The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  In the first half of the nineteenth century there was considerable variation around the ocean. In some areas, such as in the Gulf and off southern Arabia, local ships did well. In other areas a pronounced dualism developed at this time, and this is before the major impact of steam ships. British sailing ships dominated long-distance trade,

  Figure 4 The Honourable East India Company's iron war steamer, the Ship Nemesis, scudding before a heavy gale off the Cape of Good Hope on her passage from England to China. Produced by W.J. Leatham (artist) and R.G. Reeve (engraver), 26 October 1841. © National Maritime Museum, London

  and also high-value shorter distances. They were advantaged by their access to modern navigation techniques, and also by the way the greatest traders, the EIC and the private European traders, used only European-type ships owned by Europeans. All this was writ large once steam came in.

  We have noticed several times that European ships had certain advantages over local craft. In the sixteenth century they were sturdier, held together with nails so that they could survive Atlantic storms. This also meant they could carry cannon. Increasingly local shippers preferred to use European ships, partly as they were technologically superior, partly as they were less vulnerable to pirates. The improvements in navigation also helped, as did experiments from the 1760s with copper sheathing over the hulls, which countered the effects of tropical parasites. But it was the use of steam power to drive the ships which was the really important, qualitative, innovation.

  Steam engines were the driving force behind the process of industrialisation in England. First used to pump water, and then to drive machinery, in the early part of the nineteenth century they were used to provide locomotion, first on land and then at sea. Steam assisted ships developed early in the century, though regular steamer passages across the Atlantic began only in 1838.33 The very first steamboat in India was a small pleasure craft built for the Nawab of Oudh in 1819, and indeed the first regular use of steamers in India was on the Ganga river. In 1821–22 the British built two steam tugs to tow ships to Kolkata, and they used primitive gunboats, steam driven shallow draft vessels, in the first Burma War of 1824–26. From 1828 iron clad steam vessels were used on the Ganga to tow strings of accommodation boats, and barges with freight. They provided an early illustration of the superiority of steam, for they towed their barges the 780 miles from Kolkata to Allahabad in three weeks, instead of the three months taken by country boats.34 Yet there were problems also. They were very expensive to run, and had difficulty getting up to Allahabad, let alone any further, due to variable shoals in the river. In 1837 the stately Lord Auckland was Governor General. He and his sisters were towed up the Ganga with a vast entourage in a string of 'flats', or large barges. However, there were constant problems with the shallow water, so that the steamer kept running aground even though this was October when the river should have been quite high.35 Steamers on rivers were of no use in the south, where there are no rivers navigable for any distance, and on the other great river of the north, the Indus, there were other problems. Essentially there was a technological trap, in that steamers powerful enough to cope with the strong currents were too heavy to get over the shoals in the river. The advent of railways soon made these river steamers redundant. Nevertheless, they did illustrate a wider facet, which is steam as western dominance writ large. A British passenger on a Ganga steamer in a novel of 1852 said that there was an 'inconceivable separation... between us few English, silently making a servant of the Ganges with our steam-engine and paddle-boats, and those Asiatics with shouts and screams worshipping the same river.'36

  On the high seas the first steamer to be seen in Mumbai arrived in 1820, in Kolkata in 1823, and in Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya in 1825. The first steam-assisted ship to reach India from England seems to have been a small paddle steamer which arrived in Kolkata from Falmouth in 1825 after a passage of 113 days. Next year the new Governor General, Lord Bentinck, arrived in a steam boat. A steam boat was used in the first opium war in 1840, and in the same year the famous P&O Company was reorganised and two years later started regular sailings linking Suez, Aden, Ceylon, Chennai and Kolkata. In 1852 this company took over from the EIC the Suez–Mumbai route, one which became its most famous and most profitable. In this same year a regular service to far away Sydney was begun.

