Or maybe it was the son himself who fought for Garibaldi in the late 1840s as a very young man. Accounts of Louis Mandelli’s early life are riddled with gaps, and the sketchy dates that are known do fit and can apply to him rather than his father.
But in 1864 Louis Mandelli did somehow finagle a position managing the Lebong & Minchu Tea Estate. He appears abruptly on Darjeeling municipal records, and on those of the Catholic Church, as he married in January 1865, not long after arriving. That he had no experience with tea seemed to matter little. Soon under his command were two more estates, Mineral Springs and Chongtong. He now controlled 550 hectares (1,350 acres), a not insignificant amount considering the effort involved in moving between properties. “Being so busy looking after the three gardens under my charge,” Mandelli wrote in a letter, “and each of them is at a great distance from one to another, so I have to remain at each for days & days.”13
Before long, Mandelli became a partner in two other gardens. One was the picturesque Kyel Tea Estate. When a division of Lingia next door was given to Mary, the daughter of Lingia’s owner, as a wedding present in the 1870s and added to Kyel, the new estate was rechristened Marybong (“Mary’s place” in Lepcha). Even today, the winding fourteen-mile journey from Darjeeling to Marybong takes about ninety minutes by jeep in the dry season. Mandelli did it on horseback.
“I can assure you, the life of a Tea Planter is far from being a pleasant one, especially this year,” Louis Mandelli wrote to a friend down on the plains in 1876, “drought at first, incessant rain afterwards, & to crown all, cholera among the coolies, beside the commission from home to inspect the gardens, all these combined are enough to drive any one mad.”14
The rugged, feral life on an isolated garden, the hundreds of laborers under a planter’s responsibility, and the fickleness—and all too frequent cruelty—of nature when farming tea in the hills took their toll. So did the unhealthy climate and tropical diseases. “Quinine every morning, castor oil twice a week, and calomel”—also known as mercurous chloride, a poisonous white power used as a purgative, antiseptic, and fungicide—“at the change of the moon,”15 went the planters’ preventive, self-medicating prescription.
Mandelli found solace in ornithology, shooting and skinning some specimens, but mostly preserving ones that local collectors had shot or trapped for him on lengthy trips to Sikkim, Tibet, and Bhutan.
But deep losses on the estates and mounting debts to the bank began to wear him down, and he even found his beloved hobby exhausting. “The rains are frightful, the dampness horrible & the fog so dense that you cannot see few yards before you,” he wrote of collecting around Darjeeling, adding that any excursion into neighboring Sikkim is “simply madness, as the leeches will eat you alive.”16
But surely the biggest blow came from an English rival, Allan Octavian (A. O.) Hume. “Yes, Hume is a brute, in fact, I call him a swindler, as far as birds are concerned,” Mandelli wrote to a friend in January 1876:
What else would be thought of a man who promised to help me / and very grand and magnificent promises they were / to make my collection of Indian birds as perfect as he possibly could, in order only to get out the best & the rarest things to be found up here, & then leaving me on the lurch now, as he has found out that I am no more his slave subservient to his sneaking and bland manner & hypocritical ways?
Such robust underlining is not typical in Mandelli’s letters, except when writing of Hume. “I should say that swindler is too mild a term for such a man after having got out from me about 5000 birds & given only in return about 800, the commonest birds in India, 400 of which went down the khud [ravine or precipice], as they were not worth the carriage.”17
But how to complain about Hume, except in private letters like this? (“The only consolation I have in this matter is that I am not the only one who has been victimized!!!”)18 Hume had become director-general of agriculture in India in 1870 and was the country’s preeminent and most powerful ornithologist. Although considered the father of Indian ornithology, Hume is far better known as the founder of the Indian National Congress Party—the party of the Gandhi and Nehru clans, and still a dominant political force in the country. Hume made an open call to students in 1883, and during the party’s historical first meeting in 1885, the Brit was nominated to be the party’s general secretary, a position he held for nearly a quarter century.
Reading Mandelli’s letters it is impossible to picture him dancing in black tie at the Planters’ Club or playing a game of cards after a couple of rounds of pink gins. His bank, creditors, and poor health are frequently mentioned. “For the last two or three months I have been unwell & troubled with slow fever, cough, deafness etc. etc.,” Mandelli wrote in March 1877. “In fact I think old age is creeping fast on me.”19 He was just forty-four years old.
By the end of 1879 Mandelli was no longer in charge of any of the four gardens that he had recently been running or owning, an incredible turn of events. His problems—debts? poor harvests? depression?—must have severely worsened. In February the following year he committed suicide.
Mandelli left behind a wife and five children in Darjeeling. Municipal records show them steadily liquidating his property for cash over the next two years. They sold what remained of Mandelli’s prized bird collection to none other than A. O. Hume.20
The cause of Mandelli’s death was listed as “unknown” in the Bishop’s Death Register, but this was perhaps done by a sympathetic official knowing that burial in the church cemetery would be impossible if the truth was recorded. Before long, though, news of his suicide was considered common enough knowledge that when the British Museum, with thirteen of his birds in their collection, published an appreciation of Mandelli in 1906, the text clearly stated that Mandelli had taken his own life, though how remains a mystery. Mandelli used arsenic in preparing bird skins, and perhaps some grains helped him to end his life and hide the way he did it.21 This could be another reason his death was “unknown”: arsenic poisoning has many of the same symptoms as other ailments and, until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was difficult to detect, especially in a station as distant as Darjeeling.
Mandelli’s grave is impossible to locate today. The tomb is not in the main Old Cemetery, but the Catholic-dominated Singtom Cemetery, at North Point below St. Joseph’s School. Built in 1858, it is known as the New Cemetery. In both graveyards, the tombstones of settlers, soldiers, wives, and children are tipped over, cracked, broken, and obscured by moss, vines, and weeds. The inscriptions on the older ones have been worn away over the years, and vandals plucked out the brass letters on other ones during the violent, agitation-filled mid–1980s, rendering names and dates into a series of faint dots like a marquee with broken lightbulbs.
Mandelli’s legacy lives on not in tea but the animal kingdom. At least a half dozen birds carry his name, including Mandelli’s bush- warbler, Mandelli’s willow-warbler, Mandelli’s snow-finch, and Mandelli’s tit-babbler. The rare red-breasted (or Bhutan) hill partridge (Arboricola mandellii) is another. A dozen samples of these had been gathered by “Mr Mandelli’s hunters” but “nothing absolutely is known of its habits, food or note,” informed the three-volume The Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon,22 coauthored by Hume, generous, at least, in his attribution. Details of Mandelli’s spotted babbler (Pellorneum ruficeps mandellii), a rufous-colored bird with a puffy, pale breast streaked with browns and an upright tail, are more forthcoming. “They are very restless, energetic birds, constantly on the move and keeping up a never-ending chatter amongst themselves,” reads the 1922 edition of another guide to British India’s fauna. They are easy to watch if “perfectly still, but a movement of hand or foot sends them scuttling off into denser cover,” the volume warn. “They have many sweet notes as well as harsh ones, but their prevailing note is that of the genus, a constantly repeated ‘pretty-dear, pretty-dear.’”23