Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [54]
January 18, 1696: Wee have the Nombers of the bayles and peeces of Our goods in which wee have ascertained defects. We shall advise you of such goods. We inquire Liberty for the Selling of such goods cheape.
March 20: On retorne to our factorye at St. Andrew, wee are sorry to find that Mr. Ruckle continues to proceed in irregular actions. If he stay longer, he may doe the Honourable Companye mischiefe.
June 6: Wee do hope you will permit us to present the requested Pesh-Kash to the Nawab’s uncle that wee may obtain greater accommodation in Our Trade from the said Nawab.
July 24: As to the matter of Mr. Richard Ruckle, wee have proofe that he behaves in scandalous fashion on Sabbath dates.
August 1: Wee are very glad that you have inquired yourself into the unfitt conduct of Mr. Richard Ruckle and have graunted us our desire to send Mr. Ruckle home.
There were two Gabriel Legges, the wild and expansive Gabriel Legge who’d shown up in Salem with’ his tales of mountains and camels, deserts and lakes; Gabriel Legge the jealous lover and husband; the democratic Gabriel Legge who, alone among Company factors, seemed to enjoy the hardship postings, the company of rough and low-born privateers, local traders and artisans. And then there was the cautious Gabriel Legge, who worked grudgingly under Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham, men of small compass and meager imagination, whose grasp of profit was dictated by turnover and not investment.
Hannah watched her husband retire early behind his bedroom doors, ledger books open, cursing the failed opportunities and drinking until spilling the ink pot or losing the thread of commercial narrative. His eye patch was no longer dashing and touchingly vain—it was the curse of the record keeper. The logbooks of the factors are models of scrupulous entries and veiled discontents; I have pored over Gabriel’s accounts for mention of Hannah, “my goode wyffe,” and found only paltry recognition of the woman sewing just a few feet away. He would be gone, weeks on end, into the jungles and up the coast as far as Hughli, now Calcutta, and down to Lanka.
“My goode wyffe tonight entertained women in my absence. My goode wyffe bade accompany me to the mittah, but was dissuaded. Incommodious facilities for whytte women of gentel byrthe,” writes Gabriel Legge in defense of his decision; the interior, or the smaller stations up and down the coast, untouched by European influence, must have been brutal tests of stamina and resistance. Factors came out of those encounters with village India reeling with fevers, distempers, malaria, fatigue. Malaria carried off half the factors and probably left the survivors victims of fevers the rest of their lives. Many didn’t make it back to the fort at all, dying within hours from generic “tropical plagues,” which must have encompassed the full range of viral disease from rabid-bat and -dog bites to polio, the full rainbow of waterborne dysenteries (they had as many euphemisms for diarrhea as Eskimos have for snow). The head aches constantly, cuts suppurate, the bowels—well, the bowels come in for obsessive chronicling, which would indicate the commonness of defecatory commentary, like sports chat around the watercooler. Even the happy or melancholy outcome of other factors’ daily bout with the thunder mug are jealously or gloatingly recorded in Gabriel’s logs.
To his credit, whatever we may say of Gabriel Legge, he was a man capable of great loyalty, but he placed his faith more in ideals than institutions. The ideal of England in India moved him. The idea of spreading enlightenment, science, sanitation and, as he understood it, Christian tolerance, and of absorbing the best in the culture around him, was a continual delight. His practical nature was not at war with his lust for maximum profit, and both dictated the keeping of an open mind. But the idea of the “glorious enterprise” being the exclusive