A Great British Coward

These days, Kandy is a city of almost two million people, and there’s little sign of the struggles that once played out amongst these hills. A railway has wriggled up through the valleys, and there are now aerials and tunnels and a tiny pink cap of pollution. At last, it’s become the place that Kandyans had always said it was: Mahu Navara, or ‘The Great City’.

But, at heart, it’s still a medieval town. A few years back, I spent several weeks amongst its monasteries and palaces. Sometimes, it felt as if the lawyers and tailors had their own little quarter, and the monks the rest. The focus of all this holiness is a tiny fragment of human tissue, considered to be a last remnant of Buddha and over two-and-a-half thousand years old. Encased deep in a complex of temples, strongrooms and caskets, it is a single tooth. Kandyans often told me that, whoever holds this tooth holds the country in its power.

In the middle of Kandy is a lake, and from here the city rises into the walls of the valley. Beyond a rim of temples and monasteries, it climbs in ever more secular tiers: seminaries and courts to start with, then the mansions of the great and good, a few noble hotels, and then everyone else, vanishing off into the jungle. Only the wildlife ignores this hierarchy, and is always pouring over the city. Each evening, millions of crows appear in the rain trees round the lake, and everyone flees. During the night, it is the turn of the leopards, who come down and drink from the hotel pools, and eat all the dogs. Then, at dawn, the daily battle commences, as the Kandyans take on the wildfowl and the fruit bats, in a vigorous exchange of droppings and rockets.

Perhaps Kandy still retains the air of a mountain redoubt. For hundreds of years this was the last resort of the Sinhalese kings. They’d first holed up here in 1592, and, for the next two centuries, they’d kept the Portuguese

and the Dutch at bay. There was no need for complex breastworks. Usually a hedge was enough, and the mountains would do the rest, or the mighty Mahaveli River. Although shallower and less unruly now, it still wraps itself jealously around the city. Few places have been so fiercely defended by geography.

In 1803, the British made their first attempt to capture the city. An enormous force set off from Colombo, consisting of over 1,900 men. Amongst them were Bengalis, Malays, ‘coolies’, lascars (or native auxiliaries), the 51st Regiment of Foot (Yorkshiremen, but mostly ‘old men and boys’), parts of the 71st and the 19th, and a few veteran Grenadiers. Amongst the officers was the hapless Adam Davie. Everyone agrees that he shouldn’t really have been here at all, and that he shouldn’t even have been in the army. Poor Davie was one of life’s well-rehearsed failures. He had only one skill, and that was in disguising his inadequacies until the very moment leadership was needed. He knew that, one day, he’d be discovered, but, because he couldn’t tell when that would happen, he’d reduced his life to a complex muddle of indecision. This, it seems, was enough to get him into the 71st, and from there, he’d been promoted – downwards – and put in charge of the Malays. It was an ordeal that came with the rank of major.

So it was that the expedition set out. It wasn’t the cream of the British Army but the mood was musical enough. That January, the soldiers marched out from Colombo, playing their pipes and thrashing their drums, ‘full cheerfulness and joy’. It’s not hard to picture them, panting up through the jungly foothills: red woollen tunics, canvas knapsacks, heavy felt shakos pulled over the eyes, and the hair scraped back and plaited with tar. So far, the experience of Ceylon (as it then was) had left them alternately roasted and drenched, and then bloody with leeches. But these were experienced infantrymen, and, by mid-February 1803, they’d made it into the Kingdom of Kandy. The Kandyans, however, had long-since vanished, setting fire to their city as they left for the hills.

On 20 February 1803, the British had reached the empty, smouldering city. Davie was among the first to wander in amongst the blackened stumps

and the curious complex of palaces and temples. Only the pariah dogs remained, and there was no loot, no prize money and nowhere to stay. The British commander, General MacDowall, installed a new king, a brave but luckless man called Muttasamy.

