Yet we must not give a picture of total efficiency, with sea passages being as routine, sterile, and boring as those on a modern cruise ship. Colin MacKenzie was on SS Merkara in 1890. Typically even for this time, the ship had some sails also. After a dreary and hot passage through the Suez Canal they took on coal at Aden, so much that in order for them to be able to go direct to Batavia some of it was piled up on the deck at first.52 His ship, and many others, carried livestock which was slaughtered as needed to meet the British propensity for large meat meals. Royal Navy ships also did this. In 1850 a 36-gun ship cruising off the African coast to catch slave ships took on twenty or thirty bullocks, sheep, pigs and so on in Zanzibar, 'which made our main deck appear more like a farm-yard than a battery' At one time they had 'as many as fifty bullocks between the guns on the main deck, besides sheep &c.'53 Even the stately P&O ships had a barnyard aspect to them, for fodder had to be carried for the animals, and passengers woke to the crowing of cocks, cackle of geese, bleating of sheep, squealing of pigs, and lowing of cows. The steamers were dirty ships, belching out smoke and cinders. If the wind was a following one, the smoke went straight up and then dropped smut and cinders on the deck: the only relief was for the captain to turn the boat around for a time and get a good, sweeping through-draught.54 Loading the coal was a rather premodern activity, as Tompsitt found in Port Said in 1884. She wrote, in Orientalist vein,
I went to see the men bringing in the coals. I hardly know how to describe them unless I say they looked like imps of the old gentleman. They were black men, and they seemed to have only a sack on; naked legs, feet, and arms, and covered with coal dust. They brought the coals from the barge to the ship over a steep plank in rather small baskets, and they hurried to and fro and made such a dust that they were in a perfect cloud, yet they were evidently in high glee, judging by the way they skipped over the planks singing, laughing, and making as much noise as they could; if they had slipped, they would have fallen in the water. I thought it a good example of contentment.55
The scenes on the feeder routes in the Indian Ocean were even less sanitised. George Curzon wrote, as usual vividly, as usual in Orientalist tones, of the Gulf steamers:
The fore deck of a Gulf steamer presents one of the most curious spectacles that can be imagined . . . men lying, sitting, squatting, singing, chattering, cooking, eating, sleeping; and all in the midst of a piled labyrinth of quilts, and carpets, and boxes, of sailcloths and ropes, of sheep, and birds in cages, and fowls in coops, of trays, and samovars, and cooking-pots, of greasy donkey-engines and clanking chains – surely a more curious study in polyglot or polychrome could not well be conceived.56
Curzon is describing 'Asians' using a western means of transport, and this introduces the matter of what was happening to local craft as the steamers expanded. What eventuated was a pronounced dualism. We noted how it was near-impossible for locals to compete in the commanding heights of steam transport, but sailing ships for a time were able to continue on coastal routes. They carried some goods which were unloaded in the major ports onto the steamers, but they also carried low-value goods up and down the coasts and rivers. However, late in the century their role was increasingly undermined by tramp steamers, European owned and tramping from one port to another rather like the pedlars of previous eras. The characteristic dualism was well seen in the Gulf around 1900. Iraqi dates for America, Australia and East Africa were taken in steamers from Basra, while those for southern Arabia went in dhows. Indian luxury imports to the Gulf, such as textiles, arrived in steamers, but bulk goods like tiles and timber in dhows.57 In Indonesia proa or prau had, and still have, some role. In 1910 the average carrying capacity of a steamer was 3,200 cubic metres, of a native rigged proa 28 cubic metres. Steamers carried 90 per cent of total cargo, yet even so proas were still viable, feeding in to steamer routes.58 So also in East Africa, where dhows went to minor ports that steamers could not or did not visit, such as Lamu, Shihr, Mukalla. The mangrove trade to the Hadhramaut, Kuwait and Oman, a very important one, was for long carried in dhows. Alan Villiers left a vivid account of just such a voyage. Similarly, dhows brought both goods and passengers to large ports like Mombasa, where they were trans-shipped to steamers. Indeed, it could be that steamers created new routes, and markets, and that the overall expansion of trade which we noted earlier was of benefit to traditional craft as well as steamers, or at least that the crumbs left to them meant that they continued, and still continue, to have some role.
