Abstract
Continuing his examination of the crossroads of cultures, Fraser next turns his attention to a nineteenth-century case study that brings together a post-slavery Caribbean society, an explorer of Australia and a posse of British intellectuals of varied political and religious persuasions. Edward John Eyre was appointed Governor of Jamaica in 1863. He had spent much of the previous decade in Southern Australia, where his intrepid journeys around the coast and across the bush had drawn widespread international admiration, the more so because in his published account of his travels he had berated the colonial authorities and championed the cause of a downtrodden Aboriginal population. But when in Jamaica he found his own authority challenged by local opinion, his reaction was quick and brutal. Brought back to England, he became the focus of a controversy that found some of the leading thinkers and writers of the day on opposite sides.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward Said , Culture and Imperialism (London: Random House, 1993).
- 2.
Angus Calder , Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981).
- 3.
John Jacob Thomas , Froudacity; West Indian Tales (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).
- 4.
J.A. Froude, The English in the West Indies: The Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans & Co., 1888).
- 5.
Thomas, 5.
- 6.
Froude, 256–63.
- 7.
V.S. Reid , New Day (New York: Alfred A. Knoft, 1949; London: William Heinemann, 1950; London: Heinemann Educational Books, Caribbean Writers Series, 1973), 1.
- 8.
Sydney Haldane, Baron Olivier, The Myth of Governor Eyre (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1933).
- 9.
For Mill’s account of the Eyre controversy, and his views on the case, see John Stuart Mill , Autobiography, Third Edition (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1874), 295–99.
- 10.
Gad Heuman, “‘The Killing Time”’: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 44.
- 11.
For Gordon’s background and career, see Ansell Hart, The Life of George William Gordon (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1972).
- 12.
The standard late Victorian account of Eyre’s life and career is Alexander Hamilton Hume’s The Life of Edward John Eyre, Late Governor of Jamaica (London: Richard Bentley, 1867), written in the immediate aftermath of the rising and of Eyre’s official exoneration by the courts. Hume is ardently pro-Eyre. For a full, balanced and psychologically penetrating modern account, see Geoffrey Dutton, The Hero as Murderer: The Life of Edward John Eyre, Australian Explorer and Governor of Jamaica (1815–1901) (London: Collins; Sydney, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1967).
- 13.
Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sand, in 1840–1, Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines, and the State of Their Relations with Europeans, 2 vols. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1845), vol. ii, 158–59.
- 14.
Edward Brathwaite , The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 259.
- 15.
Heuman, 38, 64.
- 16.
Reid , 8.
- 17.
Henry Kingsley, “Eyre, the South-Australian Explorer” Part II, Macmillan’s Magazine, November, 1865, 55.
- 18.
In other ways, Carlyle substantially prepared the way for the public reaction to the Eyre controversy. It had been his anonymous article “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, printed in the December 1849 issue of Frazer’s Magazine, pp. 670–9, that had first sewn in the public mind the idea that the relative poverty of the Jamaican populace was due less to inclement economic circumstances than to the people’s endemic laziness. The following passage is typical: “The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour; as indeed is very conceivable in those circumstances: where a Black man by working about half an hour a-day (such is the calculation) can supply himself, by the aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! Supply and demand, which, science says, should be brought to bear on him, have an uphill task of it with such a man” (672). This routine argument was trotted out several times during and after the rising, both by Eyre himself and by others in support of the Governor’s hard line, especially in response to the demands of the Baptists. Suitably toned down, it appears both in Eyre’s submissions to Cardwell at the Colonial Office and in the “Queen’s Letter” posted as a result.
- 19.
Heuman, 116.
- 20.
The chain of command at the time of the rising had been complicated by the political evolution of the island in recent years. Technically all orders had to be issued, or at least confirmed, by General O’Connor, who held the rank of Commander-in-Chief of the British Troops in the West Indies. Confusingly, however, Eyre, who had no military experience, was Captain General and Supreme Commander-in-Chief in Jamaica , in which capacity he acted, with the support of the council, to put down the rising in the draconian manner he saw fit. Moreover, because of reforms at the War Office, for which the Secretary of State Cardwell had been responsible, the large-scale British military force had recently been withdrawn, leaving a handful of officers and an impromptu militia. The lack of a substantial regular armed force had been a constant bone of contention between Eyre and the Colonial Office. Eyre cited this deficiency as a reason for his severity during the rising, continuing to do so for some time afterwards (see note 18). Despite Eyre’s protestations, it is doubtful whether the insurgents made a distinction between the militia and regular troops.