  These early steamers were not the efficient behemoths of the late nineteenth century. They were small, dirty, inefficient and expensive. Many of them still used sail when the winds were favourable, relying on steam only in cases of necessity. In 1867 Captain Sulivan was in the Royal Navy sloop Daphne. The ship struck a gale as it entered the Indian Ocean past the Cape of Good Hope. An officer fell overboard, but the ship was unable to go back to pick him up, as even though 'the fires were lighted with the view of using steam if possible, but it could not be up for nearly two hours.'37

  The early steamers with single combustion engines required vast amounts of coal. They carried as much as they could, but this meant that they were limited to carrying only mail and passengers, there being no room for freight. In 1856 Ida Pfeiffer went from the Cape to Mauritius in a new steamer, of 150 horse power. It cost a massive £500 a month to run, not counting the cost of coal, which was very considerable. The ship gobbled up more than a ton every hour, yet coal cost £2/10s a ton at the Cape.38 This steamer was relatively efficient, for some of the early steamers used up to 50 tons of coal a day. The consequence was frequent stops at places on the way – Cape Town, Aden, Galle – to pick up coal. In the 1850s Galle imported 50,000 tons of coal a year, most of it coming from far-away Cardiff. In these early days much of the coal was taken to these depots strung around the Indian Ocean in sailing ships, thereby demonstrating that this was still an age where steam and sail were reciprocal and indeed needed each other. In 1857 only one-third of all the ships which called at Sri Lanka were steam driven, and these carried only mail and passengers.39

  Nevertheless, even at this time steam did offer predicability and faster and cheaper passages. Even in the 1850s one could travel from England to Mumbai, going overland through Egypt to reach Suez, for as little as £105, while the Cape route cost £1,000, and the Egypt route with sailing ships £350.40 Two factors acted to ensure the triumph of steam: government assistance, and further technological innovation. We will look at the matter of subsidies first.

  Why did an ostensibly laissez-faire English government provide subsidies? Sir Charles Wood, the Secretary of State for India in 1866, put it in a nutshell: 'Increased postal communications with India implies increased relations with that country, increased commerce, increased investment of English capital, increased settlement of energetic middle-class Englishmen; and from all these sources, the wealth and prosperity of England... are greatly increased.'41

  Britain already had naval dominance in the Indian Ocean after 1815. As the empire expanded over the century, it was essential to have means of regular communications between its different parts, so that trade could flourish, security be enhanced, and troops and war material be moved as needed. The device used to ensure this was mail contracts. British steamship lines, pre-eminently P&O, were given large subsidies to carry mail from one British colonial port to another. This in turn ensured the existence of a large merchant marine. The ramifications are obvious. A large merchant marine meant a reserve army of trained seamen who could be used in naval ships in time of war. Indeed, the merchant ships themselves could act as troop carriers. Troops from one part of the empire could be moved to conquer another area. The British shipbuilding industry was in effect subsidised at one remove.

  The actual subsidies were paid by the Admiralty, and later the Post Office. The first was to the EIC in 1835 to provide a mail service between Suez and India. The P&O line was formed in 1840, and immediately got a contract to take mail to Egypt. Later it got subsidies for the longest blue water routes in the Indian Ocean. The subsidies even continued after steamships became more efficient and able to carry cargo at a profit. Later in t
he century they were still there, now being used to ward off competition from German, French and Dutch quasi-government lines.

  Very large sums were involved. Between 1840 and 1867 the contracts yielded £4.5 million, and £6 million between 1868 and 1890. Overall the support given by the British government was about 25 per cent of the total capital. For the P&O line in the period 1840–80 the subsidy made up 29 per cent of operating costs, and 28.5 per cent of total receipts. These were then reduced, so between 1880 and 1914 the respective proportions were 18.8 per cent and 15.7 per cent. Even later, in the early twentieth century when subsidies had been reduced, P&O still got a grant for the India, China and Australia mails of £330,000. The P&O line also did well out of carrying bullion: in a good year over £200,000.42 Another lucrative low-volume, high-value cargo up to 1870 was opium, which had to be carried secretly to avoid complaints from moralists. Subsidies to P&O continued long after other British lines had been left to stand on their own and face competition. This was because it served the heartland of the empire, the fulcrum of the Indian Ocean, India, and so for prestige reasons had to be helped well into the twentieth century.