On the high seas it was huge barques carrying bulk cargoes which held out for a time, and these were owned by Europeans. The wool trade from Australia to England via the Cape or Cape Horn was done in sail to the end of the nineteenth century, but it collapsed soon after and was replaced by steam. These were not the more famous clipper ships which carried tea from China. Villiers scorned these as 'lightly loaded kite-filled clippers', while of the great four-masted barques sailing via Cape Horn he wrote, 'Among man's working creations for the carriage of his goods, they alone were supremely beautiful.'59 Eric Newby left a vivid account of the end of this era in 1938–39. He was in a four-masted barque owned by Gustav Erikson of Finland, who during the depression bought these great ships cheap, perhaps only about £4,000 each, and for a time could make a profit from them thanks in part to very small crews, and these abysmally treated. On Newby's ship, the Moshulu, the main mast was 200 feet high, and it was 5,300 tons dead weight. It is a sad sign of the transition that when the ship reached the Spencer Gulf to take on a cargo of wheat for Europe, they found that steamers had already taken all the grain available for export.60
The end of sail was lamented by men like Newby and Villiers, and earlier by Joseph Conrad. He thought that steamers constituted 'a disdainful ignoring of the sea'.61 In 1922 Villiers served on a steamer. He hated it. Apart from the fact that this was an Australian ship and so heavily unionised, which he did not appreciate, he thought the ship looked 'a clumsy lump'. The work was boring and repetitive, so that being a seaman on it was 'merely another form of labouring'.62
Villiers was quite right. The modern age had altered profoundly the role of men working on ships. This went back before the age of steam. In the late eighteenth century on British ships the regime became more organised and bureaucratic. This applied particularly to the 'native' crew, known as lascars. The Asiatic Articles passed by the British Parliament aimed to provide cheap labour on British ships but ensure that the lascars could not settle in England. The result was that lascar wages ended up as low as one-fifth of those of English seamen. They were recruited for a set number of years, rather than for the duration of a voyage. The results for the owners were excellent. The lascars could not desert. They were considered to be intrinsically preferable, as they did not drink, and it seemed obvious that, being orientals, they were much better at working in the incredibly hot engine rooms of the steamers.63 Mark Twain left a somewhat idealised depiction of them. He left Sydney on the P&O ship Oceana in December 1895 bound for Sri Lanka.
A lascar crew mans this ship – the first I have seen. White cotton petticoat and pants; barefoot; red shawl for belt; straw cap, brimless, on head, with red scarf wound around it; complexion a rich deep brown; short straight black hair; whiskers fine and silky; lustrous and intensely black. Mild, good faces; willing and obedient people; capable too; but are said to go into hopeless panics when there is danger. They are from Bombay and the coast thereabouts.64 On this and other ships there was a strict colour line determining who worked where.
Steam meant that all work on board ship, apart from engineers and deck officers, was essentially deskilled. Previously there had been craft-type relations on board, with a master, a servant, an apprentice and so on, and sometimes they were paid in kind, or by a concession allowing them to load some cargo on their own account. Now men were paid wages and subject to strict discipline. This was no longer a community with collegial labour relations; now they were hierarchical. There no longer was the freedom, and the mystique, of sail
ors who climbed the main mast in a storm off the Cape. So also with the rest of the maritime work force. We noted the unskilled Egyptians loading coal in Port Said, and this sort of backbreaking dirty and dangerous work was replicated all around the ocean. Men loaded coal, chipped rust off decks, shovelled coal in the bowels of the ship, and ferried cargo on and off ships manually.
