Part 5

Having informed us that camels are to be had very cheaply at Suez—say a dollar each camel for fifty miles’ distance—and that the water is very brackish, he suddenly adds, with characteristic brevity, “To save recapitulation in _describing_ Cossier, it is the same as Suez, _viz._, camels are to be had in abundance at a trifling expense, and the water is as bad.”

He remained at Suez two days, waiting with feverish anxiety the expected arrival of the Enterprise. She still did not appear—a strong N.W. wind blowing directly down the sea. Being quite unable to endure the suspense any longer, he determined to embark on the Red Sea in an open boat, intending to sail down its centre, in hopes of meeting her between Suez and Cossier.

All the seamen of the locality vigorously remonstrated with Mr. Waghorn against this attempt, and he well knew that the nautical authorities, both of the East India House and the British Government, were of opinion that the Red Sea was not navigable. But he had important Government despatches to deliver—had pledged himself to deliver them on board the Enterprise, and considering that his course of duty, as well as his reputation as a traveller, were at stake, he persisted in his determination. Accordingly, he embarked in an open boat, and without having any personal knowledge of the navigation of this sea, without chart, without compass, or even the encouragement of a single precedent for such an enterprise—his only guide the sun by day, and the North star by night—he sailed down the centre of the Red Sea.

Of this most interesting and unprecedented voyage, the narrative of which everybody would have read with such avidity, Mr. Waghorn gives no detailed account. He disappoints you of all the circumstances. All intermediate things are abruptly cut off with these very characteristic words:—“_Suffice it_ to say, _I arrived_ at Juddah, 620 miles, in six and a half days, in that boat!” You get nothing more than the sum total. He kept a sailor’s log-journal; but it is only meant for sailors to read, though now and then you obtain a glimpse of the sort of work he went through. Thus:—“_Sunday_, 13th, strong N.W. wind, half a gale, but scudding under storm-sail. Sunset, anchored for the night. Jaffateen islands out of sight to the N. Lost two anchors during the night,” &c. The rest is equally nautical and technical. In one of the many scattered papers collected since the death of Mr. Waghorn, we find a very slight passing allusion to toils, perils, and privations, which, however, he calmly says, were “inseparable from such a voyage under such circumstances,”—but not one touch of description from first to last.

A more extraordinary instance of great practical experience and knowledge, resolutely and fully carrying out a project which must of necessity have appeared little short of madness to almost everybody else, was never recorded. He was perfectly successful, so far as the navigation was concerned, and in the course he adopted, notwithstanding that his crew of six Arabs mutinied. It appears (for he tells us only the bare fact) they were only subdued on the principle known to philosophers in theory, and to high-couraged men, accustomed to command, by experience, _viz._, that the one man who is braver, stronger, and firmer than any individual of ten or twenty men, is more than a match for the ten or twenty put together. He touched at Cossier on the 14th, not having fallen in with the Enterprise. There he was told by the Governor that the steamer was expected every hour. Mr. Waghorn was in no state of mind to wait very long; so, finding she did not arrive, he again put to sea in his open boat, resolved, if he did not fall in with her, to proceed the entire distance to Juddah—a distance of four hundred miles further. Of this further voyage he does not leave any record, even in his log, beyond the simple declaration that he “embarked for Juddah—ran the distance in three days and twenty-one hours and a quarter—and on the 23rd anchored his boat close to one of the East India Company’s cruisers, the Benares.”

But, now comes the most trying part of his whole undertaking—the part which a man of his vigorously constituted impulses was least able to bear as the climax of his prolonged and arduous efforts, privations, anxieties, and fatigue. Repairing on board the Benares, to learn the news, the captain informed him, that in consequence of being found in a defective state on her arrival at Bombay, “the Enterprise was not coming at all.” This intelligence seems to have felled him like a blow, and he was immediately seized with a delirious fever. The captain and officers of the Benares felt great sympathy and interest in this sad result of so many extraordinary efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed every attention on his malady.

“Thus baffled,” writes Mr. Waghorn, “I was six weeks before I could proceed onward to Bombay by sailing vessel.” On arriving at Bombay with his despatches, the thanks of the Government in Council, &c., were voted to him, “for having, when disappointed of a steamer, proceeded with these despatches in an open boat, down the Red Sea, &c.” There was evidently much more said of a complimentary kind, but Waghorn cuts all short with the _et cætera_.

He reached Bombay on the 21st of March, having thus accomplished his journey from London in four months and twenty-one days—an extraordinary rapidity at this date, 1830. Of course, the time he was detained in Cairo, Suez, Cossier, and Juddah (where he lay ill with the fever six weeks), ought to be deducted, because he would have saved all this time, fever inclusive, if he had not expected the Enterprise from India.

