But eternity was closer than many wished. Little could obscure the fact that the voyage to the East was a dangerous one. Between 1 December 1827 and 30 November 1828, twenty-one military officers of the East India Company died at sea, from natural causes or by accident. On his second trip to India, Garnet Wolseley, now a lieutenant in HM’s 90th Light Infantry, was nearly lost in a cyclone. ‘It is commonly supposed that most if not all the East Indiamen that have been lost eastward of the Cape have gone down in these “circular storms” and we very nearly did so,’ he wrote. ‘Our mainyard was snapped in two, and sails after sails, as they were set, were rent in pieces. We had already an unsafe amount of water in the hold, and it began to be whispered that we had sprung a leak.’
Later on in the voyage the ship hit a rock: bugles sounded the regimental call, and officers at once went below to their men, who were clearing away breakfast. Wolseley’s company fell in, and he ordered them to keep quiet and await instructions from the crew.
There we stood in deathly silence, and I know not for how long. The abominable candle in the lantern sputtered and went out. We were in almost absolute darkness, our only small glimmer of light coming through a very small hatchway which was reached by a long ladder. The ship began to sink by the stern, so it was evident to all thinking minds that we hung on a rock somewhere forward. The angle of our deck with the sea level above us became gradually greater, until at last we all had to hold on to the sides of our dark submarine prison … My predominant feeling was one of horrid repugnance at the possibility, which at last became the probability, of being drowned in the dark, like a rat in a trap. I should have liked to have had a swim for my life at the least …
Happily they were ordered on deck in time to leave the ship, but the incident convinced Wolseley of the value of discipline: ‘It is based on faith, for without faith in your superiors it is only … an outward form filled with dust.’45
The loss of the Birkenhead was only one of the spectacular disasters to befall troopships. On 1 March 1825, the East Indiaman Kent, carrying half HM’s 31st Foot, caught fire in the Bay of Biscay. The ship eventually blew up, but 296 members of the 31st, forty-six of the regiment’s wives and fifty-two children were saved, together with nineteen passengers, the captain and 139 of the crew: fifty-four men, one woman, and twenty-one children perished. One soldier’s wife was immediately delivered of a robust baby boy aboard the rescuing Cambria. The soldiers behaved so well – some put their comrades’ children on their backs and swam with them to the boats – that Lieutenant Colonel Fearon, commanding the 31st, was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath. Captain James Spence, who survived the shipwreck, commanded the 31st at Sobraon, where he bore a charmed life: he had musket balls through his cap and sword scabbard, and his sword hilt was smashed by a grapeshot. His sword broke in a hand-to-hand battle with a Sikh, but he was saved when a private soldier bayoneted the man.
On 11 November 1858, the troopship Sarah Sands caught fire near Mauritius, and although all the women and children were put into the boats, the men of HM’s 54th helped the sailors to put out the blaze and pump out the hull which was flooded by water used for fire-fighting. The colours of the 54th were saved ‘at the hazard of their lives’ by Private William Wiles of the regiment, and Richard Richmond, one of the ship’s quartermasters. On 2 June 1859, the Eastern Monarch, full of wounded soldiers from Bengal, blew up at Spithead. One man, one woman and five children were killed, but the detachment commander acknowledged that the loss would have been far greater had it not been for
the very excellent behaviour of the troops, and the great assistance I received from every individual officer under my command; so cool, collected and energetic were they all, that I feel it is only due to them to bring their names respectively before His Royal Highness.46
The Royal Navy’s strong grip on the sea meant that passages to and from India were not usually subject to interference by hostile vessels. The one major exception was during the later stages of the American War of Independence, when a vengeful France joined the fledgling United States. In 1781 Admiral Pierre-André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez beat a British squadron off West Africa, and then reached India, where he had the better of a series of clashes with Rear Admiral Sir Edward Hughes. It was then difficult for the armies of the three presidencies to support one another by land. When Madras came under pressure Eyre Coote, Commander in Chief, India, declared that he had ‘one foot in the grave and one on the edge of it’, but still set off from Calcutta to help, in the armed Indiaman Resolution. Chased by Suffren, he died at sea off Madras. Those captured by Suffren discovered that, as William Hickey sneered, he looked like ‘a little fat, vulgar English butcher’, and received his captives with his breeches unbuttoned at the knees, his collar undone and his sleeves rolled up.
Privateers or isolated frigates could create havoc amongst coastal traffic on lone Indiamen. When they appeared, ships were cleared for action, cabins demolished and women and children sent below into the fetid hold. Gentlemen usually remained on deck in an effort to help, sketching out a few defensive cuts with borrowed cutlasses and generally getting in the way of those whose job it was to fight the ship. The capture of a commerce raider was a matter for rejoicing. When HMS La Sibylle took the French national frigate La Forte in Belasore Roads on 28 February 1799, the insurance office of Madras, and the Calcutta, Bengal and Amicable Insurance Companies presented two fine swords to Captain Lucius Ferdinand Hardiman. In gilt and ivory, the swords were at the very apogee of Georgian military elegance, and are evidence of the damage that La Forte was doing to trade.47
Many ships containing India-bound troops were never heard of again, however. In January 1831, the Thames-built Guildford (521 tons) disappeared somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and was reported ‘lost at sea with all hands’. She probably went down in a tropical storm, but there is a chance that she was taken by pirates, for a European female – according to some sources a passenger named Ann Presgrave – was later sold to a Malay chief in Brunei.48
FOR MOST OF THE PERIOD, British troops – and many British civilians – arriving in India disembarked at Calcutta. Relief at the sight of land was tempered by the fact that safe landing was still some way off, because the Hooghly River estuary, with its shifting sandbanks, was notoriously difficult to navigate. The distinctive James and Mary shoal, near the mouth of the river, was named after a 1690s shipwreck there. Smaller vessels were conned up the river by Hooghly pilots, while larger ones would anchor at the mouth of the river and passengers would be disembarked into tenders for the last leg of the voyage. John Luard’s troop sergeant major summed up his first impressions of India as they made their way upstream, declaring that it was: ‘Hotter than Hades, and a damned sight less interesting.’49
William Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd, diverted to India because of the outbreak of the Mutiny, recalled how:
We had two tug steamers, and the pilot and tug commanders all sent bundles of the latest Calcutta papers on board, from which we learnt the first news of the sieges of Delhi and Lucknow, of the horrible massacre at Cawnpore, and of the gallant advance of the small force under generals Havelock, Neill and Outram for the relief of Lucknow. When passing Garden Reach, every balcony, verandah and housetop was crowded with ladies and gentlemen waving their handkerchiefs and cheering us, all our men being in full Highland dress and the pipes playing on the poop. In passing the present No 46 Garden Reach … we anchored for an hour just opposite … Frank Henderson said to me, ‘Forbes-Mitchell, how would you like
