Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century

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MARITIME EMPIRES

British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, Nigel Rigby

MARITIME EMPIRES

Britain’s overseas Empire pre-eminently involved the sea. Ships carried travellers and explorers, trade goods, migrants to new lands, soldiers to fight in wars and garrison distant colonies, and also ideas and plants that would find fertile minds and soils in far-off lands. It was a two-way process, from metropole to periphery and also from distant colonies to British shires. These essays, product of a stimulating conference at the National Maritime Museum, London, are by internationally known scholars who provide a wide-ranging but comprehensive picture of the activities of maritime empire. The essays discuss a variety of maritime trades – the brutal business of the transatlantic slave trade, Honduran mahogany shipped to Britain, the movement of horses across the vast reaches of Asia and the Indian Ocean, the impact of new technologies as Empire expanded in the nineteenth century, the sailors who manned the ships, the settlers who moved overseas, and the major ports of the Imperial world, plus the role of the Navy in hydrographic survey. David Killingray is Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Margarette Lincoln is Director, Collections and Research, and Nigel Rigby is Head of Research, both at the National Maritime Museum.

MARITIME EMPIRES British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century

Edited by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby

THE BOYDELL PRESS in association with the National Maritime Museum

© Editors and contributors 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2004

Published by The Boydell Press An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN 1 84383 076 0 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maritime empires : British imperial maritime trade in the nineteenth century / edited by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-84383-076-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Great Britain—Commerce—History—19th century. 2. Great Britain—Colonies—History—19th century. 3. Merchant marine—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Killingray, David. II. Lincoln, Margarette. III. Rigby, Nigel. IV. National Maritime Museum (Great Britain) HF3505.8.M37 2004 382’.09171’241—dc22

2004003934

Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Contents Contributors

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Foreword Roy Clare

xi

Abbreviations

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1 Introduction. Imperial seas: cultural exchange and commerce in the British Empire, 1780–1900 David Killingray 2 From slaves to palm oil: Afro-European commercial relations in the Bight of Biafra, 1741–1841 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson

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3 ‘Pirate water’: sailing to Belize in the mahogany trade Daniel Finamore

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4 Cape to Siberia: the Indian Ocean and China Sea trade in equids William Gervase Clarence-Smith

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5 Aden, British India and the development of steam power in the Red Sea, 1825–1839 Robert J. Blyth

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6 The heroic age of the tin can: technology and ideology in British Arctic exploration, 1818–1835 Carl Thompson

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7 The proliferation and diffusion of steamship technology and the beginnings of ‘new imperialism’ Robert Kubicek

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8 Lakes, rivers and oceans: technology, ethnicity and the shipping of empire in the late nineteenth century John M. MacKenzie

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9 Making imperial space: settlement, surveying and trade in northern Australia in the nineteenth century Jordan Goodman

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10 Hydrography, technology, coercion: mapping the sea in Southeast Asian imperialism, 1850–1900 Eric Tagliacozzo

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11 Pains, perils and pastimes: emigrant voyages in the nineteenth century Marjory Harper

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12 Ordering Shanghai: policing a treaty port, 1854–1900 Robert Bickers

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13 Toward a people’s history of the sea Marcus Rediker

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Select bibliography Index

207 223

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Contributors Robert Bickers is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on the history of British relations with China, notably Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49 (Manchester University Press, 1999), and has edited, with Christian Henriot, New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia 1842–1952 (Manchester University Press, 2000). He is the author most recently of Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (Allen Lane, 2003). Robert J. Blyth is curator of imperial and maritime history at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He studied history and completed his PhD at the University of Aberdeen. His publications include The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947 (Palgrave, 2003) and articles on British India’s involvement in the affairs of Zanzibar and the Gulf. William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Professor of the Economic History of Asia and Africa, and current Chair of the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research concerns entrepreneurial diasporas, commodity chains and Islamic reformism. His most recent book is Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (Routledge, 2000). He has also edited (with Steven Topik) The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Daniel Finamore is the Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, where he has organised more than fifteen exhibitions. He has published widely on the history, art and artefacts of the maritime world. His research focuses on archaeological approaches to maritime social life at sea and on land. Jordan Goodman is a historian at the University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology, where he specialises in the history of science and medicine. He has published widely in these and other fields, including several books: Tobacco and History: The Cultures of Dependence (Routledge, 1993); Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology (Routledge, 1995); and The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anticancer Drug (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He is currently vii

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preparing a book on the scientific voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in the midnineteenth century. Marjory Harper is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen. She is a leading authority on the history of emigration, with particular reference to the Scottish experience of emigration to Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has published a large number of articles and books on the subject. Her most recent book is Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (Profile, 2003). David Killingray is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he has taught for the past thirty years. His most recent books are (edited with David Omissi) Guardians of Empire (Manchester University Press, 2000) and (edited with S.R. Ashton) The West Indies (Stationery Office Books, 1999). He has just completed a study of African soldiers in the Second World War. Robert Kubicek is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia. His publications include The Administration of Imperialism: Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office (Duke University Press, 1969); Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice: The Case of South African Gold Mining Finance, 1886–1914 (Duke University Press, 1979); and ‘British Expansion, Empire, and Technological Change’ in Andrew Porter, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire: III – The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1999). Paul Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor, Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History, York University. John M. MacKenzie is Emeritus Professor of Imperial History at Lancaster University and is currently attached to the AHRB Research Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the editor of the Manchester University Press ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series and of the journal Environment and History. He has just completed The Scots in South Africa (Manchester University Press, forthcoming) and is currently working on an Encyclopaedia of Imperialism (Taylor & Francis) and on a Cultural History of the British Empire. Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written numerous books and articles, including the award-winning Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and (with Peter Linebaugh) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000), recent winner of the International Labour History Association Book Prize. David Richardson is Professor of Economic History, University of Hull. Both he and Paul Lovejoy have worked and published extensively on aspects of viii

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the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and its impact on Africa. Their essay forms part of a series of studies of British commercial relations with the Bight of Biafra between 1660 and 1841. These studies will form the basis of a coauthored monograph on this subject. Eric Tagliacozzo is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University, where he is also a member of the Southeast Asia Program. His research focuses on the history of smuggling in Southeast Asia, particularly along the emerging Malay/Indonesian (Anglo/Dutch) frontier at the turn of the twentieth century. His dissertation, ‘Secret Trades and Straits: Smuggling and State Formation Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1870–1910’ won the Mary and Arthur Wright Prize for best dissertation on Non-Western History at Yale in 1999. Carl Thompson is Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, and formerly Junior Research Fellow in English at Trinity College, Oxford. He is currently writing a study of the relationship between travel writing and Romantic literature, entitled ‘The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination’, for Oxford University Press.

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Foreword The National Maritime Museum has always reached its audiences through its superb collections and its flourishing exhibition, education, research and publication programmes. Our long commitment to working with scholars from a range of academic disciplines and institutions has made a significant contribution to our efforts to make maritime and imperial history accessible to more people, and to keep it fresh and relevant to specialist and nonspecialist alike. Maritime Empires is another step along the way, opening up and exploring the relationship between the British Empire and Britain’s maritime history. A conference of the same name, jointly organised by the Museum and Goldsmiths College, University of London, was held at Greenwich in the summer of 2001. Both the book and the conference are telling illustrations of what can result from universities and museums working together on academic projects. I am delighted that this collaboration has produced such a significant contribution to knowledge about imperial history, especially since the research bridges two rich and fascinating dimensions of that subject that are too often regarded in isolation. A great many people have been involved and not all can be named here. I would, though, like to extend my gratitude to everyone for their highly effective teamwork and close collaboration. Our contributors have made the work of the editors considerably easier by producing excellent essays to the dates agreed. Professor David Killingray, of Goldsmiths College, one of the joint editors of the book, gave generously of his time in programming the original conference with Museum staff. Dr Margarette Lincoln and Dr Nigel Rigby have shared the editing load, while Helen Jones and her team at the Museum organised the conference with their usual efficiency and style. Jean Patrick and Karen Scadeng produced the bibliography, while Rachel Giles, Fiona Renkin and Eleanor Dryden of our publications department have worked closely with Peter Sowden of Boydell & Brewer to see the book through to completion. I thank them all and commend this compelling volume. Roy Clare Director, National Maritime Museum

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Abbreviations ADM ANRI ARA BL CMC CO FO HNL IOL IOL, VC

Admiralty, Public Record Office Arsip Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian State Archives) Algemeene Rijksarchief (Dutch State Archives) British Library Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service Colonial Office, Public Record Office Foreign Office, Public Record Office Henley Papers, National Maritime Museum British Library, India Office Records British Library and India Office Collections, Vanrenen Collection NAS National Archives of Scotland NCH North China Herald NLA National Library of Australia NLNZ National Library of New Zealand NLNZ, ATL National Library of New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull Library NLS National Library of Scotland NMM National Maritime Museum, UK PP British Parliamentary Papers PRO Public Record Office RIC Royal Irish Constabulary SMC Shanghai Municipal Council SMP Shanghai Municipal Police Force SSLCP Straits Settlements Legislative Council Proceedings UKHO United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, Taunton

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Introduction Imperial seas: cultural exchange and commerce in the British Empire 1780–1900 DAVID KILLINGRAY

Was the British Empire a maritime empire? Certainly the first English empire, centred on the British islands, depended in part on sea power to transport soldiers and supplies to and from France and Ireland. The wider, overseas empire that developed from the ‘age of reconnaissance’, first in the Americas and then in Asia, relied on mastery of the seas and protection of trade routes. It also required a naval strength, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that could resist and thwart other competing imperial maritime powers, notably the Spanish, Dutch and the French, and then control overseas territories acquired from them by treaty and conquest. By the late eighteenth century Britain’s overseas empire, with its vital trade in commodities and manufacturers essential for a newly industrialising power, included territories in all five continents and in the major oceans of the world. Through the nineteenth century that empire expanded, as did Britain’s naval supremacy, so that by 1880 the United Kingdom possessed the largest overseas empire and also the world’s largest naval and mercantile fleets. Informal empire also relied largely on naval power, although that extended only to limited areas of littoral and the lower reaches of navigable rivers. Whether, when and if Britain’s empire was essentially a maritime enterprise are questions addressed in this book of essays. Certainly in the last few decades there has been a growing interest in all aspects of maritime history. The large number of books on aspects of the sea, new journals and a flow of articles devoted to what has become a recognisably distinct discipline within history all demonstrate that popularity and interest. Although an established tradition of maritime history continues, mainly concerned with ships, commerce, and naval strategy, some of the more recent work has been informed by new developments and ideas from social, economic and particularly cultural history. The agenda is now much broader and includes history from below as well as micro-histories that bring into focus the lives of sailors, women on board ship and those left on land, the processes of migration, and the activities of ports and of overseas communities. It interrogates that complex weave of the past, 1

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touching aspects of life and experience only a few years ago generally thought inaccessible to historians. Greater use has been made of material culture as museums have made their rich collections more accessible to the public. The process is symbiotic in that cultural historians also have drawn on maritime history, thus opening new avenues of research. Imperial history has inevitably figured prominently in accounts of maritime ventures. The British Empire, even Ireland, was ‘overseas’ and Navigation Laws, the expanding slave trade, the commerce in foreign commodities, the movement of people to and from colonies, the decline in Britain’s economic self-sufficiency, and the increased export of manufactured goods, made empire very much a maritime concern. The expansion of maritime and imperial trade in the nineteenth century was much more than merely a metropolitan-directed activity focused on British capital, fiscal and commercial knowledge and new technological development. It was intertwined in a global system of expanding commerce influenced by a wide range of indigenous mercantile networks and social and cultural effects, all dependent on local conditions and political situations. Major questions in the recent historiography of ‘maritime empire’ are when does the British Empire become essentially maritime, and what makes the empire maritime? The idea that Britain’s, or rather England’s, ‘empire of the seas’ had its origins in a grand heroic Elizabethan venture by Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh was a myth generated in the late eighteenth century, although one that would flower later in the nineteenth century.1 As David Armitage argues: An empire of the seas would not be prey to the overextension of military dictatorship which had hastened the collapse of the Roman Empire, nor would it bring the tyranny, depopulation and impoverishment which had hastened the decline of Spain. The British empire of the seas was both historically novel and comparatively benign; it could therefore escape the compulsions that destroyed all previous land-based, and hence military, empires. In short, it could be an empire for liberty.2

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maritime enterprise, the expansion of trade and the acquisition of a few scattered colonies of settlement, did not make for imperial power. Certainly it helped to stimulate and revolutionise English ship-building as well as commercial institutions, both vital for overseas mercantile activity. However, foreign competition, the problems of victualling vessels for distant operations, shipboard disease, the constant need

1

For example, see the classic work by J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; 2nd edn 1895), pp. 11, 143ff. 2 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 100–1. 2

INTRODUCTION

for home-waters defence, and the uncertainties of winds and currents all imposed serious limitations on what could be achieved by men in what were after all frail barks.3 The view of Daniel A. Baugh is that the English state had no coherent imperial policy before 1650 but that in the third quarter of the seventeenth century it aggressively built up an imperial system with what he terms a ‘blue water policy’. These maritime and financial sinews of power were based on the ability to protect trade routes rather than to control territory, and rested on the ability of the state to pay for, build and successfully man ships, and to defeat other maritime competitors such as the French, Spanish and Dutch. This was effective until the end of the Seven Years’ War when the annexation of Canada, rather than Guadeloupe, from the French marked a significant change in imperial and commercial policy that was ‘based on a serious misconception of the actual functioning of the maritime system of power’.4 The British Empire after the 1760s, as Peter Marshall argues, became ‘territorial as well as maritime, based on military in addition to naval power, and it increasingly involved autocratic rule over peoples who were neither Protestant nor, in the British view, suited to a free government’.5 The consequences were that Britain’s commitment to Europe was increased, driven by fear of France, and this rivalry involved additional efforts to protect overseas trade routes and, inevitably, to attack French colonies. Another result was that North American colonists were expected to pay for their own defence by British arms and that when they objected, they were pitched on the path of rebellion and eventual independence from London. The leading British naval historian, N.A.M. Rodger, retorts that the picture plotted by Baugh about the rise of British imperial power was a far more complex one. He argues that until 1815 Britain was a European power and that the Royal Navy was primarily concentrated in home waters to defend the country from foreign threats. Security in home waters ‘made possible successful overseas operations’, including those of the Seven Years’ War.6 Thus it was only in the nineteenth century, when Britain’s European naval hegemony

3 See the essays in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 1: The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), especially John C. Appleby, ‘War, Politics and Colonization, 1558–1625’, pp. 55–78, and N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Guns and Sails in the First Phase of English Colonization, 1500–1650’, pp. 79–98. 4 Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: the Uses of a Grand Maritime Empire’, in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815 (London, 1994), pp. 185–223. The quotation is from p. 185. 5 P.J. Marshall, ‘A Free Though Conquering People’: Eighteenth-century Britain and its Empire (Aldershot, 2003), p. x. 6 N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Sea-power and Empire, 1688–1793’, ch. 8 in P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 169, 181.

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became global and the great commercial benefits of early industrialisation and technological dominance were being reaped, that imperial power was extended on both land and sea to make the British Empire truly a maritime empire. Throughout the whole of this period, and beyond, the East India Company had its own navy and army, and private mercantile enterprise was a prominent aspect of British overseas trade. Despite the arguments that have been rehearsed above, it is still surprising to see how relatively little has been written specifically on empire and the sea. The distinguished ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series, edited by John MacKenzie, covers a wide range of imperial topics but none of the more than thirty volumes published so far deals specifically with questions of maritime activity. Scholarly studies in books and journals that have touched on maritime empire have mainly dealt with imperial trade, particularly the growth of free trade, shipping companies and their entrepreneurs, technology, and exploration.7 The neglect of the sea is surprising given its importance in the business of overseas empire, in the conduct of imperial trade and the business of resourcing and policing imperial possessions. This collection fills a gap in the literature. It also offers a different approach. As Robert Bickers points out in this volume, maritime empires are based on ports. Trade goods, colonial migrants, migrant labourers, soldiers, and administrators, all moved through ports and moved by sea from one part of the empire to another or to foreign lands. Ports, like many a ship’s crew, were often cosmopolitan, a mix of men and women drawn by the needs of work and trade. Until relatively recently the sailors who manned ships were largely ignored by scholars. Although sailors’ songs were a common part of British landlocked culture, and although illustrations of shipboard life invariably showed sailors at work, little attention has been given to them, to how they were recruited, the conditions of service, levels of pay, and so on. Marcus Rediker has been foremost among scholars in rescuing sailors’ lives and their conditions of service from historical neglect. His chapter in this volume turns the spotlight on sailors to proclaim that they are the principal men of the sea and also to press for what he calls ‘a people’s history of the sea’. Shipboard life was dangerous and to work the vessel an adequate crew would be obtained from whomever was available. Thus crews of ocean going ships were invariably racially mixed. This was true also of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with an unknown but significant portion of Nelson’s navy being black.8 Kru from the coast of West Africa – one of John MacKenzie’s ‘maritime races’ – served on naval ships and also on

7

A list would be extensive; see the entries in Andrew Porter, ed., Bibliography of Imperial, Colonial and Commonwealth History since 1600 (Oxford, 2003). 8 At the foot of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square the bronze bas-relief of the death of Nelson, by J.E. Carew, shows a black seaman among those surrounding the stricken admiral. 4

INTRODUCTION

mercantile vessels engaged in the West African run, while Indian ‘lascars’ and Chinese seamen served in Royal Naval and mercantile vessels alongside Somalis. Many of these sailors had two ‘home’ ports, one in their home country and the other in Britain.9 Britain’s black population dates from the late sixteenth century and numbered several thousand by the eighteenth century – largely, although not exclusively, concentrated in ports such as London, Bristol and Liverpool. By the middle of the next century a settlement of black people had developed in Cardiff, and by 1900 a smaller community of predominantly Arab seamen had settled in South Shields.10 This book explores the maritime-related mechanics of Empire and attempts to show how, in practice, aspects of that vast enterprise were made to ‘work’. Central to that, as the chapters by Jordan Goodman and Eric Tagliacozzo show, was the emergence and workings of a professional hydrographic service in the Royal Navy and the way that commercial and political imperatives helped to drive maritime surveying.11 The British Admiralty supported exploration and the scientific investigation of expeditions by Cook, Banks, Fitzroy and Darwin. Both the expeditions of the Endeavour and the Beagle were, in part, concerned with the interests of the imperial state. And it was the Admiralty which, in 1849, first published John Herschel’s edited Manual of Scientific Enquiry intended for naval officers and ‘travellers in general’.12 Royal naval vessels were floating secretariats, manned by officers often with high levels of literacy and numeracy, who engaged in scientific work as well as marine exploration to the advantage of the imperial state.13 The aims of this volume are several. First of all it examines marine technology which made such great strides in the nineteenth century. In 1815 the average size of a vessel crossing the Atlantic had a displacement of a few hundred tonnes. Ships were wooden, reliant on wind and sail, out of contact with land, and with proportionately large crews. The passage was unreliable and dependent upon the weather and currents. Consequently the volume

9 Diane Frost, Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 1999). 10 On Cardiff see Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain (London, 1972), and on South Shields, Richard I. Lawless, From Ta’izz to Tyneside: An Arab Community in the North-east of England During the Early Twentieth Century (Exeter, 1995). 11 John Barrow, addressing the first meeting the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, singled out the role of surveying in the development of global commerce: Journal of Royal Geographical Society, 1 (1831), p. viiii, quoted by Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001), p. 40. 12 Felix Driver, Geography Militant, p. 38. 13 See R. Sorrenson, ‘The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century’, in H. Kuklick and R. Kohler, eds, Science in the Field (Chicago, 1996). Although a fictional character, the post-Enlightenment, natural philosopher and polymath Dr Maturin, the ship’s doctor in Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about Nelson’s navy, may stand as an example.

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of goods and people carried was fairly small. The chronometer, so vital for longitudinal positioning, was new but also expensive so that many sailors continued to use old methods.14 One hundred years later the Atlantic was being crossed by steel constructed ships averaging more than 2,000 tonnes, driven mainly by steam, able to make a consistent twenty or more knots and to arrive at a port on a specified day. A newly invented system of radio communications enabled ships to report their position and progress. Submarine telegraph cables sold crops on distant markets as futures and transmitted commercial intelligence around the world in the space of minutes. The peopling of empire, and the Americas, accelerated as ships grew larger, more specialist and increasingly efficient at carrying people and cargoes. So also did the volume of world and imperial trade. Thus technology needs to be looked at, as in this volume, not merely as a process of mechanical change but also as an important aspect of social change, a cultural phenomenon that to be understood, demands an analysis of language, semiotics and representations. The sea is a broad means of communication of goods and ideas and its very breadth and depth, in some ways, is reflected in the chapters in this volume. Contributors attempt to challenge some of the orthodoxies associated with ideas of maritime empire and to examine the integration of land and sea cultures in port cities. Although the larger picture of imperial trade is not ignored, attention is also given to focused case studies of particular imperial trade, for example Gervase Clarence-Smith’s chapter on the trade in equids. The other main purpose of this collection is to stimulate further research and writing on maritime empire, not merely within the confines of the British Empire but of other empires and imperial systems. Even contiguous empires, such as Russia and the United States, relied heavily on the sea.15 This book originates in the conference, ‘Maritime Empires’, which was jointly organised by the National Maritime Museum and Goldsmiths College, University of London, and held at Greenwich in the summer of 2001. The conference took an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Broad themes are interwoven in the various chapters: technology, expansion, control, and also culture, commerce and communication – typifying the economic, social, cultural and political ‘nuts and bolts’ that helped to hold the diverse parts of the widely scattered global British Empire together. In fact, although the empire was administered from London, the very diversity of the enterprise, managed by three major government departments of state, the Colonial, Foreign and India Offices, prevented a single coherent policy emerging at any

14

John Harrison’s long struggle to perfect the chronometer has been splendidly written about by Dava Sobel, Longtitude (London, 1996). 15 Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the United States should go beyond a defensive navy for one that would extend American influence overseas, while Frederick Jackson Turner, in his landmark essay on ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’ (1893), saw beyond the limits of land ‘for a revival of our power upon the seas’. 6

INTRODUCTION

one time. In addition, officials in different colonies presided over markedly different forms of administration and the pace of economic and political progress varied greatly from one territory to another. Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, both distinguished scholars of the slave trade, make a detailed study of the continuities and disjunctions contained with the shift from trading human beings to the ‘legitimate’ trade in palm oil in the Bight of Biafra, in a period stretching from the height of the slave trade to its abolition in the early nineteenth century. Their study looks at the contrasting fortunes of two ports in the Niger Delta region – Old Calabar and Bonny – placing them in the context of personal and business relationships and their differing financial structures. During the eighteenth century the British had come to dominate much of the West African slave trade. The campaign to end that brutal business, finally accomplished in 1807, not only marked the end of the old mercantilist restrictions but ushered in a more reciprocal trading system based more on the concept of free trade. Slaves now became illegitimate trade and new commodities were encouraged, particularly the ‘legitimate’ export trade in palm oil to be manufactured into soap to wash the British working population and oil to lubricate the wheels of their expanding industrial economy. As Lovejoy and Richardson show, the changing ideologies of trade at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries were largely driven in practice by ‘creative adaptation’ of existing structures to the new circumstances, and the outcomes were highly dependent on local conditions. Robert Bickers focuses on colonial policing, specifically on the projection of British power into nineteenth-century China. He argues that, in this instance, we need to understand local history in a broader, imperial context and he finds evidence of an intrusive and punitive colonial regime that criminalised the Chinese male. There are two levels of policing here, the one supporting the other. In all colonies there were the locally recruited police and invariably also a similarly organised military force, although some vital colonial cities also had British garrison troops. The duty of the police was to uphold civil authority; the military acted as a reserve. In addition, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Royal Navy had a policing role, especially in the colonial archipelagos of the Caribbean and Pacific. The guns, marines and armed crews of naval vessels anchored off shore or in harbour offered an intimidating presence to ‘rebellious’ colonial peoples. Two studies of specific trades come from Daniel Finamore on the transatlantic mahogany trade, and Gervase Clarence-Smith on the movement of equids – horses, donkeys and mules – across the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific Ocean regions. As Finamore says, Honduras mahogany found its way into many and diverse areas of British social life. His close study is more than merely about the broad business of buying and selling timber for furniture. Ships and shipping operations frequently generated rich and detailed accounts of aspects of trading operations, so that here we learn about ships, the crew, wives, the business of buying, loading and unloading the cargo, wages, injuries, 7

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finance and insurance. Clarence-Smith takes a broad focus in his account of the trade in draught animals essential as beasts of burden in colonial commerce and conflict, which required specialist shipping in order to move and deliver livestock. During military campaigns in temperate regions animals were vital for supply lines; not so in tropical zones infected with trypanosomiasis which killed draught animals, and where the military had to rely on the thick necks of thousands of human porters or carriers. In times of war the military needed large numbers of equids. Major campaigns, such as the South African War 1899–1902, depleted supplies and distant continents were scoured for fresh mounts. During the eighteenth century the flow of human migrants across the Atlantic to North America had numbered thousands. This increased greatly in the following century as new lands were opened, migrants were better able economically to get to ports and pay for a passage, and ships increased in carrying capacity and reliability. Britons continued to go to North America but also to South Africa, from the 1820s, and to Australia and New Zealand. Much of this was voluntary migration, although the great increase in the flow of Irish out of their famine-ravaged country from the 1840s was due to hardship. Indentured labourers from South Asia were driven by economic necessity into what has been described as ‘a new system of slavery’. For one hundred years after the 1820s, hundreds of thousands of men and women from India were shipped as labour, many on plantations, in Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Malaya, Fiji, South and East Africa.16 And let it not be forgotten that many migrants to the Australian colonies in the period 1780s to the1860s were transported as convict labour, mainly from Britain but also from other parts of the Empire. In Marjory Harper’s chapter the mechanics of migration are examined. Her emphasis is on the relationship between image and reality in the voyages of emigrants from Britain to distant parts of the Empire, primarily as seen through the eyes of emigrants from Scotland to North America, Australia and New Zealand. In particular, Harper is concerned with the female experience of Empire and the role that women played in its consolidation. This is an important topic but one that is relatively under-researched. How willing were women to migrate, to leave behind familiar surroundings and to face the unknown? On the voyage out and in the process of settlement, women had a vital role to play, one rarely open to men, of holding the family together, managing the household budget, and laying down many of the essential social foundations for life in a new country. And the mothers, wives and sweethearts left behind often constituted a lifeline of comfort and hope, not least by letter, for men who had gone as migrants.

16 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Indentured Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London, 1974); David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995).

8

INTRODUCTION

Many a ship’s ticket in the mid-nineteenth century listed not only the price of the voyage but also the daily diet for migrant passengers. The challenge of how to provide a healthy ship-board fare on lengthy voyages had long exercised sensitive captains and ships’ surgeons. By the early nineteenth century, industrial processing of foods, in particular the invention of the tin can, provided an important answer. It was followed in later decades by great strides in the means of preparing and preserving food stuffs that for many passengers changed vexatious voyages into comfortable passages. Carl Thompson explores the significance of the invention of the tin can to imperial expansion and to British imperial self-assurance and self-belief. The tin can was of material importance to the Arctic expeditions of the 1810s and 1820s, but also played a part in the symbolic resonance of the voyages. The tin can bolstered the British explorer’s image of himself and, as represented in the Admiralty-endorsed narratives of successive voyages, helped to shape the reading public’s sense of the moral legitimacy of the British exploratory project. The invention helped to convey a sense of the inevitability of Britain’s assumption of the imperial mantle, inherited from previous powers that had shown comparable technical superiority. It became associated with a greater degree of cultural inflexibility on the part of the British who increasingly showed contempt for ‘locals’ and ‘natives’ and insisted on the supremacy of the British way of doing things. As has already been mentioned, technological and industrial advance transformed the construction, propulsion and size of ships in the nineteenth century. A good deal has been written on the triumphs, if that is what they were, of large shipbuilding and the progress from iron to steel, from steam to oil-fired and triple-expansion engines capable of driving thousands of tonnes of cargo-carrying vessel through vast oceans. Robert Kubicek directs his attention at the builders, merchants, directors and controllers of Britain’s major shipping companies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As he argues, most of this ‘ship nexus’ central to the business of imperial trade and communications, and often closely allied to the interests of the state, were not the gentlemanly capitalists identified by Cain and Hopkins in their recent two-volume study, British Imperialism.17 The advances in marine technology did not only affect imperial commerce, they also had a direct impact upon the direction of British imperial expansion. As Robert Blyth shows in his case study of the experiments with steam power in the Red Sea during the 1830s, improving communications between Britain and India was an important consideration for the early pioneers of this new technology. But the extensive infrastructure required to coal these inefficient steamers drew the British into closer association with local rulers at numerous ports between Bombay and Suez, changing Britain’s relationship

17 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism. Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914; and British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914–1990 (both London, 1993).

