Chapter 13

It is scarcely possible to say when the Indian coolie trade began. Before the end of the 18th century Tamil labourers from southern India were wont to emigrate to the Straits Settlements, and they also flocked to Tenasserim from the other side of the Bay of Bengal after the conquest had produced a demand for labour. The first regularly recorded attempt at organizing coolie emigration from India took place in 1834, when forty coolies were exported to Mauritius; but it was not until 1836 that the Indian government decided to put the trade under official regulations. In 1837 an emigration law was passed for all the territories of the East India Company, providing that a permit must be obtained from government for every shipment of coolies, that all contracts should terminate in five years, that a return passage should be guaranteed, that the terms of his contract should be carefully explained to each coolie, and that the emigrant ship should only carry one coolie for every ton and a half of burden. Then as now the Indian government watched the deportation of labour from their dominions with jealous and anxious care, and when in 1838 it was found that upwards of twenty-five thousand natives had, up to that year, gone from all parts of India to Mauritius, the government became somewhat alarmed at the dimensions which the traffic was assuming. Brougham and the anti-slavery party denounced the trade as a revival of slavery, and the Bengal government suspended it in order to investigate its alleged abuses. The nature of these may be guessed when it is said that the inquiry condemned the fraudulent methods of recruiting then in vogue, and the brutal treatment which coolies often received from ship captains and masters. In 1842 steps were taken formally to reopen the coolie trade with Mauritius, and in 1844 emigration to the West Indies was sanctioned by the Indian government. In 1847 Ceylon was separated from India, and her labour supply was cut off; but this accident was soon remedied, the Ceylon government adopting protective regulations for the coolies.

Modern regulations.

Emigration of coolies under contract to labour outside India is now regulated by the Emigration Act of 1883 and the rules issued under its provisions, the only exceptions being in respect of emigrants to Ceylon and the Straits Settlements and adjoining states, or those engaged by the British government for employment in east and central Africa. By section 8 of this act natives of India are permitted to emigrate under labour contracts only to such countries as have satisfied the government of India that sufficient provision is made for the protection of the emigrants. A country which is duly empowered under the act to receive emigrants may appoint an agent, residing in India, who is responsible for the due observance of the provisions of the law. These agents are under the general supervision of the protector of emigrants. As emigrants have to be recruited at great distances from the port of embarkation, recruiters are appointed by the agents and licensed by the protector. The conduct of these subordinates is minutely regulated. Every precaution is taken to let the emigrant know the exact terms on which he is hired, and to ensure good treatment in the interval between registration and embarkation. Coolies are shipped for the most part from Calcutta and Madras, but of recent years large numbers bound for Mombasa and the Seychelles left from Bombay and Karachi. Both the coolies themselves and the depôt are medically inspected. Only those physically fit are allowed to embark. The vessels for their conveyance are licensed and inspected by the local government. The terms on which emigrants are recruited are settled beforehand by convention with the colonies concerned, and are embodied in ordinances passed by the local legislatures. They vary in detail, but their main provisions relate to the rights and obligations of the emigrants, including the grant of a return passage on the expiry of a specified period, usually ten years. The British colonies to which coolies were exported in the decade 1891-1901 were British Guiana, Trinidad, St Lucia, Jamaica, Mauritius, the Seychelles Islands, Fiji, East Africa and Natal; the only non-British country was Dutch Guiana. Emigration to the French colonies, including Réunion has been forbidden by the government of India since 1886, but there still remain in those colonies some of the former emigrants, and the questions of their treatment and repatriation have frequently formed the subject of representations to the French authorities.

The British colonies.

The number of Indian coolies resident in the various British colonies in 1900 was 625,000, of which the largest numbers were 265,000 in Mauritius and 125,000 in British Guiana. There were still 13,800 in Réunion. The regulations governing coolie labour in British Guiana may be taken as typical for the British colonies generally. They are contained in the Labour Ordinance of 1873, which was amended by the ordinances of 1875, 1876, 1886 and 1887. Under these ordinances an immigration agent-general is appointed, to whom medical officers and recruiting agents are responsible, and the emigrants are allotted by him to the separate estates. They regulate the hours of work, the rate of wages, and the general treatment of the coolies, the nature of house and hospital accommodation, the terms of re-enlistment and the conditions of marriage amongst the coolies themselves. The coolies returning from the British colonies to India in 1901 possessed average savings of £19.