- 21.
Reid , 4. But see New Day, 151: “Deacon Bogle is a-hang from the yard-arm o’ the Wolverine.” Bro’ Davies’s account of the method by which Bogle was executed conflicts with the official version. Nonetheless, it reflects a powerful image as handed down by folklore, according to which Bogle was “strung up from the arch of the very court house that he had gutted. Where, in the iconography of Caribbean nationalism, he remains: the hanged god of colonial Jamaica .” Robert Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: The St Martin’s Press, 1990), 137.
- 22.
V.S. Naipaul , The Loss of El Dorado: A History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). See especially chap. 6, pp. 182–221.
- 23.
For the response to the massacre in England, and the successive trials, see Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962).
- 24.
The Times, 6 March, 1866, 10 col.d. Written from Flamstead, Eyre’s up-country residence on the island, and dated 7 February, the letter read: “It can hardly be denied that the emergency occasioned by the rebellion in Jamaica was a great one, when that rebellion spread 20 miles in one direction in two days and a half, and 40 miles in another direction in three and a half days; or that the peril threatening the entire island was imminent when disaffection, seditious feelings, and sympathy, with a readiness to join the rebels, were known to exist in almost every parish, while at the same time the local Executive had not a single soldier available to serve any locality whatever, should further outbreaks in other parishes have taken place. Under such conditions the most prompt, certain and severe punishment became unnecessary as a means of self-defence to insure the public safety. I do not doubt but that the Inquiry now being instituted will make all this, and much more, fully apparent to the public.” Eyre’s sanguine confidence that the Inquiry would find in his favour was only partially justified.
- 25.
Eyre arrived in the West Indies on the mail steamer Tasmania on Sunday 12 August. According to The Times, reporting the following Monday, 20 August (page 7, col. c.), the late Governor who “has since remained in the town, has accepted to attend a banquet from some of the inhabitants who sympathize with him and his conduct during the rising last year”.
- 26.
Charles Kingsley to Fanny Kingsley, August 1866. BL Add. Ms. 62555. f. 123., written “before August 23, 1866.”
- 27.
The Times for August 23rd, 1866, page 7, columns a–c.
- 28.
Quoted in Semmel, 94.
- 29.
Charles Kingsley to Fanny Kingsley from Eversley Rectory, August 1866: “Look at The Times about Eyre. The speeches are very well reported. The Times, as you see, is against Eyre. But is civil enough to me…I still believe him in the right, and that the man has been sacrificed to a paltry & weak government.” BL Add. Ms. 6255. fol. 127. Kingsley’s suspicion that Eyre was being made a scapegoat by an inefficient administration doubtless continued to play a part in his reasons for carrying on defending him, even if thenceforth his support was mainly tacit. See also letter from Bishopstoke, August 1866, ff. 137–38: “The Times is evidently hedging for the change of feeling which must take place about Eyre when he comes to be known. Meanwhile I have the consciousness of having stood by a good man in all verity, and not having committed myself about the Jamaican details.”
- 30.
Quoted in Semmel, 100.
- 31.
After Kingsley’s death, Ludlow explained his attitude in a letter, quoted at length in Susan Chitty’s biography of Kingsley: “I continued corresponding with him till the time of the Jamaica committee. Then, when the Jamaican massacres took place, and Tom Hughes and myself joined the Jamaica Committee, I was amazed to hear that, without saying a word to either of us, he had joined himself to the antagonistic organisation, the Eyre Defence Fund. I wrote to him to tell him that our paths ran so divergent that it was worthless to correspond any longer.” Susan Chitty, Charles Kingsley: The Beast and the Monk (London: Hodder and Stoughton; New York: Mason/Charter, 1975), 242–43. Ludlow’s interpretation of Kingsley’s position seems slightly at odds with Carlyle’s here, though of course the two men were approaching the issue from opposite vantage points. What seemed to Ludlow like bloody-minded obduracy might very well have seemed to Carlyle to be more like timorous holding back. In any case, Ludlow and Kingsley did not meet again until the funeral of their mutual friend F.D. Maurice in April 1872.
- 32.
