Captain Low’s History of the Indian Navy (2 vols., London: Bentley & Son) has long been reproachfully demanding notice; it is easy to say something about such a work, not easy to treat it worthily. A man could hardly put together 1100 pages of small type without recording many noteworthy facts, but all matters of interest might have been packed in much smaller compass, and so packed would have found more readers and a more favourable verdict.
The two volumes trace the rise and fall of the Navy from its germ in the “ten grabs and galivats” taken up for the defence of the factory and shipping of Surat in 1615, through the period of its glory when its ships bore the Company’s flag alongside of the Royal Navy on many hard-fought days, through its decline, when they carried mails or transported troops with rare enjoyment of a brush, to its abolition in our own time, when, less fortunate than its sister service, it fell a victim to mutiny and disorders in which it had no share.
The first period in its history ends with the year 1759, when, with the capture of Gheriah, and the destruction of Angria’s power, piracy as a business of State came to an end, and when the ruin of the Seedee, and the substitution of the Company as High Admiral of the Mogul Empire, placed the local Marine first among the maritime powers of India. Its first serious service was in the operations which broke the power of the Portuguese in the Gulf, and in 1622 reduced Ormuz from an emporium of proverbial wealth and magnificence to its normal condition of a poor barren island, and for many years the Portuguese found it as much occupation as the pirates who might well have been its first concern. No doubt the captains of well-armed India-men, whose crews were borrowed for service on grabs and galivats, looked down on the latter as a sort of coastguard, but the aid of such light craft was invaluable against the shoals of small vessels which beset new-comers fore and aft, pouring down crowds of well-armed men from their long overhanging prows. For in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the shores of the Indian Ocean swarmed with pirates, kept down indeed by the Portuguese in the heyday of their power, but making head again till, by the middle of the seventeenth century, according to Italian travellers, they feared none but Dutch and English, and these only for a pestilent practice of firing the magazine rather than surrender. Yet to the Mogul governor of Surat probably the pirate of home growth was less objectionable than the intrusive trader; and indeed the Nuwab was not without excuse if he regarded the European as a more powerful pirate, seeing that some commanders took by force goods which the native owner would not sell, others ransacked ships not said to belong to the Mogul’s ports, the mutinous crews of others became open pirates; and lastly, we find Captain Kidd, and other heroes of the black flag, practising their vocation in these seas. The native pirate, the European rival, and the professional rover, kept the local marine pretty well employed, but it is not always easy to distinguish between the services of this body and the Company’s armed trading ships.
Of more interest to the Mogul Government than foreign trade were the vessels in which Mahomedan pilgrims of all ranks sailed to Arabian and Persian shrines, and for their benefit it came to terms with the Seedee, better known to us as the Hubshi of Jinjirah, the boldest of the pirates, giving him a large allowance and high rank to secure his convoy. The Company made more than one attempt to supplant him, and indeed furnished ships to guard the Mocha-Jeddah fleet in 1698, but the Seedee kept his office till 1759; in the general decay of the central power he first neglected, then openly defied, the Governor of Surat, and instead of protecting trade became its chief oppressor; till at last, in 1759, after much negotiation, the Nuwab induced the Bombay Government to intervene, and as a reward obtained for the Company the Seedee’s office. What direct profit the Company derived from the appointment Captain Low does not tell us; the omission can hardly be the consequence of the lamented destruction of papers which followed the sale of the old India House, for he records that in 1694 the Seedee’s subsidy amounted to four lacs, no doubt considerably bettered by presents, and in 1735 the money allowance was but a lac and a half: the revenues of the districts and customs assigned to the Company went to support the Surat squadron, but the fees of office granted to the officer who was its deputy amounted, to near a lac of rupees a year; it is well to remember that the holder’s gross pay was but Rs.1,000 a year, that the Governor of Bombay had but some £500, and that till near the end of the century private trade was allowed: no one, however, was permitted to enjoy this great prize for a second year. Whatever were the profits to the Company, the Nuwab could see that it did more for its wages than the Seedee, for in the next nine years the Surat squadron destroyed near a hundred pirate vessels of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay.
