra.s.s pata is on display in the British Museum (OA 1878. 12-30, 818). The history of these rare weapons may date as far back as the Mongol invasions of India, or even earlier. One of few images of a pata in use is a battle scene of the seventeenth century showing the Maratha prince Shivaji wielding a great pata (from a miniature reproduced in Monuments Anciens et Modernes de l'Hindoustan, L. Langles, 1821); the composition of the scene is reminiscent of the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii, the inspiration for the cave carving in this novel. My grandfather had been told that the pata came from a "rebellion," but nothing more is known about it with certainty. Images of this artifact, as well as the camphor-wood officer's chest, the telescope, the old books, the ancient coins and the weapons in this novel, can be seen at www.davidgibbins.com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I am grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA, and my editors, Caitlin Alexander at Bantam Dell and Harriet Evans at Headline; to Gaia Banks, Alexandra Barlow, Alison Bonomi, Chen Huijin Cheryl, Raewyn Davies, Darragh Deering, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Crystal Velasquez, Emily Furniss, George Gamble, Tessa Girvan, Janet Harron, Jenny Karat, Celine Kelly, Nicki Kennedy, Lea Beresford, Ann Ledden, Stacey Levitt, Kim McArthur, Tony McGrath, Taryn Manias, Peter Newsom, Amanda Preston, Jenny Rob-son, Barry Rudd, John Rush, Emma Rusher, Jane Seller, Molly Stirling, Adja Vucicevic, Katherine West and Leah Woodburn; to the entire teams at Headline and Bantam Dell, and to my many publishers in other languages. I owe a great deal to Ann Verrinder Gibbins, and to Angie and Molly, as well as to my brother Alan for help with my website www.davidgibbins.com.

For the field research a.s.sociated with this novel I am especially grateful to the late Alan Hall, of the British Inst.i.tute of Archaeology at Ankara; to the chair of the NATO Life Sciences Committee, for inviting me to Kyrgyzstan; and to the curator of the Cholpon-Ata open-air petroglyph museum beside Lake Issyk-Kul. My fascination with the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea dates from my time as a graduate student at Cambridge University; I owe much to the stimulus of the late Dr. James Kirkman, O.B.E., F.S.A., former curator of the Fort Jesus Museum, Mombasa, and to my grandfather Captain Lawrance Wilfrid Gibbins, who spent a lifetime sailing the same routes to India as the ancient mariners of the Periplus. Both of these men helped me to see the extraordinary sea trade of two thousand years ago.

I am grateful to Dr. Guodong Liu for his advice on Chinese names. For help in acquiring and shooting a Snider-Enfield rifle, I am grateful to John Denner and David Hurbuthnot. For my research on the 1879-81 Rampa Rebellion, I am grateful to the staff of the former Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library, the Royal Engineers Museum and Library at Chatham, the UK National Archives and the South Asia Division of the University of Michigan Library; to Lieutenant Colonel Prabhat k.u.mar of the Madras Sappers Museum and Archives, Bangalore; to Lieutenant Colonel Edward De Santis, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (retired); and, for befriending me as a boy, to the late Lieutenant Colonel John Ancrum Cameron, Royal Engineers, Madras Sapper from 1927-48, who provided a vivid link back to the time of my great-great-grandfather, Colonel Walter Andrew Gale, Royal Engineers, Madras Sapper and Rampa veteran, whose pata gauntlet sword provided an inspiration for this story.

Finally, I owe a special debt to the late Mrs. Rosemary Hobbs, whose bequest allowed me to acquire first editions of John Campbell's A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan and John Wood's A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus, and for all of her support for my expeditions and adventures over the years.

The Tiger Warrior is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fict.i.tiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ALSO BY DAVID GIBBINS.

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Crusader Gold.

The Lost Tomb.