1. Originally, affected with the kind of insanity that was supposed to have recurring periods dependent on the changes of the moon. In mod. use, synonymous with INSANE; current in popular and legal language, but not now employed technically by physicians.
Ceylon, the lushly overgrown tropical island which seems to hang from India’s southern tip like a teardrop – or a pear, or a pearl, or even (say some) a Virginia ham – is regarded by priests of the world’s stricter religions as the place where Adam and Eve were exiled, after their fall from grace. It is a Garden of Eden for sinners, an island limbo for those who yield to temptation.
These days it is called Sri Lanka; once the Arab sea-traders called it Serendib, and in the eighteenth century Horace Walpole created a fanciful story about three princes who reigned there, and who had the enchanting habit of stumbling across wonderful things quite by chance. Thus was the English language enriched with the word serendipity, without its inventor, who never travelled to the East, really knowing why.
But as it happens he was more accurate than he could have ever known. Ceylon is in reality a kind of post-lapsarian treasure-island, where every sensual gift of the tropics is available, both to reward temptation, and to beguile and charm. So there is cinnamon and coconut, coffee and tea, there are sapphires and rubies, mangoes and cashews, elephants and leopards, and everywhere a rich, hot, sweetly moist breeze, scented by the sea, by spices and by blossoms.
And there are the girls – young, chocolate-skinned, giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies and rosebud nipples and long hair and coltish legs and with scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears, who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.
It was these nameless village girls – the likes of whom have frolicked naked in the Sinhalese surf for scores of years past, just as they still do now – that young William Chester Minor remembered most. It was these young girls of Ceylon, he said later, who had unknowingly set him on the spiral path to his eventually insatiable lust, to his incurable madness and to his final perdition. He had first noticed the erotic thrill of their charms when he was just thirteen years old: it was to inflame a shaming obsession with sexuality that inspired his senses and sapped his energies from that moment on.
Minor was born on the island in June 1834 – little more than three years before, and fully 5,000 miles to the east of James Murray, the man with whom he would soon become so inextricably linked. And in one respect – and one respect only – the lives of the two so widely separated families were similar: both the Murrays and the Minors were exceedingly pious.
Thomas and Mary Murray were members of the Congregationalist Church, clinging to the conservative ways of seventeenth-century Scotland with a group known as the Covenanters. Eastman and Lucy Minor were Congregationalists too, but of the more muscularly evangelical kind who dominated the American colonies, and whose views and beliefs were descended from those of the Pilgrim fathers. And although Eastman Strong Minor had learned the skills of printing and prospered as the owner of a press, his life eventually became devoted to taking the light of homespun American Protestantism into the dark interiors of the East Indies. The Minors were in Ceylon as missionaries, and when William was born it was at the mission clinic, and into a devout mission family.
Unlike the Murrays, the Minors were first-line American aristocracy. The original settler in the New World was Thomas Minor, who came originally from the village of Chew Magna in western England. He had sailed across the Atlantic less than a decade after the Pilgrims, aboard a ship called the Lion’s Whelp, which landed at Stonington, the port beside Mystic, at the mouth of Long Island Sound. Of the nine children born to Thomas and his wife Grace, six were boys, all of whom went on to spread the family name throughout New England, and be counted among the devout and high-principled founding fathers of the state of Connecticut in the late seventeenth century.
Eastman Strong Minor, who was born in Milford in 1809, was the head of the seventh generation of American Minors; the family members were by now generally prosperous, settled, respected. Few thought it other than a badge of honour when Eastman and his young Bostonian wife Lucy, whom he married in her city in 1833, closed down the family print shop and took off by steamer carrying a cargo of ice from Salem for Ceylon. Their piety was well known, and the Minor family seemed delighted that, in spite of the couple’s wealth and social standing, they felt strongly enough in their calling to contemplate spending what would probably be many years away from America, preaching the Gospel to those regarded as less fortunate far away.
They arrived in Ceylon in March 1834, and were settled in the mission station in a village called Manepay, on the island’s north-east coast, close to the great British naval station at Trincomalee. It was only three months later, in June, that William was born, his mother having suffered badly through the addition of sea-sickness to morning-sickness during the middle of her pregnancy. A second child, also named Lucy, was born two years later.
Although William’s medical file suggests a typically rugged Indian childhood – breaking a collar-bone in a fall from a horse, being knocked unconscious after falling from a tree, the usual slight doses of malaria and blackwater fever – his was far from a normal childhood.
His mother died of consumption when he was three. Two years later, instead of returning home to America with his two young children, Eastman Strong Minor set off on a journey through the Malay peninsula, bent on finding a second wife among the mission communities there. He left his little girl in charge of a pair of missionaries in a Sinhalese village called Oodooville, and took off on an eastbound tramp steamer with young William in tow.
The pair arrived in Singapore, where Minor had a mutual friend who introduced him to a party of American missionaries bound up-country to preach the Gospel in Bangkok. One of them was a handsome (and conveniently orphaned) divine named Judith Manchester Taylor, who came from Madison, New York. They courted, quickly, and tactfully out of sight of the curious child who had accompanied them. Minor persuaded Miss Taylor to come back with them on the next Jaffna-bound steamer, and they were married by the American Consul in Colombo shortly before Christmas 1839.
Judith Minor was as energetic as her printer-husband. She ran the local school, she learned Sinhalese, and taught it to her clearly very intelligent elder stepchild – as well as, in due course, to the six children of her own.
Two of the sons that resulted from this marriage died, the first aged one, the second aged five. One of William’s half-sisters died when she was eight. His own sister Lucy died of consumption when she was twenty-one. (A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later. He moved to the American West, first as doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaskan territory to collect specimens of Arctic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor. In 1889, while still holding the post, he took off on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned, and neither boats nor bodies were ever found. A Minor Street and a Thomas T. Minor School remain, as well as a reputation in Seattle that equates the name of Minor with some degree of glamour, pioneering and mystery.)
The mission library at Manepay was well stocked, and, though the accommodation for the family was ‘very poor’ according to Judith’s diaries, the mission school itself was excellent – allowing young William to win a markedly better education than he might have received back in New England. His father’s printing tasks gave him access to literature and newspapers; and his parents travelled by horse-and-buggy often, and took him along, and encouraged him to learn as many of the local languages as possible. By the time he was twelve he spoke good Sinhalese and claims to have had a fair grounding in Burmese, as well as some Hindi and Tamil and a smattering of various Chinese dialects. He also knew his way around Singapore, Bangkok and Rangoon, as well as the island of Penang, off the coast of what was then British Malaya.