  P&O was joined in the commanding heights of long-distance prestige routes across the Indian Ocean by the French competitor Messageries Imperiales, which also operated on more local routes, as also did the Dutch entrant, KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij). These rivals had to face competition on the high seas from P&O, and on local routes from the very successful British India Steam Navigation Company (BI), which essentially operated branch lines and smaller local routes feeding into P&O. Its steamers plied between islands, and up and down rivers, as well as on the coasts of the high seas. It was controlled by Scottish interests led by William Mackinnon.

  BI was therefore an Indian variant of the predominant pattern of steamshipping enterprise in the Indian Ocean during the 1850s and 1860s, in which guaranteed income from the carriage of mails and the regularity of scheduled services demanded by postal contracts supplied the financial and operational underpinnings of the liner trades.

  The close government–commercial nexus was well seen in the way that when BI first started sailing from Mumbai to Basra in the late 1860s, their agent in Basra was also the official British government representative there. Their steamers were routinely used by the Indian government to transport troops; nine were used to take troops to Abyssinian in 1867–68. Like P&O, its subsidies from government were what kept it going. Between 1864 and 1870 the firm was, if one subtracts the mail subsidies, profitable in only one year.43

  In the Gulf British interests had been dominant since the defeat of the Qawasim 'pirates' in 1819. When a mail subsidy for this area was opened for tenders in 1862, two Indian-owned firms were unsuccessful: BI won, at least in part as it was British, and so could be better relied on to serve wider imperial interests. BI steamers connected Mumbai with Muscat, Bandar Abbas, Bushire, Bahrain later, and Basra. There was even a Basra Club, for British expatriates. Here BI ships linked with those of another British owned concern, the Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company, which went upriver from Basra to Baghdad.44

  Other Europeans were forced to operate in the interstices of the British system. KPM, founded in 1888, was explicitly designed to challenge British dominance It did very well in Indonesia, even to the extent of ousting Singapore as the main hub for local, but not long-distance, trade. This also was very much a Tool of Empire. It helped extend Dutch authority over the remote islands of Indonesia, transported troops, and in return was heavily subsidised by the Dutch government. Its lines extended to China and Japan, to Bengal, Australia and Thailand.

  BI was always closely tied to government, and indeed it has been claimed that Mackinnon, its driving force until his death in 1893, was as important in the expansion of the empire in East Africa as were the political and military leaders. He was a dominant figure not only in BI but also in the colony-promoting Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). His groups had 108 ships in 1882. He was intricately involved with the career of Sir Bartle Frere. Frere, first as a member of the viceroy's council, and then as Governor of Mumbai in the 1860s, provided crucial support as BI established itself in the Arabian Sea, and, in a quite modern way, Frere and his family and friends also invested in BI. He also had close ties with J.W. Kaye, the Secretary of the Political and Secret Department at the India Office. On one occasion Kaye got a box of grouse and a chest of tea from Mackinnon. He visited the magnate's Scottish estate, and Mackinnon acted as co-security on a loan for Kaye. In return Kaye helped Mackinnon and his various companies win government contracts and receive other government favours. Another client, Euan-Smith, was a member of the Frere mission of 1872–73. He advised Mackinnon and was lent money in return. An English consul in Zanzibar, John Kirk, retired from the Foreign Office in 1887 and became a director of IBEAC. BI was also successful in getting mail contracts from the Portuguese to link the remnants of their empire. However, by the 1880s BI was faced with competition from German lines in East Africa, and also from the French Messageries Maritimes, which got a subsidy of about £60,000 a year to compete with BI on the Aden–Zanzibar route, and also on that going Aden–Karachi–Mumbai.45

