Madurai’s peculiar connection to Scotland, Logarithms, Colin Mackenzie, and a hero’s heart
Madurai has a great cultural history, and for a long time
was Tamil Nadu’s cultural capital, and the ‘Toonga Nagaram, the city that never
slept’. It was one of those cities which endured so many rulers and changes,
notably by the Kalabhras, the Pandyas, the Cholas, the Tughlaq Sultanate, the Vijayanagar
Rayars, the Telugu Nayaks, the Nawab of Arcot and Chanda Saheb, the British
East India Company and finally the British Raj. Most would recall it as a Nayak-era temple town on the banks of the Vaigai river, or as a pilgrimage town, home
to the magnificent Madurai Meenakshi temple and the Tirumala Naikar temple.
And so, we go to Scotland to meet two stalwarts, one being Napier, considered to be the person who invented Logarithms and James Graham, the Marquis of Montrose. James was a Scottish nobleman from the 17th century (1612-1650), poet, soldier, later viceroy, and captain-general of Scotland. He led the royalists in the Civil war and had many victories, but did not fare well and following his defeat and capture at the Battle of Carbisdale, the Great Montrose was tried by the Scottish Parliament and sentenced to death by hanging in May 1650, followed by beheading and quartering. Sometime later, his excommunicated legacy was restored, and he was officially rehabilitated in public memory as a great man, his remains buried honorably at Holyrood in May 1661. All the distributed (quartered limbs) were brought back and buried with the main parts. Save one part, a critical one, that being his heart, for in 1650, his niece Lady Napier, had sent men by night to secretly remove his heart and bring it back to the family. This relic was placed in an egg-shaped steel case made from Montrose’s sword and this was then enclosed in a gold filigree box, and deposited into a silver urn, always kept at her bedside.
The description of the event by Alexander, Hester’s son is
arresting – A shot from the frigate struck one of these guns, killed two of
the men, and, with the splinters which it tore off the deck, knocked my father
down, wounded my mother severely in the arm, and bruised the muscles of my
right hand so severely that, as you know, it is even now difficult for me at
times to write or even to hold a pen. My mother held me during the action with
one hand, and with the other she held a large thick velvet reticule; in which
she, conceiving that if the frigate captured the Indiaman the French crew would
plunder the ship, had placed some of the things which she valued most,
including the pictures of her father and mother, and the gold filagree case
containing the heart of Montrose. It was supposed that the splinter must have
first struck the reticule, which hung loose in her hand; for, to her great
distress, the gold filagree box, which was in it, was shattered to pieces, but
the steel case had resisted the blow.
The couple reached India and found their way to Madurai and thus
the greatest Scottish national treasure had eventually found its way to the
temple city. Hester located a celebrated goldsmith in Madurai, who recreated a new
gold filigree case for the steel encapsulated heart, after listening to her
description of it, and also made a silver urn for it. It was also engraved in
Tamil and Telugu with the highpoints of Montrose’s life!! Imagine what they
would have written in Tamil – Periyavar Montrose sayippode ascharyamana irudayam….
This was then given a place of honor, on an ebony table in the drawing room at
the Johnston household.
Alexander, Hester’s son who knew this relic intimately
describe it thus - The steel case was of the size
and shape of an egg. It was opened by pressing down a little knob, as is done
in opening a watch case. Inside was a little parcel, supposed to contain all
that remained of Montrose's heart, wrapped up in a piece of coarse cloth, and
done over with a substance like glue.
Interestingly, this led to a myth among the locals that
anybody who possessed Montrose’s heart would never be defeated in battle or
taken prisoner! Soon it was stolen from the house by robbers and after some
time, purchased by the powerful Nawab of Arcot, in whose collection it rested
for a while!! As it transpired, Alexander, Samuel’s and Hester’s son while
hunting with the Nawab, helped him shoot down a hog and the grateful Nawab (
wonder why he was grateful – I doubt that the Nawab was a bad shot or had
difficulty in shooting down a hog!) what he wanted in return as a gift.
Alexander asked for the urn with the heart and explained the whole background
to him. Upon hearing that it was a family relic stolen from Hester, the Nawab
promptly restored the urn and the steel case to Alexander (The Nawab was killed
some years later, by the British, as explained in Major Welsh’s military
reminiscences).
Samuel and Hester returned to Europe in 1792, and were
caught up in the French revolution where all their gold ornaments were confiscated
by the revolutionary government. Hester however, entrusted the urn and the
casket to a British lady named Knowles, for safekeeping. Unfortunately, the
lady died, and the urn and the heart vanished, for all practical purposes. We
will get back to the search for the urn as we go on, but let’s get back to
Madurai after a short stop in Scotland to get to know the Napier who invented
the Logarithms. Hester Napier passed away in 1819.
