Moments after Mr Doughty had announced his arrival, Benjamin Burnham's boots landed on the deck of the Ibis with a weighty thud: the shipowner's fawn breeches and dark jacket were dusty after the journey from Calcutta, and his knee-length riding boots were flecked with mud – but the ride had clearly invigorated him, for there was no trace of fatigue on his glowing face.
Benjamin Burnham was a man of imposing height and stately girth, with a full curly beard that cloaked the upper half of his chest like a plate of glossy chainmail. A few years short of fifty, his step had not lost the bounce of youth and his eyes still had the brilliant, well-focused sparkle that comes from never looking in any direction other than ahead. The skin of his face was leathery and deeply tanned, a legacy of many years of energetic activity in the sun. Now, standing erect on deck, he hooked his thumb in the lapel of his jacket and ran a quizzical eye over the schooner's crew before stepping aside with Mr Doughty. The two men conferred for a while and then Mr Burnham went up to Zachary and extended a hand. 'Mr Reid?'
'Yes, sir.' Zachary stepped up to shake his hand.
The shipowner looked him up and down, in approval. 'Doughty says for a rank griffin, you're a pucka sort of chap.'
'I hope he's right, sir,' said Zachary, uncertainly.
The shipowner smiled, baring a set of large, sparkling teeth. 'Well, do you feel up to giving me a tour of my new vessel?'
In Benjamin Burnham's bearing there was that special kind of authority that suggests an upbringing of wealth and privilege – but this was misleading, Zachary knew, for the shipowner was a tradesman's son and prided himself on being a self-made man. Over the last two days, courtesy of Mr Doughty, Zachary had learnt a great deal about the 'Burra Sahib': he knew, for example, that for all his familiarity with Asia, Benjamin Burnham was not 'country-born' – 'that's to say he's not like those of us sahibs who drew our first breath in the East.' He was the son of a Liverpool timber merchant, but had spent no more than a scant ten years 'at home' – 'and that means Blatty, my boy, not just any damned place you happen to be living in.'
As a child, the pilot said, young Ben was a 'right shaytan': a brawler, trouble-maker and general hurremzad who was clearly destined for a lifetime's journey through penitentiaries and houses of correction: it was to save him from his kismet that his family had shipped him out as a 'guinea-pig' – 'that's what you called a cabin-boy on an Indiaman in the old days – because they were everyone's to step on and do with as they willed.'
But even the discipline of an East India Company tea-wagon had proved insufficient to tame the lad: 'A quartermaster lured the boy into the ship's store with a mind to trying a bit of udlee-budlee. But chota as he was, young Benjamin didn't lack for bawhawdery – set upon the old launderbuzz with a belaying-pin and beat him with such a will that his life-line was all but unrove.'
For his own safety Benjamin Burnham was sent off the ship at its next port of call, which happened to be the British penal colony of Port Blair, on the Andaman Islands. 'Best thing that could happen to a wild young chuckeroo: nothing like a jail-connah to tame a junglee.' At Port Blair, Ben Burnham found employment with the prison's chaplain: here, under a regime that was both punitive and forgiving, he acquired faith as well as an education. 'Oh those preachers have hard hands, my boy; they'll put the Lord's Word in your mouth even if they have to knock out your teeth to do it.' When sufficiently reformed, the boy drifted Atlantic-wards and spent some time on a blackbirder, sailing between America, Africa and England. Then, at the age of nineteen he found himself sailing China-wards on a ship that was carrying a well-known Protestant missionary. The accidental acquaintance between Ben Burnham and the English Reverend was to strengthen and deepen into a lasting friendship. 'That's how it goes in those parts,' said the pilot. ' Canton is a place where you get to know your friends. The Chinamen keep the Fanqui-devils penned inside the foreign factories, outside the town walls. No Fanqui can leave their little strip of shore; can't pass the city gates. Nowhere to go; no place to walk, no course to ride. Even to take a little hong-boat out on the river, you have to get an official chop. No mems allowed; nothing to do but listen to your shroffs counting their taels. Man can get as lonely as a butcher on banyan-day. There's some who just can't take it and have to be sent home. There's some who go down to Hog Lane, to puckrow a buy-em-dear or get must on shamshoo wine. But not Ben Burnham: when he wasn't selling opium, he was with the missionaries. More often than not you'd find him at the American factory – the Yankees were more to his taste than his Company colleagues, being more churchy-like.'
Through the Reverend's influence, Benjamin Burnham found a position as a clerk with the trading firm of Magniac & Co., the predecessors of Jardine & Matheson, and from then on, as with every other foreigner involved in the China trade, his time was divided between the two poles of the Pearl River Delta – Canton and Macao, eighty miles apart. Only the winter trading-season was spent in Canton: for the rest of the year the traders lived in Macao, where the Company maintained an extensive network of godowns, bankshalls and factories.
'Ben Burnham did his time, offloading opium from receiving-ships, but he wasn't the kind of man who could be happy on another man's payroll, drawing a monthly tuncaw: he wanted to be a nabob in his own right, with his own seat at the Calcutta opium auction.' As with many another Fanqui merchant in Canton, Burnham's church connections were a great help, since several missionaries had close connections with opium traders. In 1817, the year the East India Company gave him his articles of indenture as a free merchant, an opportunity presented itself in the form of a team of Chinese converts who had to be escorted to the Baptist Mission College in Serampore, in Bengal. 'And what better man to bring them in than Ben Burnham? Before you know it, he's in Calcutta, looking for a dufter – and what's more he finds one too. The good old Roger of Rascally gives him a set of chabees to a house on the Strand!'
Burnham's intention in moving to Calcutta was to position himself to bid in the opium auctions of the East India Company: yet it was not the China trade that provided him with his first financial coup; this came, rather, from his boyhood training in another branch of the British Empire 's commerce. 'In the good old days people used to say there were only two things to be exported from Calcutta: thugs and drugs – or opium and coolies as some would have it.'
Benjamin Burnham's first successful bid was for the transportation of convicts. Calcutta was then the principal conduit through which Indian prisoners were shipped to the British Empire's network of island prisons – Penang, Bencoolen, Port Blair and Mauritius. Like a great stream of silt, thousands of Pindaris, Thugs, dacoits, rebels, head-hunters and hooligans were carried away by the muddy waters of the Hooghly to be dispersed around the Indian Ocean, in the various island jails where the British incarcerated their enemies.
To find a kippage for a convict ship was no easy matter, for many a seaman would heave sharp about at the prospect of signing on to a vessel with a cargo of cutthroats. 'In his hour of need, Burnham broached his business by calling upon a friend from his chocolateering days, one Charles Chillingworth, a ship's master of whom it would come to be said that there was no better manganizer at large on the ocean – not a single slave, convict or coolie had ever escaped his custody and lived to gup about it.' With Chillingworth's help, Benjamin Burnham seived a fortune from the tide of transportees that was flowing out of Calcutta, and this inflow of capital allowed him to enter the China trade on an even bigger scale than he had envisaged: soon he was running a sizeable fleet of his own ships. By his early thirties, he had formed a partnership with two of his brothers, and the firm had become a leading trading house, with agents and dufters in such cities as Bombay, Singapore, Aden, Canton, Macao, London and Boston.