Mr. S. C. Hall, writing after the death of J. S. Buckingham, thus expressed his opinion of this truly remarkable man: “Whatever, during his life, envy, jealousy, monopolous interest or satirical hostility may have said to the contrary, there can be little doubt, now he is gone, that the late Mr. James Silk Buckingham was amongst the most useful as well as the most hopeful and industrious men of his time. His career was one remarkable illustration of the well-known line of the old song, ‘It’s wonderful what we can do if we try’; for at almost every step he took he was met by some disaster or annoyance, yet kept pressing on with the most dauntless persistence, making the best of the worst circumstances, and even when failing in his own personal endeavours, giving such an impulse to the powers of others in whatever cause or course he had engaged, that the end in view was generally attained, and in several notable instances within the period of his own life.”
The Buckinghams were a North Devon family, and the grandfather of the subject of this notice had lived in Barnstaple. For several generations they had been connected with the sea. Christopher Buckingham settled at Flushing on a small farm, along with his wife Thomazine, daughter of a Hambley of Bodmin.
James Silk describes his father as wearing a cocked hat, long, square-tailed coat with large pockets and sleeves, square-toed shoes with silver buckles, and as walking abroad carrying a tall, gold-headed cane.
James Silk was born at Flushing on the 25th August, 1786. He had two brothers and a sister. His father died in 1794.
“The port of Falmouth,” wrote he in his unfinished memoirs, “being nearest to the entrance of the Channel, there were permanently stationed here two squadrons of frigates, one under the command of Sir Edward Pellew (afterwards Lord Exmouth), the other under the command of Sir John Borlase Warren. The former, as commodore, hoisted his pennant on the Indefatigable, the latter on the Révolutionaire. Each squadron consisted of five frigates of thirty-two and forty-four guns each; and, in addition to these, there were continually arriving and departing from Carrick Roads, the outer anchorage of Falmouth, line-of-battle ships and smaller vessels of war; while the prizes taken from the French were constantly brought into the port for adjudication and sale. There were two large prisons, with open courts, for the reception of the French prisoners thus taken, and every month added many to their inmates.
“Both the naval commodores, as well as such captains of the frigates belonging to the squadrons as were married, had their families residing at Flushing, and the numerous officers of different grades, from the youngest midshipman to the first lieutenant, were continually coming and going to and fro … so that the little village literally sparkled with gold epaulets and gold-laced hats and brilliant uniforms.”
He tells a curious story of his childhood. Corn, owing to the war, had mounted to famine price, and the miners of Cornwall went about in gangs waging war against all forestallers, regraters, and hoarders of grain, and demolishing bakers’ shops, mills, and grain stores.
“A body of some three or four hundred of these men entered Flushing, and as they were all dressed in the mud-stained smock frocks and trousers in which they worked underground, all armed with large clubs and sticks of various kinds, and speaking an uncouth jargon, which none but themselves could understand, they struck terror wherever they went. Their numbers were quite equal to the whole adult male population of the little village, so that the men stood aghast, the women retired into their houses, and closed their doors, and the children seemed struck dumb with affright. The moment of their visit, too, was most inopportune, for on that very day a large party of the captains and officers of the packets residing at Flushing were occupied in storing a cargo of grain that had just been discharged from a coasting vessel at the quay, and locking it up in warehouses to secure it from plunder.”
At this time it happened that all the ships of war were absent on their cruising grounds. The situation was dangerous, and the men threatened an attack on the warehouses, and were muttering and brandishing their clubs, and falling into ranks, when Captain Kempthorne snatched up little James Silk, then an urchin of six or seven, seated him on a sack of corn, and bade him strike up a hymn.
With his shrill little pipe, he started—
Salvation, O! the joyful sound,’Tis music to our ears.
Whereupon at once the mob took up the chant, sang the hymn, with their strong masculine lungs; the clubs were let fall, and, the hymn ended, they dispersed harmlessly.
James Silk went to sea in the Lady Harriet, a Government packet. On his third voyage to Lisbon he was captured by a French corvette and assigned to prison at Corunna; he was then about ten years old, and the gaoler’s daughter of the same age fell in love with him, and softened the rigour of his captivity by bringing him dainties from her father’s table. She tried to induce the boy to elope with her, but James had sufficient English common sense not to accept the offer, and finally he was sent to Lisbon, obliged to tramp the whole way, several hundred miles, barefooted, and begging food and a lodging on his way. At Lisbon he was taken on board the Prince of Wales, and returned to England, where his mother induced him to leave the sea, and provided him with a small stationer’s and bookseller’s shop on the Fish Strand, Falmouth. His mother died in 1804, and when James Silk was aged only nineteen he married Elizabeth Jennings, a farmer’s daughter. He got tired of being a shopkeeper and volunteered on board a man-of-war; but on seeing a seaman flogged round the fleet for mutiny, was so disgusted with the sight that he deserted, and started a bookshop at Plymouth Dock. However one of the trustees of his wife’s inheritance had speculated with the money in smuggling ventures and lost all, so that J. S. Buckingham became bankrupt. He went to sea again, and was appointed chief officer on board the Titus, bound for Trinidad, Captain Jennings, perhaps a kinsman of his wife.