9

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with the region. With steamships proving successful, acquiring a strategic coaling station on the overland route to India became imperative, leading to the annexation of Aden and a British presence in Arabia. In the extensive literature on shipbuilding and shipping management, little attention has been given to the subject of John MacKenzie’s chapter: the humble, invariably prefabricated steam craft designed for use on distant rivers and lakes. Manufactured in British shipyards, these small vessels were shipped in numbered parts to imperial ports and then carried inland, usually on African heads, to be assembled on shores and banks where they were to be used. By maritime means Christian missionary activity was extended and colonial rule consolidated over areas of central Africa that were often difficult of access by land. In the process, Africans were introduced to industrial methods and also acquired skills in working steam ships. In the 1860s the idea of commerce and Christian evangelisation, absent in the early nineteenth century, was connected by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce when the Universities Mission to Central Africa was launched in 1860. Many decades before, William Carey, the pioneer Baptist missionary to India, had linked navigation to the dissemination of the Gospel: ‘Navigation’, he wrote, ‘especially that which is commercial, shall be one of the great means of carrying on the work of God.’18 Empire was about many things: settlement, frontiers, the expansion of control and the surveying and taming of land and alien peoples. It was also about the mapping of the seas to make navigation safer and to improve systems of trade. Eric Tagliacozzo and Jordan Goodman provide two closely-focused case studies of the importance of hydrography to empire. Tagliacozzo argues, with some justification, that within the history of empire studies of mapping have ‘never dealt with the sea as ardently or efficiently as it has with cartography done on land’. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it is ‘the blank spaces on the earth’ that excite the young Marlow, who ‘would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the glories of exploration’. While Marlow earns his living as a seaman, it is the empty continental spaces that most intrigue him, along with most of his generation brought up on that dramatic series of expeditions seeking the source of the Nile; although he admits that by the end of the nineteenth century most of the blanks were filled in and in consequence ‘the glamour’s off’.19 The romance of maritime exploration, of discovering ‘unknown’ lands and peoples, had reached its glorious peak during James Cook’s three voyages in the mid-eighteenth century;20 what was left in the nineteenth century was 18

William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. In which the religious state of the different natins of the world, the success of former undertakings, and the practicability of further undertakings are considered (Leicester, 1792), p. 67. 19 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, 1983 [1902]), p. 33. 20 See Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750 (New Haven and London, 1997). 10

INTRODUCTION

the painstaking and precise job of creating detailed charts, complete with information on tides, currents and winds, to support the growing global maritime trade and the need to police the sea routes more effectively. Tagliacozzo looks at the political and commercial implications at the end of the nineteenth century of surveying the seas around what is today Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, an area in which Dutch and British imperial maritime interests were in competition but, as he shows, where they also had an interest in working closely together and sharing intelligence. Goodman deals with the triangular relationship between colonialism, maritime surveying and trade illustrated by the history of the failed and, now, mostly forgotten colonial settlement of Port Essington in Australia’s Northern Territories in the first half of the nineteenth century. The third British attempt to establish a base in the Australian tropics was finally abandoned after a few years in 1849 in the wake of the surveying voyage of Captain Owen Stanley’s HMS Rattlesnake, as a result of which British colonial efforts shifted instead to the Cape York peninsula. Francis Beaufort, the long-serving Hydrographer of the Royal Navy, remembered today for the introduction of the Beaufort Scale of wind speeds, was the puppet master in London pulling the strings controlling Stanley’s surveys half a world away.21 As Goodman argues, Rattlesnake’s voyage has generally been seen in terms of an unbroken line of naval surveys stretching back to Cook. However, the naval hydrographical service in the mid-nineteenth century did not operate in a vacuum and Goodman shows the complex array of interests that led to the yawning gaps in Britain’s knowledge of this dangerous navigational areas being filled in. This volume offers detailed case studies of particular maritime trades, but it also throws light on the ideology of imperial traffic. Although the debate over whether the British working classes were enthused by empire still continues, popular interest was certainly sustained by the media, books of all kinds aimed at all ages, regular news of military campaigns, advertisements, the promotion of overseas settlement, the quotidian presence on British tables of colonial foodstuffs, and by the ever present interest of the churches in overseas missionary activity. Children’s writers like W.H.G. Kingston and R.M. Ballantyne, whose novels began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, reflected the preoccupations of their times by producing an endless stream of fiction that brought together colonial, religious and commercial ideologies in a persuasive mix. Few have stood the test of time, although Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) is still in print today, mainly because it managed to integrate the themes successfully with the well-established island narrative developed 150 years earlier by Daniel Defoe. Later children’s fiction, written as Britain’s muscular imperialism developed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, would tend to espouse a more overtly military ethos, typified by novels like G.A. Henty’s By Sheer Pluck (1884) or With Buller in Natal (1900).

21

Nicholas Courtney, Gale Force Ten: The Life of Admiral Beaufort (London, 2002). 11

MARITIME EMPIRES

When Conrad’s Marlow looks down the crowded River Thames at the ‘great stir of lights going up and going down’, he sees a world dominated by maritime activity, the ships and the seamen themselves as much as the water linking London with the ‘dark places of the earth’ to which British imperialism was bringing ‘light’. 22 The sea in the nineteenth century was an integral part of the British Empire, although towards the end the cracks in that empire were beginning to appear. Erskine Childers’ famous espionage novel, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), is first and foremost a lucid and exciting dramatisation of the threat posed to Britain by a unified Germany, but it also shows that the sea and Britain’s dependence on it for its wealth and strength is beginning to become less obvious to people. In many ways, Britain’s decline as a maritime power was the true insight of Childers’ novel, one that was vindicated over the next sixty or seventy years which saw the virtual disappearance of a Britishregistered merchant fleet. Today, the River Thames is less crowded. Although over one million tons of cargo are handled at British ports every day and over 54 per cent of all Britain’s imports and exports go by sea, merchant ships have largely left the shallow and narrow rivers running through the old port cities for the deep water of container terminals. Containerisation has revolutionised sea trade and, since the development of huge tankers and container ships, trade has moved further downstream from the historic ports to deeper water, closer to the sea. Here the vast areas needed for wharves, warehouses and vehicles have developed away from the busy city centres. Given this, and the prevalence of air travel, shipping and seafaring are invisible to most people and the importance of the sea to Britain is barely recognised. Today, fewer and fewer people earn their livings directly from the sea and the maritime industries are more focused on the financial services. As Marlow said, ‘the glamour’s off’, but this should not blind us to the real importance of the sea today any more than it should to the part that it played in the development and maintenance of an empire that at its height in the nineteenth century covered a quarter of the earth’s surface.

22

Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 29. 12

2

From slaves to palm oil Afro-European commercial relations in the Bight of Biafra, 1741–1841 PAUL E. LOVEJOY AND DAVID RICHARDSON

I Britain’s abolition of its slave trade in 1807 and its subsequent efforts to suppress slave carrying by other countries had an important impact on AfroEuropean relations in West Africa. In the Bight of Biafra, the external pressure to end slave exports led to expanding exports of other products, even while exports of slaves continued, legally or otherwise. The local merchants who had once supplied British merchants before 1808 were able to shift their business to non-British slave traders, at least until 1841, at the same time as exports of palm oil expanded to meet rising British demand for industrial raw materials. The effects of this shift towards non-slave exports, replicated in varying degrees and at different speeds in other African regions, raise the question of the compatibility of slave and non-slave exports as reflected in the trends in coastal slave prices and in levels of slave holding on the coast.1 Although slave ownership expanded after 1807 in areas associated with commercial production of oil, it is likely that British abolition prompted an immediate fall in export earnings of local merchants in regions such as the Bight of Biafra, but this was subsequently reversed with reviving slave exports and the recovery of slave prices associated with the expansion of so-called ‘legitimate’ exports such as oil.2 This trend appears to have continued beyond the closure in 1841 of the export slave trade from the Bight of Biafra as slaves

1 For evidence on trends in coastal prices of slaves, see Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘British Abolition and its Impact on Slave Prices at the Atlantic Coast of Africa, 1783–1850’, Journal of Economic History, 55 (1995), 98–119. 2 Trends in income in the Bight of Biafra are discussed in Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘The Initial “Crisis of Adaptation”: The Impact of British Abolition on the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa, 1808–1820’, in Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 32–56.

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increasingly became producers of commodities for trade rather than commodities of trade themselves. It is argued here that despite the apparent ease of transition in the Bight of Biafra in the period after 1807, British abolition prompted important institutional adjustments to international trade relations in the region. Whether these amounted to a ‘crisis of adaptation’, as Hopkins and others have claimed for this period of change, remains unclear.3 European trade in the Bight of Biafra was largely concentrated at two places, Old Calabar on the Cross River and Bonny at the mouth of the Rio Real. In the early eighteenth century, Old Calabar was the premier trading venue in the region but by the 1740s, at least, its ascendancy was lost to its rival on the Rio Real. From the mid-eighteenth century, Bonny was unchallenged as the principal slave port of the Bight of Biafra, exporting about three times as many slaves to the Americas as Old Calabar, and accounting overall for some two-thirds of all slaves dispatched from the region across the Atlantic in 1740–1841.4 For almost two decades after 1807 Old Calabar stemmed Bonny’s control of the region’s exports, assuming dominance over the emerging palm oil trade, but in this, as in the slave sector, its ascendancy again proved shortlived. Palm oil exports from the Cross River stagnated after 1830 in the face of rising exports from Bonny and, by the 1840s, Bonny’s control over the oil trade matched its former dominance of the slave trade.5 Notwithstanding the entry of new trading centres in the region from the 1750s, such as Cameroon and Gabon, the export trades of the Bight of Biafra fell largely under the control of Bonny, with most of the rest of the region’s exports being channelled through the Cross River. Put another way, Bonny and Old Calabar merchants succeeded in attracting the lion’s share of European credit advances in the Bight of Biafra between 1741 and 1841, whether for slaves or for palm oil, with Bonny capturing a larger proportion than its closest rival. Only briefly, in 1807–30, when Old Calabar controlled most of the Bight of Biafra’s oil exports, did its merchants succeed in arresting, if not reversing, that trend. The transition from slave exports to the sale of palm oil involved a major change in the trade of the Bight of Biafra, though the extent to which the

3

A.G. Hopkins, ‘Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–92’, Economic History Review, 21 (1968), 580–606; and An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973). Hopkins focused on the broader issues of the transition from slave exports to ‘legitimate’ trade in palm oil, kernels, and other goods and the implications of this transformation in explaining the ‘Scramble’ for West Africa at the end of the century. Hence his analysis of the immediate impact of British abolition was sketchy. For a review of the literature, see Robin Law, ‘The Historiography of the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa’, in Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Ade Ajayi (London, 1993), pp. 97–120. 4 Based on David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). 5 For trends in oil exports, see Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 12–19. 14

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

transition involved a ‘crisis of adaptation’, as Hopkins has claimed, has been debated.6 Dike early recognized the severity of ‘the economic crisis among African traders’, which he attributed to British abolition, but that view has been challenged by recent scholars who emphasize the continuity in commercial institutions and relationships.7 In his examination of the growth of agricultural exports from the region, Northrup noted ‘the relative continuity in economic structures’ surrounding the palm oil trade, emphasizing that Old Calabar merchants ‘did not depart in any dramatic way from the techniques of the slave trade’.8 He also suggested that in the Rio Real, where Bonny is located, the transition to palm oil exports ‘began later’ and was accomplished ‘in much the same manner as on the Cross River’. A similar emphasis on continuity is found in Lynn’s recent studies of commercial arrangements in the Bight, where he claims that ‘the methods of trading that marked the slave trade era’ continued ‘virtually unchanged’ in the first half of the nineteenth century.9 Indeed, such continuity is seen to have ‘allowed the great increase in exports of oil to occur’ after 1807. This chapter challenges the assumption that commercial arrangements and practices continued seamlessly during the transition from slave to palm oil exports in the Bight of Baifra. It does so by exploring adjustments to British abolitionism at the two principal trading venues in the region, Bonny and Old Calabar, and by demonstrating the limitations of personal relationships in affecting the adjustment from slave to oil exports at the two ports. We shall argue that, both before and after 1807, institutional rather than personal factors were crucial in underpinning Afro-European trade relations in the region, allowing trade to grow without the presence of British factories ashore. Moreover, at Old Calabar, and to a lesser extent at Bonny, significant and potentially far-reaching adjustments to these institutional arrangements were necessary after 1807 in order to allow palm oil exports to develop to the level they did by the 1830s. In this respect, the apparently smooth transition from slave to oil exports in the Bight of Biafra in the decades after 1807 rested on a process of institutional adjustment that was more important than continuity in personal or other ties between African and European traders in the region. In Part II we describe developments in the growth of the export trade from the Bight of Biafra in the century and a half up to 1841, at which date the export slave trade from the region virtually ceased and by which time palm oil had become its most important single export. We go on in Part III to evaluate

6

For a discussion, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Initial Crisis’. Kenneth O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885 (Oxford, 1956), p. 47. 8 David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978), pp. 190–1. 9 Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, p. 60. 7

15

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the significance of personal networks to trade growth before Britain abolished its slave trade and the validity of claims that such networks were important in smoothing the transition towards palm oil exports after 1807. In Part IV we discuss the institutional adjustments to changing parameters of trade that occurred at Bonny and Old Calabar in the post-1807 period, highlighting similarities as well as differences in adjustments at the two ports and speculating on their importance in terms of inter-port rivalry for control of trade. Part V draws some conclusions.

II The slave trade dominated commercial relations between the Bight of Biafra and the rest of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Until the 1730s the region was a modest exporter of humans, with fewer than 4,000 people a year being carried away to the Americas.10 This was much lower than numbers of deportees from some other regions, notably the neighbouring Bight of Benin and West-Central Africa. After 1740, however, slave shipments mounted rapidly and by the 1780s were over four times the pre-1740 level. Thereafter, shipments of slaves fell back slightly, but were still close to 15,000 a year on the eve of British abolition in 1807. Of the 1.5 million slaves that historians calculate embarked in the Bight of Biafra throughout the period of the Atlantic slave trade, some 900,000 (or 60 per cent) appear to have left between 1740 and 1807. British traders dominated the region’s slave exports in these years, with over 60 per cent of those shipped in the seventy years before 1807 leaving in Liverpool vessels and a further 20 per cent in Bristol ones. The peak of the Bight of Biafra’s slave export trade thus came during the years of British dominance and, when abolition took effect, over 85 per cent of enslaved Africans were leaving in British ships. The sudden removal of this carrying capacity had to have an effect on the trade. Although British abolition did not bring an immediate end to slave exports from the Bight of Biafra, there was a sharp fall in exports in the years immediately after 1807. Exports of slaves did not end completely in 1808–15, however, and they revived strongly again after 1815 as French, Portuguese and Spanish (often Cuban) owned slave ships replaced the former British ships. Annual shipments of slaves after 1815 failed to match the levels reached in 1783–1807, but they did reach a post-British abolition peak of some 13,000 slaves a year in 1826–35.11 Data on coastal prices of slaves suggest that, in these years, slave exports were worth maybe as much as £200,000 annually, or up to

10 11

All the figures in this paragraph are calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Ibid. 16

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

two-thirds of their annual value in the two decades before 1807.12 Non-British slave traders thus ensured that the human traffic remained a considerable export earner for the leading merchants of the Bight of Biafra. Such earnings, however, were increasingly supplemented by income from palm oil, annual exports of which rose unevenly and largely in response to British demand from about 400 tons in 1815 to over 20,000 tons by 1850.13 Falls in prices of palm oil in both Africa and Britain ensured that the growth of income from palm oil was less than the growth in quantities exported. Nevertheless, by the mid-1830s the value of palm oil exports was probably at least two-thirds the value of slave exports, itself close to its post-1807 peak.14 Moreover, during the ensuing decade, as slave exports were suppressed, palm oil became the principal source of export earnings of the merchants of the Bight of Biafra. By 1850, therefore, British traders regained the dominance of the export trade of the Bight of Biafra that they had held before 1807, but in palm oil not slaves. In the intervening years of transition from slave to palm oil, however, nonBritish slave traders had joined British palm oil traders in helping to ensure that the Bight of Biafra sustained commercial ties with the rest of the Atlantic world. In this respect, the years 1807–41 represented a hiatus in British commercial dominance of the region but necessarily a decline in total trade values for some of this period relative to earlier years. It is against this background that one needs to assess how the transition from slaves to palm oil was achieved.

12

Data on numbers of slaves exported and real coastal prices of slaves suggest that earnings from slaves exported from the Bight of Biafra were about £100,000 a year in the late 1810s and rose to almost £200,000 a year in the early 1830s before falling to about £150–160,000 a year in 1836–40 (Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Initial Crisis’, pp. 35, 49). These figures may be compared with Eltis’s estimates, which suggest that slave exports from the Bight were worth about £180,000 a year in 1833–7 (David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade [Oxford, 1987], p. 360). Assuming slave exports per annum of 14,900 (Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) and a mean coastal price per slave of £20–25 (David Richardson, ‘Prices of Slaves in West and West-Central Africa: Toward an Annual Series, 1698–1807’, Bulletin of Economic Research, 43 (1991), 52–6; Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘British Abolition’), we estimate that annual gross earnings to local suppliers of slaves in the Bight of Biafra were £298–372,000 in 1783–1807. 13 Our estimates are based on Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, ch. 1. Lynn’s figures relate mainly to UK imports rather than Biafran exports of oil. To compute trends for the latter from the available data, we have assumed that (a) the Bight of Biafra monopolized oil exports in 1815 and controlled 90 per cent of West African exports in 1850 and (b) the British took all West African oil exports in 1815 and consumed 90 per cent of the same in 1850. 14 Annual earnings from palm oil by brokers in the Bight of Biafra averaged about £30,000 in the late 1810s, £55–70,000 in the late 1820s, and £160–200,000 in the late 1830s (Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Initial Crisis’, p. 48). Figures by Eltis (Economic Growth, p. 360) suggest that oil exports were worth £120,000 a year in 1833–7. 17

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III Personal relationships are sometimes alleged to have played a role in smoothing the transition from the slave trade to the palm oil trade. In particular, the Liverpool merchants who dominated the slave trade before 1807 are credited with developing the palm oil trade thereafter. On the African side, the merchant families that controlled the slave trade before 1807 came to control oil brokerage after 1807. Continuity of commercial personnel and of personal contacts between British and African traders is seen, therefore, as a key feature easing the transition in commercial practice in the region. As Lynn has argued, British trade after 1807 ‘relied on the existing techniques of trading with Africa: in these terms 1807 was no break’.15 This is, according to Lynn, exemplified by the careers of some Liverpool traders, most notably John and Thomas Tobin, who both traded for slaves in the Bight of Biafra before 1807 and became ‘central figures in Liverpool’s post-abolition trade with Africa’.16 Thus, John Tobin exploited ‘links with Duke Ephraim of Old Calabar’ to promote his palm oil trade, while his brother, Thomas, used earlier connections with Bonny to become ‘deeply involved in the growth of oil exports’ from that port. Personal and family ties and shared values have been important historically in the growth of trade in various parts of the world, including the Atlantic.17 Particular emphasis has been given to their role in promoting trust among those involved in transactions, a major consideration when trade depended, as it often did, on credit. Unlike in other parts of the Atlantic world, in the case of the Bight of Biafra there is no evidence that British or other European traders encouraged family members or other associates to live in the region and to serve as resident factors. Nor, unlike in some other parts of Atlantic Africa, is there any evidence of the rise of a mixed race group of traders as a result of ‘miscegenation’ at the coast. Insofar, therefore, as Afro-European trade in the Bight of Biafra depended on personal relations, it did so largely as a result of iterative commercial transactions in which ‘trust’ between African and European parties was built on records of honest dealing and consolidated by social interaction, including visits by the offspring of local traders to Europe. Local African merchants were often educated in Britain or elsewhere around the Atlantic, and hence might well develop personal relationships that

15

Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, p. 64. Ibid., p. 63. 17 See, for instance, Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting (New York, 1985); Avner Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 450–76; Robin Pearson and David Richardson, ‘Business Networking in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 54 (2001), 657–79. 16

18

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

reinforced trade.18 It is also evident, however, that whatever resources those engaged in transactions invested in cementing personal ties, such ties were far from unambiguous in terms of their commercial outcomes. On the contrary, personal relations could be used as much to deceive as to promote trust in dealings, a feature of late eighteenth-century Anglo-Efik trade relations at Old Calabar that we have exposed elsewhere.19 While investment in personal friendships may have been necessary to promote trade, therefore, it was not sufficient to protect the parties engaged in trade from breakdowns in relations as a result of malfeasance. In this respect, the value of personal connections in facilitating the shift from slave to oil trading in the Bight of Biafra was perhaps much lower than has sometimes been assumed. These doubts about the impact of personal links on trade development in the Bight of Biafra are reinforced by the successful entry of non-British slave traders into the region’s external trade after 1807. Few, if any, of these traders had commercial contacts with the Bight of Biafra before 1807. Yet, collectively, they came to control a major share of the value of exports from the region during the following three decades. Their capacity to do so challenges the alleged importance of continuity or stability of personal contacts in promoting trade growth. A similar message surfaces when one takes a closer look at the careers of British traders such as John and Thomas Tobin on which proponents of the value of personal relations have placed much weight. Both the Tobins, it is true, were slave traders to the Bight of Biafra before 1807, but their trade was with Bonny not Old Calabar, a fact that undermines suggestions that John Tobin’s commercial dealings with Duke Ephraim of Old Calabar before 1808 provided the platform for the subsequent growth of Liverpool’s palm oil trade at the port. The Tobin–Duke Ephraim alliance, if that is what it was, was a post-1807 phenomenon, not an extension of an earlier one. As for Thomas Tobin’s links with Bonny, these, unlike John’s dealings with Duke Ephraim, do seem to have had roots in the slave-trading era. Their value in terms of the subsequent growth of the palm oil trade, however, remains questionable. Bonny did not become a significant exporter of palm oil until the 1820s, and Thomas Tobin himself seems to have emerged as a major importer of palm oil at Liverpool only after 1840.20 On the evidence of the Tobins’ careers, therefore, Liverpool’s importance in restructuring the trade of the Bight of Biafra after 1807 seems to have depended more on forging new alliances with local African traders than on adapting old ones. This was also true of non-British traders to the region. As far as personal relations in the

18 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 342–3. 19 Ibid., p. 346. 20 Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, pp. 19, 73–4.

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Bight of Biafra were concerned, events in 1807 represented a break with the past.21 A revision of the importance of personal relationships in shaping the transition from slave to palm oil exports raises issues about how the transition was achieved, particularly in the context of credit flows into the region in the century before 1841. As Dike emphasized, ‘trust’ or credit in the Niger Delta and the Cross River essentially involved advances of goods against future deliveries of exports.22 Dike’s focus was on the nineteenth century but, since he wrote, the emphasis he placed on credit has been extended back into the eighteenth century. Thus Latham argued that, though Africans were probably denied credit in ‘the uncertain conditions’ prevailing ‘in the early years’ of the Old Calabar slave trade, by the 1760s, and probably several decades earlier, Europeans were supplying credit to Efik traders, who in turn used the goods received to buy slaves at ‘inland markets’.23 Moreover, it is also recognized that what happened at Old Calabar applied with equal force at Bonny in the eighteenth century.24 Credit was, therefore, a central feature of commercial relations in the Bight of Biafra before and after 1807, with British credit playing a critical role in supporting trade expansion before 1807 and in restructuring of the region’s exports thereafter. In seeking to understand how growth and change occurred in the Bight of Biafra’s export trade in the century before 1841, we need to explain how credit inflows were secured and sustained, even in the face of externally determined changes in personal relations after 1807.

IV How was credit protected sufficiently to encourage European merchants – largely British – to make advances at the level they evidently did in the Bight 21

In fairness to Lynn, it is worth noting that he also refers to the careers of other Liverpool merchants, notably Jonas Bold, James Penny and George Case, to support his argument. Unfortunately, on close inspection their careers offer no more support for his argument than those of the Tobins. For instance, there is no evidence that Bold was involved in slaving voyages to the Bight of Biafra before 1807. Penny and Case, however, were, though the degree to which this supports Lynn’s argument is open to question. Penny commanded several voyages to Bonny in the 1770s, but thereafter maintained only a tenuous connection with the region before 1807, normally preferring to invest in voyages to West-Central Africa. Case does not appear to have visited Africa himself but was an investor in voyages to Bonny and Old Calabar in 1790–1807. How important he was as a trader in palm oil after 1807 is unclear, though he seems to have ranked behind John Tobin. See Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, for the voyage information on Bold, Penny and Case. 22 Dike, Trade and Politics, pp. 79–80, 90–3. 23 A.J.H. Latham, Old Calabar, 1600–1891 (Oxford, 1973), p. 27. 24 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1699–1841’, Journal of African History, 45 (2004), forthcoming. 20

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

of Biafra in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? The answer to this question lies in political conditions in the region and the adaptation by Europeans of local credit underwriting arrangements. To explain this we need to distinguish between conditions at individual trading venues and the different credit protection arrangements to which they gave rise. It is also useful to explore how credit protection arrangements developed before 1807 in order to see how these arrangements were affected by changes in trading parameters caused by British abolition and subsequent moves to suppress the slave trades of other nations. Our analysis suggests that, contrary to some recent findings, Afro-European commercial relations before 1841 involved local institutional adjustments to changing external economic and political parameters of trade, to which personal relationships were subordinated. Before 1807, British traders dominated slave exports from both Bonny and Old Calabar, with traders from Liverpool increasingly in the ascendancy. Security of credit was crucial to Anglo-African commercial relations in this period. Outside the jurisdiction of British judicial or political authority, credit protection in the region was based on local institutions, which themselves were related to structures of local political authority. The most closely studied mechanisms have been those of Old Calabar, where the Ekpe society emerged as the institution that enforced credit arrangements.25 An exclusively male body, the society was divided into a series of grades under a chief official known as Eyamba. Each grade required payment of dues, the highest grade costing the most, but members of the highest grades shared income from dues among themselves. Wealthy individuals able to purchase the higher grades could thus lay claim to the bulk of income from membership dues, a valuable asset as all males at Old Calabar were increasingly pressured to join Ekpe, sometimes under threat of physical abuse. The value of holding high office in Ekpe was further enhanced as its leading members determined and collected payments of duty or ‘coomey’ from visiting ships. Controlled by the leading families of the principal commercial wards or townships comprising Old Calabar, Ekpe’s rise to commercial prominence was associated by Latham with the growth of the export slave trade, where it served as a mechanism to ‘cover the inevitable problem of bad debts’ and, according to others, evolved into ‘an effective governmental institution’, enabling the various wards of the port to interact and resolve disputes.26 However one defines its status, the Ekpe society has figured prominently in traditional explanations of Old Calabar’s rise as a slave port. Ekpe’s role at Old Calabar was to mediate inter-ward competition and to attempt to regulate and enforce credit arrangements, including those with

25

The following draws on Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, pp. 347–49, which also lists the relevant literature. 26 Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 29–30; Monday E. Noah, Old Calabar: The City States and the Europeans, 1800–1885 (Uyo, Nigeria, 1980), p. 30. 21

MARITIME EMPIRES

British merchants. Almost certainly related to struggles for control of Ekpe and thus access to taxation on trade, such competition periodically erupted into open conflict and violence, most notably in an infamous massacre in 1767 that was probably linked to debt problems at a time when Old Calabar’s position in the export trade had been under pressure from Bonny for at least a decade.27 Echoes of this conflict continued through the 1770s and beyond, damaging Ekpe’s potential to enforce repayment of debts.28 Whether or not Ekpe was effective in terms of credit supervision, it is important to note that before 1808 it did not intervene to protect British interests. Its remit in such matters was confined to protecting the interests of its own members, and, despite claims by some historians to the contrary, there is no evidence to suggest that before 1807 British traders were allowed to join the society. While Ekpe was a debt collection agency, therefore, it did not act on behalf of British slave traders.29 For such traders, credit protection at Old Calabar depended on other mechanisms. The key mechanism for credit protection in international exchange at Old Calabar before 1807 was human pawning. An indigenous practice in which people were offered or ‘pledged’ as collateral for loans, human pawnship was an African institution of unknown antiquity for protecting creditors against default.30 It was not exclusive to Old Calabar, but it was adopted there by the 1760s, if not earlier, as an essential mechanism for collecting debts arising in Anglo-Efik transactions and continued to serve in this capacity through 1807.31 In resorting to pawning, British creditors seem to have insisted on introducing more precise timetables for completing contracts than was customary within local practice. In other respects, however, the system seems to have been adopted largely unaltered by them. Fundamental to the effectiveness of pawning as a debt recovery arrangement were two assumptions. The first was a belief on the part of British traders that Efik traders had a vested interest in protecting those pawned and would seek to redeem them. Consistent with this, the British placed particular emphasis on trying to obtain pawns with kinship ties to borrowers. There is evidence to suggest they were to some extent successful in doing so. The tying of pawning to kinship perhaps accounts for the fact that, in practice, the pawns held by the British tended

27 See Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, for further discussion and a review of the literature on this event. 28 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Anglo-Efik Relations and Protection Against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar 1740–1807’ in Sylviane Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategy (Athens, Ohio, 2003), pp. 101–20. 29 This is not to say that Ekpe did not impose sanctions against British traders on behalf of its members, or did not intervene in cases where imported credit gave rise to intra-African debt problems. 30 See Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds, Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Colorado, 1994) for a general survey. 31 This and the ensuing discussion draw on Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, pp. 349–53.