John Napier, after having traveled and studied abroad, came
back to Scotland, as a scholar in Greek, Theology, Mathematics, and science.
Towards the end of his life, he came up with many shortcuts for complex
calculations and devices to aid calculations. His work, Mirifici
Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (1614) contained fifty-seven pages of
explanatory matter and ninety pages of tables listing the natural logarithms of
trigonometric functions. He invented a well-known mathematical artefact, the
ingenious numbering rods more quaintly known as "Napier's bones" (as
well as the Promputary), that offered a mechanical means for facilitating
computation. As a person involved in so much more, he was studied by his peers
and later generations. While his work
was considered seminal in his times, in Europe, it has come to light in recent
times that such methods were commonplace in distant India, where the English
were yet to arrive.
Interestingly, a research paper mentions - A further link
between Scheubel and Napier is that while abroad, the latter "studied the
history of Arabic notation, which he traced to its Indian source”. Phillip
Jones explains that the diagonal line separating the units and tens digits on
the bones and the method of using the bones are counterparts of the popular gelosia or jealousy method of
multiplication. This came into Europe from Arabic writers shortly after the
introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals,
and can be traced back to the Hindu
Bhaskara (1150) or earlier. I do not want to add more, simply
because I do not want to make this a complex read.
Anyway, years passed by, and a young man named Colin
Mackenzie, a Scotsman, was asked by the then Lord Francis Napier who was
preparing a biography of the said mathematician John Napier, to collect all
available information about Hindu mathematicians and mathematics as well as
their use of logarithms (another mathematician Rueben Barrow was sent out in
1793 for the same purpose, while others such as Charles M Whish were already in
Malabar collecting and archiving similar data). Lord Napier died in 1773, and Kenneth
Mackenzie helped Colin to obtain commission with the British East India Company
so that he could join the Madras Army. It was with the task of investigating
Hindu Mathematics and Napier, that Colin set out for Madras in 1783. Little
would he know that he would never return home, and that India would hold him in
her firm grip, ever after. As Napier’s emissary, looking for information on
Napier and Hindu Mathematics, where do you think he went to? To Madurai of
course, where Lord Napier’s daughter Hester resided, in relative pomp and
glory. That is where Mackenzie met and collaborated with the well-educated
Brahmins, proficient in Mathematics, a subject we will study separately.
Nevertheless, Mackenzie had good intercourse with the Math
stalwarts in the erstwhile Nayaka kingdom with whom Hester had already
established the right contacts. Math was Colin’s interest and though he would have
seen the silver Urn with the Montrose heart, it held no interest for him, just
that they were both in the same place, at the same time, far away from
Scotland. Mackenzie’s life, both as an engineer and soldier as well as a
collector of manuscripts is quite well known, his activities in Malabar (as a
soldier at Palghat, his role in the fights against Hyder & Tipu, and his
attempts to collect Malabar & Travancore history manuscripts) are not so
well known, so they will follow in a forthcoming article.
As Alexander, Hester’s son put it - Mrs. Johnston
introduced him to the Madurai Brahmins “who were supplying her with information
on the Hindus’ knowledge of mathematics.” The more he interacted with these
Brahmins, the greater his astonishment and admiration for their expansive
learning, which “fired his interest in Indian antiquities.” This became the
basis of his lifelong mission, and “the favorite object of his pursuit for 38
years of his life.”
However, I will not tire you with mathematics and
Mackenzie’s deeds in India, at least in this article, let us get back to the
heart of Montrose. We concluded earlier that it was lost for good, in France. I
had also concluded that it was indeed lost, after my initial study, but then I
saw that the Montrose Museum had on display a relic purported to be Montrose’s
heart. Well, the heart, making its return from India to Europe continued with
its adventurous existence, for it may have traveled long and crossed many
oceans. Rachel Bennet, from the University of Warwick, came up with more
conclusions.
One Capt H Stuart Wheatley-Crowe of the Royal Stuart society
obtained an embalmed heart which was believed to have been brought to England
from France during the Revolution by the ancestors of the Perkins family, who believed
it was the heart of Montrose. Stuart had a medical examination carried out on
the heart and they found it to be approximately 300 years old, but could find
no other definitive proof of its authenticity or connections to Montrose. When
a claimant for this heart surfaced in Canada in 1951, named Mrs. Maisie
Armitage-Moore, the society sent the heart to her. She was the granddaughter of
Alexander Johnston, now a Canadian from British Columbia. Maise, now Ms Maisie
Hurley, was a larger-than-life woman who dressed in black, smoked cigars, loved
boxing and American Indians, and was a publisher of the local newspaper.
