* In the east, a young EIC conquistador, Stamford Raffles, son of an EIC sea captain born at sea, had just defeated French–Dutch forces and taken Java. In 1815, when the Dutch lost the Cape but kept the East Indies, Raffles, a fluent Malay-speaker, persuaded the weak sultan of Johor to cede to Britain a strategic island which Raffles developed into a thriving colony: Singapore.
* ‘My brother,’ he wrote to King Jérôme in 1807, ‘I hear you suffer from piles. The simplest way to get rid of them is to apply three or four leeches. Since I used this remedy ten years ago, I haven’t been tormented since.’
* The bodies were, like all of the 500,000 or so killed in Napoleonic battles, stripped naked, often by their own comrades while dying. Then scavengers extracted teeth with pliers and sold them to denture makers – ‘Waterloo Teeth’ being especially popular – and collected bones that they sold to bone grinders to use as fertilizer.
* Ironically for the royal family of capital, Barent Cohen’s first cousin was Karl Marx’s grandmother.
* Bland and managerial, Liverpool was also part Indian, Britain’s only mixed-race premier. His grandmother was the part-Indian, four-times-married Frances ‘Begum’ Johnson, daughter of a Portuguese-Indian Isabella Beizor and a British governor of St David’s (Chennai) – it was a time when many Britons in India married Indian women. Frances’s daughter Amelia married Charles Jenkinson, first earl of Liverpool, but died aged nineteen giving birth to the future prime minister.
* When the deluded George IV boasted that he had led a charge at Waterloo, Wellington semi-tactfully replied, ‘I have often heard Your Majesty say so.’
* The name Zulu derived from a warlord, Zulu kaMalandela who had founded the tribe a century earlier. Zulu meant heaven or sky and they called themselves
* The northern Nguni included the Zulus and Swazis; the southern became the Xhosa peoples. In the
* When the men died, the estates were inherited by female mixed-race potentates: in Zambezia (parts of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique) these Luso-Africans were known as the
* Mosheshoe’s family still rules Lesotho. Shaka accused Mzilikazi, a grandson of Zwide, of keeping cattle prizes for himself. The punishment was death. Mzilikazi escaped with his Ndebele clan into Transvaal and then Zimbabwe, where his Matabele kingdom confronted the Shona: the two tribes dominate Zimbabwe today. Shoshangane turned his victory into the Gaza kingdom in southern Mozambique, forcing the Afro-Portuguese
* It ran in the family. When Mehmed Ali’s daughter Nazli noticed her husband flirting with a female slave, she presented him with the slave’s head on a platter. The husband walked out and Mehmed Ali ordered one of his grandsons, Abbas, to execute Nazli, but Abbas persuaded him to let her live.
* His closest friendship, possibly a love affair, was with Sophie, the high-spirited, ambitious Bavarian princess married to Emperor Franz’s dull son Franz Karl. Her eldest son, Franz Josef, was a future emperor whose reign would extend into the First World War.
ACT FIFTEEN
1 BILLION
Braganzas and Zulus, Albanians, Dahomeans and Vanderbilts
THE LIBERATORS: BOLíVAR AND PEDRO
Around 13 October 1822, high in the Andes, at Loja (Ecuador), a desiccated, exhausted and feverish soldier inspected his troops. Later in a delirium he dreamed of climbing the volcano of Chimborazo, ‘giant of the earth’. On reaching its summit, ‘I fell in a swoon … I felt as if inflamed by strange, supernatural fire. The God of Colombia had taken possession of me. Suddenly Time stood before me …’
‘I am the father of centuries!’ said the God.
‘Surely, oh Time,’ he replied, ‘the miserable mortal who has climbed this high must perish!’
‘Hide not the secrets which Heaven has revealed to you! Speak the truth to mankind!’