22

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

to be smaller in number than the slaves for which they served as collateral. The second assumption was that any default by borrowers could result in pawns being confiscated and sold into slavery in the Americas. While British traders were sometimes evidently reluctant to follow this course of action, perhaps out of fear of damaging relations with local traders, there is again evidence that some did foreclose on pawns and that Old Calabar merchants acknowledged their right to do so in certain circumstances. Thus, both British and Efik traders accepted human pawning as an appropriate device for securing credit at Old Calabar before 1808. In important respects, the social nexus of trade at Bonny was similar to that at Old Calabar. Bonny comprised several communities whose involvement in trade was based on an expanding system of competing ‘houses’, variously classified in terms of importance on lineage, association with religious cults (or juju), and status of leaders or chiefs.32 Country chiefs or heads of houses themselves formed their own council and together with other senior ‘house’ officials were members of graded male secret societies such as Okonko, which also had some law enforcing functions.33 As at Old Calabar, where a few ward-based families came to control trade, so at Bonny a similar number of canoe houses apparently came to dominate external trade.34 On the surface, therefore, trading arrangements at Bonny might have been expected to mirror those of Old Calabar. In certain crucial respects, however, the social nexus of trade at Bonny differed from that at Old Calabar. In particular, though Bonny had its own secret societies, none seem to have appropriated the power that the Ekpe society did at Old Calabar internally to regulate contract and credit.35 How such matters were handled in the community largely escaped the attention of contemporary visitors and thus of historians. On one issue, however, observers

32 Susan M. Hargreaves (‘The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Bonny: A Study of Power, Authority, Legitimacy and Ideology in a Delta Trading Community, 1790–1914’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1987, p. 34) identifies three types of ‘houses’; Duowari, Opuwari, and Kalawari, the first two of which were the principal or major houses, the last being branches or wings of the other two or smaller independent houses. Duowari are said to derive from the original lineage groups and included most of the juju houses, whereas the Opuwari were seen as ‘slave houses’, whose origins date from the eighteenth century and were linked to the appointment of slaves as house heads. 33 On Okonko, see Hargreaves, ‘Political Economy of Bonny’, p. 111. 34 For some information on the merchants at Bonny involved in trade with the British in 1791–3, see Joseph E. Inikori, ‘The Development of Entrepreneurship in Africa: Southeastern Nigeria During the Era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola, eds, Black Business and Economic Power (Rochester, NY, 2002), p. 48. Inikori lists the individual merchants involved without seeking to identify their links with canoe houses. 35 In a sketch of Calabar, one contemporary noted that the running of Ekpe by ‘Great Egbo’, which he had observed at Calabar, had ‘escaped [his] observation’ at Bonny (Grant’s Sketch of Calabar, ed. D.C. Simmons [Calabar, 1958], p. 12).

23

MARITIME EMPIRES

of Bonny were clear: unlike Old Calabar and many other places in Africa, Bonny had no tradition of pawning people in order to secure loans or credit, whether locally or in international dealings. Moreover, insofar as such matters can be discerned, no attempt was apparently made by outsiders to introduce such a mechanism for protecting creditors against default by borrowers.36 As a result, the methods upon which the British relied before 1807 to protect credit were necessarily different at Bonny from those at Old Calabar, which were related to the concentration of political authority. The ability of merchants at Bonny to attract the credit required to underpin their huge expansion of slave exports in 1740–1807 was probably related to the turnaround times of ships at the port. Compared to Old Calabar (and indeed many other places in Atlantic Africa), ships visiting Bonny were turned round much faster, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century.37 This reduced time-related risks, including disease, as problems for British creditors lending goods to local traders. Faster turnaround times, however, may be seen as symptomatic of other, underlying mechanisms that helped to ensure that borrowers discharged their debts in good order. What those mechanisms were remains uncertain, but it is likely that they were shaped by political changes at Bonny that affected the distribution of power between the king (or Amanyanabo) and other local institutions in the eighteenth century. Central to these changes was consolidation of authority over external trade, including the granting of permission to ‘open trade’, in the office of Amanyanabo, perhaps from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the gradual assumption of dynastic control over the monarchy by the local Pepple family. At Bonny, therefore, it appears that during the era of the British slave trade a form of centralised institutional mechanism located in the office of the king or Amanyanabo emerged to oversee credit arrangements, perhaps reinforcing in turn the king’s political position relative to other local institutions as external trade grew.38 Be this as it may, at Bonny, as at Old Calabar, credit protection seems to have become interwoven with local politics and institutional arrangements. At Bonny, however, protection became tied to political centralization and third-party enforcement, whereas at Old Calabar it largely depended, in the absence of similar tendencies, on private order arrangements tied to established institutions. Did these two, apparently distinctive, systems of credit protection continue unaltered after Britain’s abolition of its slave trade in 1807 or did the changes

36

See Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Horrid Hole’. For general data on turnaround times, see David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), 478. For specific evidence on Bonny, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Horrid Hole’, where it is suggested that loading rates of ships at Bonny were twice as high as those at Old Calabar in 1750–1807. 38 For an elaboration of these arguments see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Horrid Hole’. 37

24

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

in trade ushered in by British abolition provoke change, even convergence, of the two systems? Put another way, how flexible were the two systems in accommodating change in trade relations in the Bight of Biafra after 1807? Third party or state mechanisms for enforcement of contracts through political institutions are usually seen as flexible and efficient in facilitating growth or rapid adjustments in markets.39 It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising to find evidence that the arrangements for protecting creditors that seem to have evolved at Bonny before 1807 continued largely unaltered for some time after British abolition. In effect, the holder of the office of Amanyanabo continued to monitor external trade, at least until the crisis of the monarchy that is said to have engulfed politics at Bonny from the 1830s onwards.40 In the case of the slave trade, which, after an initial decline in 1807–14, recovered strongly from 1815, it is clear that in the 1820s King Pepple (or Opubo) was central to trade and credit arrangements of the French newcomers to the port. In 1820, ‘le roi Pepper’ was said to have supplied 300 ‘Noirs de nation “Eboe”’ to the French ship Fox.41 Five years later, Jean Jacques Guimbert, master of the Fortunee, observed ten ships at Bonny trading ‘avec le Roi[,] a passer chaqun a son tour d’apres le Reglement etabli par Messieurs les Capitaines que aucun batiment ne pourre traiter avec le peuple’.42 In the same year, the master of a newly arrived French ship received advice from the king on the vessels he was currently trading with, including the dates on which they would be paid their slaves.43 Although evidence relating to other national slave carriers is unavailable, a similar pattern of control by the Amanyanabo was evident in the emerging palm oil trade, where the British were the principal creditors. A report of 1826 suggested that until ‘King Pepple’ opened trade, no African oil broker could trade with Europeans. The king’s approval to trade, it was said, was signified by a ceremony involving breaking eggs against the ship’s hull and entertaining the king on board ship.44 The fact that the Amanyanabo’s influence over external trade and the distribution of income it generated was so strong may ultimately have contributed to the internal tensions in Bonny for control of the office that arose after Opubo’s death in 1830. Significantly, one of the outcomes of this crisis was a treaty signed in 1837 by Opubo’s successor, William Dappa Pepple, with Britain, confirming the Amanyanabo’s

39

Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Institute of Economic Affairs, occasional papers, 106 (London, 1999), p. 22. 40 On this crisis see Martin Lynn, ‘Factionalism, Imperialism and the Making and Breaking of Bonny Kingship c.1830–1885’, Revue Francaise d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 82 (1995), 169–92. 41 Serge Daget, ed., Répertoire des Expéditions Négrièrs Françaises à la Traite Illegale (1814–1850) (Nantes, 1988), pp. 129–30. 42 Ibid., p. 392. 43 Ibid., p. 424. 44 R.M. Jackson, Journal of a Further Residence in the Bonny River (Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 1934), pp. 73, 77. 25

MARITIME EMPIRES

right to levy duties on trade and his liability for debts incurred by traders recommended by him.45 This treaty is sometimes seen as an effort by William Dappa Pepple to gain British recognition as Amanyanabo, 46 but it might equally be seen as an attempt by the British to endorse local mechanisms of credit protection that had worked well at Bonny for close to a century or more, provided the holder of the office of Amanyanabo was considered legitimate and acted impartially.47 Whether used impartially or not, and regardless of the changes in personnel involved in trade, the power of the Amanyanabo to regulate external trade seems to have remained as crucial to protecting creditors to Bonny merchants in the three decades after 1807 as it was in the preceding century. Based on the holding of human pawns or ‘pledges’ on board ship and the threat to carry them away should a borrower default, the pre-1807 credit protection mechanisms of Old Calabar proved less adaptable in the face of British abolition and subsequent moves to suppress the export slave trade. For those who succeeded the British as slave traders, holding humans as pawns on board ship increased the risk of seizure by naval patrols, while allowing pawns to be held ashore curtailed the threat of foreclosure and in any case raised supervision costs. Moreover, other forms of collateral were much less useful; the essence of credit protection arrangements before 1808 was that they allowed those pledged to be shipped away and sold as slaves in the event of default. Similarly, for British palm oil traders, the value of pawnship as a credit protection arrangement largely evaporated as the threat of seizing human pawns was removed by British abolition. If, therefore, local merchants at Old Calabar were to continue to compete for international credit after 1807, new ways of protecting creditors from default needed to be found. Superficially at least, on-going political changes at Old Calabar following the infamous massacre of 1767 may be considered to have provided a partial solution to this problem. A conspiracy to which British traders and traders from Duke (or New) Town ward were parties, the massacre had a decisive influence on the balance of power within Old Calabar, crippling, if not immediately destroying, the Robin family that, through their base at Old Town, had earlier controlled much of the trade of the port.48 The principal beneficiary was the Duke family of New Town, which, notwithstanding continuing involvement in the slave trade by other wards, notably Creek Town and Henshaw Town, seems to have gained commercial ascendancy over Old Calabar trade in the later eighteenth century. Indeed, by 1810 Efiom Edem (or Duke Ephraim), the

45

Hargreaves, ‘Political Economy of Bonny’, p. 200. Lynn, ‘Factionalism’, p. 177. 47 For this argument, see David Richardson, ‘Background to Annexation: Anglo-African Credit Relations in the Bight of Biafra, 1700–1891’, in Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau, ed., Between Trade and Empire (London, 2004). 48 Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’; idem, ‘Protection’. 46

26

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

head of Duke Town, had effectively eclipsed all rivals, and between that date and his death in 1834 became ‘the most influential man in Efik history’, according to Latham, controlling all the major political offices and by the 1820s effectively monopolising collection of ‘coomey’ or duty on European trade.49 This, in turn, perhaps helped to underwrite his reputation for ‘legendary creditworthiness’ and his ability to borrow simply on the security of promissory notes, as exemplified by his dealings with at least one French slave trader in the late 1820s.50 In terms of concentration of power, arrangements for securing credit at Old Calabar thus evinced signs of convergence with those at Bonny from the late eighteenth century, with Duke Ephraim centralizing political power in a fashion similar to what the holder of the office of Amanyanabo had achieved at Bonny, thereby securing trade with European merchants to a degree that had not previously been achieved at Old Calabar. Whereas power and credit security at Bonny were vested in the institution of the Amanyanabo, at Old Calabar Duke Ephraim’s ability to attract credit was based essentially on personal reputation and his unprecedented tenure simultaneously of several key offices. His personal status was, therefore, exceptional, and did not provide a secure base upon which to protect creditors against default in the longer term. Indeed, there seems to be no evidence that other traders at Old Calabar were able, like Duke Ephraim, to borrow on personal notes either before or after his death in 1834. As a result, for most traders at Old Calabar after British abolition, attracting external credit became linked to institutional innovation involving the Ekpe society. Ekpe, as we have seen, was dominated by the leading local merchants and exercised considerable cross-community power at Old Calabar long before 1807. Its powers included the determination, collection and distribution of duties on trade as well as law making and the punishment of debtors and other offenders, the principal instrument of which was ‘blowing’ ekpe against the person or persons concerned. Families were liable for misdemeanours by their members. There is some evidence that before 1807 Ekpe insisted on reinstatement of pawns who absconded while in the possession of British slave traders, but it also took action to forestall British traders from prematurely confiscating pawns in order to recover debts. Crucially, however, Ekpe only acted on behalf of its members and before 1807 this privilege, as far as one can judge, never extended to Europeans.51 It is unclear whether this reflected British reluctance to buy membership or Efik refusal to allow it, but by remaining outside Ekpe the British were unable to call on it to recover debts, relying instead on pawning. British abolition changed this situation, however, prompting credit-hungry Efik traders or protection-seeking British lenders – or both – to change their attitude towards membership of the society. Thus by

49 50 51

Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 48, 79. Daget, Repertoire, p. 380. Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, p. 349. 27

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the 1820s, if not earlier, masters of British ships visiting the port were evidently buying membership in Ekpe, sometimes at high grades, thereby availing themselves of the debt-collecting powers of the society.52 Moreover, driven on perhaps by credit-related motives, they continued to do so after 1830, though whether this was a standard policy or response to specific problems is unclear.53 In seeking to recover debts, British traders also resorted at times to other local mechanisms such as ‘panyarring’ or taking traders hostage.54 But the admission of Britons into Ekpe represented an important innovation after 1807, transforming a major local institution from an essentially inward-looking contract enforcement agency into one with an international remit, thereby helping to underwrite the security of capital flows into the port.

V In the eighteenth century, both African and European traders in the Bight of Biafra evidently felt it worthwhile to try to build good personal relations as part of the process of engaging in commercial transactions. Equally evident, established personal relations were fractured by British abolition, but even before 1807 they were by themselves insufficient to persuade British or other traders to advance credit to their African trading partners without the support of institutionally based forms of credit protection. In the absence of European courts or other institutions, local political and other factors largely dictated the institutional structure of credit protection at each trading venue and its potential for attracting credit from overseas trading partners. At Old Calabar, where political power was fragmented throughout most, if not all, of the eighteenth century, credit protection relied on appropriation and adaptation

52 An English visitor, James Holman, reported in 1828 that Englishmen were sometimes admitted to Ekpe. He instanced one Liverpool ship captain who held the rank of ‘Yampai, which is of considerable importance’, enabling him ‘to recover all debts due to him by the natives’ (Holman’s Voyage to Old Calabar [1828], ed. Donald C. Simmons (Calabar, 1959), p. 12). 53 See, for example, National Maritime Museum Archives, JOD 69, Logbook of Ship Magistrate, 18 June 1841; Latham, Old Calabar, p. 80; Northrup, Trade without Rulers, p. 109. We are grateful to the National Maritime Museum for permission to use and cite its records. 54 For the seizure in 1846 by British oil traders of one prominent Efik trader in order to force repayment of debt, see H.M. Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure 1829–1858 (London, 1970 [1863]), p. 274. It is possible to interpret this event as a case of ekpe being blown by the British against a defaulting trader. Interestingly, other traders secured the release of the offending trader by assuming surety for repayment of the debts in question. In 1872, the British consul in Old Calabar sought to outlaw seizure or panyarring of local traders by British captains, a measure that, according to Latham, prompted several British traders to join the Ekpe society during the following decade (Latham, Old Calabar, p. 80).

28

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

of the institution of human pawning. By contrast, at Bonny it seems to have become identified with centralisation of power over trade in the office of Amanyanabo. Reliance on a more ‘state’ centred, depersonalised creditprotection mechanism may have facilitated faster growth of trade before 1807 at Bonny than at Old Calabar, where credit protection became interwoven with kinship or other ties between local merchants and pawns. In the face of changes in trade relations stemming from British abolition, the institutional mechanisms for credit protection at Bonny proved more flexible than those at Old Calabar, where membership in Ekpe by outsiders came to be the preferred method of credit protection after 1807. Drawing on different institutions at each place in order to protect ‘trust’ or credit, Afro-European commercial relations at both Bonny and Old Calabar were thus a story of creative adaptation of such institutions to changing circumstances of trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly British withdrawal from slave carrying in 1807.

29

3

‘Pirate water’ Sailing to Belize in the mahogany trade DANIEL FINAMORE

When I was a boy there was hardly, in all my acquaintance, a single reputable family which did not eat off mahogany, sit on mahogany, sleep in mahogany. Mahogany was a symbol of economic solidarity and moral worth. Aldous Huxley, 19341

The increased prosperity of British and North American Atlantic port cities over the course of the eighteenth century is effectively illustrated by the significant expansion in the production of luxury furniture. Hardwoods such as oak and walnut from the British Isles and Europe had long been popular and demand from a range of industries – from furniture to shipbuilding – greatly outstripped local supplies. Imported hardwood species from South America, Africa and South Asia were introduced to suit the demand, whether for strong wood of consistent grain that took well to carving and finishing, or for inlays and veneers that bore the appearance of their exotic origins. By the mid-eighteenth century, mahogany imported from the Caribbean basin was the standard of quality for the highest grade of manufacture. As the century wore on, accessible sources on Jamaica and other islands became depleted and the British increasingly turned farther west, to the Central American mainland flanking the Bay of Honduras (today’s northern Honduras and Belize). The chests, dining tables, sideboards, chairs, and secretaries, whether decorated or plain, were always highly polished to expose the rich red colour and distinctive grain that identified the wood as the exotic product of British maritime trade into the farthest reaches of the New World sub-tropical rainforest. The ‘economic solidarity and moral worth’ intrinsic to the furniture of Aldous Huxley’s youth, therefore, embodied not just the ingenuity of British cabinetmakers, but also the labour of those who extracted and transported the massive logs to the coast, as well as those who embarked on transatlantic voyages to waters they perceived as remote and dangerous. The AfricanCaribbean slaves who had been brought to Central American forest camps to

1

Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (New York, 1934), p. 28. 30

‘PIRATE WATER’

hunt for, cut down, and drag out the massive mahogany trees have been investigated through archives and archaeological sites.2 But exceedingly little evidence has survived of the voyages made by mariners from many European nations to convey the valuable wood to the cabinetmaker. The two aims of this essay are first to address the mechanics of the mahogany trade, for those interested specifically in importation of wood into Great Britain, and second to offer a more broad-based discussion of life on merchant vessels trading to relatively remote regions of British suzerainty during the height of empire. Notwithstanding the large quantities of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury mahogany imports that are manifested physically in the form of now antique furniture, there has been little recognition of the actual transatlantic transport of the wood, most likely because quantitative documentation of the trade has proven elusive. Although duty on North American timber including mahogany was reduced following the Naval Stores Act of 1721, the wood remained expensive to import. Unlike walnut from the American colonies and mahogany from Jamaica, wood from the settlement at Honduras, which did not attain colonial status until 1862, was not always recognized as domestic and was sometimes taxed as a foreign import. During the late 1760s and early 1770s a duty of £2 per ton by weight was placed on Honduras mahogany.3 This was said to average out at £2 10s per ton upon calculation of the contents through measurement. From 1771 to 1779 (when the settlement was temporarily evacuated due to threat of Spanish invasion), the wood was imported duty free when it arrived in British bottoms.4 But by 1812 with duties charged on mahogany imported from every region, government response to foreign competition resulted in an additional £2 per ton duty levied on wood that was not from Honduras, Bermuda or the Bahamas.5 It is not possible to present a comprehensive accounting of quantities of, or taxation on, mahogany shipped between Belize, London, or any other port since the wood was loaded onto ships and recorded by merchants, shipowners and customs officials in many different forms. Wood was loaded as debarked and squared logs, log ends (short parts cut from a long log to fit into a hold), slabs, planks (both probably hand-shaped and unmilled), and boards (perhaps milled). Wood was sometimes reported by weight in tons or pounds, and other

2 O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore, 1977); Daniel Finamore, ‘Sailors and Slaves on the Wood-cutting Frontier: Archaeology of the British Bay Settlement, Belize’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1994. 3 Adam Bowett, ‘The Commercial Introduction of Mahogany and the Naval Stores Act of 1721’, Furniture History 30, pp. 43–56, 1994; PRO CO 123/14 ‘A short account of this trade in times past’. 4 BL Add. 34,903 F.166–170, Nelson Papers; ‘Dyer to Your Lord’. 5 An Act for granting additional Duties on Mahogany not imported from the Bay of Honduras . . . 20 April 1812, Geo. III, CAP XXXVI.

31

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times measured with a formula applied to convert to an estimated weight, and then to the approximate contents in board feet.6 Customs and Colonial Office records provide a few clues to the trade, but the primary extant source is the business papers of the Henley family, London shipowners whose diverse interests included the management of more than twenty voyages from London to the Bay of Honduras between 1790 and 1819.7 These papers provide not only insight into the mechanics of the trade, but they also expose aspects of shipboard life, the social network through which the wood was carried, patterns of communication across the ocean, and the web of authority, as well as its limits, within Britain’s far-flung maritime empire.

Structure of the business The prominent residents of the settlement at Honduras, those who had both land claims and slaves to harvest the wood, were only able to oversee the local activities that brought the product out of the forest and down to the coast. Although they continued to own the wood until it had cleared customs and was sold in London, the settlers were reliant on an agent for the remainder of the process. These agents acted on behalf of the overseas cutters, contracting for ships and selling the wood in England. The agents usually bundled the wood of several cutters into a single cargo, such as in 1815, when wood owned by John Potts, Vachel Keene, James Hyde, William Usher, Peter C. Wall, Mary Hickey and James Waldron, ‘all of Honduras, Merchants’, was loaded aboard the ship Trusty for the firm of Inglis, Ellis & Co in London.8 For the shipowner, profit was largely realized only on the return voyage, so the agent negotiated terms based on a fixed freight charge based on the tonnage measurement of wood that was cleared at London, calculated by the customs officers there. Cargoes were almost entirely composed of mahogany with only as much wood of lesser value, such as logwood and fustic, as the ship could carry in smaller areas of broken stowage. The agent then sold the wood for the client, issuing a letter of credit for profits remaining after the subtraction of freight, duty and associated fees. Additional charges for demurrage that the cutters might owe the shipowner for keeping the ship in port too long during loading would be calculated at the conclusion of the voyage and paid by the agent. Settlers were

6

PRO T64/276B/417 Jonathan Tomkyne, ‘An account of the quantities of Mahogany, satinwood, rose wood not including any dyeing woods imported into England from Christmas 1777 inclusive to Christmas 1783’, 11 April 1785. 7 These papers are housed at the Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. I am greatly indebted to Roger Knight for calling these papers to my attention, and to Clive Powell for providing convenient access. 8 Henley Papers, HNL/119/15 Charterparty for ship Trusty, October 1804. 32

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allowed thirty days for every 100 tons of wood they loaded before charges were applied for delays. This complex system of credit and unknown costs of transport left the woodcutters greatly reliant on the capabilities and trustworthiness of their London representatives. Unlike in a triangular trade where various legs of a voyage were carefully timed to maximize fluctuating commodity prices and seasonal weather patterns, ships in the London–Honduras trade sailed directly back and forth across the Atlantic, diverging from this bilateral pattern only for short stops at a British West Indian island (usually Jamaica) opportunistically looking for ancillary transport business to Belize. The unpredictable and often long loading times characteristic of the mahogany trade prevented a more efficient use of the ships, which often spent several months of each voyage sitting at Belize awaiting and then loading their cargoes of squared mahogany. The shipowner could increase profits by competing for one of the few contracts for outward cargo, such as stores from the transport board for the garrison stationed at Belize. Outward-bound voyages were so often nearly empty that in 1806, one agent even expected that the ship Lady Juliana call at Madeira to load ‘2 pipes, 2 hogsheads, and 16 quarter casks for one of my friends at the Bay’ without charge.9 Cargoes were occasionally taken to Barbados or Jamaica en route to Belize, but that necessitated either finding additional cargo there, or obtaining adequate ballast for the next leg, which added expense and delay. After off-loading ordnance stores, including coal and building materials, in Barbados on their way to Honduras in 1809, the master of the Surry reported that ‘they will not let me take any sand off the bitch (beach). There is nothing to be got but mood (mud) they have up out of the harbor and that is 2 dollars p. ton’.10 In the end, he paid £55 Barbados currency for 37 tons stone ballast that was jettisoned on arrival at Belize. British ships rarely went on speculative voyages to Belize, for risk of the trouble experienced by Captain Fellete of the ship Pilgrim of Liverpool in 1784. It was reported that he ‘has been here two months and get only 40 tons of wood in – she came in purpose for mahogany but the Capt soon found that neither his goods, cash, nor Bills would procure him mahogany because what was cutt was all previously engaged’.11 Belize was a six- to fifteen-day sail past the west end of Jamaica, and considered to be the western fringes of the Caribbean. A full cargo consisted of between 212 and 457 pieces of mahogany most in the form of logs but including a few log ends, planks, boards, and slabs as well.12

9

HNL/77/51 Hunter to Henley, August 1806. HNL/59/82 Horry to Henley, Barbados, 26 April 1809. 11 CO123/14 pt.2, anonymous letter fragment, 23 December 1784. 12 Planks varied from 8 to 10 feet in length, 17–29 inches in breadth, 7–10 inches in thickness, and 85–174 linear feet (in volume); HNL/84/3 ‘Measure of freight’ for ship Maria, 1790. 10

33

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Although one can imagine the length and diameter of logs varying considerably producing misleading implications of cargo size, these cargoes did range dramatically, from 115,721 to 205,227 superficial feet (of board one inch in thickness) when calculated by measurement.13 The Lady Juliana returned in 1807 with a cargo containing 457 mahogany logs. When measured in London, they were calculated to contain 200,790 superficial feet. At 480 superficial feet measurement to the volumetric ton and the going rate of £10 per ton, the cutters owed a shipping charge of £4,183. Measurements made at Belize were considered only estimates.

Preparations for the voyage Ships employed in the timber trade were usually rated by Lloyds as E1 (older than twelve years) but in good repair. Many were used repeatedly in the mahogany trade, but none were dedicated exclusively to it. A ship suitable for a mahogany run also was used for more northerly transatlantic timber voyages and, with a few internal modifications, for coastal coaling and troop transport trips as well. Ships ranged from 290 to 400 tons burthen.14 In October 1810, before the Oeconomy was sent to the Caribbean for mahogany, the master complained ‘our main rigging I am afraid of it giving way and our square main sail is very thin and tender’.15 Shippers usually requested A1 ships, but vessels were much more likely to end their careers, rather than begin them, in the Honduras trade. In 1810, the brig West Indian was condemned at Belize ‘as not being sea worthy without repair which cannot be done here’. The Lord Rodney was taking in half an inch of water per hour when she arrived in Barbados in 1812. Although the master thought they would discover the leak when they began to caulk, the ship was taking on forty inches of water in twenty-four hours by the time they loaded and departed Belize for home. The most notable distinction of timber trade ships was the raft ports in the stern, for loading large timbers. They ranged in size from 24 to 36 inches square, and were caulked and sometimes sheathed shut because those to the lower decks were below waterline when fully laden.16 Masters occasionally complained that small ports prevented efficient lading, but that large ones weakened a ships structure. Just as the woodcutters were completely dependent on their agents, so both the agents and shipowners relied on the master. Success or failure hinged on

13

The Victorian Cabinet-maker’s Assistant: 417 Original Designs with Descriptions and Details of Construction (New York, 1970; first edn 1850), p. 38. 14 HNL/86/4 Charterparty of ship Mary, October 1804; HNL/83/7 Charterparty of ship Lord Rodney, September 1812. 15 HNL/101/3 Humber, 11 October 1810, Darby to Henley. 16 HNL/69/25 1796 Sketch plan, Heart of Oak stern. 34

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the ability of the master, particularly with regard to his business acumen, management of the crew, and sobriety. Reputation and personal contacts in the port of Belize were essential assets for getting fair treatment and rapid loading of cargo. To secure their loyalty to the ship’s cause, masters were given terms beyond their monthly wages, which averaged around £8–£10 per month. Masters were given cabin allowances for food and drink, cabin furnishings, a percentage in primage on the wood they loaded, and also a private adventure of a small amount of cargo, usually three tons of mahogany, freight free. Masters could also collect half the freight on goods carried in their cabin if they so chose. On the Surry in 1808, the mate was also allowed to ship a single small log, totalling 202ft 8in, freight free. Masters were charged with obtaining crew for a voyage, and with negotiating pay. During the nearly thirty-year period of the twenty-six voyages examined, rates of pay for crew rarely varied from the standard wage for seamen at £4 10s 0d per month and ordinary seamen at £3 10s per month. In fact, by the 1810s pay for all seamen had dropped to a uniform £3 10s per month.17 Carpenters and mates negotiated wages between £6 and £7 per month. Although nationalities were not recorded, crew lists include names indicating a multinational labour force. Scandinavian names appear on every crew list, and occasional others like Johan Schwartz, Manoel Joachim and Giuseppe Brandize suggest a yet broader representation. In 1806, the master of the Lady Juliana was having trouble obtaining a full complement of men, so he wrote to the shipowners asking for more to be sent down from London in a coach. He specifically asked for Danes and Swedes, since that was what he had already, and crews got along best when they were all from one country.18 The fluidity of a ship’s crew varied considerably on any specific voyage, but a ship often returned with a substantially different complement to that with which it had departed. On the voyage of the Lord Nelson in 1813, the charterparty dictated twenty men and three apprentices, but only six sailors signed on in London and five more at Gravesend. After the second mate was pressed at Havana and one seaman died, four more signed on in Belize. One of them, named James Hunt, signed on as steward on October and was dead by November. Later in the same voyage the master died in Belize and a replacement captain from shore was appointed to complete the voyage.19 Even experienced masters could have trouble obtaining adequate crew, such as in 1809 when Robert Horry complained that he had fifteen men aboard but half of them were ‘good for nothing’. Horry was a regular master in the Honduras trade, commanding at least eight voyages there. His letters regularly complain about his crews, so it is quite possible that the dissatisfaction went both ways.

