Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [176]
* The fort and all surrounding land within the range of a shell (local villages are still occasionally referred to as ‘cannonball villages’) had been bought by the Company from the local Maratha king. It was renamed St David on the orders of the Governor, Elihu Yale – whose benefactions would later be memorialized in the name of the New England university. In fact, a more significant donor to that institution was Yale’s friend Jeremiah Dummer, but fortunately for students they did not choose to name the place after him.
* The Mughal Empire in India had been founded by Babur, born in what is now Uzbekistan and said to be descended from both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. He invaded India in the early sixteenth century and within little more than a decade had created an empire which stretched across the north of the subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Bengal. He was reputedly enormously strong (capable of jogging along with a fully grown man on each shoulder) and to have swum across all the rivers he encountered during his invasion. He also drank prodigiously, enjoyed drugs and had a hobby of stacking up the severed heads of those who had displeased him.
* By his own account, Holwell himself seems to have survived the ordeal remarkably well. Within an hour of being dragged out from under a pile of corpses he was able to hold a conversation with Siraj ud-Daula and then walked three miles. The next day, despite being covered in boils and wearing heavy fetters, he marched the same distance, under ‘an intense hot sun’. No trace of the Black Hole now remains, and the memorial obelisk commissioned by Lord Curzon has been moved to the graveyard of St John’s, the earliest surviving church in the city.
* Apart from some enigmatic observations about the use of the scrotum, no trace of this report has ever been found. During a visit to India in 1876, a woman asked Burton’s devoted wife whether their marriage had been blessed with children, and was told, ‘No, thank God; nothing to separate me from my Dick.’
* The holiday ended during the Boer War siege of Ladysmith, where Steevens died of typhoid, aged thirty-one.
* As time ticked down to the centenary of Scott’s death, attitudes changed. A 1979 double-biography of Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford portrayed the former as incompetent and deceitful. An inquiry in the late 1990s talked of Huntford’s ‘devastating evidence of bungling’ (quoted in Spufford, I May Be Some Time, p. 4). It was not that the facts had changed, merely that empire and empire-makers were seen differently.
* In 1882, the defeated king of the Zulus, Cetshwayo, was brought to London and taken on tours which included the Houses of Parliament, the bustling docks, the glittering shops of Bond Street and, oddest of all, an outing to the zoo, where he could look upon animals which, however exotic to cockneys, were native to his home continent. The king’s own position was not very different to that of the animals, with crowds gathering each day outside the house rented for him in Kensington and newspapers recording his every move. To avoid being mobbed, he had had to travel to the zoo inside a closed carriage. The king returned to Africa as comfortable in tailored frock coat as he had ever been in traditional near-nudity, and died on a Native Reserve, the human safari park of its day.
* And he was certainly not unique. At the age of fifty-one, Bishop John Hine of the Universities Mission to Central Africa – a stick-thin, feeble-looking figure with a huge beard and a preference for the company of cats to that of women – led a mission into Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), a country over twice