A Griffins Vade Mecum Draft

Extracts from Capt. Thomas Williamson’s East India Vade-Mecum (London, 1810), a guide for every gentleman proceeding to Bengal. Selected pages, much handled, with annotations in a woman’s quick hand.

Content

Read the prop edition — the book itself, with Meg’s hand in the margins

The Captain wrote this for griffins four years ago, and most of it still holds. Where it does not, I have corrected him in the margins. Read it before you accept a single invitation. — M.C.

On the Term Griffin

A newcomer to India is styled a griffin for his first year, and everything he does wrong in that year is forgiven under the name. The griffin pays too much for everything, dresses wrongly for the heat, offends his servants by kindness and his hosts by ignorance, and is watched with great enjoyment by everyone he meets.

One year exactly. On the anniversary of your landing the settlement stops forgiving. Spend the year asking questions, it is the only period in which questions are free.

The Day

The day here is built around the sun, and fighting the arrangement kills men. Rise before dawn, when the air is cool, and ride or walk then, for it is the only exercise the climate permits. Breakfast follows at nine or ten. Calls are paid before noon. At one or two comes tiffin, a light meal of curry and rice, and after it the whole settlement sleeps through the worst of the heat behind closed shutters. Dinner is at sunset, and the evening after it belongs to society: cards, dancing, music, conversation, as late as the candles last.

The sleep is not sloth, it is medicine, and you will come round to it. Note also: the morning call is the whole engine of society. Cards on the hall table by eleven. Whom you call upon first, after church has introduced you, will be read as a declaration. Ask me before you declare anything.

The Household

No European keeps house in Bengal with fewer than a dozen servants, and a respectable establishment employs twenty or more. This is not extravagance. Caste divides the work: the man who cooks will not sweep, the man who sweeps will not touch the table, the man who waits at table will not hold a horse. Each office is a separate man, each man a separate wage, and the whole is governed by the khansamah, the house steward, through whom all purchases pass.

Monthly wages, in sicca rupees:

Office	Duty	Wage
Khansamah	Steward of the household	10 to 15
Bawarchi	Cook	8 to 10
Khidmatgar	Table servant	6 to 8
Bearer	Palanquin and person	5 to 6
Bhisti	Water carrier	4 to 5
Syce	Groom, one per horse	4 to 5

A rupee stands at about two shillings and sixpence.

Learn the names in your first week, all of them, and never shout. Now the thing the Captain will not say plainly: the household hears everything. Every letter left open, every quarrel through a shutter, every name spoken at your own table is known below stairs by nightfall and in three other compounds by the following one. There is no privacy in this country, there is only discretion. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

Dress

By day a gentleman wears white: jean, nankeen, or calico, made loose, changed as often as the heat demands, which is often. Full English dress, dark cloth and all, is worn at dinner and after, whatever the thermometer says, and the man who appears at a ball in his cool morning clothes has resigned from society. A lady’s case is harder still. Muslin is her salvation, and Bengal weaves the finest muslin on earth, though the London pattern books arrive five months old.

Six months old, and everyone knows it to the week. The fleet that brought you also brought the new waists, and every dressmaker in the settlement is working through the night this fortnight. What you wore off the ship has already been noted. What you wear at the first ball of the season will be noted more. This is not vanity, it is intelligence work, and the ladies of Calcutta are very good at it.

The Table

Dinner is the great performance of the settlement. Soup, fish, joints, curries, game, puddings, all of it in courses that would stagger a London table, all of it eaten in a room at ninety degrees. The drinking matches the eating: claret and hock by the bottle, brandy with water, and no ice to be had in Bengal at any price, so that every glass arrives at the temperature of the room. Drink the water only where you trust the well, which is to say, drink the wine.

Hugh’s table gave you the Mulligatawny already, so you know the style. Two warnings the Captain omits. First, the drinking here is real, sustained, and considered manly, and a guest who keeps pace with old Bengal hands will be carried home. Second, if a Bengali gentleman ever entertains you, understand that he may host you magnificently and never once sit or eat with you. His faith forbids sharing your table, not his hospitality. Take no offence, and above all do not press him. Pressing him is the offence.

Health

The two rainy seasons carry off the greater part of those who die here, and the griffin’s first rains are his trial. The fevers, the flux, and the disorders of the liver do the work, and the treatments are bark, calomel, and the lancet. A man taken ill in the morning may be dead by evening, and burial follows within the day, for the climate does not wait upon mourning. The burial ground on Park Street receives the settlement’s dead by torchlight, the same evening, coffin and all.