Up to now, Davie had gone happily unnoticed. Then fate began to close in, as nature took its course. With nothing much to do, the British garrison had settled down to a devastating outbreak of disease. Dysentery and beriberi were soon amongst them, reducing men to ulcers. The Kandyans had only to wait. Quietly, they mustered in the hills, picking up stragglers, and slicing off noses and limbs. In Kandy, the food failed, and MacDowall – now taking huge doses of mercury – decided to pull out, with most of his troops. Barely three months after his triumphant arrival, he was blundering back though the valleys, with his Yorkshiremen limping behind. He’d left Kandy with only 500 Asian troops and 200 men of the 19th, most of whom were sick. Even worse, he’d put Davie in charge.

Poor Davie, it was the moment he’d always dreaded, and he reacted with hysteria. Howling and weeping, he begged to be relieved of his command, but his request was refused. ‘God only knows,’ he wrote, ‘what will become of us here’. He was right to be scared. There were now up to 50,000 Kandyans surrounding the city, and only twenty Britons capable of loading a 3lb gun. It wasn’t a situation that called for sensitivity, especially when a wave of warriors appeared, horribly elated. Davie’s first reaction was to try and shoot himself, but, once the gun was wrestled away, his nerve steadied, and he ordered a defence of the palace. There was even an uncharacteristic moment of courage as he slashed away at the first attackers. But he was soon himself again, begging for surrender.

Davie can’t be blamed for the chicanery that followed. The Kandyan adigar, or Chief Minister, was also spying for the British and so it wasn’t unreasonable to trust him. Under the adigar’s terms, if Davie’s men gave up their positions, they’d be free to leave, and the Kandyans would look after their sick. But this was never the deal it seemed. No sooner had the able-bodied contingent marched out towards the river, than the Kandyans

moved in on the sick. They entered the palace refectory, now a temporary hospital, and battered the patients to death. A hundred and forty-eight men of the 19th perished. Only one escaped, a tough German gunner, called Sergeant Theon.

Meanwhile, unaware of what had happened in Kandy, Davie and the ablebodied contingent assembled on the river bank: several hundred Asians, and thirty-four Europeans. For days, the rain never stopped, and they sat there, surrounded by howling dogs, and the great Kandyan horde. Unable to cross the river, Davie surrendered first the puppet-king, Muttasamy, and then all his guns. Muttasamy was immediately beheaded, and his servants shorn of their noses and ears, and sent down to the coast. Then the Kandyans separated the Europeans from their Bengalis and Malays. It’s not clear what happened to the Asians, but the Europeans were to be killed, there on the banks of the river.

Only Davie and two other officers were spared. The rest were led off in pairs, and beheaded or pounded into the mud. A few managed to kill themselves with pistols they’d hidden, or drowned whilst trying to escape. Only one got away, a sergeant called Barnsley. He reappeared some days later, at a British fort, with an unforgettable message: ‘The troops in Candy are all dished, your honour’.

Davie and the other two survivors were kept by the Kandyan king, as human souvenirs. Whilst the other two died or escaped, Davie became part of the Kandyan landscape; a forlorn, unhappy figure who’d wandered the riverbanks like a ghost. He never tried to escape, and may even have lived until 1812. He’d be remembered as a curious apparition. Barefoot, stooped and distracted, he wore a magnificent outfit of rags; a coat, red once, latticed with gold, and breeches, possibly grey. Every day, he came down to the mudbanks, where his companions had been butchered, often just sitting, watching the river as it vanished in the vapours.

For the next nine years he’d lived like this. In some accounts, he takes a wife and becomes the Madige Dissava, or Chief of the Carters. But his

letters, smuggled out in quills and lumps of jaggery, speak of a man slowly losing his mind. To begin with, he urges another invasion and begs to be rescued, but no-one ever comes. His sentences begin to fall apart, and he begs for laudanum. By the end, only opium will soothe his demons, and the rest of his letters cease to make any sense at all.