One of the most striking features of the present age, with reference to our own country, is to be found in that wonderful chain of steam communication, which within the last few years we have seen gradually linking together the British dominions, and which must girdle the globe before it completely connects every portion of our vast empire. But if it is a subject of national pride that our possessions are scattered so widely over the face of the earth, the universal ignorance which prevails respecting them in the mother country only becomes the more incomprehensible and deeply to be deplored. Moreover, the comparatively small amount of intelligence which has been brought to bear upon the subject has been most partially and improperly distributed. The colonies of Great Britain have engrossed all the sympathies of the home public. The dependencies are utterly neglected, or, which comes to much the same thing, consigned unreservedly to the tender mercies of the Colonial Office.
However much may be regretted this marked preference in favour of the colony, it is easily accounted for. An inviting and almost totally uninhabited country of vast extent and genial climate, possessing a fertile soil, and sources of unknown wealth, tempts a certain class of the home community to quit for ever their native shores and risk their fortunes in those distant lands, which henceforward possess an interest in the eyes of those they have left behind, and create in them the spirit of inquiry and enterprise. In the case of the dependency, no such inducement exists. A tropical climate is a bugbear utterly appalling to the intending emigrant. He shudders at the bare idea of passing the rest of his existence in a temperature of 90°, exposed to the attacks of cholera, fever, natives, and snakes. He has heard of fortunes having been made in India, but he has never heard of children having been brought up there, and so having failed in the attempt to get a writership for his son, he pities the lot of those who are more successful, does not bestow a second thought upon that continent to which his country owes, in a great measure, her prosperity, and betakes himself, with his wife and family, to the backwoods of Canada.
And if India is treated with such indifference, what must be the fate of that large pear-shaped island at its southern extremity, perhaps more easily recognised by the well educated as Taprobane than as Ceylon. To be sure, Trincomalee (the white man’s grave) is a name familiar to their ears, but the existence of Colombo, a city containing 60,000 inhabitants, and the seat of government, is altogether ignored, just as the Cingalese themselves seldom hear of England, or are accustomed to think of it only as the capital of London. The absence of any recent popular work upon Ceylon may in some measure account for, while it cannot quite excuse, this ignorance. And we should certainly deeply commiserate any one who, in a moment of infatuation, attempted to acquire his information from the work of Sir Emerson Tenant, which was published about two years ago, entitled Christianity in Ceylon. Those who are really interested in the subject of Christianity will find it treated of there in a cold, unsympathising manner, calculated rather to repel than to attract them. Indeed, the unfavourable reception which this book has already met with, proves that the general public, but too little mindful of Christianity at home, care as little for its development in Ceylon as did Sir Emerson himself during his late administration as Colonial Secretary of the island. Mr Baker has evidently a much better appreciation of the popular taste, when, instead of “Christianity,” he gives us “The Rifle and the Hound” in Ceylon; and we entertain no doubt that the result will prove this satisfactorily alike to himself and to his publishers.
We have, indeed, seldom perused a work with a keener relish than the one we have just laid down. Our author has shown in it that he can wield his pen as ably as he can handle his rifle, and in his exciting description of wild sports in Ceylon, he gives the public a “view halloo” of the game he is in sight of there, that must stir within him the soul of every true sportsman. But the interest of Mr Baker’s book does not consist so much in the telling and graphic manner in which he relates his own adventures and hairbreadth escapes, as in the perfectly new character in which he represents the island where he has now permanently established himself, and where he seems to be enjoying existence in a capacity hitherto untried in that tropical clime; for he is no coffee-planter reconciling himself to a solitary existence in the jungle by the hope of speedily realising what he terms “a comfortable independence,” upon which to return to his native land—or Ceylon civil servant, revelling in the prospect of retiring when he is grey-headed to enjoy anything but a comfortable independence, viz. £500 a-year, or half the highest salary that splendid service offers to unfortunate younger sons. Nor is he stationed out here with his regiment, altogether regardless, as a soldier ought to be, of a comfortable independence, and anxious to keep his hand in for natives by shooting elephants. He is no mere dilettante sportsman, endeavouring to recover the effects, and dissipate the recollections, of half a dozen London seasons. He is a settler—positively a settler in Ceylon. If our preconceived impressions of this colony be true, what a sanguine temperament our author must possess, to enable him to expose himself so cheerfully to the attacks of fever and wild beasts for the rest of his life. There certainly never was such an act of insanity perpetrated; he might as well have emigrated to the infernal regions at once. We have no doubt his friends told him so before he quitted the genial clime of his native land. But before we condemn him so roundly, let us see where he has pitched his tent, and what sort of answer he sends back to the inquiries of these anxious friends of his.
“Here, then, I am in my private sanctum, my rifles all arranged in their respective stands above the chimney-piece, the stag’s horns round walls hung with horn-cases, powder-flasks, and the various weapons of the chase. Even as I write, the hounds are yelling in the kennel.
“The thermometer is at 62° Fahr., and it is mid-day. It never exceeds 72° in the hottest weather, and sometimes falls below freezing point at night. The sky is spotless, and the air calm. The fragrance of mignonettes, and a hundred flowers that recall Old England, fill the air. Green fields of grass and clover, neatly fenced, surround a comfortable house and grounds. Well-fed cattle of the choicest breeds, and English sheep, are grazing in the paddocks. Well made roads and gravel walks run through the estate. But a few years past, and this was all wilderness.
“Dense forest reigned where now not even the stump of a tree is standing; the wind howled over hill and valley, the dank moss hung from the scathed branches, the deep morass filled the hollows; but all is changed by the hand of civilisation and industry. The dense forests and rough plains, which still form the boundaries of the cultivated land, only add to the beauty. The monkeys and parrots are even now chattering among the branches; and occasionally the elephant, in his nightly wanderings, trespasses upon the fields, unconscious of the oasis within his territory of savage nature.
“The still starlight night is awakened by the harsh bark of the elk; the lofty mountains, grey with the silvery moonlight, echo back the sound, and the wakeful hounds answer the well-known cry by a prolonged and savage yell.
“This is ‘Newera Ellia,’ the sanatorium of Ceylon, the most perfect climate of the world. It now boasts of a handsome church, a public reading-room, a large hotel, the barracks, and about twenty private residences.
“The adjacent country, of comparatively table-land, occupies an extent of some thirty miles in length, varying in altitude from six thousand two hundred to seven thousand feet, forming a base for the highest peaks in Ceylon, which rise to nearly nine thousand feet.