Another member of the staff was mounted one day upon a red horse (they paint their horses in India), a wild, half-broken Arab steed, which was giving its rider a deal of trouble. I advised my friend to dismount, and left him. Presently I rode back to find him on foot and alone. I asked him, where was his horse?
"Gone," said he. "Whenever that d——d horse saw a mosquito, it sat down and cried like a child. So I kicked it in the belly and it ran away into the jungle."
We visited Trincomalee, where the elephants built the dockyard. They carried the timber and they carried the stones, and they lifted the stones into position and adjusted them with their feet. The remarkable thing about the climate of Ceylon is its intermittent showers of tropical violence, followed by bursts of sunshine. In the result, you actually see the foliage growing. I remember the extraordinary beauty of the native decorations, which are fabricated of palms and leaves and flowers.
From Colombo we went to Mauritius, arriving there in May, 1870. Here I climbed the famous mountain called Pieter Botte, or, more correctly, Pieter Both.
PIETER BOTH MOUNTAIN, MAURITIUS
The mountain is so named after Pieter Both, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the founder of Dutch power in that region. On his homeward voyage he was wrecked in the bay overlooked by the mountain, which thereafter bore his name. Previous ascents are recorded in the archives at Mauritius, from which it appears that mine was the fourteenth. Admiral Sir William Kennedy ascended Pieter Botte in 1861; he gives an account of his climb in his interesting book, Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor (London, Nash). Kennedy started with a party of fourteen persons, of whom five reached the summit.
At nine o'clock in the morning I started, together with the captain of the maintop, Edward Hele. We took with us ropes, a rope ladder, cod-line, and a small lead. These were all our appliances. We drove to the foot of the mountain and began the ascent at 11.5 a.m. Now the mountain of Pieter Botte is shaped like a church with a steep roof, from one end of which rises a spire. This pinnacle of rock is crowned with a huge, rounded, overhanging boulder.
Part of the ridge was so sharp that we were forced to sit on it and to proceed astride. Then we came to the pinnacle. The ascent was so sharp and difficult that we were obliged to take off both shoes and socks. At one point, I lost my balance, and was only saved from falling backwards by Hele's ready hand. Climbing the pinnacle was far more difficult than scaling the overhanging boulder at the top. At the top of the pinnacle there was just room to stand beneath the overhanging boulder. The only possible method of climbing the boulder was to get the rope ladder over the top of it. Accordingly, one end of the rope ladder was attached to the lead-line. In order to swing the lead, one of us was roped with a round turn round his body, while the other, lying on his back, held the rope while the leadsman, leaning right backwards and outwards over the sheer precipice of some 3000 feet fall, swung the lead. We took it in turns to swing the lead; as we leaned outwards, the rock spread over our heads like an umbrella; and it was an hour and a half before we succeeded in casting it over the boulder. Then we hauled the rope ladder over and made all fast. It was too short, and the last few yards we hauled ourselves up hand over hand. So we climbed to the top, which is a platform of about 20 feet square. It was then 1.59 p.m. We took off our shirts, and waved them to the warships lying far below in the bay, from which we were plainly to be distinguished with the aid of a telescope. The ships each saluted us with one gun. We planted on the summit a flag upon whose staff were carved our names and the names of our ships. When we returned, my brother officers gave us a dinner to celebrate the event.