6 - Edwin Forbes

Summary

I reached Calcutta about the first of August where the ship was sold and went ashore and remained till I joined the Naval Brigade for three years I suppose you have heard about the seapoys in India and how the[y] rose and slaughtered the whites in India, well the Brigade is to keep them watched down, our Barracks is on a small Island and it is very healthy, we have a pretty good time being most all sailors who joined to defend the Settlement, we have dancing and singing in the Barracks I often think of you when I am engaging myself here thinking of the pleasant evenings that I have spent in your Company in Dixmont this is a very pleasant Country but nothing to my native state of Maine where I hope to end my travels.

Chapter 5 closed with a discussion of Britain's colonisation of the Andaman Islands in 1858, to examine rebel convict Liaquat Ali's likely fate after his transportation in 1872. This chapter will take a more detailed look at the Andamans during the early years of colonisation, through the life of a convict guard called Edwin Forbes. Forbes was American, and he was stationed in the Andaman Islands between 1861 and 1864. He was an ordinary sailor, but he wrote a diary and a series of letters during this period. They centre on descriptions of the everyday in the Andamans, but as rare evidence of the perspective of a guard, they also open up a different view on penal settlements and colonies to that explored in the book so far. This opens out further many of the broad themes of Subaltern Lives. Forbes’ manuscript provides an important glimpse into life in the naval brigade in the mid-nineteenth century. It speaks also to the impact of the penal colony on the indigenous peoples of the islands, to the connections between the Andamans and the outside world, and to the homosociality of early colonial settlement. Further, Forbes’ diary and letters provide important insights into the experiences of an American serving the British Empire.