17 18 19

HNL/43/20 Crew list for ship Cornwall, Richard Ward, master, 1814–1815. Ann Currie, Henleys of Wapping: A London Shipowning Family (Greenwich, 1988) p. 42. HNL/83/4 Douglas to Henley, 14 November 1813. 35

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On a voyage in 1808, Horry’s paternal oversight of a young apprentice was not enough to outweigh the harsh surroundings of the ship. Horry showed little compassion for his charge when he reported that: Charles Horwood left the boat in Stockes Bay this morning. I have no doubt but he is run as the boy that was with him says that he was crying for his mother. I hope you will look after him and punish him as he cannot have any reason for leaving the ship.20

On the same voyage, the amount of clothing issued to a boy named Guthrie as part of his terms of apprenticeship were viewed as a harbinger of the treatment he was to receive. Guthrie’s mother came on board at Portsmouth, complained that he hadn’t adequate clothing for the voyage, and took him off. His clothes were sold to the seamen for £2. Although Horry may not have been popular with crew, shipowners recognized the value of masters who had experience in the Honduras trade. Masters with connections there could complete their business more efficiently. When applying for a command on a Honduras-bound ship in 1819, John Weller emphasized his experience, referring the shipowners ‘to Messrs Gale & Sons in whose employ I was three years in, 2 voyages to the Bay in the Maria, 1 in the service with the same ship. Since then 2 voyages to the Bay in the Duke of York’.21 He was hired. In 1806 Henley hired William Pearson as master for his first run to Honduras. They were quite concerned about his lack of experience, so they placed a mate on board whose experience made up for him. They assured Pearson that: you will find a man that has been at the bay a great use. Mr. Bell has been chief mate of the Alliance, Capt. Gallillee last voyage and this voyage chief mate of the Meaburn. Please to let Mr. Bell see all the loading geer. Chains, Dogs &c and in case anything more is wanted let it be got at Gosport or Portsmouth. Capt Galleilee was so obliging as to offer to give me for you instructions for the Bay, which I have accepted and send by the mail.22

Upon arrival, however, Mr Bell thought better of the situation and backed out of the voyage. Preparing for departure from Falmouth, Pearson was relieved to encounter ‘another ship in Convoy from Greenock also heading to Bay – was there last year. He must be acquainted which will be of great advantage to me’.

20 21 22

HNL/116/6 Horry to Henley, 17 February 1808. HNL/119/33 Weller to Henley, 2 March 1819. HNL/77/51 Henley to Pearson, 6 November 1806. 36

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Although longevity was valued, many masters did not last long in the trade. Of twenty-two voyages returning from the Central American mainland with mahogany, one master commanded eight of them over an eleven-year period. One other master commanded four over the course of seven years, and another ten masters took on only a single voyage, not returning to the Honduras trade in the employ of the shipowners.

The voyage out: life on board It is commonly thought that masters maximized their profits on a voyage by keeping their men on short rations and selling them what they needed privately. While there is no direct evidence for this in the Honduras trade, the quality of life for the crew varied greatly between voyages. Food was a critical element affecting crew experience, health and profits for the ship. There was enormous variability in food stores from one master to another. While Robert Horry no doubt saved money by invariably supplying his ships solely with barrels and kegs of preserved beef, pork, bread, flour, peas, barley, oatmeal, rice, and suet, other masters such as Richard Ward, stocked large quantities of fresh vegetables and live fowl.23 Poor selection of provisions could have dramatic repercussions, such as in June of 1790, when Captain Bone reported that the ship’s bread which had been loaded in England in February ‘has turned out very bad mould & weveld, makes me very uneasy’.24 Some masters took additional opportunities to maximize profits at the expense of the seamen, such as when Robert Horry charged the steward five shillings for breaking a ship’s decanter, which was more than he apparently paid for it just prior to departure.25 Upon his return from Honduras in October 1807, the first mate of the Lady Juliana complained to the shipowner that he had been shorted in his wages by the master, William Pearson, and that he would ‘have nothing to do with him nor any such Drunken, Negligent Scoundrills as he is’. In contrast, an agent who went aboard the Surry when she arrived at Plymouth in 1809, described the master, James Kinnear, as ‘a fine active young man. The ship appears more like a ship bound out than return from a voyage.’ Payment of partial wages to a seaman’s family during the voyage was at the master’s discretion, and could be stopped mid-voyage, even if employment on the ship did not. In August 1810, Horry instructed the owners to ‘please to stop Peter Terese Boatswains monthly money, as his conduct since he is been here is very bad’.

23

HNL/68/12 Disbursements of the ship Hawke, 1812. HNL/122/5 Bone to Henley, 27 June 1790. 25 HNL/59/83 Bill of Sale, James Stanes, China and Staffordshire warehouse; crew list and articles, ship Freedom, 1809. 24

37

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Passengers frequently accompanied the ships in one or both directions. When listed by name, they are invariably family members of the principal merchants and woodcutters of Belize. Mahogany ships were the primary means of communication and transport between Belize and Great Britain, and women and sometimes children made the journeys unaccompanied. At least one ship master, Richard Ward, seems to have had close social connections with the wealthiest Belize merchants, since his ship Trusty became a venue for civilized entertainment on a voyage in 1816. He carried at least ten passengers in each direction, including ‘Mrs. Bennett and Servant, Mr. & Mrs. Hyde, infant, and servant’, six other men, and three single women and their servants. He was also accompanied by his wife, two children and their servant. Beyond the usual provisions for the crew, the ship was also supplied with fresh produce, more than £12 worth of old port wine, madeira, cognac, brandy and Jamaica rum, and an extensive new glassware and dinner service for twelve. A piano belonging to the master also accompanied the party round trip. Incorporation of cabin passengers into the operation of utilitarian transport voyages changed the character of daily life on the ship for everyone, and it was apparently not to the crew’s liking. Richard Manwaring was engaged as a foremast man on the voyage, but upon arrival he was told that he would cook for 20 passengers. He declined to sail with the ship, but still demanded payment for the time he spent preparing.

Leaving the ship Other sailors took advantage of the window between signing on board and departure to assess their situation and opt out. In November 1805, while preparing to depart from Portsmouth, three of Robert Horry’s men got ashore in one of the ship’s boats. Horry was surprised at one’s departure, since he ‘was useless so he didn’t think he would run’. Another ‘got away’ while watering. He chained the boats after this, but three days later while still in Portsmouth, six more men stole another boat and ran. Having ‘not heard any complaint in the ship’ and since ‘they have had small beer constant and fresh beef twice a week’, the master attributed their departure to the good rum available on shore. Once the voyage was under way, there were still limited opportunities for a crewman to escape a disagreeable situation, though it usually meant forfeiting unpaid wages earned. Crews naturally feared impressment, and sometimes the mate was even registered as master, in a ‘very prevalent altho irregular practice, of protecting, thereby, the chief officer of a ship from being impress’d’. No one wanted to be impressed on the return home from a year-long voyage, as were ten men and an apprentice, nearly the entire crew of the Valiant, on their arrival at Dover from Honduras in September 1790. Sometimes, though, going aboard a naval vessel was considered a preferred option, such as in 1811 when 38

‘PIRATE WATER’

the master of the Oeconomy reported that ‘John Jacobs and Daniel Garand entered on board HMS Sapphire after refusing their duty in consequence of which I got two soldiers.’ Although many seamen took opportunities to exchange life on one ship for life on another, some also preferred life in Spanish Central America to life on the ship. In September 1802, Robert Horry wrote: I have had the misfortune to lose 5 of the people. One is dead and 4 run away. . . . suppose they have gone to the Spanish settlements as I got a warrant and have searched every way here but cannot find them. Had some suspicion of a ship here searched and found clothes belonging to sailors that belonged to ships here that run the same night as they did.26

A few days later he reported that: Here again one of my men have thought proper to leave ship and enter on board her majesty’s ship Calypso Capt. Qinore who inforces me to pay the wages dew to him. The man has been very troublesome all the voyage and does not deserve any wages. I was very glad when he did go from the ship.27

Here Horry gives an indication of why the man sought fit to run from his duty, if he felt that the master was not going to pay him his wages anyway. Again, in 1812, Horry reported that: Three of my seamen named Peter Grenston, John Lambeth, Thomas Peterson stole the schift [skiff] from alongside, with her sails and everything complete, which deterred me until 6 in the morning as I could not get any intelligence of them. I got under way to proceed to the southward having the wind to the S-ward. Beating down along the coast I saw my boat in tow astern of a schooner. I immediately manned and armed a boat and with myself and got my boat and men. They were going to a Spanish port when the vessel fell in with them the master of the vessel knowing it was my boat suspected that they were run away with her. Fired musketry at them and brought them to. It will cost about £16 as I advertised her and men for that sum but the fellows agrees to pay it out of their wages if I will not bring them to justice.28

Other actions of the crew attest to their attempts to assert a modicum of control over their situations, either through minor acts of rebellion or cooperative action. Aboard the ship Surry in 1808, the master was reimbursed £2 on the ship’s account ‘for money stopped out of the seamen’s wages for

26 27 28

HNL/94/6 Horry to Henley, 4 September 1802. HNL/94/6 Horry to Henley, 26 September 1802. HNL/43/3 Horry to Henley, 15 May 1812. 39

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throwing the spay glass over Board’. We can assume there was a story left untold here, since had it been an accident he probably would have used the word ‘dropped’. Other sailors were more tactical. When the Cornwall prepared to depart Gravesend in 1812, Robert Horry found that seamen’s monthly pay had risen from £4 5s to £4 10s and that no one would sail for less. This cooperative action was sustained into 1813, and sailors were continuing to work for more. Leaving the Downs in May, 1813, Captain Douglas described how: My crew were troublesome, altho they engaged to proceed the voyage from Blackwall at 90/ per month seeing me anxious to gett off they started obstacles in, but when they discovered that I was determined to return to London to engage another crew they agreed to proceed at 90/.29

Due to the obvious range of controllable and uncontrollable factors, every voyage varied in expenses, profit, risks, crew disposition and treatment. There is no truly typical voyage, but the example of the 1805–6 voyage of the ship Mary, Robert Horry master, reveals interesting details about manning the ship and crew behaviour during one voyage at least.30 The initial crew of eleven men, consisting of master, mate, cook, carpenter, and seven seamen signed on in London. Following a month of preparation for the voyage in September 1805, the ship had a long layover in Portsmouth where six of this complement ran (including the cook) and one was discharged. Thirteen more men signed on board here, five of whom ran before departure for Honduras, one lasting only a single day. The Atlantic crossing was made with twelve men. Once at Honduras, two additional seamen ran, and one was impressed. They were replaced by a cook and a boy, presumably the best crew available for hire. The return voyage was conducted with a total of eleven men. The entire voyage employed twenty-six people, thirteen of whom lasted under two months and only nine of whom stayed on board for both trans-Atlantic legs. When sailors chose to run, they more often were owed money by the ship than vice versa. Owners of the Mary profited £20 5s 0d through crew who chose to run even though wages were due them. Conversely, the owners lost only £3 14s 7d on sailors who owed the ship on their departure. It is apparent that sailors considered their time on board the ship prior to transatlantic sailing to be a trial time to test out the master and crew. If they didn’t like their situation, it was preferable to depart without payment due them than to risk more time at sea. In contrast to the Mary’s 1805–6 voyage under Robert Horry, an 1807 voyage under a different master was concluded with the exact same crew under which it began.31

29 30 31

HNL/83/4 Douglas to Henley, 24 May 1813. HNL/86/6 Crew list and expenses for ship Mary, Robert Horry, master, 1805 to 1806. HNL/86/9. 40

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Hazards of the trip Much of the damage encountered by the ships was not specific to the Honduras trade, such as collisions in the crowded English waterways upon departure or return, or through general wear-and-tear at sea. The dangers of the mahogany trade were well known among shipowners, insurers and crew. As early as 1752, wrecks in the Bay of Honduras were so common that Spanish officials instructed their xebec guarda costas to search wrecks found along shore for mahogany planks or boards.32 One hazard distinctive of the Honduras trade, however, was the seasonality of the rains through which the mahogany was brought down the rivers, but which also signalled the beginning of hurricane season. Shippers had a narrow window between the beginning of the rains when the wood became accessible for loading and the full onset of the hurricane season. When John Weller arrived in June of 1819 he reported ‘Up to this date there is no rain to make the floods rise, whereby the wood comes down the river, and it will be impossible for us to sail by the first of August. There is 12 vessels in harbor waiting for the wood to come down.’33 By the end of July there were still no rains. By 1807 ships were also heading more than 100 miles to the south, to rivers in a much more rainy but nearly entirely unsettled district. Masters disliked loading in the south, because there was no settlement to supply food, labour to square the logs for shipping, or medical attention if needed. They felt it was ‘pirate water and belong to the Spanish, and English ships do not trade there, only Americans’. Here again in 1812, Robert Horry found that the proximity to Spanish settlements enticed his crew to run. If ships had not loaded and departed by August they increased their risk of encountering hurricanes on their return voyage. In September 1812, the ship Cornwall fell in with a hurricane which carried away the mizzentopmast. Was obliged to cut away all the rigging including the missen topgallant mast & sail. Broke the tiller and sprung the rudder, had the Jolly boat wash away, broke the spritsail yard in two, lost the foresail split main staysail & mizzenstaysail and main Tgsail blew loose. Washed away most of the bulwark and quarter clothes, filled the longboat full of water that the chocks went through her lee bilges and took some of the water casks away and my turtle and sundry other damage. It was fortunate that it only lasted about 8 hours or no ship could stood it. We could not stand on deck the ship was on her beam ends.34

32

PRO CO 137/59 Spanish Commandant of Port Omoa, Orders to take English vessels, 13 December 1752. 33 HNL/119/33 Weller to Henley, 21 June 1819. 34 HNL/43/3 Horry to Henley, 6 October 1812. 41

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Storms were not only a threat in mid-ocean, but in the unprotected harbour of Belize as well. The ship Lord Nelson had arrived in late June of 1813, at the beginning of the rains, and had loaded the majority of its cargo by 2 August when a hurricane struck. The crew set two anchors, gave the ship twenty fathoms of cable, hoisted up the boats and pointed the yards to the wind. As the storm and sea increased, they wore away the cables, struck the topmast, and let go their best bower anchor. At night the ship struck bottom and ‘unshipt her rudder and damaged it and the rudder case much, and tore up the deck abaft the rudder’, and the ship was fast aground.35 At daylight the next morning, they sounded around the ship and found they were in ten feet water, the ship ‘having drove to the southward 6 or 8 miles from Belize Roads’. With six extra hands from shore and four days spent hoisting out sixty-nine logs of the cargo, they were finally able to warp the ship into deeper water and repair it. Their experience was shared by every other ship at Belize, since none avoided being run up on shore. All but two were recovered.

Navigation Another hazard characteristic of the Honduras trade was the extensive reef system off the Belize coast. Not only did ships encounter the reef by surprise while still seven or eight leagues from Belize, but the main channel through the reef was so shallow that on departure ships loaded with mahogany often ran aground. Departing Belize in October 1810, Robert Horry found that his ship was loaded 21⁄2 feet more deeply than the channel, which was only 13 feet. With two pilots on board, the Valiant ran aground twice, the second time more than 20 miles offshore. Horry lost several anchors and had to offload some of the cargo with assistance from other ships before he got away. Wars and the consequent convoy protections had particular impact on business with the marginal settlement two-week sail west of Jamaica. In 1812, Robert Horry reported that: I left Honduras on the 1 of August knowd nothing of the war with America until 22. I fell in with a man-of-war, informed me and said that the sea was full of privateers which made me go to the southward of Bermuda.36

Avoiding the more heavily trafficked northern route worked for him, and the ship arrived off Dover without encountering American privateers. Travelling in convoy was required on Honduras voyage charterparties after the Act of 1798. Nonetheless, masters complained of these restrictions to their schedule, and often came up with reasons why they could not comply. Ships

35 36

HNL/82 40 Robert Horry, deposition at Honduras, 1813. HNL/43/3 Horry to Henley, 6 October 1812. 42

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departing Spithead might wait for weeks for transatlantic convoys, but these often left them at Jamaica, where they had to find further protection onward to Belize. Often of 100 ships in the convoy, there were only two or one, or even no other ships to Belize. Returning ships sometimes waited three months for convoy ships home. With the crew eating their provisions, the ships sitting loaded and ‘liable to be materially infused in the wales by the worms’, captains could either band together to sail under protest without protection, or send a sloop to Jamaica to request a convoy.37 Several of Henley’s homeward-bound ships were attacked by French and American privateers, and one was captured and scuttled. The capture of a ship had a big impact not only on the owners, freight contractors, and crew, but others dependent on the crew as well. In February 1814, Maria Cummings requested her regular £2 monthly payment from her husband’s salary as cook aboard the Lord Rodney. She was refused without explanation, and left to wonder if ‘the ship is lost or if my husband is dead’. It turned out that the owners had stopped payment because they had not heard from the ship in six months. It was later learned that the Lord Rodney indeed had been captured and scuttled by two French frigates, having been separated from her convoy in a gale. Payment of the crew ended the day the ship was captured.

Labour in Honduras: sailors, slaves, freemen hire The wages of some crewmen were withheld for fear that they would run, but many were paid what was due them at Belize, and some were given advances on future earnings. Sailors spent their wages on sugar, soap, sewing needles, and clothing, and undoubtedly on food and beverages not supplied by the ship as well.38 Every sailor who undertook the voyage round trip, regardless of position, had ‘hospital money’ deducted from their pay. The expenses never totalled more than fifteen shillings and were usually for medicine administered either on shipboard or via a doctor in Belize. Masters arranged with merchants to supply the ship with local meat and produce for their entire stay. In 91 days from February into May 1805, Jonathan Card delivered 42lb of beef, 303lb of turtle meat, and 8 live turtles to the ship Mary as the crew loaded their wood. Discounting the eight turtles that probably were bought for the voyage home, that averaged 1⁄3 lb of meat per day for each of the thirteen crew. In 1815, Richard Ward purchased 100lb of coffee and 300lb of sugar for the crew of the Cornwall. In 1805, the ship Valiant was supplied with 5,400 plantains over the course of their stay at Belize.

37

HNL/83/4 Douglas to Henley, 14 November 1813. HNL/28/12 Boys indentures, ship Adventure, James Mather master, October 1806 to October 1808.

38

43

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Once at Belize, labour shifted from operating the ship to hoisting the squared logs up from the water into the hold. The charterparty for the 1804–5 voyage of the Mary stated that ‘The said owner shall find such men boats and provisions as can be spared from the said ship and shall therewith assist in fetching on board the said cargo.’ In reality, though, the sailors alone were never enough to load a ship completely, and shipmasters contracted with established merchants on shore for labour to load their ships. They were provided with slave gangs at a rate of 6s 8d a day per man, and were charged more for labour on Sundays. This labour could accrue to considerable expense such as in 1809 when the ship Freedom paid £84 6s 8d for 253 man-days of ‘Negro hire’. In 1815, Ann Home of Belize supplied the labour of Harry, Antony, William, Quaa, Dick and Peter for seventeen days to load wood into the Trusty. Also that year, another Belize businesswoman, Jane Trapp, supplied slave labour to the ship Cornwall ‘for thirty days hire of Tom on board said vessel’. Free labourers who worked independently, such as Blackwood, Frank, and Marcus, were paid the same rate, which, when calculated out to a monthly rate, was nearly twice that paid to the sailors on board. These slaves whom the sailors worked alongside had themselves been making runs for freedom to the Spanish settlements for years, and they might well have been conduits of useful information for the sailors. Indeed, sailors and slaves represented similar potential threats to authority in the country. A visiting British commissary in 1790 described a ‘frame erected in the vicinity of the burial ground, about ten feet square and six feet high . . . intended for a Gaol, or Cage to confine disorderly Seamen and Negroes’.39

Loading the wood Loading the mahogany on board required specialized equipment and skill, since variations in efficiency of loading could result in fluctuations of 10,000–12,000 superficial feet in cargo. Ships carried their own necessary equipment, rather than relying on what was available at Belize, including chain slings, timber dogs, ‘two pairs of double screws, one long & one short, two pairs single one long & one short, two pair slings one 18 feet the smaller one 21 feet larger & a set of purchas blocks one triple one double & one single’.40 When initially cut and floated downriver, the logs were each marked with a letter code identifying their owner. These codes were cut in again after they had been squared for transport on the coast, and a number identifying a series was added. The codes were used to track the logs from the river’s edge

39 PRO CO123/9 ‘Journal of my visitation of part of the District granted by his Catholic Majesty for the Occupation of British Settlers, 20 September, 1790’. 40 HNL/101/3 Watson to Henley, 6 November 1810.

44

‘PIRATE WATER’

to the boom at the river mouth, and within the log rafts that were brought out to the ship via lighters. Ships’ manifests itemized the codes, listing the volume of each, so every log in the ship could be identified on the manifest as to owner and contents. A ship being loaded would use one of approximately ten lighters in the port of Belize for a daily rate. At 35 to 45 logs per day, a ship could employ all of the port’s lighters over the course of a voyage.41

Sickness, accidents and death Loading the wood was dangerous work, and accidents occurred frequently. Fractured arms, legs, and dislocated shoulders were the most common. If they occurred at Belize, doctors were consulted and bones set, usually at a cost of about a month’s pay, which was charged to the sailor’s account. It seems that if the sailor had accrued no wages he would be taken care of by the ship, since, while preparing to depart Falmouth in 1807, the master wrote that ‘by a blow from a capstan bar one of the men got his skull fractured in the duty of the ship’. The shipowner’s agent at Falmouth determined that ‘the man has to be taken care of as he got his misfortune on the duty of the ship. I have authorized them to draw on you for the amount of the charges of the doctor and lodgings.’42 Sickness on board is best recorded during the ships’ stay at Belize, where there was access to doctors. Diarrhoea must have been extremely common because by far the most common medicine purchases were for ‘flux powders’. It is tempting, but unscientific, to try to identify what ailments afflicted the sailors by interpreting the purposes for which various medications were prescribed. Whatever ailed master William Chapman in February 1811 must have been severe, since he was prescribed two doses of cathartic pills, an 8oz stomachic infusion, a phial of volatile aromatic spirits, four dozen doses of bark, a paper snake root, two febrifuge pills, a Clyster Syringe, an anodyne pill, 3oz Salts, a large phial of Elixer Vitriol, and two gargles for the throat.43 Masters exhibited considerable trepidation about venturing far from the community at the mouth of the Belize River, the only place doctors were available in this tropical environment. Rudimentary steps to prevent disease were taken when possible, such as in 1809, when Robert Horry purchased ‘one filtring stone and stand compleat’ from another ship master. Sanitary measures were at the discretion of the master, since there seem to have been few preventative measures practised regularly. In 1812, Richard Ward of the Hawke

41

HNL123/1 ‘Itemized list of lighters used to transport wood to ship’, ship Valiant, November 1804. 42 HNL/77/51 Pearson to Henley, 3 January 1807. 43 HNL/116/11 Medical bill for February 1811. 45

MARITIME EMPIRES

purchased ‘Some quick lime for twixt decks’ and ‘Two sheep skins for spounges’, for hygienic purposes.44 Not all sickness was attributed to the tropical environment. On board the Valiant in 1804, the master suspected that the galley equipment was making the men ill. ‘Several of my company are sick and what I account for it is the brass boilers that we have on board all the trim is wore of them and I shall be obliged to get them tin’d or new ones.’45 Crew mortality was naturally quite common and rarely disrupted the ongoing business of the ship. A master’s attitude about a crewman’s death is seen clearly in James Goodwin’s relation of an incident at Belize in 1804: A sad accident on the 20 of this month that is losing my Pennes (pinnace) and one man totally lost. They capsized in a squall of wind two men in when one was drowned and the other saved. I have grappled for the boat this three days but no signs of her. The loss of my boat is the worst of all. She was the only boat that I had to depend on my intentions was to sell the long boat but losing of my pennes I shall be obliged to purchase another boat if there is one to be got in the country.46

Funeral costs were deducted from a sailor’s wages and the remainder was either paid to his family or, if he had none, to Greenwich Hospital. Death on land was more expensive than at sea. When John Dixon, seaman on the Neptune, died at Belize in 1802, his account with the ship was charged £1 7s 2d for the boards to make his coffin, 10 shillings for making it, and another £2 10s 0d for digging the grave and paying the clergyman. James Hunt signed on board a ship at Belize in October 1813, and was dead one month later. His total funeral costs were £7 15s 0d. Since he had only been aboard for twenty days at £5 per month, this is one of the few instances in which the ship took a loss on a crewman’s pay. One of the most amazing aspects of the Henley papers is the survival of auction records for dead seamen’s possessions. Not only do they itemize the complete possessions of a sailor, but they tell how much each sailor paid for various articles of clothing. When Robert Brown, carpenter on board the Freedom, died off Belize in August 1809, five shirts, one pair of drawers, two waistcoats, boots, soap, his sea chest, a looking glass and razor, brought £2 3s 4d from four seamen and the boatswain. Though the master displayed little sympathy for Peter Donaldson, the seaman who drowned in the ship’s pinnace in 1804, his crew mates seem to have done so. When his clothes and other possessions were auctioned off to them, the sale yielded the astonishing sum of £20, much more than what was received for the possessions of any other sailor. That figure might have been

44 45 46

HNL/68/12 Disbursements of ship Hawke, London, 1812. HNL/123/1 Goodwin to Henley, 8 February 1804. HNL/123/1 Goodwin to Henley, Honduras, 25 June 1804. 46

‘PIRATE WATER’

charity to his family, at least in part. His sea chest was particularly well supplied with clothes, however, including nine pair of cotton hose, five vests, and seven cravats, but some sailors bid more than a month’s pay for the lots of personal gear. Other than the clothes, the sailors bid on brushes, a pair of boots with spurs, 3lb of soap, 2 razors and a strop, a pair of curling tongs, a parlor bag, a prayer book, 1lb of tea, and a pack of cards. The remoteness of the Honduras settlement meant that, even more so than elsewhere in the Caribbean, important news was often many months delayed, and more mundane matters like a sailor’s death usually did not precede the return of the ship. Families routinely spent months waiting for news of a missing sailor, looking for clues to their fate among Lloyds List. Many more months were spent waiting for the wages of their lost family members. Letters from Belize were routinely sent in duplicate form via different ships, one arriving two or more months after the other.

Return to London On return to London, ships were unloaded rapidly, in thirty days or less, many at West India Dock. The cargo was measured carefully and compared with the manifest, and discrepancies were either seized or paid for. The measurements made at Belize were superseded by new ones, and the changes in size could have significant impact on the freight and duty owed. At Belize, Thomas Paslow’s shipment of 170 logs loaded onto the Hawke was measured at 104,375 feet, while at London they measured 7,794 feet less, but Mary Hickey’s cargo on the same ship measured 40,950 feet at Belize and 4,418 feet more at London. Those who entered the Honduras mahogany trade generally advanced through a combination of navigational, managerial and operational experience, along with the development of a social and professional network at both ends of the route. Several masters of ships used their connections developed in the trade to become merchants. In 1817, a magistrate of the settlement named Thomas Pickstock shipped wood to James & John Poingdestre of London, men who had previously been shipmasters in the trade during the 1780s and 90s. Whatever social ties bound these three men, they were all born on the Isle of Jersey, traded in Honduras for a while, then set up as general merchants in London, maintaining businesses that integrated vast expanses of ocean into Britain’s empire. Once the wood had entered and cleared customs, it began a new odyssey where it was reduced to sawn lumber and transformed into visually compelling cabinet furniture and architectural detailing.

47

4

Cape to Siberia The Indian Ocean and China Sea trade in equids WILLIAM GERVASE CLARENCE-SMITH

The international trade in equids was both valuable and strategic in the long nineteenth century (i.e. the late eighteenth century to 1914). Horses and mules were part of the sinews of war, essential for field artillery, cavalry, mounted infantry and the baggage train. Economic uses multiplied under the impact of the industrial revolution, notably for urban transport, rural feeder routes to railways, agriculture, and forestry. The impact of the internal combustion engine only began to be felt in the early twentieth century, particularly for urban transport. Moreover, many expanding leisure pursuits depended on horses, especially riding, hunting, racing and polo. This was a diversified trade, as mules and donkeys were not suitable for certain activities, and different breeds of horses were needed for varying purposes. It was also an expensive and specialised business, for live animals needed much care and attention on board. The Cape to Siberia branch of this trade did not fit Eurocentric models of imperial interchange. This is not to deny any Western input into the movement of equids in the Indian Ocean and China Sea, for it flourished under the umbrella of the colonial peace. However, few horses came from ports in the West, or went there.1 This was a ‘South–South’ exchange, which flouted the tenets of dependency theory and similar models of colonial exploitation through trade. Indeed, from the very beginning of their maritime ventures, Europeans had learned that many forms of commerce, including the horse trade, were more profitable within Asian waters than with Europe. Prior to the First World War, a very roughly estimated 30 million equids, or a little under a fifth of the world’s total, were scattered around the Indian and Western Pacific oceans, excluding the enormous herds of Inner Asia.2 Horses were mainly bred in relatively dry and temperate lands, conducive to

1

Alexander T. Yarwood, Walers: Australian Horses Abroad (Melbourne, 1989). B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics (London, 1998); Statesman’s Year-Book (London), various years; Food and Agriculture Organization, Yearbook of Food and Agricultural Statistics (Washington, 1947). Some figures extrapolated from later data. 2

48

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fertility and health. Fairly level, lightly populated, and calcareous lands allowed for good muscle and bone formation. Breeding was thus concentrated in South Africa, the Ethiopian highlands, the northern end of the Persian Gulf, northwestern India, the Yunnan Plateau, the outer arc of the southeast Asian archipelago, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Manchuria. The maritime trade in equids was more narrowly based and gradually became a largely British preserve. In the eighteenth century, the Persian Gulf and maritime southeast Asia were the chief exporters, with India as the main market. The Indian Mutiny of 1857–8 was a turning point, as this bloody conflict might well have been greatly prolonged without nearly 10,000 horses hastily procured from South Africa and Australia. Symbolically, Sir Henry Havelock made his official entry into Lucknow on a South African mount, and the legendary George Hodson rode an Australian horse at the relief of Delhi. From then on, British officials sought to privilege supplies from South Africa and Australia with the use of steamers.3 The conquest of Mauritius, a large markets for equids, increased Britain’s stake in the trade, together with the gradual transformation of the Persian Gulf into a British sphere of influence. That said, the British faced protectionist barriers in parts of the region, and indigenous horse traders and shippers continued to thrive as indispensable intermediaries. Equids figured mainly as materials of war in the official mind, but numerous nags were also imported by sea for urban transport. Smaller numbers of more expensive animals came for leisure and breeding. In contrast, pack ponies and mules were generally locally bred or imported on the hoof. Equids were occasionally employed for rural transport, ploughing, ranching, or forestry, notably in areas furthest from the equator, but such animals would be locally bred for the most part. Horses were occasionally eaten, but were nowhere bred for meat or milk, in contrast to Inner Asia.

