The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
In the footsteps of a fellow indigo enthusiast
A writer’s compelling and extraordinary account of a journey in the footsteps of a Victorian lover of adventure and dairy-keeping impresses Michael Kerr
DEEPER THAN I NDIGO Tracing Thomas Machell, forgotten explorer by Jenny Balfour Paul
Among illustrations in this book is a postcard the author sent from Hong Kong to Devon in the year 2000. It’s addressed to one Thomas Machell, and tells him how much the city has changed since he was first there. Machell, by then, had been dead for nearly 140 years. In Deeper than Indigo, Jenny Balfour Paul performs something of a resurrection. Travelogue, memoir, history, detective story, love story – her book is partly each of these, and wholly compelling.
At the end of 1999, Balfour Paul, who had established herself as one of the world’s experts on indigo, was preparing to deliver the first lecture of the new millennium at the Royal Geographical Society in London on her travels in pursuit of dye and dyers when she was tipped off about an obscure manuscript in the British Library written by a Victorian, described as a “midshipman in the merchant navy and indigo planter”.
It turned out to be one of five volumes, totalling almost 3,000 pages, chronicling Machell’s travels and expat life – though their author had predicted he would write seven, and expressed the hope that they would be “lighted upon in some musty library in the 20th century and quoted by some descendant”.
Balfour Paul didn’t qualify as a descendant, but she felt their meeting was somehow predestined. They had indigo, diary-keeping and wanderlust in common. In what he called his “Talking Papers”, originally addressed to his father, she felt he was striking up a new conversation with her a century and a half on. By February 2000 she was setting off with her husband on the Machell trail, and acknowledging that her marriage “now seems to include a third person”. Ten years on, with her husband dead, she would still be keeping company with a very unusual Victorian.
Machell, the son of a clergyman in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1824, was clearly hardier than three of his siblings, who died in infancy, but considered a runt among the surviving nine. A limp made him unfit for the military (unlike his younger brother, Lancelot, who would become “one of the best riders in the Punjab”) and he was expected to stay at home and be a clerk. At 12, however, he abseiled from his bedroom window, Lancelot dogging his heels, and the two got as far as Brighton before being returned to their anxious parents.
As a teenager, he sailed to India then China, where he witnessed the First Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. He went around Cape Horn on a ship carrying coal and guano to the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia, where he had a passionate affair with a “nut-brown maiden of the sea”, the daughter of a cannibal chieftain. Returning to India, he worked in indigo in Bengal, coffee in Kerala, and bullock transport in the centre of the country. All the while – even when the house was so full of grasshoppers that they filled his nose and got impaled on his pen – he scribbled his journals, sprinkled with whimsical watercolours, and posted them home, along with specimens of the local wildlife, among them a hooded cobra bottled while still alive.
Machell was far from an imperialist. “The White man,” he wrote, “is not the regenerator but the annihilator of the uncivilised races, he brings no blessing to the savage.” He was ahead of his time in his concern for virgin forest felled to make way for coffee bushes: “…one cannot help a feeling of regret that those splendid trees should be cut down and burnt like so many useless weeds and rubbish”. And he was homesick, and nagged by a feeling that he hadn’t done anything “useful”.
Balfour Paul, who describes herself as Machell’s “besotted admirer”, thinks her travels pale beside his, but it turns out that in following indigo dyers she had herself smuggled into Oman, where visiting women were unwelcome, and was shot at in Yemen. She’s similarly determined in her pursuit of Machell, and aided by coincidences worthy of Dickens. When, for example, she wants to visit an obscure town where Machell lived, Jessore (now in Bangladesh), she discovers that friends of hers, development workers, happen to be stationed there at just the right time.
What take longest to clear up are questions over whether her subject wrote more diaries and where he was buried in 1862. In her efforts to answer them, Balfour Paul risks her reputation as an academic with an assertion that Machell, the man who began by speaking to her, went on to speak through her. Whether he did or he didn’t, she makes him live on the page. Deeper than Indigo is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books. telegraph.co.uk) at £17.95 plus £1.99 p&p.