Page 1 of Great Uncle Henry (Pride & Prejudice Vagary)
H enry Thomas Bennet, the second son of Thomas and Rosalind Bennet, the master and mistress of Longbourn, an estate near the market town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, was about to embark on a great adventure. He had decided to sail to the colony of India to seek his fortune.
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He was the spare, while his brother, James Thomas Bennet, who was more than ten years Henry’s senior, was the heir to the estate.
James had assiduously courted Miss Elizabeth Rose Fitzwilliam, a distant cousin to the current Earl of Matlock.
He had proposed, Miss Fitzwilliam had accepted him, and they had married the previous year.
Seeing that he and James had never been very close, primarily due to the difference in their ages, Henry did not consider asking if James would have him remain at Longbourn. They were more indifferent acquaintances than brothers.
Until his brother chose a wife, Henry had been much more important to his father, thanks to an entail to heirs male that Henry’s late grandfather had placed on Longbourn.
It would expire two generations after James and Henry.
Grandfather, like Henry’s own father, had two sons.
From what his father had related, the younger son, William, had been resentful that Thomas would inherit because of an accident of birth.
He had turned to activities like gambling and had lost rather a lot of money.
As William had no way to pay his debts, he had pledged some of Longbourn’s land to cover his debts of honour.
Unfortunately for William Bennet, he had no legal authority to do so, and when the men came to collect, Henry’s grandfather had pointed that out to them.
As Henry had received one, his late Uncle William had also been given a legacy.
Much to the man’s consternation, his debts had been paid from that money, leaving him less than two hundred pounds.
In his anger at his father for not paying his debts and forcing him to use his legacy, William Bennet had taken the pittance which had been left and stormed out of Longbourn, swearing never to darken the doorstep again.
He had taken his late mother’s maiden name, Collins, to further distance himself.
It was for this reason that late Grandfather Bennet had created the entail.
Not only was it to heirs male, but the entail precluded any descendent of William Collins from inheriting the estate.
Grandfather Bennet was bound and determined that no offspring of his dissipated son would ever be the master of Longbourn.
The entail allowed that if no son was born, the estate could be inherited by an heir who flowed through the female line, as long as his mother was born a Bennet.
That meant that if James’s wife delivered a daughter, and she never bore a son, but Felicity did—if she was still alive—her son would be eligible to inherit.
If James and Beth—it was what his wife preferred being called—had a daughter, when she married, her son would be in line to inherit as long as Henry did not have a son of his own.
After Henry graduated from Cambridge, he had considered the professions second sons gravitated towards.
Although he believed them to be honourable professions, he had no interest in the church, the law, or the army.
However, Henry had a great desire to explore the world, especially the East Indies.
In particular, the large and exotic land of India called to him.
He waited almost six years after graduating from university for the opportunity.
It came because his sister-in-law was heavy with child.
Hence, with the heir married and his wife to deliver their first child in a matter of weeks, Thomas Bennet had presented his second son with a legacy of five thousand pounds and told him to go find his way in the world.
Henry was grateful because until James’s wife began to increase, his father had refused to release his legacy or for him to travel to the East Indies or anywhere else.
With their father dropping his objections, Henry was finally free to follow his dreams.
Henry did not feel resentment that his father had never valued him for himself, rather only as a ‘spare’ who was now no longer needed.
While some may have felt animosity at being so dismissed when he had been judged superfluous, Henry felt relief and was thankful that he was allowed to pursue his own interests without interference from anyone else.
To that end, Henry purchased a berth in first class on a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company.
It was set to depart in two days, on the final Tuesday in February.
On this day, he had attended a small church in an unfashionable part of London near the inn in which he was staying.
He had farewelled his family in the middle of the previous week.
Father had grunted something unintelligible, James had given his hand a perfunctory shake, and only his mother had been sad to see him leave.
If Felicity had been there, Henry knew she would have been sorry that he was to go.
On Monday evening, Henry boarded the ship per the instructions from Captain Kirk.
Like a spectre rising from the morning fog, the ship, The Enterprise , slipped her mooring ropes with the tide on Tuesday morning.
Henry was very excited; his six to as long as eight month journey had commenced.
He prayed to on high he would not be afflicted with seasickness.
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Mid-September 1765
The Enterprise , her crew, her cargo, and her passengers had survived the seven months at sea.
They had sailed down the west coast of Africa, with some short stops along the way.
The ship had been at the Cape of Good Hope for a sennight before beginning the journey up the east coast of the continent.
After not a few storms, Captain Kirk and his crew sailed the ship into the port at Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat; a harbour owned by the Dutch East India Company, thus its arriving ships all used the port.
All of those on board, Henry among them, had given thanks to God for their safe arrival.
Although he had not suffered as much as some of his fellow passengers, Henry had suffered from occasional bouts of nausea during the voyage.
After thanking Captain Kirk and his crew, Henry went ashore and employed some of the waiting men to assist him. They collected his trunks, and he made for a hotel run by the company. The first thing he did was to scribe a letter to his mother to notify her of his safe arrival in India.
On his third night there he met a disillusioned Englishman, Mr Brian May.
Mr May was waiting for a ship to take him back to England.
He lamented the way he had purchased five hundred acres ten miles to the south of the town of Kolar in the state of Karnataka.
There was an option for five hundred acres more, but he had run out of funds to make the purchase.
He told of how he had purchased the land because of the gold fields in the area, but in three years he had discovered nothing.
He had even tried his hand at farming, but he did not have the talent for it.
For some reason, Henry’s sense of adventure told him to buy the land and the option from the man. Seeing that Mr May was out of funds, he readily agreed to sell all for five hundred pounds. The two men had gone to the Dutch East India offices, and there the purchase had been made official.
In early October, after the monsoon season was over, Henry and his retinue began the approximately nine-hundred-mile journey. Henry Bennet was very excited to be riding an elephant at various times during the journey.
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November 1765 and on.
The journey to the land Henry had purchased on a whim had taken about seven weeks.
They had crossed vast plains, gone over and around many hills, through thick vegetation Henry would call a jungle, over the few bridges across numerous rivers, and in many cases, they had to find a way around the rivers.
To call the roads, when they existed, rudimentary was an insult to rudimentary roads.
He was not normally an impulsive man, so the purchase of the land had been out of character for Henry. At least, he still had most of his funds left, so he would not suffer the same lack of funds as Mr May had .
On arrival at his land he intended to farm, which he supposed he could call an estate, Henry had smiled.
His land, even without the additional parcel he could add thanks to the option, was more than twice the size of Longbourn.
Unlike where Henry had grown up, the abode here was a glorified shack.
His first order of business was to employ builders to construct a house for himself.
He decided to name his land Longbourn East—Henry had chosen the name with a sense of irony.
While his house was under construction, Henry rented a house in Kolar.
He made his way to the land office and paid the rather nominal fee to exercise the option on the additional land.
Within a year his house was built, and in the absence of discovering gold on his land, he had begun to farm.
By the end of 1767, his farming activities were profitable, and he was a sought-after employer, treating his servants and workers with respect and fairness.
He cared nothing for the caste system in India and treated all of the men and females who worked for him generously, which garnered their undying loyalty to their master.
Letters between him and his mother were rare and stopped altogether by early 1774. Almost a year after that, a curt letter arrived from James telling Henry that their parents were dead. Based on the tone of the letter, Henry did not write back again.
There were a few English ladies in Kolar, but not one inspired Henry to offer for them.