Lloyd Graham, who investigated this further, takes it from
here - Questions remained and Maise was no longer convinced the heart
belonged to her ancestor, for an expert had told her that it seemed to have
been mummified in the Egyptian fashion, using red lead and resin wax. She was
tired of the controversy and wanted no part in the authenticity arguments and
wanted to (as John Graham wished) cremate the heart and scatter the ashes over
Edinburgh. But in 2012, when the Montrose Museum announced the James Graham
collection, they had in their possession a heart, which may have been the lost
one.
The only mention of the heart since then comes from Maise’s
great-granddaughter Kerrie. In 2007, Kerrie recalls playing with the heart as a
child and remembers being horrified when it fell into two pieces. She was very
upset until she learned that “a bullet had apparently split it in half in its
travels to Vancouver”– an inexplicable coda to an already bizarre tale. It was
apparently sent to England, for safe keeping at her nephew’s home, from where
it was eventually sent to the museum. When in Canada, it was discovered that
the heart had a piece missing, and that piece had been retained by Wheately
Crowe. The heart now in Scotland did have a missing piece and it corresponded
roughly to the piece mentioned above.
Bennet concludes - Despite the lack of absolute proof of its
authenticity, the heart was placed alongside other artefacts definitively
related to Montrose, and this perhaps is a suitable final destination. Museum
curator, Rachel Benvie, said: "There are two known hearts of Montrose and
we have managed to locate and display one of them. "I was a little bit
skeptical when I first saw it. "It is maybe slightly larger than a normal
human heart, but the process of embalming could well influence that, and it is
human. And anyway, I do feel it is right that the Marquis of Montrose should
have a larger heart than other people."
Lloyd Graham is not convinced that the Canadian contender is
the right heart and not much is known about the second contender – He explains
From this (Alexander Johnston’s description of the urn, earlier narrated in
red) it is clear that the heart was no longer the entire organ but a piece of
cardiac tissue small enough to fit inside a container no larger than a hen’s
egg; the fragment was also sealed inside a cloth wrapping. These points
distinguish it from the unshrouded intact heart inherited by Capt.
Wheatley-Crowe in 1931, which was forwarded to Maisie Armytage-Moore / Hurley
in Canada and exhibited at Montrose in 2012. This exposed, enlarged and
essentially complete heart is incompatible with Sir Alexander’s description.
How about the other heart in the possession of the museum? No
information is publicly available about the other contender for the heart of
Montrose. Unless it and its containers miraculously match Sir Alexander’s description,
Lloyd states - we must conclude that the relic he described so carefully –
which may well have been genuine –was in fact lost forever in Revolutionary
France.
The New York Times dated 29th Jan 1911, however,
mentions that the Johnston’s actually gave the trinket to an American named Mrs
Stephen Brown who used to live in Boulogne, just before they themselves got
arrested, assuming that it would be safer in American hands. However, all
subsequent search for the Brown’s and the heart yielded no results. But the ‘veteran
diplomat’ who wrote it believed that the heart was in America. Now, is the second
heart relic in the museum’s possession? I don’t know.
The Arcot nawab’s connection with the Napier’s did not
cease. It was another Lord Napier, the mayor of Madras, who was involved in
reinstating one of the claimants as the Price of Arcot, in 1867.
And that my friends, is the incredible connection between
Scotland’s hero, Madurai, Napier of logarithms and the first surveyor general
of India – Col Colin Mackenzie, and the travails of the hero’s heart across
continents and oceans, and shot at and split, even as a relic!. What an amazing
story – the story of a heart, its obscure connection to the inventor of
Logarithms, a distant city of Madurai in India and how it all connected to the
very person who later on built the single largest archive and collection of
Indian manuscripts!!
House GRAHAM From the Antonine Wall to the Temple of Hymen - Lloyd D. Graham
“A Candidate for Immortality”: Martyrdom, Memory, and the Marquis of Montrose - Rachel Bennett
Col Colin Mackenzie, First Surveyor general of India – WC Mackenzie
Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose- MARK NAPIER
John Napier - W. R. Thomas
Napier's Education: A Speculation - Alex Inglis
Tangible arithmetic I: Napier's and Genaille's rods - Phillip S. Jones