Gulf equids on the Indian market One of Britain’s major strategic headaches from the late eighteenth century was the drying up of India’s traditional sources of equids, a problem not resolved until around the 1860s, when warfare became less common and steamers delivered supplies more reliably.4 Russian and Chinese expansion into Inner Asia blocked or diverted old trade routes.5 At the same time, the military stalemate on the Northwest Frontier led Afghan rulers periodically to deny

3 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 82–3, 123; C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: A Tactical Textbook for Imperial Soldiers (London, 1990 [1906]), pp. 402–9. 4 Jos Gommans, ‘The Horse Trade in Eighteenth-century South Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 37 (1994), 228–50; Yarwood, Walers. 5 G.J. Alder, Beyond Bokhara: The Life of William Moorcroft, Asian Explorer and Pioneer

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MARITIME EMPIRES

horses to the infidel, as prescribed by the tenets of Islam.6 To make matters worse, there was a marked fall in horse and mule breeding in northwestern India, probably due to the increasing cultivation of pasture land and the disruption of transhumance routes.7 Horses and mules still came over the northeastern frontiers, but they were limited by their small size to servicing mounted infantry and the baggage train.8 Moreover, Chinese demand diverted many Tibetan horses eastwards.9 The British thus imported horses from the Persian Gulf (see Table 4.1), a trend reinforced by elite ‘Arabomania’.10 The rise of the Wahhabi regime in the later eighteenth century increased the availability of famous Najd horses from central Arabia.11 However, once the Wahhabi threat of confiscation declined, it was difficult to persuade Najd breeders to part with their stock.12 Horses were thus mainly obtained from tribesmen on the fringes of Iraq, who specialised in raising and raiding horses and camels.13 Oman still sent

Table 4.1 Persian Gulf exports of horses to India, 1810s–1913 (annual averages; many gaps) Kuwait and Bahrain 1810s 1830s 1860s 1870s 1885–90 1891–1900 1901–10 1911–13

Basra and Muhammara

c.250 c.300 c.500 379 308 295 53

c.800 c.600 38 25 44

South Persia

2,780 2,770 2,300 1,541

Total

c.850 c.1,000

3,159 3,116 2,620 1,638

Veterinary Surgeon, 1767–1825 (London, 1985), pp. 210–13; G.J. Alder, British India’s Northern Frontier, 1865–95: A Study in Imperial Policy (London 1963), pp. 16–20. 6 The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford, 1907–8), vol. 5, p. 53. 7 C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 142–3; Gommans, ‘The Horse Trade’, pp. 241–7. 8 W.W. Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, London (1885–7), vol. 6, pp. 520–1. 9 Gervais Courtellemont, Voyage au Yunnan (Paris, 1904), pp. 173, 178–9. 10 Gommans, ‘The Horse Trade’, p. 247. 11 Karl W. Ammon, Nachrichten von der Pferdezucht der Araber und den arabischen Pferden (Hildesheim, 1983 [1834]), p. 123. 12 J.R. Povah, Gazetteer of Arabia (Calcutta, 1887), p. 75. 13 Hala M. Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf, 1745–1900 (Albany, NY, 1997), pp. 118, 161–2, 166, 178–9, 181; Edward Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India 50

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some local horses, but fodder was in increasingly short supply.14 Mules were a speciality of southern Persia, while large white riding donkeys came from the hinterland of Bahrain.15 Worried by a drain of silver to India, Ottoman officials promoted exports, setting the export tax at about 5 per cent ad valorem, rather than the 12 per cent foreseen by the Anglo-Ottoman treaty of 1838.16 A Persian decree of 1823 exempted British subjects from paying any dues on horse exports, ‘excepting such as long-established usage authorizes’.17 There was a marked quickening of Indian imports after 1781, when the East India Company decided to develop its own cavalry forces.18 Gulf horses landed at Travancore in 1785 were snapped up for British dragoons, despite costing twice as much as locally bred animals. They stood at 14 to 15 hands, and were preferred to those brought by sea from Kutch, in northwestern India.19 About half the Gulf horses destined for the East India Company went to Bombay, a third to Calcutta, including the best and most expensive, and the rest to Madras. Specially equipped sailing vessels could carry 80 to 100 animals, typically stallions aged around four.20 Foes of the British, such as the Marathas and Mysore, also imported Gulf horses.21 The Indian Mutiny of 1857–58 underlined the strategic significance of the Gulf trade, especially when the policy of self-sufficiency in horses was abandoned and the much criticised Bengal stud was abolished. 22 William Mackinnon’s British India Steam Navigation Company (BISN) received a mail contract in 1862, although it was not until 1875 that he was able to run a regular weekly service from Bombay to Basra, with ‘Arab steeds’ as a return cargo. This concentrated exports of equids in Basra and Bushire, to the detriment of Kuwait and other ports, until the BISN introduced a parallel ‘Slow Gulf Service’ in 1903.23 However, Gulf exporters generally failed to meet

and of Eastern and Southern Asia, Commercial, Industrial and Scientific (Madras, 1871) (2nd edn), vol. 2, pp. 614–17. 14 Edmund Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam and Muscat, in the US Sloop-of-War Peacock, during the years 1832–3–4 (Wilmington, 1972 [1837]), pp. 359, 361; S.B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (London, 1966 [1919]), p. 423. 15 J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (London, 1908–15), Appendix T. 16 Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 74–5, 105–10, 160–1, 171–2, 237–8. 17 A.K.S. Lambton, Qajar Persia: Eleven Studies (London, 1987), pp. 113, 130–2. 18 G. Tylden, Horses and Saddlery: An Account Of The Animals Used by the British and Commonwealth Armies from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, with a Description of their Equipment (London, 1965), pp. 50–4. 19 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 29–30, 41. A hand equals four inches. 20 Ahmad M. Abu-Hakima, The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965 (London, 1983), pp. 98, 101, 105; Ammon, Nachrichten, pp. 278–82. 21 R.J. Barendse, ‘Reflections on the Arabian Seas in the Eighteenth Century’, Itinerario, 25, 1 (2001), 27, 30. 22 Yarwood, Walers, ch. 5. 23 George Blake, B. I. Centenary, 1856–1956 (London, 1956), pp. 100–4, 118. 51

MARITIME EMPIRES

changing demand in India for larger horses. Only some Arab-Turkoman crosses from Persia were tall enough. The average Arab stood at only around 14 hands, and Omani horses were reviled.24 Far from welcoming renewed British interest, the Ottomans banned exports of horses through Basra periodically, in 1864, 1875, 1882, 1900 and 1911. They taxed it heavily at other times, strictly prohibited exports of mares, and proposed that all ships be searched for contraband equids. This reflected a perceived threat to breeding stock, brought home by difficulties in acquiring light cavalry remounts during the Crimean War of 1854–6. Moreover, the balance of payments of Ottoman Iraq improved, due to rising date exports and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The Ottomans were also better able to enforce policy from Istanbul after the ending of Mamluk rule in 1831.25 All Ottoman export bans proved to be temporary, for they only led to a surge of clandestine exports through neighbouring states. The Persian port of Muhammara [Khurramshar], just over the Shatt-al-Arab from Basra, was the chief beneficiary, for the semi-autonomous Arab Shaykh levied low export duties.26 Kuwait, with a policy of virtual free trade, sent about 800 horses a year to India on sailing vessels in the 1860s.27 However, the Ottomans occupied northeastern Arabia in 1871, seizing control of trade routes inland from Kuwait.28 Exports of horses and mules from southern Persia remained modest, despite the interest of the Indian army in the region’s mules.29 A terrible drought decimated livestock in 1869–72, and mules were snapped up for local transport.30 As for British attempts to resurrect the Omani trade from 1866, they foundered on the scarcity and poor quality of local horses.31 Arabs controlled much of this trade in Gulf ports, notably exporters from tribes connected to breeders, but there was also a scattering of Shi’i Persians, Eastern Christians and Baghdadi Jews.32 In the 1840s, exporters of horses were reported to import African slaves.33 Local sailing vessels, built and manned by Gulf Arabs, carried many horses to India, although British steamers carried

24

Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India, vol. 2, pp. 614–17. Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 97–8, 106–7, 161, 173–6, 183; Lorimer, Gazetteer, App. T; Abu-Hakima, The Modern History, p. 103. 26 Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 176–7; Lorimer, Gazetteer, App. T. 27 Abu-Hakima, The Modern History, p. 103. 28 Fattah The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 118–20. 29 Manfred Schneider, Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsstruktur und Wirtschaftsentwicklung Persiens, 1850–1900 (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 303–5; Eteocle Lorini, La Persia economica contemporanea e la sua questione monetaria (Rome, 1900), p. 190; Lorimer, Gazetteer, App. T. 30 Gad G. Gilbar, ‘Persian Agriculture in the Late Qajar Period, 1860–1906: Some Economic and Social Aspects’, Asian and African Studies, 12 (1978), 357–9. 31 Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, p. 174; Robert G. Landen, Oman Since 1856 (Princeton 1967), p. 147. 32 Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 65–83, 162–73, 180–3. 33 Abu-Hakima, The Modern History, p. 103. 25

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increasing numbers from the 1860s.34 In Bombay, Gulf Arabs owned most stables and acted as indispensable brokers for European buyers. 35 Even in the fairs of northern India, Arabs were well known as horse dealers in the 1830s.36

Capers on the Indian market South Africa’s presence on the Indian market was precocious, with the first recorded shipment of ‘Capers’ in 1769.37 The Dutch brought horses to the Cape soon after they settled there in 1652, with Java and Persia probably the main sources. Fresh breeding stock arrived from Europe and the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as farmers were encouraged to meet British military requirements.38 Donkeys arrived from the Cape Verde Islands in the eighteenth century, giving rise to mule breeding in Malmesbury district.39 Horses passed into indigenous hands from 1822, the Sotho becoming the most successful breeders in southern Africa.40 The Cape thus seemed best placed as a politically reliable source of equids. Following contacts with Madras Presidency officers, Lord Somerset, governor of the Cape in 1816, proposed supplying India with several hundred horses a year, transported on East India Company ships. The Company demurred, and exports continued to be sporadic, often limited to animals bought at the Cape by British personnel bound for India.41 However, the trade was already significant for certain farmers.42 Purchases were stimulated by the success of South African horses on the Calcutta race track from 1812, and British officers in India remained keen on Capers.43

34

Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 26–7, 60, 66–7, 104–5, 110–11, 157, 173; Blake, B. I. Centenary, p. 118. 35 British Library Oriental and India Office Collections, Vanrenen Collection (henceforth IOL, VC), Adrian Vanrenen, 17 February 1867 and 7 December 1869; Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 170–1; Yarwood, Walers, p. 128. 36 George W. Earl, The Eastern Seas (Singapore, 1971 [1837]), p. 188. 37 Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, p. 58. 38 H. Epstein, The Origin of the Domestic Animals of Africa (New York, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 474–6; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 58–9. 39 Official Year Book of the Union, and of Basutoland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland (Pretoria, 1922), vol. 5, p. 495. 40 Eric Rosenthal, Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa (London, 1964), pp. 234–5; R.S. Summerhays, The Observer’s Book of Horses and Ponies (London, 1954), pp. 63–4. 41 Marcus Arkin, Storm in a Teacup: The Later Years of John Company at the Cape, 1815–36, Cape Town, 1973, pp. 212–14, 228–30. 42 George M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, London, 1897–1905, vol. 17, pp. 488–91; vol. 32, p. 478. 43 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 2, 30–1; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 52–3, 58. 53

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South African exports to India became more regular from the 1840s, although rather high prices limited the flow to some fifty a year from 1841 to 1850.44 It was the Indian Mutiny that really boosted exports, with military agents buying 5,482 horses and 108 mules from 1857 to 1861, bringing a windfall gain of £215,645 in export revenues.45 Capers were tough and well adapted to tropical conditions, making excellent light cavalry remounts. They were somewhat undersized for horsed artillery, however, even if superior to smaller Gulf and ‘native’ breeds. A team of eight 15-hand Capers was allocated to a six-pound gun, whereas six horses would have been usual in Europe.46 Capers were chiefly bought in Bombay and Madras presidencies, but also reached Calcutta and Ceylon.47 South Africa’s overall horse exports (see Table 4.2) then fell away markedly, and were more or less balanced by imports, while net imports of mules stood at around 2,500 a year in 1911–14.48 Some factors put forward to explain dwindling exports are far from convincing. Warfare in southern Africa only briefly constrained supplies, and a healthy trade should have spawned its own transport, even if less shipping was available after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.49 Disease was a more serious problem. North of the Zambezi, tsetse flies spread nagana, a protozoan blood parasite, or trypanosome, which was deadly to all livestock. A virus transmitted by small midges or gnats, with Table 4.2 Horse exports from South Africa to all destinations, 1827–1918 Cape ports only 1827 1833–39 average 1841–50 average 1857–61 average 1865 1870 1875 1880–85 average 1911–18 average

South Africa

319 284 234 1,096 98 175 29 90 788

44

Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India, vol. 2, p. 618. Robert Wallace, Farming Industries of Cape Colony (London, 1896), pp. 309–10; Yarwood, Walers, pp. 122–3. 46 Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 59–60; Yarwood, Walers, pp. 27, 52; IOL, VC, Adrian Vanrenen 24 August 1868 and 10 February 1870, and Jacob Vanrenen 15 March 1869. 47 Yarwood, Walers, p. 79; Official Year Book, p. 495. 48 Official Year Book, p. 497. 49 Yarwood, Walers, p. 102. 45

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zebras as a natural reservoir, caused African horse sickness and extended further south.50 The latter disease ravaged South Africa in epizootic surges every twenty years or so, with a severe outbreak in the mid-1850s estimated to have killed nearly 65,000 horses.51 Epizootics had a transitory impact, however, for the horse population of the Cape and Natal rose from 145,000 in 1855 to 446,000 in 1899.52 This increase also casts doubt on alleged competition for pasture from merino sheep, goats and ostriches.53 South Africa’s ‘mineral revolution’ constitutes a much more convincing explanation for falling exports from the late 1860s, as prices rose to the point that Capers ceased to be competitive in India.54 ‘Horse-whims’, large wooden wheels powered by equids, raised ore from open diamond pits in Kimberley.55 More significant was surging demand from transport riders, who harnessed horses, donkeys, mules, and even domesticated zebras.56 The opening up of the continent also redirected exports overland, for example to Angola and the Rhodesias.57 Breeders no longer strove to meet the requirements of Indian artillery units, since they could easily find local purchasers for smaller horses.58 Although plans to send Caper remounts to India lingered on till the 1890s, the trade was over.59 Indeed the South African War of 1899 to 1902 brought an unaccustomed flood of horses into South Africa. The British lost an astounding 326,000 horses, with relatively few killed in action. They deployed some 494,000 against the Boers, of which about 334,000 were imported, nearly half from the United States. In addition, some 67,000 mules arrived from the United States. Altogether, about a tenth of the total cost of the war was attributed to the purchase of equids.60 Other military campaigns led to similar but smaller bursts of imports into tsetse-free parts of eastern Africa, notably Madagascar, the Horn, and the Nile valley.61

50

Denis Fielding and Patrick Krause, Donkeys (London, 1998), pp. 85–99. Wallace, Farming Industries, pp. 308, 316–19, 322; British South Africa Company, Reports on the Administration of Rhodesia, 1898–1900 (London, 1900), pp. 202–5. 52 Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, Table C11. 53 Epstein, The Origin of the Domestic Animals, vol. 2, p. 477; Yarwood, Walers, p. 123. 54 Yarwood, Walers, p. 102; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, p. 50. 55 Rosenthal, Encyclopaedia, p. 235 (and illustration). 56 Marylian and Sanders Watney, Horse Power (London, 1975), pp. 90–1; Wallace, Farming Industries, p. 316. 57 Dirk Postma, De Trekboeren te St. Januario Humpata (Amsterdam, 1897), p. 237; Watney, Horse Power, p. 90. 58 Somerset Playne, Cape Colony (Cape Province): Its History, Commerce, Industries and Resources (London, 1910–11), p. 619; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, p. 60. 59 Wallace, Farming Industries, pp. 314, 319. 60 Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 28–33, 61–2, 69; Yarwood, Walers, p. 203; Theodore H. Savory, The Mule, a Historic Hybrid (Shildon, 1979), p. 23. 61 Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (Addis Ababa, 1968), pp. 286, 555–6; Callwell, Small Wars, pp. 59, 215, 233, 402; Yarwood, Walers, pp. 3, 168–70. 51

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Table 4.3 Australian exports of horses to India 1861–1920 (annual averages by decade; by ports of export)

1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–00 1901–10 1911–20

New S. Wales

Victoria

108 23 292 1,145 1,279 1,974

729 2,418 3,366 3,034 2,570 2,120

Queensland

5 7 27 762 3,419 5,894

South Australia

Western Australia

Total

n.a. 25 82 131 347 1,249

213 142 100 – – –

1,055 2,615 3,867 5,072 7,615 11,237

Walers from Australia and New Zealand on the Indian market Australia thus became India’s main supplier (see Table 4.3), and also sent horses to a huge sweep of territory, from Egypt to Japan. New South Wales’ foundation stock came from South Africa in 1788, and throve in a highly favourable environment, containing few diseases or natural predators. There were successive additions of English, Arab, Timor, and Chilean blood. The name Walers, derived from New South Wales, was progressively applied to horses of every breed, type and origin, including those from New Zealand.62 Sporadic exports of Walers to India began as early as 1816, but it was not until 1834 that the first experiments were made with supplying remounts to the army. British officers in India disliked geldings, however, and gold rushes from 1851 provoked an acute shortage of horses in Australia itself. Horse exports to India thus made slow and erratic progress until the 1860s, despite the waiving of export duties.63 Indeed, in the 1840s, New Zealand was the main market for Australia’s small exports of horses. The Indian army nevertheless became the steadiest purchaser of Walers, taking powerful beasts with cart horse blood for the artillery, horses similar to English hunters for cavalry officers, and inferior ‘bounders’ for other ranks. Although the military market was the sheet anchor of the business, only about a third of the horses imported through Calcutta between 1891 and 1897 were destined for the army. Walers were much in demand as race-horses, riding horses, carriage pairs and polo ponies, for both British expatriates and the Indian elite.

62

Jane Kidd, The Horse: The Complete Guide to Horse Breeds and Breeding (London, 1985), pp. 14, 90, 93, 190; Summerhays, The Observer’s Book, pp. 18, 54–5; Yarwood, Walers. 63 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 15, 24, 32–4, 53–60, 80–5. 56

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The use of steamers from 1881 cemented Australia’s advantage on the Indian market, eliminating many of the delays and dangers that had earlier attended the trade. Over time, Melbourne slowly lost its pre-eminence, as ports in South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland became better equipped to handle livestock. Breeding also shifted increasingly to Queensland, as closer settlement and the spread of Merino sheep edged horses out of many southern pastures. Horses from Western Australia were too slight for the Bengal remount market, but military purchasers in Madras and Ceylon were more favourably disposed towards them.64 Exports to India were in the hands of Scots shippers, notably Archibald Currie, unrelated to the more famous Currie family of the Union-Castle Line. Based in Melbourne, he spent some fifteen years operating sailing vessels of around 400 tons. He travelled to Britain to order his first steamers in 1882. With an average speed of 12 knots, they were large and especially designed to carry horses to India. Currie’s success attracted the attention of William Mackinnon’s BISN, which already carried horses from the Persian Gulf to Bombay, and which bought Currie’s firm in 1913. The BISN disposed of a large pool of steamers, and its Extra Steamers Section in Calcutta was able to conjure five vessels ‘out the blue’ when there was a sudden demand for the transport of some 2,500 horses to India in 1898. The BISN had ships of up to 7,000 tons built specifically for the trade, with jute bags from Calcutta as the main return cargo. Blindfolding and hoisting horses in slings was gradually replaced by walk-on facilities, with a docile young mare chosen to lead a bunch on board. Steamers usually followed a route round Australia from West to East.65 Although many successful horse exporters in Australia were Scots, the greatest were probably the multinational Vanrenen family. Originally Prussian aristocrats exiled to the Cape, they adopted a Dutch name, and then became anglicised. One Vanrenen was involved in breeding horses for the Indian market in South Africa in the early nineteenth century. Henry Vanrenen began exporting Australian horses from the middle of the century, helped by his brothers serving as cavalry officers in India, and became perhaps the most famous entrepreneur in this business.66

The Mascarenes: plantation markets The plantation islands of the southwestern Indian Ocean were the largest purchasers of equids in relation to their human population. The cultivation

64 65 66

Yarwood, Walers pp. 22–4, 33–64, 80–123, 141–65, 199. Blake, B. I. Centenary, pp. 116–20, 204. IOL, VC. 57

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of sugar cane required many animals for cartage, and there were horse-powered sugar mills on Réunion before the introduction of steam.67 The British urged the use of horses to cope with problems caused by the abolition of slave imports in the early nineteenth century.68 Mauritians also developed a passion for horse-racing early in the nineteenth century.69 Not until the spread of light railways around 1900 did the demand for equids begin to falter.70 Neither Mauritius nor Réunion became breeders of equids on any scale, even though the Dutch brought horses to Mauritius in 1666.71 Donkeys came in the eighteenth century under the French, who also took horses on to the Seychelles.72 There was little land available for breeding, and less labour, so that periodic attempts to cut import bills met with slight success. The islands were free from nagana, but equids in Mauritius suffered from the related surra, trypanosoma evansi spread by horse-flies.73 Disease may explain why mules and donkeys were more numerous than horses, although this could also have reflected the French background of settlers. Whereas cattle could easily be obtained from neighbouring Madagascar, equids came from many distant lands, beginning with the Persian Gulf. Oman was said to be already sending ‘mules’ to the French plantations in the Mascarenes in the eighteenth century.74 In the early nineteenth century, Oman specialised in exporting donkeys to Mauritius, mainly raised in Bahrain and its hinterland. The trade picked up in the late 1830s and averaged some 630 a year in the 1840s, with a few horses to complement it. Although this business was reported to be ‘extinct’ by the 1870s, small imports of ‘Muscat asses’ persisted to the late 1890s.75 In the 1830s and 1840s, British trade reports showed some 500 mules a year entering Mauritius from France, a major exporter in world terms, with some competition from the Horn of Africa and South Africa. A ship or two from Mauritius and Réunion called at the Red Sea port of Massawa each year, with exports averaging around 400 a year. Mules bought for $15 in Massawa sold for $160–200 in the Mascarenes, but risks and costs were considerable. The animals were out of condition on the hot coast, and prone to disease. Ships had to provide ventilation, water, fodder, and protection against injury from

67

André Schérer, La Réunion (Paris, 1985), p. 50. Theal, Records of the Cape, vol. 32, p. 478. 69 Charles G. Ducray et al., Ile Maurice (Port Louis, 1938), pp. 79–83. 70 Schérer, La Réunion, pp. 81–2; Encyclopaedia Britannica (NY, 13th edn, 1929), vol. 15, p. 109. 71 P.J. Moree, A Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 1598–1710 (London, 1998) p. 78. 72 Deryck Scarr, Seychelles Since 1770: History of a Slave and Post-slavery Society (London, 2000), pp. 12, 17. 73 The Mauritius Almanac and Colonial Register, 1926–27, Section A, p. 57; Fielding and Krause, Donkeys, p. 90. 74 Barendse, ‘Reflections on the Arabian Seas’, p. 30. 75 Landen, Oman, p. 147; Mauritius Blue Books. 68

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rolling and pitching. The trade withered away from the 1870s, possibly because demand was rising in Ethiopia, as well as in the Sudan and Kenya.76 South America then became the main supplier of mules to Mauritius, although the origins and mechanics of this trade are not known. As early as 1834, 26 mules arrived from ‘The States of the Rio de la Plata’, and the trade may well have begun earlier.77 Argentina replaced Uruguay as the chief source of mules in the late 1890s.78 Complicating the picture was a late nineteenthcentury re-export trade in mules from Mauritius to India, of uncertain size.79 France and Algeria probably kept a significant position on the Réunion market, as French protectionism increased from the 1880s. South Africa and Australia provided horses for Mauritius in roughly the same sequence as for India, with South Africa entering the market earlier, but dropping out after the mineral revolution.80 In the 1840s, Cape ports sent about 200 horses a year to Mauritius, or four times the number of those going to India. Imports of Australian horses in the 1830s and 1840s were smaller and more erratic.81 Western Australia specialised in this niche market for a time, probably exporting timber with horses, but the 1890s gold rushes put an end to the business.82 Walers continued to dominate the Mauritian turf, however, until just before 1914 when the island turned to European racehorses.83 (See Table 4.4 for numbers of all equids imported to Mauritius between 1833 and 1913.) Table 4.4 Mauritian imports of equids, 1833–1913 (annual averages; some years missing; 1851–60 decade missing)

1833–39 1841–50 1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–1900 1901–10 1911–13

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Horses

Mules

Donkeys

Equid total

423 403 416 650 499 371 741 286

1,040 1,553 1,092 2,079 966 948 477 102

(with mules) (with mules) 30 79 142 61 82 0

1,463 1,956 1,538 2,808 1,607 1,380 1,300 388

Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, pp. 211, 352–5, 368, 376, 392, 411, 426, 441–5. Parliamentary Papers, Trade Reports for Mauritius. Mauritius Blue Books. Blake, B. I. Centenary, pp. 118–19, 127. Ducray, Ile Maurice, pp. 79–81. Parliamentary Papers, Trade Reports for South Africa and Mauritius. Yarwood, Walers, pp. 63–4, 97, 199. Ducray, Ile Maurice, pp. 81–3. 59

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The Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia found a fairly steady outlet for their cheap little ponies in the Mascarenes, probably growing out of earlier exports of slaves. The first certain mention of this trade dates from 1821, and it remained firmly in the hands of French ships’ captains, with Mauritius a larger customer than Réunion.84 Just over 100 horses a year arrived in Mauritius from the Dutch East Indies in the 1840s, and the Lesser Sundas provided between a third and two thirds of the island’s imports from the end of the 1870s to 1914.85 Sailing ships from Mauritius visited the Lesser Sundas till 1914, but did not return thereafter.86 Réunion seems to have dropped out earlier, after the imposition of French protectionist duties in the 1880s.87

Southeast Asia: protected markets In the crowded waters of Southeast Asia, Britons were at a disadvantage. British Malaya underwent a tremendous economic boom from the 1880s and bred no equids, although oxen and elephants were prominent in rural transport.88 Annual imports of horses ran at around 2,000 in 1895–7, probably growing to some 3,000 a year by 1905. Singapore and Penang acted as entrepots, redistributing animals to smaller ports.89 Malayan imports initially came from Indonesia, where the Dutch favoured their own flag.90 Batak, Gayo and Minang ponies from the Sumatran highlands were known as ‘Deli ponies’, as they were shipped from east coast ports.91 Sumatra remained the principal source for Penang, the trade amounting to about 500 head a year in the late 1890s and early 1900s, whereas Singapore imported more ‘Java ponies’, possibly re-exported from the Lesser Sundas.92 ‘Java ponies’ provided most of the draught power for Singapore’s cabs up to the 1880s.93 They were also

84 I Gde Parimartha, ‘Perdagangan dan Politik di Nusa Tenggara, 1815–1915’, unpublished thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1995, pp. 104, 208–9; Pieter Hoekstra, Paardenteelt op het Eiland Soemba (Batavia, 1948), p. 5. 85 Mauritius Blue Books. 86 H. Kistermann, ‘De paardenhandel van Nusa Tenggara, 1815–1941’, unpublished student graduation paper, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1991, pp. 50, 59. 87 Schérer, La Réunion, pp. 68–9, 80. 88 Amarjit Kaur, Bridge and Barrier, Transport and Communications in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1957 (Singapore, 1985). 89 Straits Settlements Annual Reports, Singapore. 90 Frank J.A. Broeze, ‘The Merchant Fleet of Java, 1820–1850: A Preliminary Survey’, Archipel, 18 (1979), 251–69. 91 J.H. Moor, Notices of the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries (London, 1968) (reprint of 1837 edn), p. 99; Summerhays, The Observer’s Book, p. 65. 92 Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië (The Hague, 1917–21), vol. 3, pp. 151, 227–9; Straits Settlements Annual Reports. 93 Peter J. Rimmer, ‘Hackney Carriages, Syces and Rikisha Pullers in Singapore: A Colonial Registrar’s Perspective on Public Transport, 1892–1923’, in Peter J. Rimmer and Lisa M.

