The gold machine, p.9
The Gold Machine, page 9
If he stayed in motion for ten years, jolted on horseback from plantation to plantation, now he would vegetate in one place for the same length of time, recovering that tentative faith in ownership his highland ancestors had lost. Did he have the store of years left to learn that you have to be born to creative indolence, to the art of living on your land values and investments? It takes generations of inbreeding to be fit for staring across a breakfast table, at rods of black rain pricking the estate, without the reflex compulsion to spring up and out. The yawn of aristocratic ennui is hard won. It smells of wet spaniel, steaming horse tweed and cold untouched kedgeree.
There are no great revelations, post-mortem, in any life. What does the published Arthur Sinclair ‘In Memoriam’ of 1905 have to tell about those years of rehearsed retirement? Nothing. At the final reckoning, with so much ground to cover, so many voyages, the Scottish return is a sequence of coloured postcards, census forms and changing addresses: waiting on inevitable disaster. In the photograph that accompanies the obituary tribute, Arthur is crinkled in that smile of secret knowledge while pretending to read a folded newspaper. One of his own field reports? The delight, at this achieved retirement of which he speaks, is palpable.
A most engaging conversationalist, Mr Sinclair was never happier than when describing to his friends the rare plant life of the many distant portions of the world he had seen. He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a Fellow of the Royal Colonial Institute. He was a Liberal in politics.
As we have seen in the photograph on the lavatory wall, Arthur’s family is strategically positioned across the grass in front of Banff Castle, an arrangement of achieved possessions: sons and daughters, nursemaid and babe, with a status almost equal to the rocking-horse. The small print in the Observer is a struggle. Soon there will be banner headlines. There is a dark shadow creeping across the investment horizon like those minatory ‘drops of soot’ on the young planter’s original potato patch.
At the end of this time I fell amongst thieves, and as misfortunes rarely come single, the Hemileia must needs play havoc with securities in Ceylon at the same time, so that I began to look abroad again for investments and occupation, resulting in a trip to Tasmania, an adventure often talked of with friends now gone.
Subtle plagues wait quietly for their moment, some unaccountable episode of interspecies transmission. Fungal karma: the obliteration of holdings inspired an ill-judged and ruinous search for gold. The attempt was too blatant. Wealth, as Victorian novels imply, should arrive slowly and steadily, through the generations. You don’t just shovel it out of the ground, out of land occupied by others. The blind strike at Tasmania cost Arthur most of his remaining reserves, and set him up for the final punt, out by rail from Lima, then by mule to the far side of the Andes.
Accessible sources offer sparse information on the gold-prospecting venture. ‘He made a trip to Australia,’ admitted the memorial tribute. Arthur’s own summary in his brown-paper 1900 autobiography is almost as terse.
My prospecting during these three years cost me over £2000, money not by any means wasted, as I gained in return a more thorough knowledge of this beautiful, if in many respects over-rated and sadly misguided island than many of the natives possess, and learned to appreciate better our own beautiful native land on which there is yet ample room.
——
John Ferguson’s account of Ceylon in 1883 outlines the disaster that struck the coffee harvest, but he is obliged to give the episode a positive spin. ‘The present financial depression and scarcity of capital in Ceylon can readily be understood when a succession of four bad seasons, involving a deficiency in the planters’ harvest equal to five million pounds sterling, are taken into consideration. There have been periods of depression before.’
A classic boom and bust cycle. And an invitation for those with deep pockets to hold their nerve. ‘Wild speculation’ is treated as a meteorological condition. ‘Financial shock’ as an earth tremor. ‘A London capitalist, who visited the island, said the most striking picture of woe-begone misery he saw was the typical “man who owned a coffee estate”. Yet this was followed by good seasons and bounteous coffee harvests.’
Arthur pincers his open newspaper against the offshore breeze and never hazards an emotion beyond his standard enigmatic smile.
The colonists who make fortunes in the island do not think of making it their permanent home… The ‘accumulated profits’ made during the time of prosperity, which at home form a reserve fund of local wealth to enable the sufferer from present adversity to benefit by past earnings, are utterly wanting in Ceylon… Ceylon, in fact, is a sort of ‘incubator’ to which capitalists send their eggs to be hatched, and whence they receive from time to time an abundant brood, leaving us but the shells for our local portion.
On permanent display: the golden eggs of an asset-stripping colonial culture. Transport moored. Treasure in London vaults.
Money has been sent here to fell our forests and plant them with coffee, and it has been returned in the shape of copious harvests to the home capitalist, leaving us in some cases the bare hill-sides from whence these rich harvests were drawn.
Having critiqued the failure of European investors and profit takers to adequately engage with the island, Ferguson arrives at an unexpected conclusion. The true profit was for the humble plantation labourers, Tamils from Southern India who were ‘saved from starvation’ by the generosity of estate owners.
