Clive Read online

  * * *

  A ship of the times was a tiny, enclosed microcosm of the English social structure – the ship’s officers and senior Company officials enjoying an idle if restricted passage, the junior officials like Clive socialising among themselves with little to do, the crew and functionaries below them, each in their watertight social containers, exchanging only orders, formalities and pleasantries.

  Clive – aloof, shy, prickly, energetic – was unpopular among his contemporaries and spent much of his time alone; his few friends among the new clerks had gone aboard another ship. The food was poor, while delicacies and drink were expensive to someone of Clive’s meagre resources. Life on board quickly settled into a monotony as routine as the rise and fall of the Atlantic swell.

  The ship passed the tip of Brittany and crossed the choppier expanse of the Bay of Biscay, sighting the northern tip of Spain and the Portuguese coast. Finally, the west coast of Africa was sighted, which the vessel clung to like a limpet. As the climate grew steadily hotter Clive preferred to spend his time, and even to sleep, on deck rather than in his cramped and foetid quarters below. As time passed, frustration gave way to resignation. He was dreamy and distantly detached much of the time, looking out to sea or studying the few books he had brought on his future trade. Clive could relax and even become jovial after a few drinks in the evening. He disliked the captain, Gabriel Seward, a loud-mouthed, grasping man.

  Off the westernmost tip of Africa, in increasingly stifling heat, the Winchester prepared to zig the Atlantic to the easternmost tip of Brazil, where it would pick up the trade winds that would zag it across down under the rump of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. The buoyant security of the great East Indiaman had given Clive not a moment of apprehension since leaving London. Now the ship bucked and groaned in heavier seas near the Cape Verde Islands. As he looked towards the protuberances on the skyline, the last land before the deep ocean crossing, shouts suddenly reverberated around him.

  One of the half-dozen ships accompanying the Winchester was in difficulties. It appeared to have stopped dead in the open sea. Huge waves broke over it. It had run aground on a hidden reef. The wind was strong and attempts by the Winchester and other ships to veer closer to her – while keeping clear of the murderous rock – proved hopeless; they were driven away, and the small schooner went down with all hands.

  * * *

  A fortnight later, as the seas calmed and the climate grew suffocatingly hot, the Winchester and its escort vessels crossed the Equator. After many days without sight of land, Clive had his first glimpse of a new continent – South America.

  Jubilation was short-lived. After a day or two gazing at the flat, sandy beaches and dense foliage of the level land beyond, where the steamy and exotic smell of damp vegetation blew across to the Winchester at night and the moist-laden air left Clive in a continual bathe of sweat, the soothing rise and fall of the vessel suddenly ceased with a juddering crunch as it made contact with sand or rock.

  Initial alarm, after witnessing the fate of the Winchester’s sister ship near the Cape Verde Islands, subsided quickly: the day was a fine one, the sea not too heavy, the ship plainly not floundering. It had run aground, under incompetent navigation. Boats were making their way from shore. Those aboard, however, had panicked, and all male hands joined in throwing off anything heavy in an effort to float the ship before the pounding of the sea began to break it up. Many of Clive’s own belongings were thrown off.

  He was taken safely off in one of the boats; and thus he landed for the first time on a strange continent: Brazil, a province of Portugal, where the ship’s company was housed uncomfortably for a few days. After the damage had been inspected in calmer waters, a few minimal repairs made and water pumped out of the hull, Captain Seward decided the ship could be floated off. Clive and the others returned aboard.

  Frustration followed; the Winchester could certainly not proceed without major repairs, and the weather had turned bad – too severe to try and reach the safety of the nearby port of Pernambuco. The ship was well anchored, far enough from land to prevent it being driven ashore, but close enough to give it a good chance of rescue in the event of another disaster.