At the age of twenty-two he became commander of a vessel, and made several voyages to the West Indies and in the Mediterranean. In these latter he rapidly acquired a knowledge of and even fluency in speech in French, Italian, Greek, and Arabic, and this determined him to undertake mercantile life at Malta; but the plague having broken out there in 1818, he was prevented from landing, and resolved to try his fortune at Smyrna, but was unsuccessful. He then went to Alexandria, and thence to Cairo, where he made the acquaintance and gained the esteem of Mahomet Ali, then Pasha of Egypt.
He now formed the scheme of connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean by a canal, and for this purpose surveyed the Isthmus of Suez and convinced himself that the cutting of such a waterway was quite feasible, and that such a connection would be of enormous advantage to English trade with India. He laid his plans before Mahomet Ali. “No sooner had the idea of renewing the ancient commerce between India and the Mediterranean by way of the Red Sea taken possession of my mind,” wrote Buckingham, “than I began to think how much this would be facilitated by the juncture of the two seas by a navigable canal; and I bent all my thoughts to the object.” But Mahomet Ali would not hear of the project. He shrewdly asked, “Whose ships would mostly use the canal?”
“The English vessels assuredly.”
“Ah! and then the English would begin to think how nice it would be to have Egypt so as to secure the passage. I am not going to sharpen the knife that would cut my own throat.”
The Pasha had a plan of his own; he had purchased two beautiful American brigs then in the harbour of Alexandria, and he proposed arming them and sending them round the Cape of Good Hope into the Red Sea, for he desired to open up a trade with Egypt from India. But Buckingham pointed out to him that he could not do this without great risk of losing them, as the East India Company had supreme command of all the Indian Ocean eastward of the Cape, and would seize and confiscate all vessels found in those seas without their licence, French and Portuguese vessels alone excepted.
James S. Buckingham now ascended the Nile beyond the cataracts to Nubia, but was there seized with ophthalmic blindness. To add to his distress, on his way to Kosseir he was attacked in the desert by a band of mutineers of the army of the Pasha, who plundered and left him entirely naked on the barren waste, many miles from any village, food, or water; and even when he reached Kosseir, he was obliged to retrace his steps, as the vessel which should have conveyed him forward had been seized by the mutineers.
Buckingham next occupied himself with an endeavour to master the hydrography of the Red Sea, visiting every part in the costume of a Bedouin Arab.
The Pasha now proposed to him that he should go to India and sound the merchants there as to establishing a through trade to Europe by the Red Sea, and a Company of Anglo-Egyptian merchants took the matter up with zest. But on his proceeding to Bombay he found that the proposition was coldly received.
Whilst there, in May, 1815, Buckingham had the offer of the command of the Humayoon Shah, a vessel built at the Portuguese port of Damann, north of Bombay, by the Imaum of Muscat, for trade with China. The retiring captain, named Richardson, in three successive voyages had cleared £30,000, and the situation had been sought by several of the marine officers of the East India Company. When these disappointed men heard that Buckingham had secured the appointment, they were angry, and applied to the Company to eject him from India and close every port there in their power against him. This they did by refusing him a licence to remain in India.
The British Government, in granting a charter of exclusive trade to India and China to the East India Company, gave that Company thereby a right to expel from their dominions all British-born subjects who had not their licence to reside there, this being deemed necessary to protect them from the competition of “interlopers” as they were called, who might undersell them in their own markets. But though the British Government might thus condemn all the twenty million of its own native-born subjects to this state of ignominious dependence on the will or caprice of a handful of monopolists, a body of some twenty-four directors only—in whose hands lay the power of granting licences or banishing those who did not possess them—it could not authorize the exercise of such powers against the natives of any foreign state; consequently James Silk Buckingham was advised to become nationalized as an American citizen, in which case the East India Company would be powerless to expel him.
In point of fact, the case stood thus: all foreigners who had no natural claim on India as a part of their dominions might visit it freely and reside and trade in it as long as they pleased, without licence from its rulers; whereas British-born subjects, who had contributed by their payment of taxes to support the very Government that made the charter, were unjustly excluded, although the conquest of India had been made by British blood and British treasure, and the country was still held under the British flag. In short, all foreigners were free men there, and the freeborn Englishman alone was a slave.
Buckingham so felt the iniquity of this system that later, when he came to England, he agitated and wrote against the continuance of the charter.