After another seventy years the Bombay Marine became in name what, as the only local armed fleet, it had long been in fact—the Indian Navy. Wherever round the basin of the Indian Ocean there had been fighting in those years, the vessels of the Bombay Marine had borne the British flag with honour, though the services of officers and crews, both afloat and ashore, had been too sparingly recognised. And in those years was commenced the series of surveys which are still the chief authorities for the navigation of the Eastern seas, and have given the names of Rennie, Moresby, Haines, and Taylor a permanent place in history. But men who entered the Bombay Marine were still serving efficiently when the Indian Navy was abolished, in the belief that ships of the Royal Navy would carry on the police of the seas as efficiently, but at less annual cost, and that other arrangements might be made for the business of inland navigation and transport; the necessity for recurrent shore surveys seems not to have been foreseen, though already a special department has been created and placed under a retired officer of the Indian Navy. It is impossible not to admit that, through its want of influential friends, the Service was treated unjustly. The guarantee of “Colonel Sykes’s clause” has, through repeated agitation, been made so effectual for officers of the Indian Army that men of forty have retired as full colonels, because all their regimental seniors had joined the Staff Corps, while the officers of the Indian Navy were forced to retire without appeal on something like the pension of their rank. But they must have felt a grim satisfaction in knowing that they had outlived the piracy which had been the scourge of Western India and the first cause of the creation of the force; their last serious service was in administering a final pounding to their old enemies the Waghers, the last survivors of the flourishing pirate communities of Kattyawar.
Besides surveys of the Eastern seas, European nations trading with India are indebted to the Indian Navy for the opening up of the Overland Route, and so, indirectly, for the construction of the Suez Canal. Without steam, indeed, the Red Sea could never have become a highway of commerce, while with its extended use that great canal could not for ever be closed; but the Hugh Lindsay of the Indian Navy, the first steamer constructed in the East, which, after thirty years of service, was still staunch enough for work as a tug at Kurachi, was the first steamer to appear on its waters, making the voyage to and from Suez in 1830, under the command of Captain John Lindsay. The expense of the voyage, however, was so great that, after seven trips, the Court bade the Government of Bombay only repeat it in case of emergency, and it was reserved for Lieutenant Waghorn, also of the Indian Navy, by sacrifice of his private fortune and professional prospects and ten years’ unceasing labour, to prove that communication with India through the Red Sea was not only a luxury of State, but a profitable commercial enterprise. From his labours all have profited save himself and his family, and the only public acknowledgment of his services is a bust in the Canal Garden at Suez.
With some labour, caused by the want of an index, many notices of interest might be quarried from Captain Low’s pages. The early history of Bombay, the antecedents of the rulers of Muscat and Zanzibar, the settlement at Aden, the true story of Perim, the achievements of the Sepoy Marines, who are now represented by two regular regiments of the Bombay Army, all invite notice, but our space is exhausted. Yet we must find room to mention the self-denial of Commodore Hayes, who, rather than embroil the Company with China, released two junks captured in running the blockade from Batavia with Dutch property, and so sacrificed his large share of £600,000 lawful prize; and the gallantry of Midshipman Denton, who, unable to board a proa, lashed her bowsprit to the taffrail of his gunboat, and so continued his course, fighting her all the time. And for contrast with the experience of the Bay of Bengal, where we believe that the full pressure of a great cyclone has never been recorded, as the anemometers have broken with a pressure of sixty pounds, we may note that, in the cyclone of November, 1854, so famous at Bombay, the pressure did not exceed thirty-five pounds to the square foot: with such a storm as that which raged in Calcutta in October, 1864, the whole native town of Bombay would come down like a house of cards. We are sorry not to have been able to notice Captain Low’s labours more favourably; particular points which we had noted for objection we will pass over in silence.