The meeting, held on 29 August 1866, is described at some length in J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834–1881, 2 vols. (London: Longman and Green, 1884). Froude quotes a letter by Carlyle to Miss Davenport Bramley written the day after it, 30 August: “Yesterday, in spite of the rain, I got up to the Eyre Committee, and I’ve let myself be voted into the chair, such being the post of danger on this occasion, and truly something of a forlorn hope and place for enfants perdus. We seemed, so far as I can measure, to be a most feeble committee: a military captain, a naval ditto, a young city merchant, Henry Kingsley , Charles still hanging back afraid…” Froude, Carlyle, ii, 329. Charles Kingsley’s non-attendance would tend to suggest that he had been more wounded by criticisms of his Southampton speech than he had let on to Fanny. To be fair to Kingsley, however, his time was at a premium in 1866, since he was combining the responsibilities of Rector of Eversley (where, however, he had a curate), Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and Chaplain to the Queen. Moreover, if Carlyle’s journal is anything to go by, even the sage of Cheyne Walk was in two minds. “Eyre Defence Committee”, he notes on 26 September, “small letter of mine has been raging through all the newspapers of the empire, I am told; for I have carefully avoided everything pro or contra that fooling populace of scribblers in any form put forth upon it or me.” Froude, Carlyle, ii, 364.
- 33.
Frazer’s Magazine, December, 1849, 670–79.
- 34.
Frances Eliza Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life Edited by his wife, 2 vols. (London: H.S. King and Co., 1877), vol. ii, 235. The correspondent was a Mr T. Dixon, a “cork-cutter of Sunderland”.
- 35.
See note 25 above.
- 36.
Quoted in Semmell, 113. Ruskin’s further judgement, also quoted by Semmel—admittedly delivered late in life, some time after the Eyre controversy had died down—was that Kingsley “failed in the most cowardly way when we had the Eyre party to fight”, and that on that occasion he proved himself to be a “flawed—partly rotten, partly distorted—person”.
- 37.
Charles Kingsley to Fanny Kingsley, Eversley Rectory, August 23, 1866. BL Add. Ms. 62555, ff. 125–26.
- 38.
Quoted Semmel, 122–23. Huxley’s further comments clarify the issues at stake as viewed by contemporaries: “The hero-worshippers, who believe that the world is governed by its great men, who are to lead the little ones justly if they can; but if not, unjustly drive or kick them the right way. Will sympathize with Mr. Eyre. The other set (to which I belong), who look upon hero-worship as no better than any other ideology, and upon the attitudes of mind of the hero-worshippers as essentially limited, who think it better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains; who look upon the observance of inflexible justice as between man and man as of far greater importance than even the preservation of social order, who believe that Mr. Eyre has committed one of the greatest crimes of which a person in authority can be guilty, and will strain every muscle to obtain a declaration that the belief is in accordance with the law of England…”
- 39.
J. A. Froude, A History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, 8 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1862–64). Kingsley’s remarks in his review refer principally to Froude’s account of the behaviour of the Spanish legation in London during the reign of Elizabeth I as related in vol. viii.
- 40.
Reproduced in ‘Mr Kingsley and Dr. Newman . A correspondence on the question ‘whether Dr. Newman teaches that Truth is no virtue?’, John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), 341.
- 41.
John Sutherland, “‘Westward Ho!’ ‘A Popular Successful Book’” in Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: The Athlone Press, 1976), 117–32.
- 42.
R.F. Forster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 394, 608.
- 43.
Quoted Semmel, 156.
- 44.
For an astute discussion of these connections, especially as they featured in the minds of Kingsley and his associates, see David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), especially chap. 4, pp. 98–119, “‘Hysteric Celts”’.
- 45.
Philip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (London: John Murray, 1954), 346.
- 46.
Froude, West Indies, 4.
- 47.
Magnus, Gladstone, 358.
- 48.
Tom Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays By an Old Boy (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1857), 150–51: “It was in this state that Master Tom lay at half past seven in the morning following the day of his arrival, and from his clean little white bed watched the movements of Bogle (the general name by which successive shoeblacks of the School-house were known) as he marched round from bed to bed, collecting dirty shoes and boots, and depositing clean ones in their places.”
- 49.
See The Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 edition, vol. ii, 360, where Bogle is defined as “a phantom causing fright…(Usually supposed to be black, and to have something of human attributes, though spoken of as it.) Also applied contemptuously to a human being who is ‘a fright to behold’.”
- 50.
Reid , 2.
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Fraser, R. (2018). Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles Kingsley, Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rising. In: Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_8
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