British East and South Africa.

During the construction of the Uganda railway large numbers of coolies were recruited in the Punjab and exported from Karachi to Mombasa. During the decade 1891-1901 the number of these emigrants was 33,000; but on the completion of the line the emigration practically stopped, while in 1901-1902 there were over 6000 emigrants who returned to India. Some, however, settled in East Africa. Coolies are also exported for government employment in Nyasaland. In Natal the Indian population had by 1904 reached over 100,000 and slightly outnumbered the whites. Many of the coolies had become permanent residents in the colony (see NATAL).

Assam, Ceylon and Burma.

According to the census of 1901 there were 775,844 foreigners in Assam, of whom no fewer than 645,000 or 83% were brought into the province as garden coolies. The recruiting of these coolies is regulated by Act VI. of 1901, which provides that a labour agreement may be entered into for four years, and includes a penal clause, under which a coolie deserting or refusing to work may be punished with imprisonment. The coolies can also give an agreement under Act XIII. of 1859, by which they are only liable to civil action for breach of contract. The latter are called non-act coolies. This system of immigration has made tea-planting the most important industry in Assam, and has greatly increased the prosperity of the province. Migration to Ceylon and Burma takes place chiefly from the Madras ports, and is of a seasonal and temporary character. The tea estates and pearl fisheries of Ceylon, and the town work and harvesting in Burma attract large numbers of Tamil labourers. The respective numbers embarking in 1901 were 117,000 for Ceylon, 84,000 for Burma and 27,000 for the Straits Settlements. In Ceylon there is no system of recruitment like that for the Assam tea-gardens. The coolies come in gangs, each under its own headman, with whom the planter deals exclusively, leaving him to make his own arrangements with the individual coolies. The coolies are mostly carried in small sailing vessels from the ports of Madura and Tanjore, and the number who permanently settle in Ceylon is not very great.

See E. Jenkins, _The Coolie; his Rights and Wrongs_ (1871); J. L. A. Hope, _In Quest of Coolies_ (1872); and C. B. Grose, _The Labour Ordinances_ (Georgetown, 1890). (C. L.)

COOMA, a town of Beresford county, New South Wales, Australia, 264 m. by rail S.S.W. of Sydney. Pop. (1901) 1938. The town is the centre of a pastoral district and has a large trade in furs, while at Bushy Hill, a mile from the town, is a small gold-field. Cooma, which is pleasantly situated at an elevation of 2657 ft., is the tourist centre for visitors to the Yarrangobilly Caves and Mount Kosciusko and its observatory. The caves are distant 65 m. from the town, situated in the side of a hill, overlooking the Yarrangobilly river; they are seven in number and of remarkable beauty and extent.

COOPER, ABRAHAM (1787-1868), English animal and battle painter, the son of a tobacconist, was born in London. At the age of thirteen he became an employé at Astley's amphitheatre, and was afterwards groom in the service of Sir Henry Meux. When he was twenty-two, wishing to possess a portrait of a favourite horse under his care, he bought a manual of painting, learned something of the use of oil-colours, and painted the picture on a canvas hung against the stable wall. His master bought it and encouraged him to continue in his efforts. He accordingly began to copy prints of horses, and was introduced to Benjamin Marshall, the animal painter, who took him into his studio, and seems to have introduced him to the _Sporting Magazine_, an illustrated periodical to which he was himself a contributor. In 1814 he exhibited his "Tam O'Shanter," and in 1816 he won a prize of £100 for his "Battle of Ligny." In 1817 he exhibited his "Battle of Marston Moor" and was made associate of the Academy, and in 1820 he was elected Academician. Cooper, although ill educated, was a clever and conscientious artist; his colouring was somewhat flat and dead, but he was a master of equine portraiture and anatomy, and had some antiquarian knowledge. He had a special fondness for Cavalier and Roundhead pictures.

