p. 194 Tommy Chaseland .. son of an Aboriginal Australian woman and an English convict. .. involved in crewing between Tasmania and Sydney, and the wider Pacific.. settled in New Zealand in 1824.. came to have the Maori name Tame Tirene… became headman of the sealing boats in Foveux Straits, off South Island, belong to Robert Campbell, a Calcutta merchant who had moved to Sydney. His relationship with a Maori woman, Puna, first comes into the archive when he navigated an open sealing boat from Chatham Island, after being wrecked there. According to an oral history collected in the early 20th cenutry, Puna helped Chaseland by sitting in the bow of his boat ‘karakia-ing’ praying till the storm abated. After he settled at Codfish Island, which was set aside for sealers by Maori chiefs, he once again found himself in total debt to Puna. When shipwrecked, Puna is said to have dragged Tommy ashore. By 1844, Puna had taken on “household duties of cooking and bed-making” and in another recollection, she was described as “one of the few Maori women … capable of being a helpmate to a civilised man”. By this time, Chaseland had become renowned as a whaler, perhaps the best in New Zealand. He is said to have become quite a “dandy”, enjoying the white shirts which were ironed for him by Puna… the Puna-Chaseland partnership made the transition to an age of liberal imperialism: it was blessed and formalised by Rev James Watkin in 1843. Puma was also baptised. She died six years later. Tommy then married a young woman, the daughter of a Maori woman and a Portugese sailor.”
p. 204 “The monk;s real name was Maung Nu… led an itinerant life and moved in the circles of trade and the law. When his fame as a scholar spread, he was invited by King Bo-daw-hpyaya to take up residence at his capital in Amarapura, now within reach of Mandalay in northern Burma/Myanmar .. wrote letters probably on helf of people who could not write to their relatives … for a young man ‘Lotus Leaf’. For ‘Lotus Leaf’, Rangoon was a city to which people came from across the Bay of Bengal: ‘all sorts of sailors, strangers and aliencs in habit and custom, and belonging to many races all of which I cannot name’. Among the people listed were Armenians, Roman Catholics, Portugese, Africans, Arabs, all kinds of Indians, including Hindu Sarhus [holy men], Muslim crewmen and Bombay merchants’.”
p. 220 First Anglo-Burmese War “For others – including General Sir Archibald Campbell, who led the forces involved in the First Anglo-Burmese War … the Birmese war allowed a new lease of life for careers forged in the Napoleonic wars. One account of the war on the Irrawaddy notes how the troops were composed of young officers, who had not seen action since the end of the Napoleonic conflict… at a time of peace, soldiers in need of work took up service in an unnecessary war. After all the real threat posed by Burma to India was minimal. .. From another perspective, foreigners within the court of Ava, who provided advice to the king, included refugees of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. One figure who takes a prominent role is a Spaniard, Sr Lanciego, who had married into the court, and who was a privateer, wrecked ‘by the changes and chances of the French revolution’/ He was the king’s collector at the port of Rangoon.”
p. 235 WLooting is in full display in the tragic events that unfolded as the British turned on the sultanate of Yogyakarta. As the leading historian of this episode writes, “it was the exchange of ‘one form of colonial tyrannu for another’. In the shameless words of the treaty the British concluded with the sultan of Mataram after the fall of Yogyakarta, the conquest was said to arise from the need for “the preservation of the Country from the oppression of a cruel and relentless Tyrant…” Here once again was the trope of the oriental despot which was at work in Burma and Sri Lanka to justify invasion in the guise of liberation.”
p. 242 The mid-19th century rise of the military machine of the British empire in Asia is usually appreciated from its land frontier in the northwest of India. Here, costly wars were fought, pushed by the emerging “Great Game”, as Britons worried about Russian invasion of India. These wars are no longer seen to be driven by high-level strategy, but more by men on the spot who manufactured crises which called for intervention. The lack of secure commuications – until the laying of telegraph lines – allowed such belligerent men to take the initiative… yet it is possible to turn this story inside out by shifting from the land frontier of British India to its maritime frontier… British boats, logistics and diplomacy did not perform well here. Meanwhile, resistance to British advances could also generate strength from fighters across the sea, from religious ideas which had spread across water, or from modes of political imagination which were also shared or which at times took water as a theme of inspiration.”
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