  Clive at first had been both alarmed and enthused by the adventure. But as the days turned into weeks the severity of the travellers’ predicament became apparent. They were at the mercy of the often rough, sometimes stormy, seas, unable to move, secured only by anchors as they were buffeted. Frustration battled with fear as the boat bucked, was swept by torrential rains and hit by violent electrical storms, all in a tropical humidity that left them drenched day after day.

  The weeks stretched into months, and still the ship could not move. The teenager of no importance and little patience could only fret along with the others until one day, as he gazed out to sea from the poop in a particularly violent squall, the ship suddenly rolled violently, and he was toppled overboard. Captain Seward, standing nearby, immediately grabbed a bucket that had been tied to a rope on deck. Soaked, dragged down by water-laden clothing, struggling to stay afloat in huge waves before being dragged away from the ship’s side, Clive seized the bucket and was hauled back, losing his hat, wig and shoes in the swell.

  After that, Clive’s dislike of Seward, who had saved the youth’s life, vanished, in spite of the latter’s poor seamanship and grasping nature. Clive was to become a grateful debtor. It was the first of his many brushes with death.

  The monotony and occasional alarm of the enforced wait continued for four months altogether. Only in September did the seas calm enough for the Winchester to raise anchor and make for Pernambuco, accompanied by a hearty cheer from the ship’s company. The houses crowded along the undulations of the shoreline beckoned to Clive and his companions.

  They had spent six months now on board, the last four under gruesomely stressful and trying conditions, the equivalent of being marooned – except constantly buffeted by storms, rough seas and high winds. They were still less than a third of the way to India. For weeks, they had lived with boredom and the fear that their ship might be lost. Now at last they would have a respite ashore, and could soon proceed on their voyage.

  * * *

  Pernambuco was a major port, a colourful maze of dazzlingly tiled colonial buildings arranged along narrow cobbled streets in the Portuguese fashion. In place of the order of England was the disorder, ease and exoticism of the tropics. Pernambuco’s inhabitants had different shades of dark skin, only the tiny élite of the port being white, the rest a mixture ranging from mulatto to brown to black. It was a bustling, thriving centre of commerce, its usual vigour rendered listless at midday by the intense heat, its life awoken by the cool of equatorial early dusk at around 6 p.m. all year round when the beat and bustle of music and trade would resume.

  To a young man just turned 18, the first taste of a tropical lifestyle seemed racy and exciting after the frozen and orderly structure of society in eighteenth-century England. The Portuguese colony was different even from a British colony: more relaxed, extraordinarily free in matters of sex, the Portuguese being largely unconcerned about intermarrying with the local Indian population or even with the imported black slave community.

  Clive was to become more accustomed to it than he expected. It took a further five months for the Winchester to become seaworthy again, and it was not to put to sea again until February. Berthed aboard ship in the port, Clive had the freedom of the town and would wander to its perimeters, where baked beaches and azure seas stretched as far as the eye could see. Behind the town lay a great expanse of scrub and arid desert – the sertao.

  The climate, while much more humid than he was to experience at Madras, provided his first acclimatisation to the intense heat of his soon-to-be-adopted country. Thus Clive of India’s first acquaintance with the tropics was a long spell not in India, but in Brazil, where he learnt bastardised Portuguese; ironically he was never to learn any Indian language.

  As a very junior member of the privileged cl
ass of writers and a sprig of the English squirearchy, he was occasionally invited to the social events of the local aristocracy, more relaxed than those of their Indian counterparts. He may have been introduced to some of the young ladies of local society – although Clive was so awkward at this stage that it is hard to believe any conversation would have got far.

  Otherwise he had time on his hands, and we know that he spent all of his money, some presumably on clothing to replace what he had lost in the near-disaster at sea – he was always extravagant and fastidious in matters of dress – and some on the drink he had already become fond of in the small taverns of the port. It seems probable that he was first exposed to sexual temptation here: the mixed-race girls of eastern Brazil were famous for their beauty, and the port notorious for its easy morality. To an awkward teenager accustomed to the restricted life of the country gentry in eighteenth-century England, the laxity of local morals came as a shock.