No wonder that to such a people the planting country of Ceylon, when all was prosperous, was an El Dorado, for each family could there earn from 9s. to 12s. per week, and save half to three-quarters the amount… Nor ought we to forget the Tamil Cooly Mission which is doing a good work in educating and Christianizing many amongst the coolies, mainly supported as it is by the planters.
Ferguson goes on to quote Sir Edward Creasy: ‘I have seen more human misery in a single winter’s day in London, than I have seen during my nine years’ stay in Ceylon.’
If Ceylon was a logical destination, Tasmania was a mid-life crisis, representing the pivotal moment when Arthur decides not so much to prospect for gold as to write about it, to surf the prevailing fashions of nineteenth-century fiction. It feels as if, brooding in his chair on the grass in Scotland, dozing off, making indecipherable notes, he turns to a pile of romances. The broken world is better viewed as a novel.
I discovered, among Arthur’s late-century books with their decorative covers, The City of Gold by W.H. Davenport Adams. A stepped Mayan temple, in gilded relief, emerges from an unyielding jungle. Here, already, are the base elements of the journey that Arthur is dreaming and which he must one day take. The intoxicated abundance of the forest – ‘masses of glorious foliage… a girdle of gardens, orchards, plantations of agave, and fields of maize, so richly studded with luxuriant flowers that the whole seemed a fairy-land of bloom’ – was offering access, the right invader at the right time, to the promised goal. ‘To retreat was not less difficult or dangerous than to advance; and with a firm countenance and a steady step they continued their march towards the Golden City.’
Tasmania is as far as you can go without passing into the polar ocean. Robert Louis Stevenson, in the years before he transported his tubercular lungs to the leper colonies of the South Seas, was lodged with his family in a highland cottage at Braemar, Aberdeenshire, where his stepson, Lloyd Osborne, sketched the outline of an island. Myth would have this holiday vision as the germ of Treasure Island. Stevenson made additions and improvements, but the map he provided for the frontispiece of the first edition in 1883 was lost, either in the post or among business papers at the offices of Cassell & Co. in London. A second version had to be supplied, lacking some of the inspiration of the original: a black border more like a hole burnt in the paper. The map provoked the words that follow:
The next morning we fell early to work, for the transportation of this great mass of gold near a mile by land to the beach.
The first Stevenson map, on a scale of three English miles, was never found. And that, Arthur came to realise, at the conclusion of all his venturing, was the best definition of treasure: an imaginary fortune that can never, and should never, be excavated. The treasure is the journey towards it.
As much as anything now, Arthur was intoxicated by the contract between island and gold. Had he read ‘The Gold-Bug’ by Edgar Allan Poe? ‘He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want.’ And, in consequence, Mr William Legrand, like my great-grandfather, is tempted to find himself a ‘very singular’ island. Poe’s creatures dig, they discover a treasure. ‘The chest had been full to the brim… There was not one particle of silver. All was gold…’
Sun gods. Gold-plated saints and madonnas. Gold fillings wrenched from the mouths of the dead.
But Arthur was no ‘amateur emigrant’, he was a hardened professional; so much of his life had been spent in transit; reading, talking, sending letters to newspapers. If an account of the missing Tasmanian years could be located somewhere, we would have the romance of gold: my great-grandfather’s Nostromo. He was beginning to understand, along with the circulation of ocean currents, the base equations of capital.
Gold was the catalytic agent. The opening up of a richly yielding gold mine at Mount Morgan in Queensland in 1882 made its primary owner, William Knox D’Arcy, a very rich man. He reverse immigrated – as Arthur had done, after his modest success in Ceylon – to set himself up in the grand style in London. And like the Spaniards of old, he had his profits shipped back in the form of gold bars. But profit is restless: D’Arcy used some of his accumulated small change to acquire oil leases in Persia. ‘His company, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company,’ as Jim Richards explains in Gold Rush, ‘went on to become British Petroleum – founded on Australian gold.’ Colonial dividends, at the end of one century, biased towards the trading houses of the City of London, secured profitable geo-political interventions – burning wells, leaking tankers, terrorist ‘outrages’, disorientated whales swimming up the Thames – for the next.
Tasmania was the redacted chapter, the broken link invalidating the genetic chain that led back to essential truths about my great-grandfather. Three years after Arthur Sinclair published In Tropical Lands, a much more significant title came to the attention of the reading public: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. A title that invited constant re-invention and misinterpretation. The invasion metaphors were too tempting. Wells begins: ‘With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.’
The master of prophetic fiction goes on to explain, in his preamble, that we should consider this attack from Mars in the light of our own neurotic compulsion to attack, possess, and convert. The Martians, like colonists in Ceylon and Peru, considered earth dwellers as aboriginals, ‘inferior animals’.
‘And before we judge them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon inferior races,’ Wells writes. ‘The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?’
Whalers and sealers made camp on Tasmania’s virgin fringes. By 1832, the year of Arthur’s birth, there were around 13,000 settlers of European origin on the island. They brought with them 200,000 sheep to crop and trample on the aboriginal population’s hunting grounds. The first colonists were overwhelmingly male. They engaged in wholesale abduction and rape of the women they found. The ‘Black War’ between natives and invaders was reckoned by Australian historians to have brought about the total elimination of the indigenous population. That war concluded in 1832.