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the staple of early horse-racing. After experiments with Burmese, Chinese and Australian horses, Singapore turned increasingly to Australian supplies from the 1890s.94 Java’s towns were the ‘sink’ for ponies from the Lesser Sunda Islands, even though there were numerous local breeds, including the beautiful little Kedu horses of central Java.95 Indeed, the Priangan highlanders bred the largest horses in Southeast Asia, at around 15 hands, sending some 3,000 a year to the Buitenzorg market in the 1920s.96 Among the Lesser Sundas, Sumbawa already exported more than a thousand a year prior to the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.97 South Sulawesi’s large horses were prized by the Dutch armed forces, although exports withered away from the 1860s.98 The golden age for Sumbawa and Sumba was from the 1890s to the 1910s, whereas exports from Bali, Lombok, and Timor declined (see Table 4.5). Dutch protection of shipping made it virtually impossible for the British to break into the carrying of horses from the Lesser Sundas to Java. From 1818, all coastwise shipping was legally restricted to Dutch vessels, owned by Dutch Table 4.5 Horse exports from the Lesser Sunda Islands, 1880–1918 (annual averages by decade; very approximate; mostly to Java)

1821–30 1831–40 1841–50 1851–60 1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–1900 1901–10 1911–20

Bali and Lombok

Sumbawa

Sumba

W. Timor and dependencies

n.a. n.a. n.a. c.1,000 n.a. n.a. c.350 c.100 c.10 c.1,000

c.200 c.250 c.1,000 c.4,000 c.2,000 n.a. n.a. c.6,000 4,357 5,065

– – 680 n.a. c.750 c.2,000 1,851 c.3,000 1,302 2,520

129 248 336 597 1,187 2,966 1,120 c.750 c.750 c.2,000

Total

c.10,000 c.6,500 c.10,000

Allen, eds, The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes and Plantation Workers (Singapore, 1990), p. 131. 94 Eric Jennings, The Singapore Turf Club (Singapore, 1970). 95 A. Cabaton, Java, Sumatra and the Otter Islands of the Dutch East Indies (London, 1911), pp. 119–20; Robert Kay, ‘Java Ponies and Otters’, The Horse Illustrated, 11, 41 (1939), 24–7. 96 W.B. Worsfold, A Visit to Java, with an Account of the Founding of Singapore (London, 1893), p. 220; Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, vol. 5, p. 59. 97 Gerrit Kuperus, Het cultuurlandschap van West-Soembawa (Groningen 1936), p. 21. 98 Koloniaal Verslag 1857 (The Hague), p. 142; Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, vol. 3, pp. 151, 227–8. 61

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subjects. British shippers lost out, initially to the benefit of Hadhrami Arabs, legally Dutch subjects, who owned European rigged ships. 99 For several decades, Arab ships even fought off competition from Dutch steamers, introduced in the 1860s.100 However, Arab shippers lost out when special facilities for live animals were introduced on steamers around 1900.101 The Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, founded in 1888 for inter-island services by a cartel of Dutch shippers, then became the chief transporter of Lesser Sunda horses to Java, benefiting from generous official subsidies and assistance.102 Hadhrami Arab domination of the Lesser Sundas horse trade outlived their loss of control of shipping.103 They already enjoyed a commanding position by the 1840s in Sumbawa and Sumba.104 The trade was ‘completely in their hands’ in Java by the 1880s.105 Arab merchants were typically transients at this stage, sending junior members of family firms based in Java to secure cargoes.106 In the early 1870s, Arabs on Sumba built temporary houses made of bamboo or mats, with simple enclosures for horses. After a lengthy physical examination, bargaining went on for hours.107 As Arabs increasingly took up residence in the Lesser Sundas, they tightened their grip. Some went into the interior to purchase horses, but they usually worked through local brokers. Advances in trade goods, purchased on credit in Java, were the norm, and the final settlement of accounts followed sales in Java. Horses were either delivered directly to Dutch military depots to fulfil contracts, or were sold by auction.108 Javanese imports of foreign horses were on a smaller scale, but they picked up over time, typically involving Australian Walers for the army and wealthy Europeans.109 Arab horses were repeatedly investigated by the Dutch colonial

99

Broeze, ‘The Merchant Fleet of Java’. L.W.C. van den Berg, Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l’archipel indien (Batavia, 1886) p. 150 101 Kistermann, ‘De Paardenhandel’, pp. 51, 62, 65. 102 J. à Campo, Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij; Stoomvaart en Staatsvorming in de Indonesische Archipel, 1888–1914 (Hilversum, 1992). 103 W.G. Clarence-Smith, ‘Horse Trading; the Economic Role of Arabs in the Lesser Sunda Islands, c.1800 to c.1940’, in H. de Jonge and N. Kaptein, eds, Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade, and Islam in Southeast Asia (Leiden, 2002), pp. 143–62. 104 Kuperus, Het Cultuurlandschap, p. 27; Parimartha, ‘Perdagangan dan politik’, pp. 147–8. 105 Berg, Le Hadhramout, p. 146. 106 J.H.P.E. Kniphorst, ‘Een Terugblik op Timor en Onderhoorigheden’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 14, 2 (1885), 16–17; Kistermann, ‘De Paardenhandel’, pp. 38–43. 107 Parimartha, ‘Perdagangan dan politik’, pp. 160–1. 108 G.C.A. Dijk, ‘De Sandelhout en de Paardenfokkerij in Nederlandsch Indië’, De Indische Gids, 26, 1, ii (1904), 385–6; Kistermann, ‘De Paardenhandel’, pp. 55–61; M.H. du Croo, ‘Cijfers en Beschouwingen Betreffende het Eiland Soembawa’, Koloniale Studien, 3, 3 (1919), 603–7; P. Hoekstra, Paardenteelt op het Eiland Soemba (Batavia, 1948), p. 46. 109 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 155, 168; Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, vol. 3, p. 153. 100

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cavalry, but were never considered suitable.110 Breeders in Australia’s Northern Territory were geographically well placed to break into the Java trade by exporting from Darwin from the 1880s, but they met with little success.111 Western Australia did better, with exports to Indonesia and Malaya peaking at 3,109 in the decade 1871–80, but falling dramatically in the 1890s, as all horses were required to service the gold rushes.112 Eastern Australia’s Indonesian market improved when the Dutch cavalry decided to replace Lesser Sundas ponies in 1902. By 1907, the whole force was mounted on Walers. However, this was a much smaller market than that of British India, for Dutch cavalry units were largely confined to Java, and only disposed of around 700 horses at this time. Moreover, after entering the war in 1914, Australia banned exports of horses to the neutral Dutch possessions, leading to hasty purchases of unsatisfactory animals from China. The ban was temporarily lifted in 1916, but only for a batch of 250 horses, all under 14.5 hands.113 Manila was Southeast Asia’s second ‘sink’ for sea-borne horses. The city sucked in animals from all over the Philippines, with Chinese and Chinese mestizos as the main horse traders in the 1840s.114 From areas at a certain distance, horses came by sea, usually on sailing craft. In 1862, 177 horses arrived this way, just over half from Zambales and Ilocos to the north. The rest nearly all came from the islands of Mindoro and Lubang to the southeast, or the neighbouring Bikol peninsula.115 As in the Dutch case, the Spaniards reserved coastwise shipping to their own flag, although British and other Western firms sometimes employed men of straw.116 The Philippines and Guam obtained few horses from foreign sources before the end of Spanish rule in 1898, although some Walers were sent to Manila in the 1880s.117 After Spain’s defeat in 1898, the Americans faced a radically deteriorating situation, as the archipelago’s horses were ravaged by guerrilla war and new diseases brought by American troops, notably surra (Trypanosoma Evansi). Prices roughly tripled in a decade, despite imports of thousands of horses and

110

C.A. Heshusius, KNIL-Cavalerie, 1814–1950; Geschiedenis van de Cavalerie en Pantsertroepen van het Koninklijk Nederlands-Indische Leger ([no place], c.1978), pp. 6, 22. 111 C.C. Macknight, ‘Outback to Outback: The Indonesian Archipelago and Northern Australia’, in J.J. Fox, ed., Indonesia: The Making of a Culture (Canberra, 1980), p. 144; Yarwood, Walers, p. 165. 112 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 63–4, 149–50, 199. 113 Heshusius, KNIL-Cavalerie, pp. 22–3. 114 John Crawfurd, A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries (Kuala Lumpur, 1971), pp. 43, 44, 79, 155; Jean Mallat, The Philippines: History, Geography, Customs, Agriculture, Industry and Commerce of the Spanish colonies in Oceania (Manila, 1983), pp. 134, 174. 115 Dan Doeppers, personnal communication. 116 John Foreman, The Philippine Islands (London, 1890), pp. 301–4. 117 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 150, 165, 199. 63

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mules from the United States. American equids were costly, spurned local fodder, and had no resistance to surra. Private American dealers thus wisely bought cheaper and hardier Walers.118 American officials and officers eventually followed suit, with military purchasing agents stationed in Australia in 1904. By 1910 about a thousand Queensland horses had been sent to the Philippines, largely for military use.119

East Asia: elusive markets East Asia remained less significant for maritime imports than its huge population might have warranted. Compared to the British in India, the Chinese bred more equids, and were much more successful in procuring supplies from Inner Asia, as China’s Manchu dynasty reigned in close alliance with Mongol princes till 1911.120 Mobs of around a hundred tough Mongolian ponies were driven overland, or shipped along the country’s extensive internal waterways, reaching as far south as Shanghai and the lower Yangzi. Horses from Tibet and East Turkestan, known as ‘river ponies’, also flowed freely into western China.121 Larger Russian or cross-bred horses sometimes appeared, and railways drained an increasing proportion of the Mongolian trade to Manchurian or north Chinese ports, whence they went by steamer to Shanghai and southeastern ports.122 Hui, Chinese Muslims, were famed as horse traders throughout the empire.123 Some foreign horses also entered China by sea, especially in the southeast, poorly situated for both overland supplies and local breeding. Overall imports into China fluctuated at around 1,000 horses a year between 1911 and 1918.124 Imports initially came mainly from the Philippines and Portuguese Timor, reflecting the ancient trading connections of Macau, but both trades were in decline by the end of the century.125 Walers were the main beneficiaries. They

118

John Foreman, The Philippine Islands, 3rd edn (Shanghai, 1906), pp. 336–8; Hugo H. Miller, Economics Conditions in the Philippines (Boston, 1920), pp. 326, 330; Charles B. Elliott, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government (New York, 1968), p. 346. 119 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 155–6. 120 Austin Coates, China Races (Hong Kong, 1994). 121 Coates, China Races, pp. 22–4, 44, 47, 59, 74–5, 186, 212. 122 I. Mihailoff, ed., North Manchuria and the Chinese Eastern Railway (New York, 1982), pp. 129–32; Julean Arnold, Commercial Handbook of China (Washington, 1919), vol. 1, p. 563, 571–2. 123 Marshall Broomhall, Islam in China, a Neglected Problem (London, 1910), p. 224. 124 China Year Book 1912, 1916, 1919, 1921–22, London. 125 Ernesto J. de Carvalho e Vasconcellos, As colónias portuguesas (Lisbon, 1896), p. 394; Great Britain, Foreign Office, Historical Section, Portuguese Timor, p. 17; Coates, China Races, pp. 3, 15–16, 29, 72. 64

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already dominated racing in Hong Kong from as early as the 1840s, and were first noted in Shanghai in 1855.126 Australian horses, especially prized by wealthy expatriates, had the southeastern market for foreign horses more or less to themselves by 1906.127 Large numbers of horses were only imported into North China by sea for military operations, such as the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion. Surviving beasts were sold locally when campaigns ended.128 Japan’s modernisation after 1868 involved fluctuating levels of imports, despite an underlying drive for self-sufficiency. The authorities strove to increase both the number and the quality of horses, while curiously eschewing mules, so significant in China and the United States. Overland transport shifted from pack horses to wheeled vehicles, and farmers experimented with draught animals. Initial imports of breeding stock were drawn mainly from North America, Europe and Australia. Japan’s new model army also required numerous horses, and fell back on imports for war with China in 1894–5 and 1900, and for the 1904–5 struggle with Russia over Manchuria.129 Australia sent 22,796 horses to East Asia from 1861 to 1931, with Japanese agents pushing up horse prices in Queensland prior to the contest with Russia.130 The Russians drew on their own huge supplies of horses to prepare for the conflict of 1904–5, partly shipped down the Amur River, as the Trans-Siberian Railway was not finished. Upstream of Khabarovsk in 1900, Hosie encountered ‘four Russian steamers towing barges whose decks were crowded with horses, the steamers themselves being packed with Russian officers’. The following day, another steamer passed by, towing ‘a large barge packed with horses and recruits’. On meeting yet another similar steamer, Hosie was informed that the horses were bred in central Siberia.131

Conclusion The First World War set off a new spurt of exports, with Australia and New Zealand supplying Middle Eastern and Indian forces with horses, as well as contributing to the European theatre of war. Of a total of 135,926 horses, about

126

Coates, China Races, pp. 31, 35, 72, 207, 244. Harry R. Burril and Raymond F. Crist, Report on Trade Conditions in China (New York, 1980), p. 68. 128 Coates, China Races, pp. 44, 107, 201–2. 129 Vivienne Kenrick, Horses in Japan (London, 1964), pp. 143–5; Japan Year Book 1910 (Tokyo), pp. 297–8. 130 Yarwood, Walers, pp. 153–6, 168–9, 202. 131 Alexander Hosie, Manchuria, its People, Resources and Secret History (London, 1901), pp. 104–5, 118. 127

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a tenth came from New Zealand. These horses went mainly to Egypt, for the war against the Ottomans, and proved a great success in the Syrian campaign. Some were diverted to India, as the Afghans hesitated whether to ally with the Ottomans. About 5,000 went beyond the Middle East, to the battlefields of France. A further 8,000 were purchased for Egypt but never sent, due to lack of shipping.132 South Africa bore the brunt of African campaigns. The recently created Defence Force had some 8,000 horses and mules at the outbreak of hostilities, but around 160,000 by January 1916. After suppressing a Boer rebellion, the South African army seized German South West Africa in 1915. However, attempts to repeat this success in German East Africa in 1916 turned into an equine calamity, due to the ravages of nagana. Only 3,108 animals remained alive in October 1916, out of 31,000 horses, 33,000 mules and 24,000 donkeys sent there from South Africa.133 This was the swan song of the horse trade. The titanic conflict hastened the development of the internal combustion engine, which gradually displaced horses from their two main niches, warfare and urban transport. Horses continued to be shipped, but the trade became a minor curiosity. One enduring legacy of the long nineteenth century proved to be the commerce in racehorses and polo ponies, although they are increasingly shunted around in aeroplanes rather than ships. Yawning gaps remain in the study of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific Ocean trade in equids during the long nineteenth century. Many case studies have hardly been considered by professional historians, notably South Africa, the Mascarenes, Ethiopia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, and Manchuria. In other cases, work is at a preliminary stage, as for Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and eastern Siberia. Even the major studies by Yarwood, on Australia, and Fattah, on the Gulf, virtually ignore mules and donkeys. This essay, based almost entirely on secondary sources, is of necessity somewhat superficial, but it suggests what could be done with a more intensive use of archival materials.

Note on sources for tables and trade statistics Most statistics quoted in this chapter come from consular and colonial trade reports in Parliamentary Papers, Foreign Office Historical Section handbooks, Koloniaal Verslag, Mauritius blue books, and South African handbooks, yearbooks and almanacs. Much of the rest is taken from Yarwood, Walers, and

132 Yarwood, Walers, 169–70, 180–9; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 65; Blake, B. I. Centenary, p. 119. 133 Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 62–3.

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Clarence-Smith, ‘Horse trading’. Occasional materials were gleaned from Lorimer, Gazetteer, Appendix T; Schneider, Beiträge, pp. 303–5; Lorini, La Persia, p. 190; Ammon, Nachrichten, pp. 278–9; Abu-Hakima, The Modern History, pp. 103, 107; Theal, Records of the Cape, vol. 35, pp. 94, 98; Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, vol. 3, p. 151.

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5

Aden, British India and the development of steam power in the Red Sea, 1825–1839 ROBERT J. BLYTH

On the morning of 19 January 1839, a combined Royal Navy and East India Company force assembled off the south-west coast of Arabia. In addition to a frigate, a cruiser and an armed schooner, transports carried 700 British and Indian troops. Their purpose was the seizure of the near-derelict port of Aden. The ensuing naval bombardment quickly reduced the town’s crumbling fortifications to rubble; despite a gallant local defence, the invading troops soon overwhelmed the inadequately armed Arabs. Within a matter of hours, the Union flag was hoisted and Aden became a British territory.1 The reasons for the capture of Aden were primarily maritime, relating to the successful experiments with steam-powered vessels on the route between Bombay and Suez, and the need to establish a convenient coaling station. They were also sub-imperial, concerning British India’s regional security, the promotion of its commercial interests, and the forward outlook of the Bombay presidency. This essay examines those early experiments, and in particular the first voyage of the Hugh Lindsay in 1830; the challenges – technical, geographical and political – faced by the pioneers; and the reasons why Aden emerged as the key port for Britain and India on the ‘overland’ route. The enormous economic and strategic importance of India within the British Empire meant that the safety and efficiency of communications with the sub-continent were always of paramount concern to imperial officials. Before the advent of the steamship, the railway, the electric telegraph and the Suez Canal, correspondence between Britain and India was slow and unreliable. With a fair wind, a typical East Indiaman might take at least five months to sail to Calcutta via the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage of more than 11,000 miles. Ships crossing the Indian Ocean had to await a favourable monsoon to assist their passage and this could add weeks or even months to a voyage. The distribution of mails – or daks – around the sub-continent was problematic and 1

R.J. Gavin, Aden Under British Rule, 1839–1967 (London, 1975), p. 1. The storming of Aden is vividly described in G. Waterfield, Sultans of Aden (London, 1968), ch. 8. See also, C.R. Low, History of the Indian Navy, 1613–1863, 2 vols (London, 1877), II, pp. 118–23. 68

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in general it took two years to receive a reply to a letter sent to India.2 This was not an issue for the day-to-day activities of the East India Company: the Cape route was familiar and secure and avoided the costly requirements for warehousing and the transhipment of bulk goods. But it did pose difficulties in time of war or when a situation required the rapid transmission of orders and information. Moreover, the loss of the Company’s monopoly on Indian trade in 1813, and on Chinese trade in 1833, introduced new commercial and political imperatives, adding to the pressure for speedier communications. In these circumstances, however, the ‘overland’ alternatives to employing a lumbering East Indiaman on the long Cape route were limited and fraught with complication. Urgent dispatches from Britain, for example, could be sent to the Mediterranean and then either via the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea or across Syria and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. Although these were much shorter routes, they were rarely employed because of inadequate charts and maps, the hostile terrain and volatile political nature of the territories to be traversed, and the difficult sailing conditions of the Gulf and, more particularly, the Red Sea.3 During the nineteenth century, technological advances removed some of these obstacles; changes in Britain’s political relationship with the Middle East overcame many of the rest. In both these areas, it was the government of Bombay and its agencies, rather than metropolitan departments of state or commercial interests, which promoted the initial stages of this communications revolution.4 Following the successful use of steam-powered vessels on inland and coastal waters around Britain, the technology was adapted for longer voyages. The American ship Savannah made a steam-assisted crossing of the Atlantic in 1816 and other ships followed. By the early 1820s, attention increasingly turned to employing steam power on the vital route to British India. Given steam power’s technical limitations, this was an ambitious proposal. Nevertheless, the potential commercial and political advantages for India of a regular steam service with Britain were enormous. In 1823, the Calcutta Steam Committee was established to promote steam communications with Bengal,

2 D.R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), p. 130. 3 The history of the development of communications between Britain and India has received much attention both in academic and in popular works. H.L. Hoskins, British Routes to India (New York, 1928) remains the standard account. See also, S. Searight, Steaming East: The Forging of Steamship and Rail Links Between Europe and Asia (London, 1991) and, for details of the early efforts to establish these routes, G.I. Khan, ‘Attempts at Swift Communication Between India and the West Before 1830’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 16, 2 (1971), 117–58. 4 Headrick, Tools of Empire, p. 135. For an overview of the impact of improved communications on the Red Sea, see C. Dubois, ‘The Red Sea Ports During the Revolution in Transportation, 1800–1914’, in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. L.T. Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (New York, 2002), pp. 58–74.

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and similar bodies were set up in Madras and Bombay. Calcutta, however, took an early lead. With the backing of the presidency government, a prize was offered for the first steam passage to India and an additional reward promised for the operation of a permanent service before the end of 1826. The East India Company’s Court of Directors gave its backing to Calcutta’s initiative.5 A wooden paddle steamer, the Enterprize, was purchased for the experiment. Although much smaller than a standard East Indiaman, it was – at 120 feet in length and displacing 470 tons – a substantial steam vessel fitted with two 60-horsepower Maudslay engines. The subsequent voyage merely served to highlight the rudimentary nature of the early steam technology, the enormous scale of the undertaking via the Cape and the wholly unrealistic expectations of the energetic promoters. The Enterprize left Falmouth for Calcutta in August 1825, carrying seventeen passengers and a packet of important Company dispatches. It became clear almost at once that the attempt was doomed. The woefully inefficient engines required a massive cargo of coal, which was piled into every available space above and below deck. This huge extra burden and a lack of proper trim gave the Enterprize a draft of 16 feet, pushing the paddles too low in the water to achieve optimum propulsion. Headwinds and storms in the Bay of Biscay, combined with the crew’s preoccupation with fuelling the boiler, denied the vessel the effective assistance of sail, causing considerable delay. With the boiler consuming 10–12 tons of coal a day to maintain a rate of 6–7 knots, the Enterprize exhausted its coal supply long before its only scheduled coaling stop at Cape Town. It then had to make way under sail alone, requiring a change of course that further added to the distance. The prize was lost. Coaling at the Cape was slow and the second leg to Calcutta was attempted in the face of adverse monsoon winds; once again the coal ran out far short of Bengal. The voyage of nearly 14,000 miles had taken 113 days, with only 62 days under steam. Although this was itself a major achievement, neither the available technology nor the existing infrastructure could yet support a steam passage to India via the Cape.6 The failure of this attempt was a serious setback for Calcutta and for the promoters of steam communication more generally. If the Cape route was beyond the capability of any existing steamer, Indian steam enthusiasts had either to await the development of more powerful and efficient vessels and the creation of a chain of coaling stations or find an alternative route. For the advocates of steam in Bombay, the latter held the greatest potential.

5 Extract from Public Letter from Bengal, 31 December 1823; extract from Public Letter to Bengal, 11 May 1825, IOL, L/MAR/C/576. For technical and operational details of the first steamers used in India, see C.A. Gibson-Hill, ‘The Steamers Employed in Asian Waters, 1819–39’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Malayan Branch, 27, 1 (1954), 120–62. 6 For details of the Enterprize’s voyage, see Searight, Steaming East, pp. 23–9; Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 95–6.

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If a steamer could open up the overland route via the Red Sea and Suez, Bombay would become the obvious Indian port for the new service, providing a host of commercial opportunities, and giving the presidency an automatic advantage over its east coast rivals at Calcutta and Madras. The scheme seemed sensible, especially given that Admiralty steam packets had begun plying the Mediterranean between Gibraltar and Malta by the late 1820s. It was argued that if a service from Bombay to Suez could complement one operating to Alexandria, passengers and mails would be transported to and from India in under two months. This proposal captured the collective imagination of the British community in Bombay. In the mid-1820s, the dynamic governor, Mountstuart Elphinstone, put in place the foundations for a series of experimental voyages and charged his officials with the necessary drive and determination to achieve the goal.7 Captain Sir Charles Malcolm, RN, the superintendent of the Bombay Marine, the Company’s navy, eagerly backed Elphinstone’s plans for a variety of reasons. Aside from the commercial and political rivalries between Bombay and the other presidencies, Malcolm was acutely conscious of the Bengal government’s hostility towards the Marine, particularly during the period of reform and severe fiscal retrenchment introduced by the utilitarian governor general, Lord William Bentinck. Malcolm complained: ‘Great efforts are being made on the Bengal side to destroy us root and branch – they always hated the Marine and now worse than ever. . . . [T]hey . . . look upon us with an evil eye – as West India proprietors would on emancipated slaves.’8 He hoped to transform the fortunes of the Bombay Marine and saw the development of a packet service to Suez as a useful means of modernising the force and raising its profile. But many officials in Calcutta felt its activities – anti-piracy patrols, limited naval warfare, troop transportation, and hydrographic surveys – could be undertaken by the Royal Navy at less cost to the Indian exchequer. The Court of Directors in London was inclined to agree. Nevertheless, Malcolm had two key allies in Calcutta and in London. Despite his concerns over the costs and benefits of the Bombay Marine, Bentinck was a keen proponent of steam communications. Similarly, at East India House, Sir James Cosmo Melvill, the auditor of the Indian accounts and later the Company’s chief secretary, was anxious that the proposed experiments succeed, although, as he made clear to Malcolm, his support for the venture did not represent the majority view: You know that I am something of an enthusiast on the subject of steam navigation between England and India . . . which I am persuaded is perfectly practable [sic] by

7

Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 103–6. C. Malcolm [hereafter Malcolm] to P. Malcolm, Bombay, n.d. [13 March 1829], NMM, MAL/3. See also Malcolm to H. Lindsay, 23 March 1829; Malcolm to R. Campbell, Bombay, 24 April 1829; Malcolm to J. Melvill, 17 May 1829, NMM, MAL/3; Low, History of the Indian Navy, I, pp. 503–4. 8

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the route of the Mediterranean and Red Sea. If you succeed in establishing the communication from Bombay to Suez – English enterprise and spirit will do the rest, and thus a system of rapid intercourse with our possessions in the East will be established, an object of incalculable benefit to a gov[ernmen]t abroad under the control of one at home. In the present state of the finances of India, it is scarcely necessary to suggest to you the expediency of your financing your arrangements upon the most economical scale. . . . I am sure you will excuse the freedom of these remarks – nothing would induce me to be so free but my anxiety that all your proceedings should be such as to obtain the approbation of the authorities in this House.9

Malcolm, however, was additionally well placed to proceed with steam communications. His brother, Sir John Malcolm, having succeeded Elphinstone as the governor of Bombay, was persuaded of their utility and leant his support to the venture. Another brother, Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, commanded the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean squadron and was, therefore, ideally positioned to arrange connections with steam packets at Alexandria. Indeed, one commentator suggested that any company engaged on the Red Sea route be called the ‘Malcolm Line of Steam Packets’.10 In 1829, Commander Robert Moresby of the Bombay Marine, ‘a most intelligent officer and a good surveyor’, was sent up the Red Sea in the Company warship Thetis with 600 tons of coal to establish depots at Aden, Jeddah, Cosseir and Suez, in addition to the existing store at Mocha. This was in preparation for a hasty and ill-conceived attempt to reach Egypt using the Enterprize; the experiment was abandoned after the ship failed to reach Bombay from Calcutta.11 In the meantime, a small paddle steamer – based on the design of a Liverpool packet and built for use in the Persian Gulf – was chosen for the Red Sea passage. Steam engines and experienced engineers were sent from Britain to Bombay to complete the construction of the vessel, which was named the Hugh Lindsay after the chairman of the Court of Directors in a rather obvious attempt to mollify London’s growing hostility towards the costly scheme.12 Malcolm was pleased with the vessel, as he indicated in a letter to Melvill in October 1829: We launched the Hugh Lindsay today – if our vessel could be judged on the stocks to go it must be her – she is a perfect beauty to look at and I daresay will be so in

9

Melvill to Malcolm, 18 September 1828, NMM, MAL/3. Hoskins, British Routes, p. 117; Khan, ‘Attempts’, p. 150. 11 Malcolm to Melvill, 24 February 1829, NMM, MAL/3; extract from Public Letter from Bengal, 31 March 1829, IOL, L/MAR/C/576; Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 106–8. 12 Malcolm to G.A. Prinsep, Bombay, 18 January 1831, NMM, MAL/5; Melvill to Malcolm, 18 September 1828, NMM, MAL/3; Malcolm to Lindsay, Bombay, 18 November 1829, NLS, MS5899, f. 85; extract from Marine Letter from Bombay, 10 April 1827, IOL, L/MAR/C/576. 10

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the water – and if her engines fit and are all right she must go against all the seas and currents in India.13

In planning the Hugh Lindsay’s maiden voyage, Malcolm was determined to avoid the shortage of coal and coaling stations that had prevented the Enterprize making a steam passage to India. Following the completion of brief but successful sea trials, the Hugh Lindsay – commanded by the experienced Captain James Wilson of the Bombay Marine – left Bombay for Suez on 20 March 1830, taking advantage of the monsoon. The voyage was uneven. The first leg of nearly 1,700 miles from Bombay to Aden covered more than half the total distance. The vessel was designed to carry coal for five-and-ahalf days of steaming, but to reach Aden twice the load was required for the voracious boilers. Consequently, it was piled on deck, in the saloon and even in the cabins to ensure a sufficient supply. Like the overburdened Enterprize, this adversely affected the ship’s performance. The Hugh Lindsay’s draft was pushed down from 11 feet and 6 inches to almost 14 feet, which severely strained the paddles, a problem again exacerbated by the lack of proper trim. Indeed, the vessel was so low in the water leaving Bombay that it was nicknamed the ‘water-lily’.14 The calculations for coal consumption proved disconcertingly accurate when the ship arrived at Aden less than eleven days later with only six hours’ supply remaining. The voyage had been achieved under steam, with the assistance of sail, at an acceptable estimated average speed of eight knots. As will be seen, coaling at Aden was problematical, taking five days. The ship now steamed up the Red Sea to Mocha and on to Jeddah, where a further four-and-a-half days were spent coaling. Headwinds and rough seas on the way to Cosseir slowed the vessel and threatened to smash the paddlewheels. Nevertheless, the final short leg to Suez passed without incident and the ship’s single passenger, Colonel Campbell, disembarked safely together with a packet of 306 letters, worth 1,176 rupees in postage. The packet was conveyed to Alexandria and arrived in London from Bombay after only 59 days, a speed of communication far greater than anything possible via the Cape. The passage to Suez had taken 33 days, with 12 days spent coaling. Compared to the efforts of the Enterprize, the Bombay experiment was something of a triumph. No official arrangement had been made for the Hugh Lindsay to receive a significant number of passengers or a decent amount of mail at Suez. This oversight, a further indication of the Company’s hostility towards the undertaking, had the unfortunate effect of casting the otherwise successful mission as a costly experiment rather than as the first of a potentially practical series of regular voyages. The return passage was also relatively free of problems, except for the protracted process of coaling. Four days were spent loading