This is a convenient place to present some random data on speeds at sea, before going on to the other two technological matters, the Suez Canal and ports. It will be remembered from the previous chapter than a good speed for a sailing ship was up to 200 km a day (see pages 186–7). In the nineteenth century ships in the Great Southern Ocean, scooting along before the westerlies, could achieve over 500 km a day.65 Tim Severin's replica dhow usually made about 140 km a day. The huge barques carrying bulk cargoes from Australia to Europe went very fast in the Great Southern Ocean and elsewhere, partly to save costs and partly as they were racing each other to get to Europe first. One of them in the southern Indian Ocean covered, very dangerously, 126 miles (225 km) in eight hours, the equivalent then of 675 km in a day.66 Villiers wrote that one could expect to do about 470 km a day between the Cape and Australia, about the same speed as the great VOC ships in the seventeenth century. Modern specialist yachts do much better. In late 2001 one of the boats in the Volvo Round the World race in the southern ocean set a record by covering 640 nautical miles (1150 km) in one day of very heavy sailing. This is an average of 26.6 knots. The fastest sailing vessel on record was a trifoiler which in 1993 reached 46.5 knots over a 5,000 metre course.
These however are exceptional speeds. Further north, in the monsoon zone, times were slower, but still much faster than those claimed by Braudel for the Mediterranean. Generally speaking, with a good wind a ship could make 150 km a day. Yet without a favourable wind things could be very slow. In 1822 Fanny Parks's ship, near the equator, made only 17 nautical miles, 31 km, in a whole day.67 Passages on inland waterways could be slower still. Emily Eden's 'flat', that is a large barge towed by a steamer, averaged only 36 km a day and was constantly bumping on the banks and going aground.
As a rule of thumb, late nineteenth century cargo steamers averaged 10 or 11 knots, the mail steamers up to 18, with 15 knots, that is 15 nautical miles an hour, resulting in a distance over a day of 650 km.68 Particular circumstances could alter this drastically. Isabel Burton travelled on an Austrian Lloyd ship which went only 8 knots, the reason being, so she darkly noted, that 'the captains have a premium on coal'. Ships in the Suez Canal also had to go slower. Burton passed through in 1876, when it was just opened. Ships could travel only in daylight, and the top speed was less then 6 knots.69 Gavin Young had an interesting voyage on a local craft from Colombo to the Maldives in 1979. The launch he was on made only 6 knots, and was wildly overloaded with a cargo of lavatory seats and bowls, chairs and tables. The crew, as is still commonly done on small craft in the Indian Ocean, had a sail and used it when the wind was favourable.70
The triumph of steam, if this be not too grand a term, was strongly facilitated by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As Isabel Burton put it, 'it is the last link riveted in the great belt of trade, and the road for our ships is completely defensible.'71 In combination with steam the results were dramatic and rapid. Both the numbers of ships which transited, and their sizes, grew exponentially. The average size of ships transiting was 1,510 tons in 1880, but 5,600 tons in 1938. Total transits were 486 ships in 1870, in 1880 it was 2,026, in 1890 it was nearly 3,389, in 1900 it was nearly 3,441, in 1910 it was 4,533, in 1920 it was 4,009, and in 1930 it was 5,761. A year after the opening shipping through the Canal was 436,000 tons, in 1875 it was 2 million, in 1895 it was 8.4 million, and in 1913 it was 20 million. The tyranny of distance was greatly reduced. London to Basra via the Cape was 11,440 nautical miles, via Port Said 6,700. To Mumbai was respectively 10,780, and 6,370, to Kolkata 11,810 and 8,020, and to Fremantle 10,960 and 9,640. Put in other terms, the savings in terms of distances to be travelled were: London to Mumbai 42 per cent, to Kolkata 32.6 per cent, Fremantle 14.3 per cent, Kuwait 42.5 per cent, Singapore 27.8 per cent.72
The main user was always Britain, and as Burton noted it was a vital link in the imperial system. The British occupied Egypt in 1882 in order to ensure British control of the canal. To the late 1880s nearly 80 per cent of the ships using the canal were British, and indeed from its opening until 1934 British ships in every year made up at least 50 per cent of the total. The central strategic importance of the canal also led to Disraeli's purchase of Egypt's shares in 1875, after which Europeans owned 99 per cent of the total shares of the company which ran the canal. Most of the employees of the company were European or Americans, as were thirty out of the thirty-two directors. The directors were paid very generously, and the British government also did well out of its shareholding. They paid £4 million in 1875, and received dividends of £86 million between 1895 and 1961.73
The indirect advantages to the British were less easy to quantify, but were massive. The canal facilitated trade, made possible faster communications with the heart of the empire, India, and rapid movement of troops from the metropole to the colonies. The reciprocal nature of the enterprise is perhaps best seen in the way Indian troops were used in 1882 to help the British take-over of Egypt, and in 1885 in the Sudan. Other consequences were legion. The canal assisted in the demise of sail between Europe and the Indian Ocean, and the Cape route became less profitable. Steam and canal were linked, while sailing ships could not use this narrow water way. Cape Town became isolated and less important in the imperial system, while east and southeast Africa were now drawn more closely in. The Red Sea route, which had been eclipsed by the Cape route since the sixteenth century, revived: steam ships calling at Jiddah rose from 38 in 1864 to 205 in 1875.74 Islands in the Indian Ocean – Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius – once used as way stations for shipping using the Cape route, were now less important.