COOPER, ALEXANDER (d. 1660), English miniature painter. His works are of great rarity, and the chief are a series representing the king and queen of Bohemia and their children, in the possession of the German emperor; some very remarkable portraits belonging to the queen of Holland, and others in the possession of the king of Sweden and in various Swedish galleries. He was the brother of Samuel Cooper, but whether senior or junior to him is not known, although, according to certain Swedish authorities, he is stated, upon very slight evidence, to have been born in 1605, four years before his more famous brother. He came to Sweden in 1646, and the Swedish documents declare that he was a Jew, and that his full name was Abraham Alexander Cooper. He had previously been residing in Holland, but on reaching Sweden entered the service of Queen Christina, and continued to be her miniature painter until 1654, when she resigned the crown. Two years later, Cooper was in Denmark, carrying out some commissions for Christian IV., but in 1657 was back again in Stockholm, where he died in the early part of 1660. The date of his birth is not known, but he is believed to have been born in London.

For full information regarding his career, and for various documents bearing his signature, see _The History of Portrait Miniatures_, by G. C. Williamson, chap. vi. page 78, and an article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for October 1905. (G. C. W.)

COOPER, SIR ASTLEY PASTON (1768-1841), English surgeon, was born at the village of Brooke in Norfolk on the 23rd of August 1768. His father, Dr Samuel Cooper, was a clergyman of the Church of England; his mother was the author of several novels. At the age of sixteen he was sent to London and placed under Henry Cline (1750-1827), surgeon to St Thomas's hospital. From the first he devoted himself to the study of anatomy, and had the privilege of attending the lectures of John Hunter. In 1789 he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at St Thomas's hospital, where in 1791 he became joint lecturer with Cline in anatomy and surgery, and in 1800 he was appointed surgeon to Guy's hospital, on the death of his uncle, William Cooper. In 1802 he received the Copley medal for two papers read before the Royal Society of London on the destruction of the _membrana tympani_; and in 1805 he was elected a fellow of that society. In the same year he took an active part in the formation of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, and published in the first volume of its _Transactions_ an account of an attempt to tie the common carotid artery for aneurism. In 1804 he brought out the first, and in 1807 the second, part of his great work on hernia, which added so largely to his reputation that in 1813 his annual professional income rose to £21,000 sterling. In the same year he was appointed professor of comparative anatomy to the Royal College of Surgeons and was very popular as a lecturer. In 1817 he performed his famous operation of tying the abdominal aorta for aneurism; and in 1820 he removed a wen from the head of George IV., and about six months afterwards received a baronetcy, which, as he had no son, was to descend to his nephew and adopted son, Astley Cooper. He served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1827 and again in 1836, and he was elected a vice-president of the Royal Society in 1830. He died on the 12th of February 1841 in London, and was interred, by his own desire, beneath the chapel of Guy's hospital. A statue by E. H. Baily was erected in St Paul's.

His chief works are _Anatomy and Surgical Treatment of Hernia_ (1804-1807); _Dislocations and Fractures_ (1822); _Lectures on Surgery_ (1824-1827); _Illustrations of Diseases of the Breast_ (1829); _Anatomy of the Thymus Gland_ (1832); _Anatomy of the Breast_ (1840).

See _Life of Sir A. Cooper_, by B. B. Cooper (1843).