He now turned his attention to a series of fresh exhortations to large public meetings which he convened at different places—Calcutta, Madras, the Isle of France, the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena, &c., on the subject of shortening the route from England to India, and greatly lessening the time. He described the various points of the new route he proposed, and also the new kind of steam-vessel which it was advisable to have built and fitted up, for the sole purpose of a rapid transmission of the mail. In an “Address to His Majesty’s Ministers and the Honourable East India Company,” which we find among his papers, there occurs the following passage—simple in expression, noble in its quiet modesty, but pregnant with enormous results to his country, all of which have already, in a great degree, been accomplished.

“Of myself I trust I may be excused when I say that the highest object of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of life—my turn of mind—my disposition long ago impelled me to give all my leisure, and all my opportunities of observation, to the introduction of steam-vessels, and permanently establishing them as the means of communication between India and England, including all the colonies on the route. The vast importance of three months’ earlier information to His Majesty’s Government and to the Honourable Company, whether relative to a war or a peace; to abundant or to short crops; to the sickness or convalescence of a colony or district, and oftentimes even of an individual; the advantages to the merchant, by enabling him to regulate his supplies and orders according to circumstances and demands; the anxieties of the thousands of my countrymen in India for accounts, and further accounts, of their parents, children, and friends at home; the corresponding anxieties of those relatives and friends in this country; in a word, the speediest possible transit of letters to the tens of thousands who at all times in solicitude await them, was a service to my mind,” (of the greatest general importance) “and it shall not be my fault if I do not, and for ever, establish it.”

By his indefatigable efforts in India, having extensively made known his plans and methods for accomplishing these great objects, and bringing home with him the testimonial of thanks he had received from the Governor in Council of Bombay, he returned to England. Let his own words—homely, earnest, straightforward, full of sailor-like simplicity, impulsive, and fraught with important results—relate his reception.

“Armed with the record of the Governor’s thanks, I commenced an active agitation in India for the establishment of steam to Europe. In prosecution of this design, I returned to England, expecting, of course, to be received with open arms—at the India House especially. Judge of my surprise on being told by the successor of Mr. Loch (Chairman of the court), that the India Company required no steam to the East at all!

“I told him that the feeling in India was most ardent for it; that I had convened large public meetings at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, and, in fact, all over the Peninsula, which I had traversed by _dawk_; that the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, was enthusiastic in the same cause, and had done me the honour to predict (with what prescience need not now, in 1849, be stated), that if ever the object was accomplished, it would be by the man who had navigated the Red Sea in an open boat, under the circumstances already named.

“To all this the Chairman made answer that the Governor-General and people of India had nothing to do with the India House; and if I did not go back and join _their_ pilot service, to which I belonged, I should receive such a communication from that House as would be by no means agreeable to me!

“On the instant I penned my resignation, and placing it in his hands, then gave utterance to the sentiment which actuated me from that moment till the moment I realised my aspiration—that I would establish the Overland Route, in spite of the India House.”

How little must the public of the present day be prepared to find such a condition of affairs, or anything in the shape of antagonism in such a quarter, now that the Overland Route has become not only a practical thing for the “mail” but for ordinary travellers and tourists, and a matter of panorama and pantomime, of dioramic effects and burlesque songs—the sublime, and the ridiculous! But how did it fare with our enterprising sailor, after penning his resignation, and handing it in with such a declaration and defiance?

“This avowal,” says Lieutenant Waghorn, “most impolitic on my part as regarded my individual interests, is perhaps the key to much of the otherwise inexplicable opposition I subsequently met with from those upon whose most energetic co-operation I had every apparent reason to rely. I proceeded to Egypt, not only without official recommendation, but with a sort of official stigma on my sanity!

“The Government nautical authorities reported that the Red Sea was not navigable; and the East India Company’s naval officers declared, that, if it _were_ navigable, the North-Westers peculiar to those waters, and the South-West monsoons of the Indian Ocean, would swallow all steamers up! And, as if there were not enough to crush me in the eyes of foreigners and my own countrymen, documents were actually laid before Parliament, showing that coals had cost the East India Company twenty pounds per ton, at Suez, and had taken _fifteen months_ to get there.”