Read that last line twice, because it is the fact of this place. Dead by evening, buried by night, the estate at auction within the month. You have arrived in October, which is the kind season. Use it to get strong. And whatever a surgeon here tells you, the native physicians the Company men laugh at have kept this city alive far longer than we have been in it. Ask the household before you ask the surgeon. Quietly.

Getting About

The palanquin is the carriage of Bengal: four bearers and a relief, a shilling’s distance for an anna or two, available at every corner and at every hour. Horses serve for the morning, carriages for the evening drive on the Course. There is no bridge over the Hooghly, and there will be none, the river does not permit it. Howrah and the western bank are reached by ferry, the up-country stations by boat and by the dak, the post relay, which carries a letter faster than it carries a man.

The bearers know every house in the settlement, announce your destination and nothing else. And do not be alarmed by the sanitation, which is performed by kites, crows, jackals, and the great adjutant storks that stand about the rooftops like undertakers. They are the municipal service. The smell you will stop noticing, as the other book promised you.

What Money Buys

Everything in Calcutta is for sale twice. The Europe shops around Tank Square sell London goods a year stale at three times the London price. The auction houses sell the same goods secondhand at a third of it, for this is a city of short residences, and the effects of the departed, their furniture, their plate, their horses, their libraries, come under the hammer weekly. For everything else there are the bazaars, where the price begins at treble and falls with your patience, and where a stranger buys well only through a broker.

The broker is the point. Every house of standing keeps its banian, its native man of business, and nothing of consequence is bought, sold, lent, or learned in this city except through one. Ours is reliable. If you need something found, or something asked where an English question would raise heads, come to me and I will put it through him. That is what he is for.

Law and Rogues

The King’s court at Calcutta tries Europeans under English law, with English juries, and hangs housebreakers with English regularity. Beyond the town the Company’s courts try everyone else under a different law entirely, and between the two systems there is a gap into which a great deal of wickedness falls unexamined. The rivers have their dacoits, armed gangs who take boats whole. The port has its crimps, who deliver drunk or drugged sailors to short-handed ships for a fee. And gentlemen still settle affairs of honour at dawn on the Maidan, which is against the law, and conducted like an institution.

The gap in the middle is the true map of this place, remember it when something will not add up. A European of any standing is very hard to touch here, which men of low character also know, and some of them came out precisely because they know it.

The Other City

North of the Europe town the streets narrow and Calcutta becomes ten times itself: the bazaars, the temples, the great houses of the Bengali merchant princes built around courtyards no sahib has seen, the tanks where each quarter draws its water and its gossip. Its faith is everywhere and unashamed, the goddess above every doorway, the great autumn festival just concluded with drums and lamps and images carried to the river. Its learning is old and its conversation, they say, is an art. Few of us can report on any of it at first hand.

Here the Captain honestly knows nothing, and neither do I, beyond this: the men who run that city lend the money that runs ours, the Armenians trade in both, and half the people in this compound walk between the two cities every evening of their lives. Everyone you will dine with this month calls the far side of the town a mystery. It is not a mystery. It is a neighbour we have not called upon. Bear that in mind when the drawing rooms tell you what “the natives” think. — M.C.

Context

Capt. Thomas Williamson’s East India Vade-Mecum (1810) is the standard gift for a griffin sailing east, and copies pass from hand to hand in every outbound cabin. This copy is Meg’s own, carried out on her own first voyage, annotated since, and pressed on the newcomers of her household with the flyleaf inscription: “For the new arrivals, the parts worth believing marked. M.C.”

Clues Embedded

• The household-privacy warning is tactically real: nothing said or written in the Cavendish Compound is private from its twenty-two servants. Players who absorb it will handle their letters and their planning differently.
• Meg’s banian offer is a standing, legitimate investigation channel into the Indian commercial world, purchased at the cost of Meg (and the household) knowing the question was asked.
• The law-and-rogues margin note names the impunity gap that shelters more than one thing in this chapter.
• The caste-dining caution is armour for the party’s first Indian hospitality, wherever it is received.

Prop Notes

Printed book extracts in period type, with the annotations in a woman’s fast, confident hand crowding the margins. The wage table prints as Williamson’s own. If produced as a physical prop, the marginalia carry all the voice, the extracts can be abridged freely.

Relationships

• Created Margaret Cavendish — Selected the extracts and wrote the marginal corrections in her own hand
• Related to The City of Palaces — The practical companion to the orientation piece — the Tuesday to its history