Two years after arriving in Darjeeling, Campbell married a women fifteen years his junior30 and fathered twelve children.31 Along with the supervising tasks of his position—essentially managing the fiscal, criminal, and civil administration of the district—the energetic Scot also controlled the station funds, acted as postmaster, and was the marriage registrar.32 He started a papermaking factory that lasted for a couple of years33 and introduced various new crops, including cinchona for producing quinine to treat malaria. (Cinchona is Darjeeling’s second most important crop today.)
And with undreamed-of consequences, Campbell was also the first to grow tea in Darjeeling.
In 1841, just two years after arriving, Campbell planted tea in the garden of his residence, known as Beachwood, with stock that came from the nurseries in the western Himalayan foothills. The trees came to bear in the second half of that decade, and the Company inspector reported in 1853 that both Chinese and Assam varieties were doing well in Campbell’s garden. Civil Surgeon Dr. J. R. Withecombe and Major James Arden Crommelin, a Calcutta-born member of the Royal Bengal Engineers, also had extensive plantings near Darjeeling town. Campbell stated in a report dated April 28, 1853 that some two thousand tea plants, ranging from twelve years old to seedlings of a few months, were growing at two thousand to seven thousand feet in elevation.34 He requested that none other than Robert Fortune, once again back in China for the Company, personally come to Darjeeling and give his opinion on the “suitableness of the climate and soil of the Hills for the cultivation and manufacture of Tea.”35
With governmental backing, Campbell established tea nurseries in Darjeeling and in Kurseong. While both types of leaf varieties were planted,36 Chinese ones that had largely failed to flourish down in the jungle conditions of Assam were wildly, even unexpectedly, successful. Plants from stock Fortune had smuggled out of China thrived in Darjeeling’s misty, high-elevation climate.
The Company began to propagate plants for individuals and small companies opening up land and clearing plots for tea gardens. Nepalese laborers stripped the Himalayan foothills of their virgin forest by cutting away and burning the underbrush, and severing the lateral roots of large trees so that they toppled over under their own weight. Rocks and roots were removed, the land hoed smooth and, in places, terraced, and saplings transplanted in straight, even lines along the contours of the hills. The first commercial gardens were planted out in 1852 at Tukvar by Captain Masson, Steinthal (“Stone Valley” in German) by a German missionary named Joachim Stölke, and Aloobari. More gardens quickly followed: Makaibari, Pandam, Ging, Ambootia, Takdah, Phubsering. The first factory opened on Makaibari on 1859.
Darjeeling was growing—but remained an enclave within the rajah of Sikkim’s domain. It was only a matter of time for the British to be intimately drawn into the kingdom’s internal affairs and conflicts, and to want to expand out of isolation.
The situation came to a head during Joseph Hooker’s plant-hunting visit in the late 1840s. Attracted to the region’s lavish and diverse flora—four thousand species of flowering plants and three hundred varieties of ferns grow in and around the forests of Darjeeling alone37—Hooker spent three years in the Darjeeling hills, Sikkim, and Nepal identifying and collecting. “In short, there is no quarter of the globe so rich in plants,”38 he wrote in the preface of The Flora of British India, his magnum opus coming out of the trip. The seven-volume work, published between 1875 and 1897, totaling nearly six thousand pages and including some sixteen thousand species, contributed greatly to public knowledge of the region’s rich floral biotope. But Hooker’s travelogue of the journey, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist (1854), dedicated to his close friend Charles Darwin, was an immense popular success. The book informed, inspired, and excited a public with its high-peaked Central Asian descriptions and adventures.
Hooker was a grandee in the heroic age of scientific exploration. After completing his medical studies in Glasgow, the twenty-two-year-old Scot joined Captain James Clark Ross’s four-year-long expedition to Antarctica, which set off in 1839—the last of the epic voyages of exploration done under sail—as assistant surgeon and botanist on the Erebus. He had the opportunity not only to observe and collect at the southern pole, but at all the main areas of the southern hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego to Tasmania and the Cape. Back in Britain, as Hooker began assembling his great work on the region’s flora (published between 1844 and 1859 in six large quarto volumes), the urge to collect in rich, unexplored regions returned. When offered a chance to go to the Himalayas, he took it and traveled with official accreditation and a government grant.
Hooker, with tiny spectacles crowned by wild, worried brows, and with heavy side whiskers and a beard encircling his otherwise clean-shaven face, arrived in Darjeeling famous and also well connected. His father was director of Kew Gardens. (Hooker fils would succeed him at the august institution.) The young Joseph was a confidant, collaborator, and early reader of Darwin.* On the ship traveling out to India, Hooker became friends with the new governor-general, Lord Dalhousie.
For Hooker’s first expedition into Sikkim, Superintendent Campbell himself obtained permission. On Hooker’s second one, in 1849, which would take him through Sikkim to the frontier of Tibet, Campbell, unable to resist the opportunity to fulfill a decades’-old dream to see the mysterious and forbidden kingdom, joined his esteemed visitor.
That autumn the men, against protests of Sikkimese guards, crossed into Tibet. Once back in Sikkim territory, the two Scotchmen were immediately placed under arrest. According to a contemporary newspaper account, Campbell was beaten, tightly bound with bamboo cords, and tortured. Officials interrogated Campbell and tried to force him to sign various documents promising that the British wouldn’t exert their influence in Sikkim. Campbell refused. The men were then escorted to the Sikkimese capital, Tumlong. While Hooker remained free to collect along the way, guards restrained Campbell, who, exhausted after some days of walking, had his hands bound to the tail of a mule was and pulled the final distance.39 The men remained locked up in Tumlong well into December. Eventually released, they arrived back in Darjeeling on Christmas Eve, six weeks after being seized.
Repercussions were swift. A punitive British force crossed into Sikkim and camped for a couple of weeks. The soldiers didn’t fire a shot; they simply made their presence known. That was enough. The British stopped paying the rajah’s annual allowance for Darjeeling and, more significantly, annexed the lower part of Sikkim, called the Terai. The name translates to “moist land,” referring to its marshy grasslands and boggy forest. While Hooker called it “that low malarious belt which skirts the base of the Himalaya”40 and a “fatal”41 district, the 640-square-mile tract of land was the most fertile part of Sikkim’s largely mountainous dominion.
For the Sikkimese, this turned their kingdom—bordered to the east and west by enemies and enclosed on the north by impenetrable Himalayan peaks—into a landlocked mountain hinterland cut off from all access to the plains below. They now had to pass through British territory to reach them.