Notwithstanding all these apparently overwhelming allegations, Mr. Waghorn succeeded in convincing the Pasha of the entire practicability of his plans; and having fully gained the confidence of that potentate, he obtained permission to proceed according to his own judgment. By means of his intimate knowledge of the whole route and all its contingencies, Mr. Waghorn saw that coals might be brought readily enough to Alexandria—then up the Nile—then across the Desert on camels—for not more than five pounds per ton. He immediately hastened back to England, and was “fortunate enough” to impress his conviction on this point on a very able public servant, Mr. Melville, Secretary to the East India House; and through his instrumentality one thousand tons of coals were conveyed by the route, and by the means above-mentioned, from the pit’s mouth to the hold of the steamer at Suez, for four pounds three shillings and sixpence.

“From that hour to this (June, 1849), the same plan, at the same, and even a smaller cost, has been pursued in respect of all the coals of the East India Company,—the saving in ten years being _three quarters of a million_ sterling, as between the estimated, and the actual cost of coal.”

Having now most deservedly obtained the friendship of the Pasha, Mr. Waghorn was enabled to establish mails to India, and to keep that service in his own hands during five years. On one occasion he actually succeeded in getting letters from Bombay to England in _forty-seven days_; and immediately afterwards both the English Government and the Honourable East India Company, at the pressing solicitations of the London, East India, and China Associations (Mr., since Sir George Larpent, Chairman) started mails of their own—taking from Mr. Waghorn the conveyance of letters, without the least compensation for the loss, from that time to this (1849); these authorities having, till then, repeatedly declared that they had no intention of having mails by this route at all.

It should not be omitted, that, during these efforts, Mr. Waghorn feeling that his position in India would be much advantaged, and therefore his means of utility, if he could receive the rank of Lieutenant in the British Navy, made repeated applications to this effect, from 1832 to 1842. But in vain. He thought that his great services might have obtained this reward for him, especially as it would add to his means of usefulness. But no. Government, like the serpent, is a wonderful “wise beast,” and the ways of Ministers are inscrutable. All spoke of his merits, but none rewarded them. At length, in 1842, Lord Haddington, being Head of the Admiralty, did grant this scarce and astonishing honour! Egypt actually beheld the man, who had brought England within forty-seven days of her sands, before any steam system was in operation between the two countries, permitted to write the letters R.N. after his natural name!

In conjunction with others, partners in the undertaking, Lieutenant Waghorn now arranged for the carriage of passengers, the building of hotels at Alexandria, Cairo, and other places, and he soon familiarised the Desert with the novel spectacle of harnessed horses, vans, and all the usual adjuncts of English travelling, instead of the precarious Arab and his primeval camel. These, with packet-boats on the Nile, and the canal (and afterwards with steamers), duly provided with English superintendants, rendered Eastern travel as easy as a journey of the same length in the hot summer of any of the most civilised countries.

Lieutenant Waghorn had now every prospect of making this hitherto undreamed-of novelty as profitable to himself in remuneration of his many arduous labours, as it was serviceable and commodious to the vast numbers of all countries, especially his own, who availed themselves of it. But unfortunately, just when his enterprise, industry, capital, and his possession of Mehemet Ali’s friendship were beginning to produce their natural results, the honourable English Government and the honourable East India Company “gave the monopoly of a chartered contract to an opulent and powerful Company!” Lieutenant Waghorn had coupled with his passenger system the carriage of overland parcels, which was a source of great profit, and through it there was a constant accession to the comforts of the passengers in transit. But it would seem as if the Government and the India House regarded this man only as an instrument to work out advantages for them, in especial, and the world at large, but the moment he had a prospect of obtaining some reward for himself, it was proper to stop him. Had he not been allowed to write Lieutenant before his name, and R.N. after it? What more would he have?

“This Company,” says Waghorn, “already extensive carriers by water, gleaned from my firm the secret of conducting my business with an alleged view to supply it on a much more comprehensive scale, and _to employ us in so doing_; but when nothing more remained to be learned from us, we were forthwith superseded, though with a useless and utterly unproductive expenditure, on the part of our successors, of six times the money we should have required to accomplish the same end. Overwhelmed by the competition of this giant association, I was entirely deprived of all advantages of this creation of my own energy, and left with it a ruin on my hands, though to have secured me at least the Egyptian transit would not only have been but the merest justice to an individual, but would have been a material gain to the British, public, politically and otherwise. In my hand the English traffic was English, and I venture to say that English it would have continued to this day, had I not been interfered with. But my successors gave it up to the Pasha.”

