“Lovely indeed is the fair island of Nookahiva,” wrote Thomas Machell, “and lovelier still the dark daughters of that sea-girt isle.” He would certainly have known. In 1844, the Yorkshire teenager sailed round Cape Horn on a ship bound for the largest of the Polynesian Marquesas Islands. As soon as the vessel, which was laden with a new wonder-fertiliser guano (essentially birdshit), reached land, Machell was sexually initiated by the daughter of a cannibal chief. His racy journal, which is full of such exploits, gives a thrilling account of how he then avoided the murderous wrath of his lover’s father.

Jenny Balfour Paul first came across the journals of this midshipman and indigo-planter in 1999, while attending a meeting at the British Library. A librarian thought Balfour Paul, a world authority on indigo, would find Machell fascinating. But the librarian had made a mistake. “I just didn’t want to know,” she says. “I’d had enough of indigo. The last thing I wanted to do was read seven volumes of journals.”

Indigo, the world’s only natural blue dye, is made from certain types of plant; in India, indigofera is used. Machell worked in Bengal, where the dye was made by adding oxygen to vast vats full of green indigofera leaves. The resultant liquid was dried into hard blocks, a process Machell oversaw. Balfour Paul came round to the long-dead Englishman when she saw, in one of his journals, a watercolour entitled Indigo Planters After Tiffin. It showed Machell and his French boss, feet on table, smoking pipes in white linen suits at their plantation.

Indigo planters After Tiffin by Thomas Machell. Photograph: British Library

“Notice anything?” she asks me, as we look at a reproduction of it in her new book Deeper Than Indigo: Tracing Thomas Machell, Forgotten Explorer. “It’s from the perspective of the punkawallah.” What she saw in this picture, painted from the point of view of the man who operated the fan, was that Machell was not one of those yawnsome little Englanders gone to India to make money, exterminate the wildlife, exploit the natives and then retire to the home counties with their provincial worldview intact. “The watercolour shows, I now realise, what I intuitively liked about him: he was always observing, always noticing what other people were doing. He was empathetic.”

Balfour Paul – a weaver, lecturer, artist, traveller and writer – found herself entranced by this solitary adventurer, who became her obsession for 15 years. “AN Wilson says the book is a metaphysical love story and, although I’m resistant to that idea, he may have a point.” This globe-trotting Victorian loner, she adds, had an infirmity he was too ashamed to name. “I suspect he had some kind of lameness, which might explain why he never married and why he never fitted in.”

Her initial idea was to edit the journals of the man she had so fallen for, and publish them with an introduction and annotations. That would have been a good book since Machell, Zelig-like, bore witness to leading events of the day. In 1841, on his first voyage from England, he sailed around the Cape of Good Hope on a ship carrying troops to the first of Britain’s shameful opium wars against China. “My chief knowledge of civilised life,” he wrote, after giving a thrilling eye-witness account of a battle, “consisted in handling the murderous weapons with which our civilised troops had murdered whole hosts of flying Tartars and Chinese.” On his second voyage, he got off with the cannibal’s daughter.



Before he died, aged 39, Machell worked in indigo in Bengal, coffee in Kerala and on a bullock train in central India. He learned the local languages, grew a monumental beard, became swarthy and, at one point, passed himself off jokingly as Sheikh Abdullah el Hajji. But throughout, Machell was the outsider: aboard ship, he was nicknamed Smike, after the gentle, simple, runaway servant boy from Nicholas Nickleby. “It helped that he was an outsider,” says Balfour Paul. “It’s what makes his journals so richly observed.”



But he remains a true Victorian in one sense. Machell writes, Darwin-like, about skinning and stuffing the animals he captured and planned to send home to be put on display in a museum at his father’s Yorkshire rectory. There’s a compelling account of his struggle onboard ship with a hooded cobra. “I did not wish to spoil him by giving him a coup de grace, so I got him into a bottle alive and corked him down much to his surprise and here he is on the table before me.”

