Page 259 - Eye of the beholder

On 10th March 1792, the Daniells set sail for Madras by boat from Calcutta, and arrived in Madras on 29th March 1792. The southern part of India had largely been uncharted territory. The area around Mysore had been off limits to earlier artists like William Hodges because of the presence of hostile powers like Tipoo Sultan. The rest of the journey through south India was to be conducted overland. They stayed in Madras for 10 days. During this time, news had reached the artists that a peace treaty had been negotiated between Tipoo and Cornwallis (see chapter XX), thus paving the way for free passage across these territories. This news could well have spurred the idea of an overland travel through these territories. As there are no known records of any paintings done by them during these 10 days stay at Madras, it is reasonable to assume that the time was spent in planning and organizing the logistics of the journey. (Figure 3).
A description of the logistics involved in overland travel in India would be an interesting anecdotal diversion here. The roads were hazardous, settlements few and far between, and the terrain was treacherous with banditry rampant. Travelers had to buffer against all these contingencies while embarking on a journey. This had obvious implications for the size of the travel party. Consider the following narrative from the journey undertaken in the same region by a Spanish Friar Domingo Fernandez de Navarette more than a 100 years before the Daniells: ‘We left the royal city on the 28th of July, there went twenty two carts loaden with goods and necessaries for the journey, six officers of the company a-horseback, four stately Persian led horses with rich furniture. One of them dy’d by the way , that had cost five hundred pieces of eight: Four colours, four trumpets, two kettle drums, sixty servants, and five palanquines, with five or six men to carry each of them; it was a train for a king’. Navarette, being a friar, was travelling frugally. The Daniells, in contrast, already had access to some money, and were travelling less frugally than their previous journey across north India. When they set out from Madras on the afternoon of 9th April 1792, they had ‘a train of forty eight servants. For travelling, they had two palanquins, each with 11 bearers, two horses with two syces or grooms, a bullock cart and three pack bullocks with four drivers to carry the tents and baggage. There were seven bearers to carry the provisions and the chickens, two coolies to carry the drawing tables and another the cot. Their personal servants consisted of a head servant, a dubash to handle money matters, a cook, two orderlies, two tent pitchers, a Portuguese servant named Francis and a Muslim boy. In view of the length and the rigors of their tour, it was a modest retinue.
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