13 14

Malcolm to Melvill, Bombay, 14 October 1829, NLS, MS5899, f. 82. B. Cable, A Hundred Year History of the P&O, 1837–1937 (London, 1937), p. 50. 73

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100 tons of coal at Suez; two-and-a-half days passed loading a further 50 tons at Cosseir; more than two days were lost at Jeddah, where two passengers joined the ship; and two days were needed at Mocha for restocking and the provision of tallow to lubricate the engines. Once out of the Red Sea, six days were spent at Aden coaling again and riding out a storm. The final leg to Bombay pushed the Hugh Lindsay to the very limit. With a day’s less supply than expected loaded at Aden, it made Bombay with only four hours of coal left, having already damped and burnt the ashes to maintain pressure. Wilson had, however, gallantly shown that a small paddle steamer, operating in generally good conditions, could usefully be employed between Bombay and Suez; and that greater benefit would be gained if a connection were made with a steam packet at Alexandria. Disregarding official censure from London and the jealousy of Calcutta, the Bombay authorities instructed Wilson to make more voyages up the Red Sea. Malcolm was confident of success and thought the experiment would gain broader support, despite the reaction in certain quarters: The directors are I believe very inimical to the whole thing; but they cannot stop its progress – we have shown the way and it will go on, the ministers are very favourable to it, and also the governor general.15

Each of the subsequent trips revealed the real potential of the enterprise, while continuing to highlight the experimental nature of the undertaking. A second passage was made in December 1830 with the steamer carrying more mail and the outgoing governor of Bombay, Sir John Malcolm, who was clearly determined to encourage the scheme through his final official duties. Despite boiler difficulties, the Hugh Lindsay made Cosseir in good time, having coaled at Maculla rather than Aden to shorten the first leg of the voyage. The return voyage was more difficult, which was especially unfortunate given that the new governor, John Fitzgibbon, the Earl of Clare, was on board. The steamer arrived at Jeddah but found insufficient coal to make Maculla. In poor weather, it reached Mocha where some coal was found, although not enough to leave the Red Sea. Wilson was compelled to return to Jeddah and await fresh supplies from Suez. These were not, however, immediately forthcoming and the Earl of Clare and his official entourage were stranded amid the unprepossessing environs of the small port for 43 days. Engine trouble, heavy seas and monsoon winds made the rest of the voyage slow and uncomfortable. The governor, his proconsular patience obviously strained by the experience, arrived at Bombay in ‘a very bad humour’; his reception of Captain Malcolm was understandably frosty and seemed to bode ill for the steam route. Malcolm, both shame-faced and furious, threatened to bring Commander Moresby, again charged with the

15

Malcolm to C. Coville, Bombay, 17 November 1830, NMM, MAL/5. 74

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provision of coal in the Red Sea, to a courts martial for landing too little at Jeddah but later relented.16 Lord Clare, like his predecessors, soon saw the advantage of the route and leant his support to further voyages. A third passage in 1832 again failed to connect with a Mediterranean packet – the passengers and mails were left at Alexandria for a month – but improvements in coaling meant the outward voyage was completed in under 22 days. A fourth passage in January 1833 demonstrated the full potential of the experiment, bringing news from London to Bombay within 59 days.17 The problem now was how best to proceed. Practical and technical dilemmas needed to be addressed and, above all, a reliable estimate of the projected costs was required before the enthusiastic Bombay government attempted to win over the parsimonious directors of the Company, whose opposition remained the greatest obstacle to a regular steam service. The initial voyages of the Hugh Lindsay certainly demonstrated that an abundant supply of high-quality coal – ideally from Llangannech in South Wales – was essential to sustain any fledgling steamer service and that the existing infrastructure for the coaling of vessels was wholly inadequate. Malcolm and the Bombay government considered solutions to both. In some respects supply was not a problem. Coal could be brought from Britain to India and then shipped to the Red Sea, but this was very expensive. Numerous schemes were suggested: bringing coal direct to the Red Sea; shipping coal to Alexandria and thence by camel to Suez; or exploiting a local resource.18 All were found wanting. Coal for the Bombay to Suez route would have to come from India’s imported supplies – despite the awkward logistics of the operation – until the introduction of a regular service produced the projected economies of scale. In June 1830, the Bombay government informed the Court of Directors of its difficulty in securing a reliable supply of coal for the Hugh Lindsay: This vessel consumes so large a quantity that the whole of the coals stored in the Red Sea will be expended this voyage, and if five steamers are established, making four trips in the year, the consumption will not fall short of three thousand tons annually, even allowing the other vessel[s] to have engines of less power.19

16

Malcolm to J. Malcolm, Bombay, 30 March 1831, NMM, MAL/5. Capt. J.H. Wilson, I.N., On Steam Communication Between Bombay and Suez, With an Account of the Hugh Lindsay’s Four Voyages (Bombay, 1833), pp. 47–50; H. Tucker and W.S. Clarke (Public Dept) to Lord Clare, 27 August 1834, IOL, L/MAR/C/576. 18 On the various solutions to the coal supply problem, see, for example, J. Barker (British consul, Alexandria) to Court of Directors, 19 February 1833, and Marine Dept to Govt of Bombay, 25 September 1833, enclosed in H. Mathew (Govt of Bombay) to Malcolm, 23 July 1834, NMM, MAL/4. 19 Extract from Marine Letter from Bombay, 21 June 1830, IOL, L/MAR/C/576. 17

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This was not a prospect to be relished at East India House, especially when some estimates of the cost of supplying coal were as high as £6 per ton.20 The provision of coal to the Red Sea remained a cause of anxiety and a source of friction for many years. The establishment of suitable depots en route was, perhaps, of even greater concern to the Bombay authorities. Having completed the first four voyages in the Hugh Lindsay, Wilson summarised the difficulty: It is a peculiar feature of the Red Sea that in the vicinity of both its shores, reefs, shoals, and islet[s] are so thickly scattered as to leave few ports available for common purposes, and still less as coal depots; among these few it is in vain to look for the facilities afforded by the ports of more civilized countries, where quays, breakwaters, and all the other means that mechanical ingenuity can devise are nothing, and we must effect our purpose as we can with the means which the ports of a barbarous country can afford; as to attempt forming complete establishments for coal depots at each port would involve an outlay, and constant current expense, which the probable returns would not warrant: a brief notice of the principal ports will suffice to show that in selecting depots we have only to choose from a variety of difficulties.21

The trials experienced by the Bombay Marine at Aden in 1830 were typical of those faced by the steam pioneers in the region and are worth examining in some detail. After the Thetis had landed coal at the port in 1829, the Company sloop Coote, commanded by Captain Pepper, was sent to Aden to ensure that Wilson faced as little inconvenience as possible in loading supplies. This exposed the difficulty of negotiating with the local rulers. The Sheikh of Aden was little help to Pepper, who had to travel more than twenty miles inland ‘on poor miserable horses and indifferent camels’ to strike a deal with the Sultan of Lahej. Having welcomed Pepper’s party with ‘a warmth of attention’, the sultan was disappointed not to receive any dispatches from the Bombay government. He then requested payment both for the expenses he had incurred during the initial landing of the coal and for the labour required to load the Hugh Lindsay, a task he promised to complete in a day. Pepper, ‘having learnt the difficulty of obtaining anything like supplies and, the more so, cash’ at the dilapidated port of Aden, decided to leave for Maculla. Even here he failed to raise the $1,800 demanded by the sultan: banyan traders accepted a Company bill for supplies but would not make a cash advance. Returning to Lahej, Pepper concluded an arrangement by which the sultan would deliver the coal, subject to Wilson providing the necessary sum. Pepper supplied Wilson with a letter containing advice on the conduct of any meeting with the sultan. The provision of gifts, government letters and

20

Barker to Court of Directors, 19 February 1833, enclosed in Mathew to Malcolm, 23 July 1834, NMM, MAL/4. 21 Wilson, On Steam Communication, p. 9. 76

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a cash bribe for the sultan’s officials was deemed essential. Pepper concluded: ‘This chieftain . . . during our interview with him evinced the true character of the Bedowin [sic] Arab . . . [although] professing at the same time a desire to continue and cultivate the friendship and countenance of the British Government.’22 It seems that Captain Wilson did not receive Pepper’s letter until the Hugh Lindsay reached Aden, leaving him somewhat unprepared. Wilson sent an officer ashore, with presents and dispatches for the sultan, to request that the coal be loaded immediately. As before, the Sheikh of Aden would not act without the specific instructions of the sultan. Wilson, both keen to proceed with the coaling and anxious to avoid protracted negotiations with the sultan, circumvented the local situation: On the morning after our arrival, I was informed that the Sooltan [sic] wished me to visit him at Lahiga [sic Lahej], when ‘everything could be settled’. A letter with an enclosure, which I had in the meantime received from Commander Pepper . . . enabled me to understand what was meant by ‘everything being settled’. As I was not provided with the means of meeting these demands, should they be repeated, I requested the sheikh to write to the Sooltan, that the Government would be much displeased with the detention of the vessel and if there were any demands on account for coal, the better way would be to give me at once what was required to take the vessel to Judda [sic Jeddah], and on my return for the rest, on my way to Bombay, I would settle all accounts. On the next day the shipment of coal commenced, but two days had thus been lost, and three more were occupied in getting on board sufficient to make the passage to Judda.23

There were similar tribulations at the other ports en route and Wilson noted that one-third of the journey time was occupied with coaling. He made a number of recommendations to the Bombay government and to the Court of Directors about the future provision of ships and coal depots for the proposed steam service: I would submit as my opinion that the class of vessels fittest for the navigation of the Red Sea would be such as could be propelled by engines whose consumption should not exceed nine tons in the twenty-four hours, and which should carry fifteen days coal at that rate of consumption, and such vessels would I am of opinion be fully capable of performing the passage from Bombay to Cosseir or Suez in two stages.24

22

Capt. Pepper to commander, Hugh Lindsay, Aden, n.d. [November 1829], NMM, MAL/4. 23 Wilson to Malcolm, 29 May 1830, NMM, MAL/4. 24 Wilson to Court of Directors, Suez Roads, 22 April 1830, NMM, MAL/4. 77

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Wilson suggested Mocha as the most suitable port for a coal depot. Although far nearer Suez than Bombay, it was within the reach of the steamers envisaged by Wilson. Moreover, boats and labour were more abundant at Mocha than at Aden or Jeddah, where loading was performed ‘in a dilatory manner’.25 Indeed, Aden was not employed as a depot for the Hugh Lindsay’s three subsequent voyages. Admiral Sir Edward Owen, the commander-in-chief of the East Indies squadron, congratulating Malcolm on the successful voyage, suggested he establish a depot at a place ‘free from the vixations [sic] and exactions [sic] of the mercenary chieftains who be in your way’. Owen reassured Malcolm that ‘experience will soon ease your difficulties’.26 Of course, while the service remained experimental, it was impossible to gain the experience urged by Owen or to make meaningful progress towards improving the essential infrastructure along the route. The one difficulty that continued to overshadow the entire project was the East India Company’s financial predicament. The Marine Department in London estimated that a service involving four steamers – two on each side of the Isthmus of Suez – would cost in excess of £100,000 per annum. Even the calculation of this huge sum assumed the service would operate without serious problems, but the department warned that ‘if experiments should turn out as ill as in the past, it is impossible to compute the magnitude which the expense might attain’. The conclusion of officials in London, transmitted in a lengthy dispatch to Lord Clare in March 1832, recognised both the value of the undertaking and the very serious constraints on Company revenues: We are not insensible to the advantages of a rapid communication with India, and of the importance of encouraging the application of steam to that purpose. We are also disposed to believe that a steam communication by the Red Sea . . . would open the way to other improvements, and would ultimately redound to the benefit of this country, as well as of India; and if our finances were in a flourishing state, we might possibly feel it our duty to incur even the enormous outlay which we have specified. But in the present condition of our resources, we cannot think the probable difference of time in the mere transmission of letters a sufficient justification of such an expense. We cannot anticipate that the return in postage and passengers would pay for more than a very small portion of the charge. These considerations induce us to pause before we determine the great question of engaging in any project of this character. At present not seeing our way clear to such a result, as would justify the expense, we shall not authorize any further steps in the matter. At the same time we deem the subject too important to be lost sight of, or hastily dismissed. We shall therefore not fail to carry on enquiries into the practicability of effecting the end in view at a reasonable expense, we desire

25 26

Wilson to Malcolm, 29 May 1830, NMM, MAL/4. E. Owen to Malcolm, Penang, 12 August 1830, NMM, MAL/5b. 78

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that you also will prosecute similar enquiries and communicate to us the result; but that you will not adopt any measure involving expense without our previous sanction.27

Concerns over the parlous state of the Company’s finances, and a widespread belief that steam communication should be left to private enterprise, demanded a halt in Bombay’s activities. The fiscal pre-occupations of the Court of Directors were not, however, those of Lord Clare and the Indian Navy. The Bombay government took a contrary stance, promoting steam communication via Suez with further voyages, despite direct orders to halt the experiments. Reacting to the Marine Department’s negative conclusions of March 1832, the Bombay authorities reported that ‘it was not deemed proper to make any alteration in the voyage on receipt of that dispatch’. Although irritated by Bombay’s continued defiance, officials at the Marine Department seemed reconciled to the situation in their response to the presidency’s wilfulness: This does not justify the repeated subsequent disobedience of our orders, of which we shall say nothing further, because it can answer no good purpose to issue instructions which are systematically disregarded and . . . [will] . . . limit our notice of the infraction to a mere expression of displeasure.28

These exchanges did little to advance Bombay’s cause at East India House: the Marine Department had already complained that ‘The Hugh Lindsay in all her four voyages has brought nothing of any moment.’29 Indeed, external developments advanced the project rather than an internal Company breakthrough. By the mid-1830s, however, with a semi-regular service increasingly moving from aspiration to reality, the Company found itself out of step with public and political opinion in Britain vis-à-vis the practicality and desirability of the route. Vocal steam campaigners – both in parliament and outwith – were dismayed at the Court of Directors’ lack of support for the efforts in India. In 1835, during a debate on the possible opening of the Euphrates route, Sir John Hobhouse, the president of the Board of Control, indicated that ‘it would . . . be the duty of the King’s Government to take steps for the navigation of the Red Sea’. This was a clear indication of the national significance now attached to securing steam navigation with India. Pressure from parliament via the Board of Control forced the Company, against the 27

R. Campbell and J.G. Ravenshaw (Marine Dept) to Lord Clare, 14 March 1832, IOR, L/MAR/C/576. 28 W.S. Clarke and J.R. Carnac (Marine Dept) to Lord Clare, 26 August 1835, IOR, L/MAR/C/576. 29 Marine Dept to Govt of Bombay, 25 September 1833, enclosed in Mathew to Malcolm, 23 July 1834, NMM, MAL/4. 79

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wishes of its shareholders, to order the construction of further steam vessels to augment the activities of the Hugh Lindsay and to complement the rapidly expanding packet services in the Mediterranean, although the Court of Directors remained reluctant to sanction their exclusive use on the Suez route.30 But this lukewarm support had the effect of revitalising interest across India. In Bengal, for example, steam enthusiasts now abandoned their hopes for the Cape and tried to employ the Red Sea passage. The ensuing rivalry between the presidencies and their steam committees, the fevered promotion of individual vessels and disputes over financial liability for coal and other costs all resulted in a diffusion of effort. Captain Malcolm, approaching the end of his term as superintendent of the Indian Navy, complained bitterly to C.B. Greenlaw, the secretary of the Bengal Steam Fund, that ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. He objected to the complex arrangements of the Court of Directors, noting that decisions were being made by ‘men as ignorant as children of the customs of the Arabs’.31 Nevertheless, the backing of Westminster and, belatedly, of East India House ensured that the purely experimental stage was now at an end and that the supporters of steam could move to capitalise upon Bombay’s earlier endeavours. In 1837 a regular steam service, subsidised by the Treasury in London, was established with the aim of providing a monthly packet from Bombay to Suez.32 Although the Red Sea route had now assumed a greater significance, the important issue of coal depots had still to be resolved and was becoming more pressing. In 1834, Malcolm recommended stocking three principal depots at Bombay, Maculla and Jeddah, with secondary stores at Mocha and Cosseir. Costs and facilities remained problematic. Malcolm believed the nature of Britain’s connection with the region needed to alter and he suggested the appointment of a political agent for the Red Sea to supervise the distribution of coal and to protect British interests.33 The need for a string of stations serving the Red Sea was a political inconvenience and a financial liability. Malcolm observed in 1838, that with larger steamers entering service, only a single depot would be required if the Hugh Lindsay were removed from the line of packets. By this stage, other ports and locations – including the islands of Socotra and Perim – had been investigated and opinion was firmly in favour of acquiring Aden, a move that Malcolm now considered ‘absolutely necessary’. Commander Stafford Bettesworth Haines of the Indian Navy had already surveyed the area around Aden. Despite the earlier difficulties

30 Clarke and Carnac to Lord Clare, 23 December 1835, IOL, L/MAR/C/576; Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 125–7, chs 8–9. 31 Malcolm to C.B. Greenlaw, Bombay, 26 February 1838, NMM, MAL/6. 32 Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 217–18. 33 Malcolm to Lord Clare, Bombay, 2 September 1834; Malcolm to R. Grant, Bombay, 29 October 1835; ‘Second part of the remarks upon a steam armament and packet service for the Indian Navy’, memo by Malcolm, 25 March 1836, NMM, MAL/4.

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experienced at the port and notwithstanding its general state of desolation and decay, he was able see Aden’s great advantage as a centre for British activity. It had a magnificent and deep natural harbour, a commanding position at the entrance to the Red Sea, and could be made into a defensive bulwark.34 Moreover, events at Aden and further afield now gave the Indian authorities the pretext to proceed with its acquisition. In 1837, the Duria Dowlat, a vessel belonging to the Nawab of the Carnatic and flying the British flag, ran aground – or was, more likely, deliberately wrecked – at Aden. The sultan claimed the cargo, while locals plundered the ship and ill-treated some of the passengers, subjecting several women ‘to the most brutal indignities’.35 This ‘outrage’ could not pass without Bombay’s intervention and Haines was sent to Aden to investigate the incident, obtain restitution for the affair and, significantly, to enter into negotiations with regard to Britain’s use or ultimate acquisition of the port. The Bombay government urged Malcolm to ensure that Haines ‘be instructed not to lose sight . . . of the desirable object of obtaining consent to our establishing a coal depot at Aden’. Indeed, Sir Robert Grant, the forward-minded governor of Bombay, was keen to bring Aden fully under British control but the governor general, Lord Auckland, restrained him, preferring a more cautious approach.36 However, Grant’s officials in the Indian Navy favoured his course of action. Following a discussion with Haines that suggested the sultan would respond favourably to Britain’s overtures, Malcolm replied that ‘it would be found very advisable had we the sole control over the town of Aden’. Consequently, he ordered Haines to secure ‘the transfer to the British government of the whole . . . of Aden . . . including the town and both bays’.37 This certainly met Grant’s objectives, although Malcolm’s instructions to Haines did somewhat exceed his original orders. At the same time, the wider geopolitical situation around the Red Sea increasingly influenced British and British Indian opinion in favour of outright annexation, bringing further pressure to bear upon the Sultan of Lahej. Muhammad Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, was expanding his dominions into western Asia and down the Arabian littoral of the Red Sea. Ever sensitive to the security of British India, officials in Whitehall,

34

Malcolm to Locke, Bombay, 27 April 1838; Malcolm to P. Malcolm, Bombay, 28 February 1838; Malcolm to Col. Campbell, Bombay, 28 February 1838, NMM, MAL/6. Although the new steamers had a greater range than the Hugh Lindsay, Malcolm complained that their rate of coal consumption was still too high. The Atalanta, for example, burned 28–30 tons a day, leading Malcolm to comment that the coal ‘flowed right up her chimney’. Malcolm to Greenlaw, Bombay, 30 April 1838, NMM, MAL/6. 35 Low, II, p. 116. 36 J.P. Willoughby to Malcolm, Bombay, 25 November 1837, NMM, MAL/8; Gavin, Aden, p. 30. 37 Malcolm to Willoughby, Bombay, 27 November 1837; marginal note by Malcolm, n.d.; Malcolm to Haines, Bombay, 30 November 1837, NMM, MAL/8; Gavin, Aden, pp. 28–9; Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 197–200. 81

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Bombay and Calcutta were anxious to prevent the pasha seizing Aden, thereby establishing Egyptian authority beyond the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. Containment of Egypt in south-west Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, therefore, became a British priority by the late 1830s. The capture of Aden – already identified as the key location for the vital coal depot on the Suez route – would clearly signal Britain’s intent, providing a more definite British presence than the mere negotiated use of the port.38 The promotion of steam power, the security of the British routes to India and the external policy of Britain now focused on Aden and Haines’s talks with the sultan. In January 1838, after difficult and protracted discussions, Haines gained an undertaking from the Sultan of Lahej that appeared to give the British the right to occupy Aden. This was, however, only an interim agreement, which contained a number of important caveats and failed to settle upon the sum Britain was prepared to pay for the port. Further negotiation was required but these talks collapsed when the sultan threatened to kidnap Haines in a crude attempt to force Britain’s hand. Haines returned to Bombay more convinced than ever of the sultan’s unreliability and the need to act decisively to secure British control. Simultaneously, under pressure from Britain and Egypt, the future of Aden caused splits within the ruling family of Lahej, adding to the complexity of the situation. News of the threat to Haines further influenced the official and political debate in Britain and India: Sir Robert Grant, Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, and Sir John Hobhouse, the president of the Board of Control, all favoured direct action; Auckland remained guarded. It was decided that Britain should continue to seek the acquisition of Aden, although Auckland insisted that this be achieved peacefully. Haines sailed once more to Aden in the autumn of 1838. But increasing tension in the port and at Lahej made negotiation fruitless and the mission ended in an armed confrontation, with Haines lacking the men and means to resolve the situation. Persuaded of the need to move decisively and to uphold British honour in the humiliating standoff with the sultan, James Farish, the acting governor of Bombay following Grant’s death, disregarded Calcutta’s instructions and ordered the forcible capture of Aden. A force was dispatched and seized the port on 19 January 1839. Authorisation for the action reached Farish from London and later from Calcutta within a few weeks but by then, of course, Bombay’s annexation of the port was a fait accompli.39 Aden’s capture signalled the end of the first stage of the efforts to establish regular steam communications between Britain and India. Technological advances allowed the Bombay to Suez route to function with the provision of a single coal depot, making Aden the ideal port for this purpose. The

38

Gavin, Aden, pp. 26–7. For details of Britain’s response to Egyptian expansion into Arabia and around the Gulf, see J.B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford, 1968), ch. 8. 39 Gavin, Aden, pp. 31–7. 82

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subsequent development and success of the ‘overland’ route and the widespread adoption of steam power did not, however, salvage the fortunes of the Indian Navy, as Malcolm had hoped. The inefficient steamers the East India Company and the Indian Navy employed on the route continued to prove very costly to run. As early as 1842, the newly created Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) introduced a subsidised passenger and mail service from Calcutta to Suez. A decade later, P&O assumed the Bombay to Suez route as its operations spread across the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the scale and scope of the Indian Navy’s activities were steadily curtailed and the service was finally disbanded in 1863.40 The annexation of Aden also ushered in a new phase in British and British Indian relations with the region. The port was added to the possessions of the East India Company, becoming an outpost of the Indian Empire and part of the Bombay presidency. Aden’s economy quickly recovered from its long decline and flourished under British rule as the volume of trade and shipping expanded through the nineteenth century, especially following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. In addition, it developed into a strategic bulwark, defending the routes to India, and became the centre of a protectorate that encompassed tribal territories in south-west Arabia and involved associated agreements with neighbouring Somaliland. The combination of steam experiments, technical requirements, foreign policy imperatives, and local exigencies thus brought Aden in the British Empire, making it the first of many colonial acquisitions during the long reign of Queen Victoria.41

40 Cable, History of P&O, chs 11–12; Hoskins, British Routes, ch. 10; Low, History of the Indian Navy, II, passim. 41 On the subsequent development of Aden under British rule, see Gavin, Aden, passim.

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6

The heroic age of the tin can Technology and ideology in British Arctic exploration, 1818–1835 CARL THOMPSON

On 11 August 1831, the men of the Victory, under Captain John Ross, were hard at work in a desolate bay in Arctic Canada. Rather strangely, given the location, they were busy stocking up on provisions, helping themselves to a vast array of supplies left behind when an earlier naval expedition had had to abandon one of its ships, the Fury. Suddenly, and briefly, one of the most hostile environments in the world became a place of spectacular bounty. The incongruity between the supplies and the setting was not lost on Ross, who later wrote: I need not say that it was an occurrence not less novel than interesting, to find in the abandoned region of solitude and ice, and rocks, a ready market where we could supply all our wants, and collected in one spot, all the materials for which we should have searched the warehouses of Wapping and Rotherhithe.1

Ross’s tone here is interesting. Even as he acknowledges the surprising transformation that has taken place in the Arctic, that relaxed, circumlocutory understatement (‘I need not say’: ‘not less novel than interesting’) makes it seem as if it is entirely in the order of things that British explorers should effect such transformations. British efficiency has quite naturally turned a mishap – the loss of the Fury – to advantage; at the same time it has turned a waste zone, an ‘abandoned region of solitude and ice and rock’, into a veritable trading emporium akin to ‘the warehouses of Wapping and Rotherhithe’. Slightly ahead of its time – Ross’s narrative of the expedition was published in 1835 – Ross’s prose ripples with a self-belief that today seems stereotypically ‘Victorian’.

