This is truly an unknown story of a newspaper editor who so shook up British rulers of India that he was imprisoned for libel and his paper closed down. His tragic end came on a ship taking him from India to China where he was going to make money to feed his family. He died on the voyage, his body sewn up in a shroud, the last stitch through his nose to make sure he was dead, and cast into the South China Sea.
None of this seemed likely when James Augustus Hicky (who may have been born in Dublin – Andrew Otis is not sure) went to India in 1773. India then was being conquered by the East India Company in the greatest heist in corporate history, when company servants made an estimated £15 million in “presents” between 1757 and 1784 (£1.9 billion in today’s money). Hicky, despite having no qualifications, had worked as a surgeon’s mate on a ship. He arrived in Calcutta dreaming of such riches.
But after seven years he had incurred debt which landed him in jail and he decided to publish the weekly Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, Asia’s first newspaper. Readers loved his lighthearted satirical style and campaigns to improve Calcutta’s dreadful roads and sanitation. His problems came when he took on Warren Hastings, governor-general of India, and Sir Elijah Impey, the chief justice and Hastings’ friend.
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White soldiers, fighting the company’s wars, wrote to Hicky about how, unlike their officers, they had not only not shared India’s riches but not been paid for months. Armed with this ammunition, he accused Hastings of corruption and even suggested Hastings suffered from erectile dysfunction. The resulting criminal libel actions, presided over by Impey, saw Hicky imprisoned and ruined.
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However, Hicky’s campaigns resonated in London. Impey and Hastings were tried in parliament, with Edmund Burke leading the prosecution. Both were acquitted but Hastings’ trial was an 18th-century sensation, lasting eight years. Burke’s charges that he had “subverted” India’s laws, rights and liberties and “whose country he has laid waste and desolate”, set the moral standards for British rule in India.
Ironically, Hicky thought Indians were noble savages while Hastings valued Indian laws and customs.