  If it was hard for other Europeans to compete with these British lines, it was nigh impossible for local financiers. We noted that two Indian firms tendered unsuccessfully to take mail to the Gulf. In all cases, local people did not have access to the higher echelons of government which people like Mackinnon had and used so ruthlessly. From the 1880s Japan imitated the west and established a similarly close nexus between government and industry: this was not possible for European colonies. The career of the Bombay and Persia Steam Navigation Company, founded by a group of Mumbai Muslims in 1877 to service the hajj trade, is instructive here. One consequence was that the traditional sailing ships lost this route too, the only long-distance one left to them. This line was later renamed the Mogul Line, and in 1913 came under British ownership and effectively was controlled by BI. So also later, when the Scindia Line in India, well financed and run, was, thanks to pressure from BI, restricted to coastal trade.46 The dominance of the established lines, especially the British ones, was further reinforced by the Conference system, essentially a cartel which was prepared to cut rates mercilessly to send any outsider bankrupt. An example was a firm established in 1884 in Western Australia to challenge the two dominant lines sailing to this new colony.

  A freight war ensued, with rates per ton going from 40/- down to 10/-. Finally the upstart caved in and joined the conference: predictably, rates then went up again. Assam tea planters at about this time similarly failed to challenge the conference system.47

  Government help, then, was one reason for the triumph of steam in the second half of the nineteenth century. The other one was important technological innovations, which made steam ships much more efficient. From 1838 the screw propeller began to supersede paddle wheels and after 1850 iron replaced wood in the construction of the ships. The most important breakthrough was the development of the compound steam engine in the 1860s, which used the same steam twice, thus cutting down on the amount of coal needed. These engines also could sustain much higher pounds per square inch pressure. Innovation continued: steel began to replace iron in the late 1870s, and by the 1890s the triple expansion engine, which worked at 200 p.s.i., was being used. Early in the next century steam turbine engines and diesel engines appeared, making another important break. The size of the steamers consequently rose: in 1867 the P&O ship Sumatra was 2,022 GRT, but by 1911 the Maloja was a monster of 12,340.48

  One important result of these developments was that less coal was needed. In the early days steamers hopped from one coaling station to another, but these stops progressively became less frequent. In 1884 a passenger described how his steamer took on coal at Port Said, and then sailed non-stop to Western Australia; though the ship sailed less well as the voyage progressed, for the coal had acted as ballast.49 The steamers could now profitably car
ry cargo as well as mail and people. Regular cargo voyages began in the ocean in 1866. As we will see, this did not apply to bulk cargoes for some time yet, but most other cargo was carried on the predictable and reliable steam ships. One other innovative helped here, of benefit especially to the settlement colonies of South Africa and Australasia. This was refrigeration. In 1880 the first cargo of frozen Australian mutton was landed in London in prime condition. Soon after, butter and fruit were taken too.50

  The greatest advantage of the modern steamers was that they were able, to a very large extent, to conquer nature. They promised regular passages, unaffected by the monsoons which for so many millennia had acted as a strait jacket on Indian Ocean sailing. True that this took a while to achieve. In the early days of steam, in the late 1840s, P&O promised, on pain of being fined, to do the Suez to Kolkata voyage in 523 hours, and the return one in 543. However, during the monsoons of May to July 120 hours had to be added. But soon the monsoon became irrelevant. On the run to Australia, P&O ships left London every other Friday in 1913, that is with the Suez Canal being used. The voyage to Fremantle was precisely 32 days, and to Sydney 41. One could avoid the Bay of Biscay and go to Marseilles by train. The train left London at 11.00 a.m. on Thursday, got to Marseilles at exactly 7.10 a.m. on Friday, and the boat sailed at 10.00 a.m. BI ships were soon able to ignore the dreaded southwest monsoon off the west coast of India. From 1863 the line operated a routine service from Kolkata to Mumbai. Ships left both ports on the 1st and 15th of each month, and called at fourteen regular ports, and others by request, during the three-week journey.51 One much noted consequence of this routine and efficiency was the way in which it made the voyage from the metropole to India much easier. Consequently English women could join their husbands in India, go home for holidays, and send their children back to school in England. It is claimed that this reduced any chance that the English rulers of India would be indigenised in the way previous rulers from outside had been, for a return home was now easy.