A page from Machell’s journal, including a sketch of dhow in Muscat. Photograph: British Library

But ultimately that book wouldn’t do. Balfour Paul had a better idea. She decided to write a book intertwining her own travels with his. They were, she realised, kindred spirits. Both fled secure middle-class England in search of Indian adventures. Teenage Machell sailed on a three-master called the Worcester, bound for Calcutta. Nearly 130 years later, public schoolgirl and English literature graduate Balfour Paul drove to India in a Land Rover with other like-minded hippies she’d met in the underground car park at Paddington station. She would thread her fugitive life story with his, writing about the places they had both visited. Then she would pay homage to this forgotten man by retracing his travels across Arabia, Polynesia, Afghanistan, Bengal, even Patagonia, visiting his birthplace in Beverley, Yorkshire, and the ancient Machell ancestral seat of Crackenthorpe Hall, Cumbria.

But she couldn’t always follow where Machell led. In 2008, she sailed from Southampton to Kolkata on the last freighter from England to India to accept passengers. But when the ship docked at Jeddah, a city Thomas had visited a century and a half earlier, the captain told her she would not be able to go ashore. “I had no male escort to take me around the city, he said. That still makes me furious.”

Thomas Machell’s self portrait. Photograph: British Library

Balfour Paul had made that slow journey in 2008 alone, following the death of her husband after 34 years of marriage. “There’s an Arabic saying, ‘Your soul cannot travel faster than the speed of a trotting camel.’ I’m sure Thomas would have agreed.” During those long weeks on the freighter, she kept her own journal (which forms part of Deeper Than Indigo), confiding in Machell rather as he did to his father through his journals. Was she seeking solace after her husband’s death? “In part. I’d had a wonderful marriage. All my adult life really was with Glencairn.”

She met poet and diplomat Glencairn Balfour Paul in 1974, after replying to a small ad in the Times: “Interesting job in warm agreeable country. Applicant must be a graduate with wide interests and a driving licence.” The job was to be social secretary to our man in Amman (ie the Jordanian ambassador) who had recently been widowed. Despite the age gap (she was in her early 20s, he in his mid-50s), they were soon married. “After his death, I was lost for a while. I holed up at my home in Devon. So heading off as a solitary woman on the last freighter felt right.”

But then her book takes an unexpected turn. During a trip to India, she met a Jungian psychotherapist specialising in past-life regressions. Rashna Imhasly-Gandhy suggested that Balfour Paul, rather than being in love with Machell, was actually his reincarnation. She agreed to be regressed and her book describes the results. In one session, she sobs and shakes as she “experiences” the 1857 Sepoy rebellion against British rule, which Machell had witnessed. In others, she reports moments from his childhood in Yorkshire and his adulthood in Bengal as if she were him.

But these transcendental passages serve the book’s narrative well, since they can be read as her imaginative projections of what Machell may have written in the last two volumes of his journals – volumes that have never been found, if indeed they were ever written. Mingling fact and fiction was, however, too much for some publishers. “They weren’t sure where the book would go on the shelves.” This is not a good enough reason for declining such a wonderful book.



So is she Machell reincarnated? She giggles. “I don’t even know if I believe in reincarnation. It may all be nonsense.”

In 2003, Balfour Paul made a pilgrimage to Machell’s grave in the company of her daughter Finella. In the neglected Raj cemetery in Narsinghpur, which his remains now share with pigs, cows and dogs, she sat on his tomb and cried. Yet she still didn’t quite know what the man looked like. Yes, he had whimsically sketched himself for the journal at the barber’s, on a bird-shoot in Bengal, and from the perspective of the punkawallah, but always in profile – as if he had something to hide.

The only known photograph of Machell, in Jabalpur, 1862. Photograph: British Library

Then, in May 2010, another man approached her as she worked in the British Library. This librarian was carrying a box of photographs that had been removed from Machell’s journals in the 1990s. In it, she found a portrait of a seated man clutching a walking stick, looking world-weary. It was taken in Jabalpur in 1862, the last year of Machell’s life.

“Dear Thomas,” writes Balfour Paul on the last page of her book, opposite that picture. “I am in the library where I have connected with you many times over the last decade. But I am looking for the first time at the single existing photograph of you. It is faded and unlabelled, and I am the only person who would recognise it as you. Buddhists describe the body as the guesthouse and the person’s mind, or spirit, as the guest. You feel more complete now I can see your guesthouse just before you, its guest, departed.”

• Deeper Than Indigo, published by Medina, is out now.