Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [73]
The Chief Factor recovered as soon as Thomas Tringham brought him word of the joint-stock association. To prove to himself that his recuperation was complete, he humiliated Tringham for lazy record keeping in front of the junior writers. The youngest writer noted duly that Samuel Higginbottham “was in sufficient repossession of his natural unkindnesse to heape a parcell of indignitye on all and sundrie.” Thomas Tringham was so disillusioned by this unprovoked malice that he disclosed nothing about his own small part and investment in the formation of Sookian’s and Chetty’s company. The Fort St. George Council commended Higginbottham for restoring “stabilitie and respecte to the English nation” and ordered him to procure through this new association twenty thousand pieces of Guinea cloth and twelve thousand pieces of salampore cloth without advancing credit to the merchants. Higginbottham, not to be outdone by the ghost of Cephus Prynne, promised to deliver on his own recognizance thirty thousand pieces of Guinea cloth and twenty thousand pieces of salampore and better-than-ever quality.
The catastrophe that the Marquis had predicted came very quickly. Sookian’s and Chetty’s weavers missed the date for delivery, forcing the Chief Factor into criminal alterations of dates in the factory accounts. When the two merchants finally did haul the goods to the factory for quality checks, the sorters discovered that only a third of the orders had been filled, and the balance made up with bales of ginghams and sailcloth dungaree.
In his rage—or perhaps in his desire to emulate the demonic furies of Cephus Prynne—Samuel Higginbottham is recorded as having seized a sloop belonging to Kasey Chetty and personally supervising its dismantlement. For years after, he talked of this as the one glorious moment in his long service to the Company. When Samuel Higginbottham died in Fort St. Sebastian, Martha Ruxton (who by then was Martha Ord Ruxton Yale Hartley, having long outlived Doctor John and stayed on) had a piece of that sloop’s mast and a scrap of one of its two sails buried with him. She also commissioned the stonecutter to etch a sloop on his headstone.
I have traced that sloop with my fingers. Mr. Abraham, my guide, saw it as a worthy mercantile symbol. “Higginbottham,” he says, telling me there are, with appropriate fracturing of the word after nearly three centuries of Tamilization, a number of place-names, streets, even families perhaps, carrying versions of that glorious name. Those who came out from England and died and left their bones in the English cemetery occupy a special place in Mr. Abraham’s litany of heroes. A corner of England forever goat trampled, vine tufted, sun beaten and salt encrusted.
It seems a fitting commemoration of impotence. I had to shoo a goat off the mast tip.
11
HANNAH LEGGE might have lived out her life in India, in the new palace Gabriel was building in New Salem. Her bones might be resting in St. Mary’s Cemetery of Fort St. George. Wherever she stayed, I am convinced she would have changed history, for she was one of those extraordinary lives through which history runs a four-lane highway.
There is some evidence from his logbooks that Gabriel Legge intended to retire from piracy—the capture and hanging of Captain Kidd had a sobering effect; the increasing ferocity of Deccani wars between Hindus and Muslims put several delicate financial relationships in question, and the increasingly erratic behavior of both Chief Factor Higginbottham and Nawab Haider Beg made continued dealings a less stable prospect than when the association had been formed.
Between Gabriel Legge’s sixteenth and seventeenth voyages, Samuel Higginbottham unintentionally incited a riot that ended with Nawab Haider Beg assigning exclusive blame to the English East India Company and dispensing justice by cutting off the