COOPER, CHARLES HENRY (1808-1866), English antiquary, was born at Great Marlow, on the 20th of March 1808, being descended from a family formerly settled at Bray, Berkshire. He received his education at a private school in Reading. In 1826 he fixed his residence at Cambridge, and in 1836 was elected coroner of the borough. Four years later he was admitted a solicitor, and in course of time he acquired an extensive practice, but his taste and inclination ultimately led him to devote almost the whole of his time to literary research, and especially the elucidation of the history of the university of Cambridge. In 1849 he resigned the office of borough coroner on being elected to the town-clerkship, which he retained till his death on the 21st of March 1866. His earliest production, _A New Guide to the University and Town of Cambridge_, was published anonymously in 1831. _The Annals of Cambridge_ followed (1842-1853) containing a chronological history of the university and town from the earliest period to 1853. His most important work, the _Athenae Cantabrigienses_ (1858, 1861), a companion work to the famous _Athenae Oxonienses_ of Anthony à Wood, contains biographical memoirs of the authors and other men of eminence who were educated at the university of Cambridge from 1500 to 1609. Cooper's other works are _The Memorials of Cambridge_, (1858-1866) and a _Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby_ (1874). He was a constant contributor to _Notes and Queries_, the _Gentleman's Magazine_ and other antiquarian publications, and left an immense collection of MS. materials for a biographical history of Great Britain and Ireland.

COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (1789-1851), American novelist, was born at Burlington, New Jersey, on the 15th of September 1789. Reared in the wild country round Otsego Lake, N.Y., on the yet unsettled estates of his father, a judge and member of Congress, he was sent to school at Albany and at New Haven, and entered Yale College in his fourteenth year, remaining for some time the youngest student on the rolls. Three years afterwards he joined the United States navy; but after making a voyage or two in a merchant vessel, to perfect himself in seamanship, and obtaining his lieutenancy, he married and resigned his commission (1811). He settled in Westchester county, N.Y., the "Neutral Ground" of his earliest American romance, and produced anonymously (1820) his first book, _Precaution_, a novel of the fashionable school. This was followed (1821) by _The Spy_, which was very successful at the date of issue; _The Pioneers_ (1823), the first of the "Leatherstocking" series; and _The Pilot_ (1824), a bold and dashing sea-story. The next was _Lionel Lincoln_ (1825), a feeble and unattractive work; and this was succeeded in 1826 by the famous _Last of the Mohicans_, a book that is often quoted as its author's masterpiece. Quitting America for Europe he published at Paris _The Prairie_ (1826), the best of his books in nearly all respects, and _The Red Rover_, (1828), by no means his worst.

At this period the unequal and uncertain talent of Cooper would seem to have been at its best. These excellent novels were, however, succeeded by one very inferior, _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_ (1829); by _The Notions of a Travelling Bachelor_ (1828), an uninteresting book; and by _The Waterwitch_ (1830), one of the poorest of his many sea-stories. In 1830 he entered the lists as a party writer, defending in a series of letters to the _National_, a Parisian journal, the United States against a string of charges brought against them by the _Revue Britannique_; and for the rest of his life he continued skirmishing in print, sometimes for the national interest, sometimes for that of the individual, and not infrequently for both at once. This opportunity of making a political confession of faith appears not only to have fortified him in his own convictions, but to have inspired him with the idea of imposing them on the public through the medium of his art. His next three novels, _The Bravo_ (1831), _The Heidenmauer_ (1832) and _The Headsman: or the Abbaye of Vigneron_ (1833), were designed to exalt the people at the expense of the aristocracy. Of these the first is by no means a bad story, but the others are among the dullest ever written; all were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1833 Cooper returned to America, and immediately published _A Letter to my Countrymen_, in which he gave his own version of the controversy he had been engaged in, and passed some sharp censure on his compatriots for their share in it. This attack he followed up with _The Monikins_ (1835) and _The American Democrat_ (1835); with several sets of notes on his travels and experiences in Europe, among which may be remarked his _England_ (1837), in three volumes, a burst of vanity and ill-temper; and with _Homeward Bound_, and _Home as Found_ (1838), noticeable as containing a highly idealized portrait of himself. All these books tended to increase the ill-feeling between author and public; the Whig press was virulent and scandalous in its comments, and Cooper plunged into a series of actions for libel. Victorious in all of them, he returned to his old occupation with something of his old vigour and success. A _History of the Navy of the United States_ (1839), supplemented (1846) by a set of _Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers_, was succeeded by _The Pathfinder_ (1840), a good "Leatherstocking" novel; by _Mercedes of Castile_ (1840); _The Deerslayer_ (1841); by _The Two Admirals_ and by _Wing and Wing_ (1842); by _Wyandotte, The History of a Pocket Handkerchief_, and _Ned Myers_ (1843); and by _Afloat and Ashore, or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford_ (1844). From pure fiction, however, he turned again to the combination of art and controversy in which he had achieved distinction, and in the two _Littlepage Manuscripts_ (1845-1846) he fought with a great deal of vigour. His next novel was _The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak_ (1847), in which he attempted to introduce supernatural machinery with indifferent success; and this was succeeded by _Oak Openings_ and _Jack Tier_ (1848), the latter a curious _rifacimento_ of _The Red Rover_; by _The Sea Lions_ (1849); and finally by _The Ways of the Hour_ (1850), another novel with a purpose, and his last book. He died of dropsy on the 14th of September 1851 at Cooperstown, New York. His daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894), was known as an author and philanthropist.

