In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

On a steaming July day in 1810, the air still wet after the morning rain, a young Englishman leaned on the railing of an East India Company frigate at anchor in the Bay of Bombay. He was of medium height, with the brown eyes and even darker brown hair that bespoke his Welsh heritage. William Vawdrey Glascott, named after a family friend in Cornwall, William Vawdrey, who in turn gave two of his sons the middle name of Glascott, answered to the name of Billy or Will. He was to become Anna’s grandfather. But at the moment he was twenty-one and just beginning the great adventure of his life. Billy had joined up with the Indian Army, the private army of the British East India Company, as a cadet and now strained eagerly on the crowded deck for his first sight of the foreign city where he planned to spend his life. The Sir Steven Lushington was a big Indiaman, with a weight of 608 tons (Sutton, 155), making its last voyage to the East. The voyages from England in the East India Company’s Indiamen were full of horrors. “There were courts-martials innumerable amongst the recruits” (Hervey, A Soldier of the Company, 9). One traveler related that “the cat o’ nine tails was constantly at work” during his voyage in 1809, and “so many of the soldiers on board were flogged” that at last the captain intervened “and informed the senior military officer that he ‘would not have his quarter-deck turned into a slaughterhouse ’” (Cotton, 60). But the greatest danger was disease, and the decks were filled with sick and often dying men. The trip had taken four months because it was made before the development of the Overland Route, when passengers from Europe could travel by land to Suez and there pick up a regular steamer on to India. The first scheduled steamer east from Suez did not sail for another twenty years, and it 11 two Ancestors A Methodist,a Soldier, and a “Lady Not EntirelyWhite” would be sixty years before the Suez Canal opened in 1869, allowing ships to sail due east from the ports of Europe. The 1810s was still an age when travelers to India took the long route. Billy’s ship left Portsmouth on March 14, 1810, and sailed south, down the west coast of the African continent, around the stormy Cape of Good Hope, then north, up the east coast. Turning east at last, on its port side the ship passed the Persian Empire and crossed the Arabian Sea to the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. Billy’s first sight was an enormous semicircular bay lined with waving coconut palms, just visible along the low hills. The air had changed and now carried the strong smells of rotting fish and dank shallow waters. There were seabirds screeching everywhere. Small boats swarmed around the ship, the people in them holding up their wares to the foreigners. There was an air of celebration, making it easy to forget the ugly truth that these new soldiers, most without any training, had come to strengthen an army of occupation, that they were reinforcements of the foreigners who held these lands by force against the wish of most of its Indian peoples. The Company did have a military academy, known officially as the East India Company’s Artillery and Engineer Seminary, unofficially as Addiscombe . It took boys from ages fourteen to eighteen to train them for the artillery or as engineers, considered the more elite branches of the Company’s military . Admission required that a boy “have a fair knowledge of Arithmetic, write a good hand, and possess a competent knowledge of English and Latin Grammar” (Vibart, 15). The fee was sixty pounds for two years, high enough to keep out most would-be cadets, who joined the infantry instead.The boys who joined the Company’s army were typically impoverished second and third sons or bastards (since the class structure and sexual mores of Great Britain created a seemingly endless supply), from country families all over England, Scotland, and Ireland. William Hickey, a cadet a few years before Billy, left us a vivid account of the emptiness of the testing process: I attended before a Committee of Directors to undergo the usual examination as a Cadet. Being called into the Committee room . . . I saw three old Dons sitting close to the fire, having by them a large table, with pens, ink...

Share