The Indian Ocean (46 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The steamers could now profitably carry 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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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'.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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 sailors 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.