Cooper was certainly one of the most popular authors that have ever written. His stories have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe and into some of those of Asia. Balzac admired him greatly, but with discrimination; Victor Hugo pronounced him greater than the great master of modern romance, and this verdict was echoed by a multitude of inferior readers, who were satisfied with no title for their favourite less than that of "the American Scott." As a satirist and observer he is simply the "Cooper who's written six volumes to prove he's as good as a Lord" of Lowell's clever portrait; his enormous vanity and his irritability find vent in a sort of dull violence, which is exceedingly tiresome. It is only as a novelist that he deserves consideration. His qualities are not those of the great masters of fiction; but he had an inexhaustible imagination, some faculty for simple combination of incident, a homely tragic force which is very genuine and effective, and up to a certain point a fine narrative power. His literary training was inadequate; his vocabulary is limited and his style awkward and pretentious; and he had a fondness for moralizing tritely and obviously, which mars his best passages. In point of conception, each of his three-and-thirty novels is either absolutely good or is possessed of a certain amount of merit; but hitches occur in all, so that every one of them is remarkable rather in its episodes than as a whole. Nothing can be more vividly told than the escape of the Yankee man-of-war through the shoals and from the English cruisers in _The Pilot_, but there are few things flatter in the range of fiction than the other incidents of the novel. It is therefore with some show of reason that _The Last of the Mohicans_, which as a chain of brilliantly narrated episodes is certainly the least faulty in this matter of sustained excellence of execution, should be held to be the best of his works.

The personages of his drama are rather to be accounted as so much painted cloth and cardboard, than as anything approaching the nature of men and women. As a creator of aught but romantic incident, indeed, Cooper's claims to renown must rest on the fine figure of the Leatherstocking, and, in a less degree, on that of his friend and companion, the Big Serpent. The latter has many and obvious merits, not the least of which is the pathos shed about him in his last incarnation as the Indian John of _The Pioneers_. Natty Bumpo, however, is a creation of no common unity and consistency. There are lapses and flaws, and Natty is made to say things which only Cooper, in his most verbosely didactic vein, could have uttered. But on the whole the impression left is good and true. In the dignity and simplicity of the old backwoodsman there is something almost Hebraic. With his naïve vanity and strong reverent piety, his valiant wariness, his discriminating cruelty, his fine natural sense of right and wrong, his rough limpid honesty, his kindly humour, his picturesque dialect, and his rare skill in woodcraft, he has all the breadth and roundness of a type and all the eccentricities and peculiarities of a portrait.

See _James Fenimore Cooper_ (Boston, 1883), by Thomas R. Lounsbury in the "American Men of Letters" series; Griswold, _Prose Writers of America_ (Philadelphia, 1847); J. R. Lowell, _Fable for Critics_; M. A. de Wolfe Howe, _American Bookmen_ (New York, 1898); and the introduction by Mowbray Morris to Macmillan's uniform edition of Cooper's novels (London, 1900). (W. E. H.)