BRINGING HOME THE EXOTIC:
Eyles Irwin
A Series of Adventures
(1850)
Unlike our other travelers, Eyles Irwin was born 'abroad' in Calcutta, the son of an Irish soldier in the
service of the East India Company. He was sent to England to be educated but returned to India as soon
as he could, becoming a writer in the Company at Madras at the age of 15. Along with administrative
materials, Irwin began to write poetry about his beloved life in beautiful India.
By 1776, Irwin was an assistant to the Governor of Madras, George Pigot. Pigot feuded with his own
council over issues of the autonomy of local rajahs. He was deposed and imprisoned, and those who
supported him, including Irwin, were dismissed. Infuriated, in April 1777 Irwin departed for England
to lay Pigot's case and his own before the board of directors. Unfortunately, he chose the theoretically
easier route that would later become the Suez Canal. Bad weather forced his vessel to put in at Yambo
on the coast of Arabia (modern Yanbu al-Bahar), the first European ship to dock there. The local ruler
locked Irwin up in a tower until he paid a large bribe; the poor civil servant then had to pay another small
fortune for a ship to take him to Suez. The ship's crew, however, headed in the opposite direction, arriving
at Cosire in Upper Egypt at the beginning of July. Irwin escaped from there to join a caravan to Guinah
(modern Jinah), where he was robbed and detained until he once again bribed a vizier. At that point,
he managed to befriend a local sheikh who arranged for his transport across the Thebaid desert. He
then sailed down the Nile to Cairo, Rosetta, and Alexandria, finally limping to Marseilles and thence to
England. The trip had taken almost a year, but it would yield this book.
As soon as he arrived, Irwin learned that Governor Pigot had died in prison but that his own position
with the Company had already been restored. Disillusioned with Company politics, he wrote a volume
entitled Eastern Eclogues, including the supposedly true story of a Brahmin who threw himself from a
temple spire to protest the English colonial government and predicting the ultimate defeat of the English
at Muslim hands. He also took advantage of the time in England to marry, but knowing no occupation
outside of the Company, he soon left his bride to return to Madras (by a much calmer route) in 1781.
In that year the colorful George Macartney became Governor of Madras, with the mission of seizing
local Dutch settlements in revenge for the Franco-Dutch alliance aiding the American revolutionaries.
Lacking support from Governor-General Warren Hastings' administration, Macartney paid for the
venture by overhauling taxation practices in the area. Irwin acted as his intermediary and soon found
himself on another sinking ship of state as the conflict with Hastings led to exposure of the latter's
corruption and his ignominious return to England. This time, however, Irwin kept his job, becoming
superintendent of revenue for a large region in 1783. He instigated the first major campaign against the
"Polygars" (Palayakarrars), whose struggles against the British are considered the first stirrings of Indian
independence.
In 1785 ill health took Irwin back to the British Isles; he accompanied a diplomatic mission to China in
1792, where he was presented to the Qianlong Emperor, and afterward retired from the Company. Still,
his heart remained in the East. His poetry, published in several volumes, often uses exotic settings, and he
used his international knowledge on an influential 1789 pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Feasibility of the
Supposed Expedition of Buonaparte to the East. His comic opera The Bedouins, or Arabs of the Desert had a
three-night run in Dublin in 1802. He was named a member of the Royal Irish Academy in the 1790s.
Irwin's best-known work, also held by the Library, may be an article about the origin of chess, originally
included in a letter to the Earl of Charlemont, then published in the 1820 book
The Incomparable Game of Chess by Domenico Ponziani.
In it Irwin describes playing the game with members of the Brahmin
class in India, who spoke of its invention in China. He made a point of investigating this claim on his trip
to China, where a Mandarin introduced him to "the Royal Game." Although recognizeable as a sibling of
chess, this game's king is supported by two princes rather than a queen: "That the agency of the Princes,
in lieu of the Queen, bespeaks forcibly the nature of the Chinese customs, which exclude females from
all power or influence whatever; which Princes, in its passage through Persia, were changed into a single
Vizier, or Minister of State, with the enlarged portion of delegated authority that exists there; instead of
whom, the European nations, with their usual gallantry, adopted a Queen on their Board." Irwin even
uses the game to support the idea that the Chinese invented gunpowder, because one of their pieces is
called the 'rocket-boy.' Irwin's theory is now in disrepute, but its wide dissemination suggests the respect
in which he was held as an authority on all things of the Near and Far East.
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