There was a symbiotic connection between the three elements we have delineated. Steam ships became bigger and bigger, and this was made possible by, and also required, the progressive deepening and widening of the canal. Similarly, bigger ships needed better ports, or on the other hand better ports made possible bigger ships. An engineer in 1910 vividly described this as a race:
A race between engineers: such might describe the condition of affairs in the maritime world of today in regard to two of the most important branches of civil engineering. On the one hand, we have the ship designers turning out larger and larger vessels; on the other is the harbour engineer, striving vainly to provide a sufficient depth of water in which to float these large steamships. It is a tremendous struggle. The former has set the pace, and the latter finds it hot, so much so that he is hard put to it to keep on his rival's heels.75
We have had occasion to notice how difficult were many of the ports around the ocean before the nineteenth century. The Coromandel coast was notoriously dangerous; Kolkata and Jakarta, both vital centres, were located on treacherous estuaries. An American visitor described Jakarta in the 1830s:
The mode of landing in Batavia is not common. The water in the roads is so shallow that ships lie about three miles from the shore. . . . There are two booms, formed of wooden piles, extended seaward, for a mile, in a straight line from the shore, having a canal between them; at the entrance of which, the sea breaks over a sand bar, with such violence at times during the north-west monsoon that boats are frequently upset and the passengers are subjected to a narrow risk of becoming food for sharks and alligators, even if they escape drowning.76
To get ashore in Chennai was, as we have noted already, a real obstacle course. In June 1765 Mrs Kindersley wrote despondently that 'I am detained here by the tremendous surf, which for these two days has been mountains high: and it is extraordinary, that on this coast, even with very little wind, the surf is often so high that no boat dares venture through it; indeed it is always high enough to be frightful.'77
Kolkata, being f
ar up the delta of the Hughli, had no surf, but it had other perils. Mrs Kindersley, once she was able to leave Chennai, next wrote to a friend:
At length I have the satisfaction to inform you of our arrival at Calcutta. The voyage from Madras, short as it is, is a dangerous one; for the entrance to the mouth of the Ganges is a very difficult piece of navigation, on account of the many islands, cut out by the numberless branches of the river; many of which branches are really great rivers themselves, and after sweeping through and fertilising the different parts of several provinces, there disembogue themselves, with great force, and the roaring noise of many waters. Besides there are a number of sand banks, which, from the prodigious force of the waters, change their situation. Therefore it is necessary to have a pilot well skilled in the different channels; but as such are not always to be had, many ships are thereby endangered, and sometimes lost.78
Figure 5 Custom House Wharf, Calcutta. Produced by Sir C. D'Oyly (artist) and Dickinson & Co. (engravers). © National Maritime Museum, London
Figure 6 Madras. Produced by Leighton (artist) and William Measom (engraver), c. 1848. © National Maritime Museum, London
The Indian Ocean Page 35