Captain Richard Burton is facile princeps of modern travellers. There scarcely any part of the world which he has not visited, and wherever he goes he seems to have the history, geography, and ethnology of the country at his fingers’ ends. His last important contribution to geographical science is the account of his visit to the Land of Midian, whither he went, commissioned by the ex-Khedive of Egypt, in search of the gold mines of which the ancient Arab geographer and others speak. The results of his expeditions are published in two works: The Gold-Mines of Midian and the Ruined Midianite Cities (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1878) and The Land of Midian (Revisited), 2 vols., issued by the same publishers during the present year. Having received an invitation from the ex-Viceroy, Captain Burton proceeded to Cairo in March, 1877, where an expedition was organized for the purpose of exploring the auriferous region. The author’s comparison of the Cairo of the present time with the city as he knew it in his old pilgrim days, and as it is described in Lane’s “Modern Egyptians,” forms, although only incidental, a very interesting portion of the book. The chapter on Suez also is a good specimen of Captain Burton’s style, and contains at once a topographical sketch, an archæological and historical description, and a chatty and amusing account of the modern city, its society, and surroundings. Midian, called nowadays by its inhabitants, as by the mediæval Arabic geographers, Arz Maydan, the Land of Midian, is that part of Arabia which occupies the east coast of the Gulf of Akabah, and extends some two degrees further to the south. The borders are somewhat difficult to ascertain, and it is probable that the ancient Midianites, like some of the larger and more powerful Bedawin tribes of the present day, wandered far and wide, and that their limits shrunk or extended according to their numbers, or the resisting power of their neighbours. The ancient history of the land is told by Captain Burton in a most exhaustive manner, the Biblical accounts being supplemented by copious references to Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Arabic writers of all ages. The quantity of gold, silver, and other metals mentioned in Numbers xxxi. 22, as being produced by Midian, was curiously borne out by the results of the expedition. A lengthy and learned notice is also given of the Nabathæans, whose former rock-cut capital, Petræa, is still one of the marvels of Arabia; whose king, or ethnarch, Aretas (in Arabic, El Hareth), is mentioned in the New Testament; and whose rule embraced so large a portion of Syria and Arabia, and extended late into Christian times.
The discovery that gold existed in Midian was in the first place due to Haji Wali, familiar to the readers of Captain Burton’s “Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina” as the companion of the author in the caravanserai at Cairo while preparing for the journey to Hejjaz. The old Haji was once returning from a visit to Mecca, when halting by the shore of the Gulf of Akabah he scooped up a handful of granitic sand which sparkled in the bed of the wady and took it with him to Alexandria. There he took his specimen to an assayer, and, although the glitter which had attracted him proved only to be produced by the presence of mica, his sand when smelted in a crucible yielded a comparatively large portion of pure gold. The information of the discovery was not received with encouragement by the official to whom Haji Wali communicated it, and the latter ceased to think more of the subject. The assayer, however, set out for the new Eldorado and lost his life, probably murdered by the Bedawin. Captain Barton believes that the secret of the gold has never been really lost, and that the washing of sand has always been clandestinely carried on. Be that as it may, Captain Burton, believing the Haji’s story, endeavoured to recommend his discovery to the notice of the Egyptian authorities, who pooh-pooh’d the whole thing, and merely remarked that gold was becoming too common. For nearly a quarter of a century Captain Burton kept the secret to himself, but at length he again sought out his old friend Haji Wali, obtained from him more exact information as to the locality, and carried him off with the expedition, the means for organizing which Ismail Pasha furnished. The results of the expedition, which was only a pioneer one, were sufficient to corroborate all that the Haji had said, and to confirm Captain Burton’s own prognostications drawn from the ancient sources which his extensive learning enabled him to consult. The adventures of the party fill the remainder of the first of his two books and form extremely pleasant reading.