Henry Jackson's male line is traced back to Carlisle near the border of Scotland in early 1600's. His great great grandfather settled in Yorktown, Virginia where Henry's great great grandfather father was born. He later moved to Kingston, Jamaica where Henry's grandfather, later Sir John Jackson, Baronet, was born in December 1763. In 1797 he married Charlotte Gorham of Placentia, Newfoundland, daughter of General Gorham Spry of Nova Scotia and niece of the governor of Barbados. Henry's father John, ,the author's great grandfather) was the second of their six children. The oldest son, Keith Alexander, inherited the title. For the sake of clarity the older John will be addressed in this book as Sir John.
Sir John went to Eton College at the age of fourteen. He was elected M.P. for Dover in 1803 and director of the British East India Company in 1807. He became Baronet in 1815 and was also a ship owner and Navy agent. As a director of the East India Company he was able to secure his son John a good position with the company. John was sent to Macau on the Chinese coast to learn the tea trade. After a few years he was given the task of establishing tea and coffee plantations in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) the East India Company. While in Macau he met and perhaps married a Portuguese woman, Hermanajilda Paisley. There is no surviving record of a legal marriage, perhaps because the church later burnt down, and little is known of her. She bore four children, Charles (1822) Charlotte (1824) Catherine (1827) and Henry (1830). According to a hand written passenger list John (and presumably Hermanajilda) embarked on the 'Orwell' in Macau on 28th Feb 1829 with two sons and one daughter, (I think this should read one son and two daughters) and landed at (illegible), twenty days sail from Macau on March 20th. Where ever they landed it may have been there that Hermanajilda died in giving birth to Henry, as interpolated by hand at a later date on the same passenger list.
John's son Henry, who survived his mother's death in childbirth, attended York Collegiate School from the age of eleven, and joined the Indian navy at the tender age of fifteen. Nowadays with our concern to protect young people from the realities of life it does seem rather harsh to launch a boy of fifteen into a career where he could be far from home in rigorous conditions for long periods of time. A career whose traditions, according to Winston Churchill, were "rum, sodomy and the lash" and where the tradition of "cabin boy" was still an essential adjunct to officers and captains who spent long periods at sea. Henry's photo as a young officer shows him to have been an exceedingly handsome young man of great promise, which was richly fulfilled in later life. It was the first sight of this picture which decided me to write this book.
One wonders that such winsome looks could be combined with such steadfast courage, resolution and boldness as he was to reveal in and
out of his profession, and that his manly virtues were so happily combined with the sensitivity of an artist. Could it be that Hermanajilda, who died in giving birth to this her fourth child, in her heart's agony and anguish with her dying breath bequeathed to him in full measure her Portuguese grace and beauty, as her desperate and loving gift to this new-born orphan son to whom she would never give suck. None of Henry's six sons displays this remarkable androgynous Iberian comeliness as revealed in this photo of him, a young man resplendent in gold-braided uniform.
"... a man in hue all hues in his controlling
which steals men's hearts and women's souls amazeth"
Beauty is eternal but the possession of it is painfully fleeting, and the bearer of youthful beauty is disfranchised by the ravages of time long before life's brief candle is snuffed out. Youthful beauty requires a degree of expectant innocence which cannot long endure the rude onslaughts of reality.
The photo of Henry in more mature years shows his youthful bloom traded for the sterner features of his ripened manhood, though barely concealing the former perfection of his youth. His mother's name Hermanajilda is said to be of Visigoth origin, a Germanic tribe who settled in the Iberian Peninsula in the 5th to 8th centuries A.D. The first part of the name is obviously Visigothic, but remembering that in Iberia the letter
'J' is pronounced as our 'H' the latter part would have been pronounced 'Hilda'. Hermanajilda's first son Charles was born 1823 and would have been 7 years old when his mother died. No doubt he would have remembered her well, and he honoured her memory by giving all three of his daughters the second name Hermanajilda. One of them had both mother's first names - Maria Hermanajilda. Henry named one daughter Hilda and one son bore Hermanajilda's surname Paisley.
It does seem strange that none of my family ever heard of John's first marriage until a couple of years ago and I assume my father knew nothing about it either. The first report I heard was that John had taken an Asian boy home from Macau and I assumed some kind relationship illicit or otherwise. Then I came across a variety of stories from various sources and gradually tracked down the reality. There does seem to be some kind of mystery, and the fact that no record of marriage with Hermanajilda can be found perhaps explains it. My father would have been ten years old when his father Murray went to Henry's funeral in Wellington and one would expect that he would know about it. Perhaps he was not told.
On 8th March 1832 John married Honoria Anna Maria Daniell, daughter of James Daniell of the East India Company's China Service. I have here a book kindly given me by Nigel Thorp - a beautiful leather-bound miniature containing two novels in French language by Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre. It is inscribed:
"to Honoria Jackson Dover 16th March 1832
From her beloved
husband"
which is just eight days after their marriage so presumably they honeymooned in Dover.
I have also a large Bible in Gothic German script, bought in Aachen 1848, with the name John Jackson inscribed therein. It later came into the possession of my grandfather Murray James Hamilton Jackson (Henry's younger half-brother) and in 1965 to me. With John and Honoria being conversant with German and French it is perhaps not surprising that Henry became a notable linguist.
Honoria and the children spent much of the time in London with her parents, as John travelled back and forth to India and Ceylon on company business. John returned to London in the 1850s to retire and spend time with his family. It appears that he did not settle well in England and after the death of his daughter Louise of pneumonia he looked around for some country with a more benign climate to live in. The choice fell on New Zealand. John and his wife Honoria with the younger members of their family arrived in Wellington in January 1857.
I may remark here that three of the children of John's second marriage bore the same names as those of his first marriage and what is more, in the same order. Only Henry's name was not repeated. The first two boys of the second marriage, Keith Robert and Keith John, both bore the same name as John's older brother Keith who died in Heidelberg at the age of 45. It would seem clear from the naming of the children that John was definitely the head of the family, and that he was a man of strong loyalties.
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