  He had soon exhausted the £54 he had been given for the journey to India – which had already taken twice as long as expected. He resorted to borrowing from his grasping life-saver, Captain Seward, accustomed to performing such a role for his passengers, with the promise that Clive’s father would redeem the debt. Stiff and awkward with his fellow travellers, and one of the youngest among them, he got on well enough with the local people to converse with them, which was to stand him in good stead among the sizeable Portuguese Indian community, many of whom were later to soldier for him.

  At last, in February, the ship sailed again: the bronzed young man, his first experience of tropical life behind him, was already very different from the gawky youth that had set out from London a year before. For five weeks, the Winchester sped before favourable trade winds across the inhospitable emptiness of the South Atlantic, the climate growing mercifully cooler and more temperate. As it approached the African continent a ferocious gale, worse than any Clive had yet endured, struck. Hurricane-force winds battered the ship, which bounced helplessly yet buoyantly about in giant seas. When the storm passed, serious damage had been done to the rigging and sails, and the Winchester was forced to make another unscheduled stop – at Cape Town.

  It took eleven days to repair the damage. The little Dutch settlement was quite different to Pernambuco: to Clive it resembled a summery version of Manchester set against the dramatic backdrop of Table Mountain. It was a place of orderliness, neat and tidy straight streets, pleasant gardens and social order and preference. The rebellious teenager’s only anxiety in this little corner of Calvinist Holland was his growing indebtedness.

  The ship left to cross the reputedly more dangerous Indian Ocean, with its sudden squalls, rocks and pirates, on the last leg of the long journey. But the trip proved unexpectedly uneventful. On 1 June, the surly youth, thoroughly bored and weary of life on board, saw the continent that was to change his life – and he its destiny.

  CHAPTER 3

  Coromandel

  They arrived off the Coromandel Coast in late afternoon. From the ship Clive could see that the land extended flat in both directions as far as the eye could see: a shimmer of heat haze lay over the sand. They reached Madras Harbour in darkness and Clive watched the lights of the colonial settlement from the deck of the Winchester with a mixture of intense excitement and apprehension. He was a long, long way from home. A yearning for the familiar hearth of Styche Hall, for his peppery father, loving mother and doting, quarrelsome sisters was later to overwhelm him, as his letters testify. He would not see them again for years, if ever.

  Ahead lay the unknown, his destiny; he knew nothing of how to survive on this vast continent. He had never taken advice in his life; now he would have to from those with experience of India if he was to survive and prosper. There was the glittering prospect of making his fortune. There was the possibility of death by disease. In a confusion of emotions he went below.

  Waking and dressing at dawn, he reached the side of the ship in time to hear the guns of Madras boom their welcome. Before him stretched a flotilla of small ships with varying sizes of hulls, masts and sails – clippers, dhows, bulky East Indiamen, tiny fishing boats bobbing at anchor like a species of exotic insect. The beach was one of the longest and finest in India. Dominating the shoreline was the 500-yard-long low wall of a magnificent fort, nonchalantly stretched out, its line of battlements running from the buttressed towers at the corners. A single sea gate was visible.

  Even by the architectural standards of the time it was an unusually elegant specimen: within, the tops of other fine buildings could be seen, including the steeple of St Mary’s Church, the ornate, impressive bulk of the Company’s main warehouse and the rococo splendour of the governor’s palace. To the right of this dazzling array of white buildings lay a sprawl of squalid, jumbled, colourful housing and streets peopled, it seemed, by a mass of humanity: the ‘black’, or Indian, town.

  To the left were the pretty, decaying remains of the old Portuguese settlement. Flat-bottomed, coconut-fibred boats took Clive and the new arrivals ashore. He was carried the last few yards on the back of an Indian. He was immediately surrounded by a crowd at the sea gate of Fort St George. The smell was indescribable: a mixture of excrement, curry, spices and humanity, the odour had an almost physical presence.