The absence of all circumstantial descriptions and all graphic details in the papers, both printed and in manuscript, we have previously noticed. We had at first made sure of being able to present our readers with a picturesque and exciting narrative of the Life and Adventures of Lieutenant Waghorn—for adventures, in abundance, both on the sea and the Desert, he must assuredly have had; but he does not give us a single peg to hang an action or event upon, not a single suggestion for a romantic scene. Once we thought we had at last discovered among his papers a treasure of this kind. It was a manuscript bound in a strong cover, and having a patent lock. Inside was printed, in large letters, “Private: Daily Remembrancer: Mr. Waghorn.” It contains absolutely nothing of the kind that was evidently at first intended. It is crammed full of newspaper cuttings; and the only memoranda and remembrances are two or three melancholy affairs of bills and mortgages made to pay debts incurred in the public service. So much for his daily journal of events while travelling. He was manifestly so completely a man of action, that he could not afford a minute to note it down. Had it not been for the vexatious oppositions by which he was thwarted, and the painful memorials and petitions he was subsequently compelled, as we shall find, to present in various quarters, we verily believe he would have given us no written records at all of a single thing he did, and all that would have been left, in the course of a few years after his death, would have been the “Overland Route,” and the name of “Waghorn.”

We must now take a cursory view of his labours. To do this in any regular order is hardly possible, partly from the space they would occupy, but yet more from the desultory and unmanageable condition of the papers and documents before us.

During many years he sailed and travelled hundreds of thousands of miles between England and India, more particularly from the year 1827 to 1835, inclusive; passing up and down the Red Sea with mails, before the East India Company had any steam system on that sea. On one very special occasion, on this side the Isthmus, in October 1839, when the news arrived at Alexandria from Bombay, of Sir John (late Lord) Keane’s success at Ghuznee, he managed to obtain the use of the Pasha of Egypt’s own steamer, the Generoso, the very next day after Her Majesty’s steamer left Alexandria; and he personally commanded this vessel, and conveyed the mail to Malta, which was immediately sent on by the Admiral there, to England. Of such acts of special usefulness on occasions of great emergency, numerous instances might be related of him. His services in Egypt are well known to all who dwell there, or have travelled in that country. For the information of such as may not have any personal knowledge of these things, we may mention a few of the most prominent. Lieutenant Waghorn and his partners, without any aid whatever, with the single exception of the Bombay Steam Committee, built the eight halting places on the Desert, between Cairo and Suez; also the three hotels established above them, in which every comfort and even some luxuries were provided and stored for the passing traveller—among which should be mentioned iron tanks with good water, ranged in cellars beneath;—and all this in a region which was previously a waste of arid sands and scorching gravel, beset with wandering robbers and their camels. These wandering robbers he converted into faithful guides, as they are now found to be by every traveller; and even ladies with their infants are enabled to cross and recross the Desert with as much security as if they were in Europe.

He neglected no means of making us acquainted with our position and line of policy in these countries. He wrote and published pamphlets in England to show the justice and sound policy of our having friendly relations with Egypt, in opposition to the undue position of Turkey (1837, 1838); also, to make his countrymen conversant with the character of Mehemet Ali, and with the countries of Egypt, Arabia, and Syria (1840); another on the acceleration of mails between England and the East (1843); and a letter to Earl Grey on emigration to Australia (1848). At this time, in conjunction with Mr. Wheatley, he had established an agency for the Overland Route to India, China, &c., and had offices in Cornhill, which are still in active operation. The enormous subsequent increase of letters to India by the mail, may be inferred from this fact—that in his first arrangement, Lieutenant Waghorn had all letters for India sent to Messrs. Smith and Elder of Cornhill, to be stamped, and then forwarded to him in Alexandria: the earliest despatches amounted to one hundred and eighty-four letters; this number is now more than doubled by the correspondence of Smith and Elder alone, on their own business. They were the first booksellers who rightly appreciated Mr. Waghorn’s efforts; and they cordially co-operated with him.

“When he left Egypt, in 1841, he had established English carriages, vans, and horses, for the passengers’ conveyance across the Desert (instead of camels); indeed, he placed small steamers (from England) on the Nile and the canal of Alexandria. Every fraction of his money was spent by him in getting more and more facilities; and, had the saving of money been one of the characteristics of his nature, the Overland Route would not be as useful as it now is—and this is acknowledged by all. Mr. Waghorn claimed for himself, and most justly, the merit of this work: he claimed it without fear of denial; and stated upon his honour, that no money or means were ever received by him from either Her Majesty’s Government or the East India Company to aid it. It grew into life altogether from his having, by his own energy and private resources, worked the ‘Overland Mails’ to and from India for two years, (from 1831 to 1834) in his own individual person. ‘Will it be believed,’ says he, ‘that up to that time Mr. Waghorn was thought and called by many, a Visionary, and by some a Madman?’”