who enjoyed a host of enviable privileges because, if captured in battle, his life was never spared.
Apart from the soldiers (each possessing his own rank according to numbers of men killed) there were the keepers of the tent; the ‘mouth of the king’; the head of the advance guard; the chief of the night guards; the guard of the women’s quarters; the female providers of honey for the tej; the hundreds of tej-bearers, all women, with their own chief and their own hierarchy; the grass-cutters, wood-cutters, herdsmen, drummers and minstrels, butchers and maidservants. ‘So minute are the particulars of all these minor posts,’ Plowden wrote, ‘that they would fill a volume.’ When an ox was slaughtered in camp, he watched the meat being divided into a hundred pieces and distributed, each cut of the carcass corresponding to a different rank.
War was poetic and chivalric. Every year Ras Ali would march his tens of thousands to the province of Gojjam to do battle with its rogue ruler, Biru Goshu, who had taken the ras’s wife. Every year Biru would present Ras Ali with a cape to award to the governor the ras left behind. As soon as Ras Ali was gone, Biru killed the governor, took the cape and waited for Ras Ali to return again after the following rains. War was also brutal – the ‘warrior is bred to consider killing (geddai) as the great object of existence’. Musket stocks were hung with ‘disgusting trophies’, the leathery testicles of slaughtered enemies.
In good Victorian style, the young Plowden was both drawn to the wildness of Ethiopia and motivated by an urge to improve it. As the years passed, his enthusiasm began to veer away from the country’s medieval colour towards its worldly prospects. He wrote lovingly of a climate which could bear ‘comparison with any in the world’, a soil ‘fitted for every crop’, diversity of flora to amaze botanist and herbalist alike, green slopes for the tea-planter, gold, copper and saltpetre for prospectors. Ethiopia’s vineyards could challenge any in Bordeaux. It was India, on a smaller scale, but untouched. The country’s problem, Plowden said, was leadership. Calm and conciliatory diplomacy would unite its eternally squabbling chiefs, while those who resisted, who held out on the mountaintops, ‘would soon yield to the persuasion of some howitzers, or bombs of larger calibre’.
He puffed at his pipe, sipped his coffee, and shifted his legs on the alga’s leather grid. The breeze was good and the sails full. He was impatient to reach England, yet could not forget what he’d left behind. Sometimes during those languid days he thought he could ‘hear in fancy, the wild war-cry of the half-naked Galla … mingling with the murmur of the restless ocean’.
His mission soon ran into difficulty. The dhow’s captain proved to be an idiot. When the goat’s milk dried up, the first of the gazelles died. Another was killed leaping from a window in Jeddah, the third when the dhow was wrecked on a coral reef. Plowden alone struggled ashore from the wreck. For days he staggered through the Sinai desert, weakened by thirst, close to death, wondering whether ‘it were not better to die at once on my lance’. But after a week or so he reached Suez. There he found that the rest of the embassy had been rescued from the reef. All the presents had been lost or destroyed, and the envoy himself refused ever to go near a boat again. Plowden continued to London on his own.
2
A few weeks later, from a hotel room in Covent Garden, Walter Plowden wrote to the Foreign Office. He laid his plans before them in two detailed, handwritten reports. The Foreign Secretary at the time was Lord Palmerston, and by coincidence he had also been Foreign Secretary some fifteen years earlier when a similar letter was doing the rounds. That earlier letter came through a William Coffin, son of a yeoman farmer from Dorset who had been stuck in Ethiopia for so long he could barely speak English when he emerged. He had brought a letter of friendship from a Tigrayan noble to King George IV. The Foreign Office lost it. Coffin waited three years in London before they gave him the reply.
Plowden had more luck. This time Palmerston was immediately receptive. A foothold on the Red Sea was now of much more relevance, to protect the route to India from the French. He was convinced too of Plowden’s optimism about trade. Within a few weeks of landing in England (and after a little quiet investigation into the young man’s character), Plowden was appointed HM Consul to Massawa. He was to receive a salary of £500 a year, a gift budget for Ras Ali of £400, a letter signed by Queen Victoria herself and a nineteen-point treaty to lay before the ras.
Six months later, Plowden was back in Ethiopia. Thrilled to be among the mountains again, he took the road to Gondar. As it led higher into the Simiens, the air grew colder, the cliffs steeper, until at a high pass it pushed through a narrow doorway in the rock. With the great inland sea of Lake Tana on his right he entered land ruled by Ras Ali. Striding ahead of his baggage train, he reached the capital of Debre Tabor. There, outside the ras’s residence, he met his old friend John Bell. Pushing through the crowd, Plowden embraced ‘several old acquaintances’. In the semi-darkness of the court he found Ras Ali sitting on a cowhide on the ground, while workmen and courtiers, horses, flies and children milled around him.
‘He was much pleased to see me,’ wrote Plowden, ‘and immediately besieged me with questions as to what I had brought for him.’
After the initial meeting, Plowden retired. Several times that first day, messages arrived from the ras. Let me see the gifts. Have you brought guns?
Plowden gave no answer.
The next day he again entered the ras’s court, and read out the letter from Queen Victoria:
‘Your Highness will clearly perceive the great advantage to Abyssinia from intimate connection with the Sovereign of the British Empire whose dominions extend from the rising to the setting sun –’
Ras Ali looked up at the long-legged Plowden: Why does the farenj stand?
‘– and whose fleets are to be met with in every part of the seas which encompass the earth.’
Ras Ali knew nothing of the sea.
Plowden then spread the bulk of the gifts before him. The afe-negus – ‘mouth of the king’– whispered to Plowden, ‘One thing at a time is usually better.’
Plowden waved him away. His queen, he told him, did not mind. He gave a flamboyant bow, left the gifts, and stepped out again into the sunlight. Plowden was no longer the eager young traveller who had left the ras two years earlier. He was now Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul and he was playing the ras. As the days passed Ras Ali began to send requests to Plowden for more gifts.
‘It is needless to recall,’ boasted the consul, ‘all the childish messages with which I was bored every five minutes.’ With the ras primed, Plowden then subtly introduced the idea of signing the treaty.
But Ras Ali was also playing Plowden. At each meeting, Plowden was forced again to go back to the beginning. What exactly is this treaty? What use is it to me? And each time Plowden had to explain that it offered friendship between sovereigns, and that his own sovereign whose fleets etc. Each time, Plowden had to part with a gift. He began to dig into his own supplies. First the matchlocks brought from Egypt. Then his own private armoury, the guns and pistols kept for his protection. And still Ras Ali put off signing the treaty.
Then Plowden heard a familiar sound. From the tented city, from the plains around Debre Tabor came the beating of the ras’s negarits. Tens of thousands of souls stirred, packed up their tents, rounded up their sheep and cattle. The chiefs took down their slash-sleeved shirts, men left their homes to join the southbound flood. The ras was going to war. He was leaving for his annual fight with Biru Goshu. Plowden had no option but to take his treaty and follow him.
They dropped down into the gorge of the Blue Nile, and crossed into Gojjam,