  As he strove to regain his dignity in the throng and made his way through the gate, he had a real sense of entering an enclave of Little England. Huddled together within the walls were the offices and warehouses of the Company, the barracks for its troops, the two churches (St Mary’s and the baroque Portuguese Catholic church) and a host of merchant houses. To accommodate the climate, most of the buildings were large and airy, with columns and shutters.

  Shrugging off the small army of Indians volunteering to be his dubash – valet – he was welcomed along with the other new arrivals by Company officials and taken to his new quarters at the hostel: a couple of rooms, which were reasonably light with high ceilings because of the climate. They were dirty and somewhat Spartan, but adequate for an 18-year-old. He slept on board ship until his rooms were cleaned and whitewashed.

  * * *

  The Company’s welcome was warm, if shortlived. He and the new arrivals were taken around the settlement and then shown outside the fort to experience the crowded hubbub of the ‘black town’ and admire the villas or ‘garden houses’ of the governor and the wealthier Company traders. He glanced over the near-desert beyond, which extended, seemingly without limits, to the horizon.

  He was taken to the offices and shown the desk he would work at. The approach of his new superiors was businesslike, friendly, not overwhelming. His supervisor seemed amiable enough, if loud and a little too bossy for Clive’s taste. He was now in the real world, where he would have to earn his living, not enjoying the enforced indolence of life on board the Winchester, or the sheltered rebelliousness of his youth. When the surly adolescent arrived in the hostel, and the exuberance of having escaped from the confines of the ship slowly ebbed away, the first of the black depressions he was to experience throughout his life began to engulf him.

  Clive was at first miserably unhappy at Fort St George. After the initial relief of landing and discovering the pleasures of a new world, the reality of deep loneliness and drudgery sunk in. Over in the ‘black town’ there was bustling life amid all the smells, joss-sticks and putrefaction. Here in Fort St George, there was the orderliness of a tiny expatriate community where everyone knew everyone, there was one employer and an almost militaristic structure of social hierarchy. Fort St George resembled nothing so much as a minor public school, the kind of existence Clive had rebelled against as a boy – but rebellion here would ruin his career.

  His job was tedious in the extreme. Clad only in shirt, breeches and suncap, he filed figures and added them, inspected cloth, prepared ledgers, checked inventories, made orders and argued with Indian suppliers about quality and quantity. He was a glorified apprentice shopkeeper. He deeply disliked his pompous and bossy overseers.

  His
pay was performance-related: he earned only £5 a year, but his lodgings were free and he had an allowance of about £3 which paid for his candles, three servants and lodgings. In terms of modern purchasing power in India, he had living expenses of around £600 a year and a salary of some £1,000 a year. The rest had to be earned from his work, in which he was privileged above local merchants.

  The conditions took a great deal of acclimatisation. His lodgings were plagued with mosquitoes, giant ants and constant coatings of dust from periodic dust storms. He was often bathed in sweat from the heat, particularly if there was any urgent hurrying to and from office to warehouse. The mixture of English and Indian food took time to get used to.

  His three servants provided some consolation. Fortunately the heat was dry, unlike the suffocatingly humid atmosphere he was to experience in Bengal, but its intensity was oppressive nonetheless. In his boredom he may have relished the terrifying typhoons that periodically ravaged the enclave.

  He wrote miserably to his cousin: ‘I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country. I am not acquainted with any one family in the place, and have not assurance enough to introduce myself without being asked. If the state I am now in will admit of any happiness it must be when I am writing to my friends. Letters were surely first invented for the comfort of such solitary wretches as myself.’

  Pathetically he pleaded, ‘If there is any such thing which may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two friends who each love each other without the least guile or deceit, who are united by a real inclination, and satisfied with each other’s merits … when you write me, I beg it may be carelessly and without study, for I had much rather read the dictates of the heart than of the understanding.’