Nothing I could find in any of Arthur’s fugitive publications, or in newspaper references to his life and career, cast much light on the Tasmanian years. It felt as though two islands, Ceylon and Tasmania, were being yoked together: one as a spoiled paradise and the other as the crucible of coming darkness.
It is safe to say that no such calamity has befallen Scots colonists since the Darien disaster, though in the Darien scheme the amount of money involved was not a twentieth part of the amount lost by the inroads of this very insignificant looking parasite.
The brave stuck it out, waiting for their luck to turn, or diversifying into tea, while others ‘lost heart and retired to the Antipodes’. A barren land less suited to genteel retirement it would be hard to imagine.
And then, out of nowhere, or an accounts office in a Melbourne suburbs, came an email with attachments.
Dear Iain,
We share an ancestor! I am descended from Arthur Sinclair’s second daughter, Catherine. She moved to Australia and married George Angus.
You still have the family name and so must be descended from one of her brothers. Which one?
Do you have any information about the family? I have some letters and photos that I will happily share with you if you are interested. I am aware of Arthur’s book ‘In Tropical Lands’ – it has been described as something of a classic, isn’t that nice?
I am attaching a few photos.
I would be very pleased to hear from you, so I am hoping you will reply!
Kindest regards,
Susan Voutier (Filing Clerk)
Of course I did reply, immediately. And I began to correspond with this recovered cousin. It appeared that Catherine, travelling with her father, met and married a fellow Scot, and settled in Australia. Susan Voutier’s grandmother was Catherine’s daughter. But ours was not a fortunate family. Catherine had five children. Her first daughter, Jessie, died of gastroenteritis at a few months old. Her second, Kitty, was five when she succumbed to pneumonia on a return voyage to Scotland. She was buried at sea. The only son, John Sinclair Angus (known as Jack), pictured with medal and folded arms, was twenty-one when he was killed at Gallipoli. The fatality, in the immediate aftermath of that hideously misconceived war game, could not be confirmed. Some years later, a search of the battlefield found a white Bible with Jack’s name and address.
There were more photographs, more postcards to consider. And a grouping of Arthur and his children that I had never seen. For the first time, Arthur is not smiling. But he is accompanied by his entire tribe: now the children are young adults. Susan told me that the portrait was taken to mark their return to Scotland. Beneath the account of Arthur’s funeral that she sent, along with a family tree, was the torn headline from a missing article: A RUBBER VENTURE.
Susan was persistent in her research. She combed through boxes and family files, paying particular attention to newspaper cuttings. ‘I know Arthur wrote under the nom-de-plume of “Old Colonist” and I have an exercise book with a few samples.’
This was the prompt I needed. I had seen ‘Old Colonist’ material somewhere when I cleared the massed cupboards of my parents’ house in Wales. Now I attacked the even more compacted midden of my own attic. I recovered a tranche of documents, early photocopies: a serial account (rich and detailed as the published Peruvian material) of Arthur Sinclair’s gold-prospecting expedition to Tasmania.
Putting aside my copy of the Folio Society edition of The War of the Worlds, I was struck by the resemblance between Grahame Baker’s frontispiece illustration, showing the cyclopean Martian ‘Thing’ emerging from the crater on Horsell Common, and the floating eye of Allen Ginsberg’s ayahuasca vision reproduced in The Yage Letters. The poet had given his sketch a title: ‘The Great Being’.
Hell’s Gates
‘Some inch of Scotland in my blood.’
– Don DeLillo, Americana
It was a disconcerting experience, combining recognition with novelty in equal measures, to greet Susan Voutier and her sister Catherine on our Hackney doorstep. And to take an impulsive step towards them, as if to offer an embrace, and then at the last to hesitate: a firm handshake and a froth of welcoming babble. We were not, on the Scottish side, much of an embracing family, but we shared our curiosity about a discontinued heritage. Old Arthur Sinclair was the only one to gift us with some form of written record.
The sisters, as I understood it, were leaving Australia for the second time in their entire lives. They had long plotted a ‘return’ to the home country. I was surprised – thinking that their methods and inclinations must be like my own – to learn that they had visited none of the addresses associated with Arthur and his family. They based themselves in Edinburgh and took the tourist excursions that best fitted their agenda. It was good to have discovered this connection, and to have physical proof of the family journey to Australia.
We liked each other and the meal progressed very well. Farne joined us and says that the stories went easily back and forth, despite the fact that our visitors were both somewhat deaf. Catherine ate slowly and carefully, a kidney condition meant that she had to avoid potassium. Neither of the sisters had children. Catherine, the medical librarian, was married. Susan lived at home. And there was a brother who was not well. Like my father, Susan didn’t drink. But she made no objection to our indulgence.