Buckingham returned to Egypt and occupied himself with making a chart of the Red Sea. But the Anglo-Egyptian merchants, not relishing their defeat by the East India Company, entered into a compact with Mahomet Ali to send Buckingham to India as his envoy and representative; and as such the Company could not refuse to allow him to reside there. Accordingly, habited as a Mussulman, turbaned and long-robed, with his speaking eye, jovial face, and dark, flowing beard, he looked every inch of him a true-born Oriental, and his extraordinary knowledge of various languages stood him in good stead as he made his way overland to India, by Palestine and Bagdad. Proceeding still on his course, he entered Persia, crossed the chain of the Zagros, and embarked at Bushir in a man-of-war of the East India Company that was bound on an expedition against some Wahabee pirates in the Persian Gulf, and going ashore at Ras el Khyma, acted as interpreter to Captain Brydges, Commander of the Squadron, assisted in bombarding the town, and then proceeded to Bombay, which he reached after a journey of twelve months. But his mission was again unsuccessful; either the Bombay merchants had no confidence in the Egyptian Government, or they were jealous of any interference with their own line of trade.
Now, however, the Company’s licence reached him, authorizing him to remain in their territories, and he regained the appointment to the vessel Humayoon Shah, in the service of the Imaum of Muscat, and he remained navigating the Eastern waters till Midsummer, 1818, when, having received commands from the Imaum to proceed to the coast of Zanzibar, on a slaving expedition, he threw up his engagement, worth £4000 per annum, rather than be implicated in such a nefarious trade.
Buckingham next became proprietor and editor of the Calcutta Mirror, a Liberal paper, that instantly obtained an extensive sale, and brought in to its founder a net profit of £8000 a year. But his resolute advocacy of Free Trade, free settlement, and free Press, and an exposure of the misdoings of the East India Company, brought down on him the heavy hand of Mr. John Adams, the temporary Governor-General. His paper was suppressed, and he was ordered to quit Calcutta. His little fortune was sacrificed in a vain attempt to fight the Governor and the Company, and he was thrown back on the world, almost as poor, save in experience, as when a youth he trudged from Corunna to Lisbon. He left his magnificent library at Calcutta, in the hopes of being able to return, after having obtained redress at home. But the redress he hoped for never came. Too many interests were involved to accord it to him, and his library, like his fortune and his hopes, was wrecked.
It was not till after many dreary years, that the East India Company, under pressure from the Government, could be induced, as an indemnity for the wrongs done him, to accord him an annuity of £200, in addition to one of the like amount awarded him by the British Government, “in consideration of his literary works, and useful travels in various countries,” September 1st, 1851. “Pompey and Cæsar berry much alike.”
“The blow to him at Calcutta was altogether a very savage one,” says Mr. S. C. Hall, “but, like all injustice, it recoiled at length on those who gave it. From the hour that Buckingham was driven from that city (Calcutta), the power of the great Indian monopoly, both commercial and governmental, was doomed. It was by no means his case alone which accomplished that doom. But oppression and vindictiveness, by driving him home, made him for a time the representative there of voices that never entirely slept; whilst the impolicy that had aroused them was persevered in to the last—not ceasing, even after the trade was thrown open, but at length provoking that rebellion which was followed by John Company finally having to make an assignment of his whole estate and effects to John Bull.” In England Buckingham started the Athenæum, a literary weekly, but did not long retain it in his hand; he was not, in fact, qualified for its editorship. He was a Liberal politician avant tout, and a littérateur only in a second or third place.
In 1832, the Reform Bill was passed, and the same general election that sent Wm. Cobbett to the House of Commons for Oldham, sent James S. Buckingham from Sheffield, for the avowed purpose of giving him the best standpoint possible from which to assail the East Indian monopoly. That Company had never made a more fatal mistake than when it persecuted and drove him from India. Buckingham was a theme for caricature in Punch from 1845-1848.
It is open to question whether the East India Company could have engaged J. S. Buckingham’s services if, instead of hounding him out of India, they had endeavoured to secure a man of such exceptional ability and intense resolution of purpose in its service. In heart and soul he was opposed to a monopoly, and if he had been engaged, he would have accepted an engagement only for the purpose of remedying some of the abuses of their government, and rectifying some of the injustices done. But he was so utterly and conscientiously opposed to the whole system, that it is more than doubtful whether he would have met favourably any overtures made to him.
In England an excellent conception of his, which he was able to realize, was the foundation of the “British and Foreign Institute.” To this he was moved by seeing so many Orientals and others adrift in London, without any centre where they could meet and communicate their ideas with statesmen and politicians of Great Britain, and where they might gather for refreshment of mind and body alike. The Duke of Cambridge became President, and the Society attracted to its soirées the literary and intellectual of all lands.
His pen and his voice were employed for some years in advocating reforms.
He died on June 20th, 1855, in his seventieth year, and his wife died in the house of her son-in-law, Henry R. Dewey, 22nd January, 1865, at the age of eighty.
It is greatly to be regretted that he did not live to complete his Memoirs. He had two sons—James, who died in Jamaica, 1867, and Leicester Forbes Young Buckingham, who ran away with an actress, Caroline Connor, and married her at Gretna Green, 5th April, 1844. She had made her first appearance on the London stage at the Haymarket Theatre in 1842. The marriage was not happy and they separated, she to return to the stage, where she acted under the name of Mrs. Buckingham White. He died at Margate 17th July, 1867.