1 John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of the North-West Passage (London, 1835), p. 109.

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Surveying the stores of the Fury, one item especially holds Ross’s attention. With surprise and satisfaction, he comments that: Where the preserved meats and vegetables had been deposited, we found everything entire. The canisters had all been piled up in two heaps; but though quite exposed to all the chances of the climate, for four years, they had not suffered in the slightest degree. There had been no water to rust them, and the security of the joinings had prevented the bears from smelling their contents. Had they known what was within, not much of this provision would have come to our share, and they would have had more reason than we to be thankful for Mr Donkin’s patent.2

The ‘canisters’ referred to here were made of tin, and Ross’s fascination with them is not merely an incidental detail in his narrative. In this paper I shall argue that the tin canister and its contents contribute in no small way to the self-assurance just noted. Today tin cans are humble artefacts, but at this period in British history, and in this chapter of British Arctic exploration, they have an altogether different resonance. A new and distinctly ‘modern’ technology, the tin can was of immense material significance in enabling the Arctic expeditions mounted by the British in the 1810s and 1820s. More than that, however, they also play a part in what one might term the symbolic economy of these voyages. Insofar as they figure in the narratives that were published after each voyage (and it is upon the representation of the tin can in these expensively-produced, Admiralty-endorsed volumes that I shall principally focus here), the tin cans admired by Ross are arguably performing a function that is as much rhetorical as material. That is to say, they serve in a small but significant way to persuade contemporaries not only of the possibility of British exploration in the Arctic, but also of the propriety, the necessity, perhaps even the inevitability of British expansion into the region. Some of the fundamental principles impelling British exploration in this period are simultaneously embodied and emblematized in the tin can; the main part of this paper will accordingly sketch its iconicity with regard to the larger ideological assumptions of the age. At the same time, the new food technology arguably enables a subtle adjustment in those assumptions; as will be mooted at the close of this paper, tin cans and preserved foodstuffs are possibly a factor (among many others, of course) in the more expansionist and bullish mood that seems to characterize British attitudes to exploration, empire and colonialism in the 1820s and 30s. British explorers, and British tin cans, were in the Arctic in the early nineteenth century as the result of a major drive by the Admiralty to discover a North-West Passage, a navigable route across the top of the American continent which would link the Atlantic and the Pacific. This was a project that proceeded by both land and sea. John Ross commanded the ships Isabella

2

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 108. 85

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and Alexander on a first maritime expedition in 1818, whilst in 1819 John Franklin headed an overland expedition to the Canadian north coast. William Edward Parry commanded a second naval voyage in 1819, taking the Hecla and the Griper across the meridian of 110° west, and thereby claiming a government prize of £5,000 for the partial discovery of a possible North-West Passage. Under Parry the Navy developed a ‘wintering-out’ technique that would be used by subsequent expeditions: the Hecla and the Griper spent the winter ice-bound in the Arctic so that they were in a position to push further west the following spring. Parry led two further voyages, the first running from 1821 to 1823 and the second from 1824 to 1825 (the Fury being abandoned during the latter voyage). Ross commanded a second expedition in 1829. This was not an official naval expedition, being commercially sponsored: in ethos, personnel and technique, however, it was very much in the tradition of the earlier naval voyages.3 The Isabella and the Alexander, on the first of these expeditions, took as a central component of their provisions some 9,000 pounds of tinned, preserved meat. Such preserved meats, and the tin cans in which they were contained, represented the convergence of two recent technological advances. The first was a new method of food preservation developed by the Frenchman Nicholas Appert. ‘Appertisation’ consisted of the packing of a foodstuff into an impermeable container, typically a glass bottle, which was loosely corked. The bottle was then heated in a bath of hot water, causing air to be expelled, whereupon the bottle was swiftly recorked in such a way as to seal it hermetically. Appert’s The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years was translated into English in 1811, in which year a British engineer named Bryan Donkin – the ‘Donkin’ referred to by Ross – bought the rights to the process.4 The firm of Donkin, Gamble and Hall subsequently made a going commercial concern out of Appert’s innovation by combining appertisation with another new technology: tin canning. Donkin patented the tin can in 1812, and before long a wide range of preserved foodstuffs in tin cans – meats, vegetables and soups – were available. They

3

The principal accounts emerging from these expeditions are: William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyage for a Discovery of a North-West Passage (London, 1821); Parry, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (London, 1824); Parry, Journal of a Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (London, 1826); John Ross, A Voyage of Discovery . . . in His Majesty’s Ships Isabella and Alexander (London, 1819); Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage. In addition, I shall also make occasional reference to the account produced by George Lyon, who captained the secondary vessel on Parry’s second voyage, viz., The Private Journal of G.F. Lyon of H.M.S. Hecla, During the Recent Voyage of Discovery under Captain Parry (London, 1824). 4 The text is catalogued in the Bodleian Library as Charles [sic] Appert, The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years (London, 1811). 86

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were initially regarded as luxury items, selling to a highly fashionable clientele that included even the Royal Family.5 This was the new technology put to use by the Admiralty on Ross’s voyage of 1818 – as far as I can tell, the first naval expedition to use tinned foods. The Admiralty’s interest in Donkin’s preserved meat had, ostensibly, little to do with its fashionability and everything to do with its supposed antiscorbutic qualities. To British eyes, the Arctic was a terrifyingly barren region in which crews could not rely on hunting game or on finding other forms of fresh provisions. Expeditions to these regions had to come stocked with all the supplies they needed. Traditionally, salted meat was used as the principal source of sustenance, but salt meat weakened the men’s resistance to scurvy, particularly in Arctic conditions. Donkin’s preserved meats and preserved vegetables used far less salt than traditional foodstuffs and were felt to reduce susceptibility to scurvy. It is in this regard that they are chiefly discussed by both Parry and Ross.6 Both men stress that preserved meats mean preserved men, a claim that is to some extent supported by remarkably low rates of mortality on these expeditions. How justified Parry and Ross were in emphasizing the role of preserved foodstuffs in the prevention of scurvy is less certain. Work done in the 1980s suggests that Donkin’s products would have gone some way in providing the crews with vitamin C, but that they probably were not as important a factor in the avoidance of scurvy as contemporaries thought. Some 25 to 50 per cent of a substance’s vitamin C was probably lost in the canning process, and much would also have depended on the original freshness of the ingredients being processed.7 Whatever the actual health benefits accruing to a diet of Donkin’s preserved meats, it is important in the present context to note the contemporary perception that the new food technology was a significant factor in preventing scurvy, and thus in enabling these long Arctic expeditions. It is in such 5

See Venetia Murray, High Society in the Regency Period, 1788–1830 (Harmondsworth, 1998), p. 196. For a letter informing Donkin that the Prince Regent, the Queen and other ‘distinguished personages’ had dined on his ‘patent beef’, and ‘highly approved’ it, see Anon., A Brief Account of Bryan Donkin, FRS, And of the Company He Founded 150 Years Ago (Chesterfield, 1953), p. 19. 6 For example, Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. clxxii; Ross, A Voyage of Discovery, p. 196. Gilbert Blane also recommends that the new preserved meats be served to sick and convalescent sailors in his ‘On the Comparative Health of the British Navy 1779–1814, With Proposals for its Further Improvement’ (1815), although Blane makes reference only to appertisation, and not to tin canning. See Tim Fulford, ed., Romanticism and Science 1773–1833, 5 vols (London, 2002), I, p. 174. 7 See A.E. Bender, ‘The History and Implications of Processed Foods’, in J. Watt, E.J. Freeman and W.F. Bynum, eds, Starving Sailors: The Influence of Nutrition upon Naval and Maritime History (London, 1981). But see also in the same volume Ann Savours and Margaret Deacon, ‘Nutritional Aspects of the British Arctic (Nares) Expedition of 1875–76 and Its Predecessors’, which seems more strongly to suggest the positive value of canned foods in preventing scurvy. 87

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perceptions, of course, that the rhetorical significance of the tin can resides, as opposed to its purely nutritional value. As Margaret Visser notes, ‘food is never just something to eat’.8 Almost invariably, it has a hugely important semiotic aspect, operating as one of the most potent social and cultural signifiers. To understand fully the role of tinned foods in this phase of British exploration, and in these exploration narratives, we accordingly need to attend to what they signalled to contemporaries, as much as to the ways in which they were practically useful. Something of what they signalled can perhaps be deduced from the preceding argument: they are ‘modern’ (because newly invented), ‘healthy’ (because recommended, rightly or wrongly, by the latest medical theory) and also, in certain regards, ‘elite’ (because eaten at the highest echelons of British society). Today, this may seem a surprising cluster of associations to attach to tin cans, but to reconstruct their cultural symbolism in the early nineteenth century, we need in the first place to remember that they were not yet mass-produced, and so were not yet cheap and ubiquitous.9 In the second place, we need also to recapture a contemporary sense of astonishment at the tin can, a sense that it represented a truly remarkable advance in food preservation. There have of course been methods of food preservation practised for centuries: drying, smoking, and so forth. Traditional techniques, however, usually alter significantly the substance being preserved; tin cans, in contrast, yield foods that have changed little in taste or texture, as if they have just been freshly cooked.10 Thus George Lyon, commander of the Hecla on Parry’s second expedition, described the victualling arrangements on that voyage as follows: ‘an excellent allowance of fresh Donkin’s meats was issued for all, with pickles, lemon-juice, spruce and other beer besides, so that fresh food formed the chief messes’ (my emphasis).11 This seems an oxymoronic usage to us – ‘fresh’ tinned foods? – yet it speaks of a contemporary sense that tinned foods were somehow barely processed at all. If Lyon implicitly reveals a contemporary sense of surprise and admiration at the new mode of food preservation, that amazement is far more explicitly stated in a remarkable passage in Ross’s 1835 narrative. Recalling Christmas Day, 1831, when he and his men dined on tinned food taken from the Fury, Ross proceeds to speculate thus:

8 Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsession, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 12. 9 The mass-production of tin cans began in the late nineteenth century: from this date the prestige of tinned foods seems to plummet, until they become in the early twentieth century, in some quarters, emblematic of the worst aspects of a modern, ‘trashy’ mass culture. See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London, 1992), pp. 21–2. 10 See T.N. Morris, ‘Management and Preservation of Food’, in C. Singer, E.J. Holmyard, A.R. Hall, and T.I. Williams, eds, A History of Technology, 5 vols (Oxford, 1958), vol. 5. 11 Lyon, The Private Journal, pp. 397–8.

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I know not whether the preservation of this meat, thus secured, be interminable or not; but what we brought home is now, in 1835, as good as when it went out from the hands of the maker, or whatever be his designation, the Gastronome for eternity in short, in 1823. If it can be kept so long without the slightest alteration, without even the diminution of flavour in such things as hare soup and purée of carrots, why may it not endure forever, supposing that the vessels were themselves perdurable? Often have I imagined what we should have felt had Mr Appert’s contrivance (of which, however, neither he nor his successors are the real discoverers) been known to Rome[;] could we have dug out of Herculaneum or Pompeii one of the suppers of Lucullus or the dishes of Nasidenius; the ‘fat paps of a sow’, a boar with one half roasted and the other boiled, or a muraena fattened on Syrian slaves; or, as might have happened, a box of sauces prepared, not by Mr Burgess, but by the very hands of Apicius himself. How much more would antiquaries, and they even more than Kitchener or Vole, have triumphed at finding a dish from the court of Amenophis or Cephrenes, in the tombs of the Pharaohs; have regaled over potted dainties of four thousand years’ standing and have joyed in writing books on the cookery of the Shepherd Kings, or of him who was drowned in the Red Sea. Is it possible that this may be, some thousand years hence, that the ever-during frost of Boothia Felix may preserve the equally ever-during canisters of the Fury, and thus deliver down to a remote posterity the dinners cooked in London during the reign of George the Fourth? Happy indeed will such a day be for the antiquaries of Boothia Felix, and happy the Boothian to which such discoveries shall be reserved.12

This is first and foremost an amusing flight of fancy, yet there is arguably more than just wonderment being expressed here. Christmas dinner is the most important dining event in the Christian calendar, a meal that acts as a powerful affirmation of the values of any nominally Christian community. Donkin’s Preserved Meats take centre-stage at this dinner largely as a matter of expediency: roast beef is normally served up at Christmas on these voyages, but by this stage in Ross’s expedition the supplies of fresh beef have run out. Yet on the basis of Ross’s eulogy to tinned foods, one might plausibly suggest that one iconically British dish has merely been replaced by another, newer icon: closely associated with the tin can, it would seem, are larger assumptions as to Britain’s role in the world, and Britain’s place in history. In this regard, one should first note that Ross’s musings, whilst being undoubtedly whimsical, also enact a comic variation of a venerable literary and political theme, that of the translatio imperii. The locus of ultimate culinary sophistication is here assumed to move from Egypt to Rome to Georgian London. It is easy to imagine that in a different writer’s hands this might be a trajectory traced ironically, creating a mock-heroic or satirical mood, when traced in relation to the tin can. Yet this is surely not Ross’s intention here: we probably find Ross funnier in this passage than he is intending to be, because it is hard today to see the tin can in anything other than a disparaging 12

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, pp. 619–20. 89

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light. There is real admiration in Ross’s writing, and a sense that in inheriting the culinary empire of the Egyptians and Romans, Britons have also surpassed their precursors. Of all the great empire-builders, only the British have managed to preserve their dinners for posterity. In the undoubted playfulness of Ross’s conceit is mingled a considerable technological and imperial pride. Alongside the trope of translatio imperii, one should also register the figure with which Ross finishes the passage. Ross’s final flourish is the imagining of future ‘antiquaries’ who will be delighted to discover tin cans, and to find preserved within them the dinners of a long-lost civilization. Implicit in this imagined scene, it is important to note, is a conception of a future settlement or civilization – named ‘Boothia Felix’ by Ross – that has come into being on what is presently just an ‘abandoned region of solitude and ice and rocks’ (to recall the quotation that began this paper). This is an off-the-cuff witticism by Ross, but there is a sense in which it reveals the fundamental cast of this explorer’s thought. Ross thinks naturally in terms that suggest a transformation of the Arctic wastes, this transformation clearly being construed as an improving, civilizing act. Here Ross is entirely of his time, and the inheritor – as were the other explorers on these expeditions – of attitudes that had dominated British exploration since the Cook voyages of the 1760s and 1770s. Under the guidance especially of Sir Joseph Banks, British explorers from this date proclaimed and pursued what might be called a ‘georgic’ agenda: that is to say, they were interested not just in observing the world, but also, where necessary, in changing it.13 The globe constituted an estate that was to be managed with the greatest possible efficiency – this being not simply a commercial, but also a religious imperative. The ideologues of what has been termed the ‘Christian agrarian tradition’ taught that there was a providential injunction to bring all regions of the world under some form of cultivation – even if this meant, in some regions, effecting radical change in the local economy and ecosystem.14 The georgic mentalité understood such interventions as a benevolent, beneficient act of ‘improvement’ (another contemporary buzzword).15 Rather than plundering nature, after the fashion of earlier European

13

The term ‘georgic’ is taken from Virgil’s poem of that name, which celebrates agricultural labour and the techniques of agricultural husbandry. It was in this classical vocabulary that the business of agricultural improvement was frequently discussed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even though the culture of improvement was more directly motivated by Christian ideas. The Royal Society, for example, set up a ‘Georgical Committee’ in 1666. See Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 52. 14 Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 54. For a more general sketch of the intellectual and theological background to improvement, see also pp. 50–81; for the Banksian implementation of this agenda, see pp. 85–128. 15 See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1983), pp. 160–1. 90

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voyagers, explorers of this era thus saw themselves as correcting nature, redressing deficiencies which nature itself had brought about. Or as Ross writes of the Arctic in 1835: ‘as universal knowledge “progresses”, a new interest will attach to a region so robbed of “natural rights” by nature herself’.16 Within the broader nexus of georgic ideas and images Donkin’s preserved meats have a small but distinctive part to play. In the first place, they are obviously a vital tool in allowing the British to conduct the providential mission in this particularly inhospitable region of the world. More than this, however, tin cans and preserved foodstuffs in themselves enact or embody certain key aspects of the georgic agenda. They master nature in an improving way, by preventing the natural processes of putrefaction. At the same time, the tin can also achieves in miniature another key goal of georgic ideology. It may seem banal, but we must remember that tin cans contain things with great effectiveness. Implicit in this act of containment – to further state the obvious – is a strict separation of that which is inside the container and that which is outside it. Thus ‘the security of the joinings’ on the Fury’s tins stopped the aroma of the contents getting out (which would have drawn hungry bears) and air getting in (which would have caused decay). The tin can as container prevents the contaminating mixing of elements: matter is ordered and kept tidily apart. And if the tin can is thus regarded as effecting a tidy regulation of space, there is another aspect of the new technology also to be borne in mind. Appert in his original experiments had chiefly used glass bottles. A French board of inquiry into appertisation, however, had noted that ‘with respect to the embarkation of meat necessary for a whole crew on a long voyage’, difficulties lay ‘in the requisite multiplicity of bottles’, since these were fragile and awkwardly shaped for bulk storage.17 Here Donkin’s application of tin canning to Appert’s techniques of food preservation represents an important advance. Tin cans have the advantage over glass bottles in being not only individually more resilient, but also collectively a far more versatile storage mechanism. They can be stacked neatly and easily stowed away: en masse, they constitute a far more effective use of space than alternative contemporary storage technologies. The tin can, then, embodies and enables the careful regulation of space and matter. In so doing, it answers to, and emerges from, a concern with tidiness and orderliness that lies at the very heart of the ideology impelling the British exploration of the Arctic. What emerges overwhelmingly from all the official narratives of these expeditions is a firm conviction that the georgic cultivation of the world must begin with a careful ordering of the world. The equally firm conviction evinced everywhere by Parry, Ross and Lyon is that orderliness per se is a good thing, carrying medical, intellectual and even moral benefits. This drive towards order is most powerfully apparent in

16 17

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 270. Appert, The Art of Preserving, pp. 161–2. 91

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these narratives in the way these explorers maintain a strict control over their immediate environments; that is to say, over their ships. To those accustomed to think of exploration as a constant movement forwards into the unknown, the narratives of Parry and Ross will come as something of a surprise. Exploration as conducted on these expeditions, and as presented in these narratives, is for the most part a far more static exercise. The wintering-out technique developed by Parry meant that for the greater part of the ‘voyage’ the main emphasis is on getting both ship and crew safely through the long Arctic winter. As a result, exploration on the Parry and Ross model becomes largely a matter of good household management, and of keeping everything in good working order. The ship itself is systematically scrubbed, cleaned and inspected. Provisions and equipment, equally, are regularly surveyed. Whatever threatens the smooth running of these well-regulated ships is in turn to be tackled systematically. Condensation, for example, is a particular concern, and we read at length about the systems put in place to counteract it. The subjects that most occupy Parry and Ross can thus be curiously but engagingly banal: the drying of damp bed linen, for example, or the growing of mustard and cress in window boxes. Exploration comes to seem above all a domesticating force, in a way that obviously dovetails neatly with the georgic agenda just sketched. And in their domestic emphasis there is something very comforting about these narratives. Parry and Ross’s good housekeeping can sometimes acquire an uncanny aspect when juxtaposed with the desolate wastes and the curious light effects of the Arctic, but for the most part British composure seems unruffled. Readers are invited to witness the construction, in an otherwise hostile environment, of a reassuringly familiar household. And particularly reassuring to the affluent readership of these expensivelyproduced quarto volumes, one can surmise, is the fact that it is so strikingly a middle-class household that takes shape in the Arctic, complete with such middle-class rituals as tending window-boxes, reading a daily newspaper – The North Georgian Gazette, established by Parry on his first voyage – and performing in amateur dramatics. It will be apparent that the ship is to be conceived not just as a physical space that is scrupulously regulated by Parry and Ross, but also as a social space. Along with the ordering of the ship itself, the ordering of the ship’s community is a subject that receives considerable emphasis in these narratives. Again, a close, scrupulous regulation of affairs is the official hallmark of all these expeditions. Because inactivity is so marked a feature of this mode of exploration, a significant problem is occupying the crew over the long winter months. Their time is accordingly strictly timetabled, and both Parry and Ross devote considerable portions of their narratives to giving us the daily and weekly schedules by which the crew are organized and regulated – such timetables constituting, of course, not only an ordering of men but also an ordering of time. In itself, such organization is not remarkable in a naval vessel. What is noteworthy, however, is the amount of space devoted to the topic by Parry and 92

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Ross. From one perspective, they are obviously just explaining how they dealt with the unusual conditions thrown up by the ‘wintering-out’ strategy. From another perspective, however, it is clear that in offering such explanations they are also striving to present an image of naval discipline as an ‘improving’ force. The captains of these expeditions portray themselves as benign figures working not just for the success of their missions but also for the more general good of their crews. Since these were volunteer crews, there is little need for the harsh discipline which could still be a feature of life elsewhere in the Navy. At the same time, however, the discipline maintained by Parry and Ross is arguably more pervasive and more intimate than was the norm in most naval vessels (and in this regard these Arctic expeditions once again continue a trend which seems to originate in the Cook voyages).18 The sailors are often imaged as children, in need of gentle correction for their own good. The clothes, diet and even the body of each sailor are closely monitored. All are compelled to undertake what Parry terms a ‘systematic mode of exercise’.19 Nor is it just the body that is to be systematically exercised and improved. Both Parry and Ross put their men to school, establishing either a regular school where topics such as reading and writing can be learnt, or a Sunday school for the discussion of religious and moral topics. All the official narratives stress the intellectual and moral advances made by the men under this regime.20 As Ross writes in 1835: Under their system of education, [the men] had improved with surprising rapidity: while it was easy to perceive a decided change for the better in their moral and religious characters; even, as I have reason to believe, to that which is rendered difficult from long habits, the abolition of swearing.21

Authority in these narratives thus presents itself as teacher or parent, and in either guise it becomes suffused with that quietly spoken, but deeply held, religious self-assurance which so characterizes these expeditions. If containment, order and improvement are thus manifest in variety of different ways within the ship, they are also ideals that are to be imposed on the world beyond the ship, on the barren, uncharted Arctic. The primary purpose of these expeditions, of course, is to conduct a geographical and hydrographical survey. Landmasses and waterways unknown to Europeans are

18

See Christopher Lawrence, ‘Disciplining Disease: Scurvy, Navy and Imperial Expansion, 1750–1825’, in David Miller and Peter Reill, eds, Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge, 1996). 19 Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. 124. 20 At least one disaffected member of Ross’s second expedition, however, seems to have regarded these classes as little more than a form of protracted social humiliation. See Robert Huish, The Last Voyage of Captain John Ross (London, 1835), pp. 181–2, which was based on the reminiscences of William Light, steward on the voyage. 21 Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 226. 93

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mapped and given fixed definition, and the lines inscribed on the charts included in all these narratives effect in yet another form the regulation of space. Further to this principal agenda, the business of these expeditions is also the systematic collection and classification of the contents of the Arctic. The intellectual paradigm within which these explorers work is that established by Linnaeus in his Systema Natura of 1735. Again, this conception of exploration as a scientific exercise, and more specifically as science conducted in a Linnaean manner, enters British exploration largely through the influence of Sir Joseph Banks. The Linnaean agenda makes the explorer a form of scientist concerned above all with taxonomy, and the result of this classificatory zeal is a further sense of order and intellectual tidiness being conferred on the previously chaotic state of our knowledge of the Arctic. Parry and Ross’s narratives offer their readers a mass of botanical, zoological and geological knowledge in a precise, professionally rigorous manner, structured neatly into tables, appendices and supplements to appendices. As well as the narratives themselves, these expeditions also resulted in innumerable geological, botanical and zoological specimens. As the narratives describe this specimen-gathering aspect of the expeditions, however, one again gets a sense of a fetish being made of classificatory orderliness. Analysis and dissection are practised with a zeal that can seem chilling. A glutton bear wanders on to Ross’s ship and is promptly killed: Ross notes that it was an inhospitable reception to kill the poor starving wretch, but it was the first specimen of the creature which we had been able to obtain. Are the life and happiness of an animal to be compared with our own pleasure in seeing its skin stuffed with straw and exhibited in a glass case?22

In context, there seems to be little irony intended here. With Ross especially it can seem that orderliness, and the practical and moral improvement that comes with orderliness, brook no soppy sentiment. In a variety of different ways, then, these British explorers pursue in the Arctic the goals of ‘order’ and ‘improvement’. Since these are also, of course, attributes or achievements intrinsic to the new food technology, Donkin’s preserved meats stand in a metonymic relationship to the larger aims and ambitions motivating these voyages – and this close relationship perhaps helps to explain the somewhat grandiose course taken by Ross’s rhapsody on the tin can. Nor is this the only moment in which a congruence between the tin can and the larger ideological framework seems apparent in these exploration narratives. Donkin’s preserved meats hove back into view in relation to another important element in all these texts, which is the representation of the indigenous population of the region, the Inuit. And here again, references to Donkin’s preserved meats seem to possess a subtle rhetorical effect. When

22

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 627. 94

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the tinned foods consumed by the British are related to other scenes of eating and other references to diet in these narratives, they can be seen as forming part of an overall symbolic economy which in toto works to endorse not only the moral worthiness of the British enterprise in the Arctic but also the justness of any proprietorial claim on the region. The role of Donkin’s preserved meats in shaping attitudes towards the Inuit is best approached through a scene which first takes place in Parry’s first voyage, and which is then re-staged in Ross’s second voyage. Out with a work party that is being assisted by two Inuit men, Parry stops for dinner, ordering ‘a tin canister of preserved meat to be opened’.23 This is done with a mallet, an operation that fascinates the elder Inuit who directed his whole attention to the opening of the canister, and when this was effected, begged very hard for the mallet which had performed so useful an office, without expressing the least wish to partake of the meat, even when he saw us eating it with good appetites. Being prevailed on, however, to taste a little of it, with some biscuit, they did not seem at all to relish it, but eat a small quantity from an evident desire not to offend us, and then deposited the rest safely in their canoes.24

This proffering of preserved meats is repeated by Ross, who similarly found that the Inuit did not relish our preserved meat; but one who ate a morsel seemed to do it as a matter of obedience, saying it was very good, but admitting, on being crossquestioned by Captain Ross, that he had said what was not true; on which all the rest, on receiving permission, threw away what they had taken.25

These two encounters are innocent enough, and reflect well the generally cordial relationship that exists between the Inuit and the British in these expeditions. At the same time, they occupy a small but not insignificant place in a bigger context. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested that all meals stand in syntagmatic relationship with each other: that is to say, any meal, however seemingly insignificant or functional, exists in relationship to all the other meals eaten by a particular social group.26 If this is the case, we should first factor into these two trivial exchanges of food those grander, civilizing conceptions regarding Donkin’s preserved meats that come to John Ross’s mind after Christmas dinner. More generally, one must keep in mind the potency of food as a signifier of both cultural self-definition and cultural difference. The inability of the Inuit to appreciate the wonders of Donkin’s 23

Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. 279. Ibid., pp. 279–80. 25 Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 246. 26 Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal’, in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London, 1975), p. 251. 24

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preserved meat acquires deeper significance when one recognizes that it adds to an overall representation of the Inuit which defines them very much in terms of what, and how, they eat. Parry and Ross knew the Inuit as ‘Esquimaux’ – a name they did not use of themselves, and which in fact means ‘raw flesh eater’.27 It was a pejorative tag originally coined by Canadian Indians to describe the Inuit, but the British explorers, on the basis of these narratives, might just as easily have invented the label. In all these accounts, the way the Inuit eat is a subject that much concerns the British. The Inuit fondness for raw food is a recurrent theme in these texts. Another is the poor hygiene arrangements of the Inuit, and the dirty conditions in which they cook and prepare food. Thus Parry peers into a pot of ‘sea-horse flesh’ and cannot disguise his distaste even as he attempts to be charitable: ‘some ribs of this meat were by no means bad-looking, and, but for the blood mixed with the gravy, and the dirt which accompanied the cooking, might perhaps have been palatable enough’.28 Ross in 1818 was more blunt: ‘the habits of this people appear to be filthy in the extreme’.29 A third staple ingredient in the depiction of the Inuit is their gluttony. They are often described as eating until they were physically incapable of squeezing in any more food. This habit provokes the following outburst from James Clarke Ross (John Ross’s nephew, who contributed several sections to the official 1835 narrative): Disgusting brutes! The very hyena would have filled its belly and gone to sleep: nothing but absolute incapacity to push their food beyond the top of the throat, could check the gourmandizing of these specimens of reason and humanity.30

This is not the only moment in the younger Ross’s writing when a disturbingly bestial imagery is used in relation to the Inuit: elsewhere they are also described as pigs, vultures and tigers. James Clarke Ross’s hyperbolic rhetoric seems to reflect a general hardening of British attitudes over the course of these expeditions. Parry and Lyon, whilst often finding the Inuit distasteful, generally endeavour to maintain a tolerant attitude towards them; in 1835, both John and James Clarke Ross are far less forgiving. Consistently, then, and with increasing vehemence, what is emphasized about the Inuit is that they are savage, dirty, gluttonous eaters. These repeated scenes arguably serve a rhetorical as much as an informative function. Two dietary styles are in a sense contrasted throughout these narratives: the Inuit characterized by rawness, excess, and dirtiness, and the British by tidiness,

27

See Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London, 1996), p. 187. 28 Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. 286. 29 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery, p. 133. 30 Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 358. 96

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cleanliness and self-discipline, as they allot themselves rationed amounts of preserved meat from their remarkable, new-fangled tin canisters. One might read this opposition in terms of a Levi-Straussian distinction between the savage and the civilized. Equally pertinent, however, is the reading Mary Douglas makes of dirt in Purity and Danger: namely, that dirt is chiefly ‘matter out of place’, matter that is not so much offensive in itself, as in the fact that it somehow contravenes a classificatory system.31 Arguably, what most disturbs the British about the Inuit is disorderliness in a variety of forms. When they cook, as Parry noted, blood mixes with gravy, and dirt gets into the food. Substances are allowed to mix improperly, as the Inuit display a scandalous inability to keep materials separate or neatly contained. When the Inuit binge, they show an inability to marshal resources properly that is equally troublesome to the timetabled, abstemious British, eking out their supplies over the Arctic winter. Donkin’s preserved meats are again on view, interestingly, at one moment when Lyon is travelling overland with a mixed party of British sailors and Inuit. He finds he has to dole out preserved meats ‘in equal proportions’ to the Inuit as well as to the British, since ‘the Eskimaux, with their customary improvidence, [had] brought no provision with them’. 32 Such seemingly inconsequential scenes accumulate over the course of these narratives, until Inuit untidiness, wastefulness and improvidence with regard to food come to figure other ways in which the vast natural resources of the Arctic are wasted on its current inhabitants. Drifting across the landscape, the Inuit do not settle, and they do not cultivate. Advancing neither ‘order’ nor ‘improvement’ in the Arctic, they are ultimately unable to make the region yield a harvest in accordance with providential injunction. It follows, rather sadly, that the Inuit must themselves be tidied up and put in order. Here one witnesses a changing mood across the course of these expeditions. The genial paternalism that is the official attitude to the Inuit gives way, with ever greater frequency, to more intolerant outbursts. The apparent callousness of Ross as he has that glutton bear killed and stuffed reappears in a more disturbing context. In 1819 Ross envisaged that the Inuit would, in the future, be successfully harnessed to British commercial interests. By 1835 the mood has darkened, and Ross issues a declaration in which a now familiar word resonates chillingly: Is it not the fate of the savage and the uncivilised on this earth to give way to the more cunning and the better informed, to knowledge and civilisation? It is the order of the world and the right one: nor will all the lamentations of a mawkish philanthropy, with its more absurd or censurable efforts, avail one jot against an order of things as wise as it is, assuredly, established (my emphasis).33

31 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), p. 35. 32 Lyon, The Private Journal, p. 240. 33 Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 257.

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Such a statement is all the more shocking since it sits, without provoking any particular comment or explanation on Ross’s part, alongside scenes that show that Ross liked the Inuit personally. Parry and Lyon often display a similar capacity to make a strict separation between personal feelings and official, ‘proper’ notions of decency and progress – such distinctions perhaps being the most disturbing form taken by the categorizing, compartmentalizing tendencies that so characterize these expeditions. In this chapter, my primary intention has been to demonstrate that the new tinned foods have a metonymic relationship with the agenda being more generally pursued by British exploration in the early nineteenth century. Secondarily, I have also speculated as to the extent to which the tin can, in figuring metonymically these larger assumptions and aspirations, possesses an unexpected rhetorical function for contemporaries. It comes as a surprise today to imagine that anyone could feel inspired or reassured by the consumption of tinned foodstuffs, yet this is perhaps to project back anachronistically our own attitude towards a household item that has become cheap and ubiquitous. For the Arctic explorers who used them in the course of their expeditions, and for the readers who subsequently encountered them in the accounts of these expeditions, the tin can carried very different associations: as a consequence, Donkin’s preserved meats work in their own small way to bolster the image of British exploration as a force for order, improvement and good discipline. And it is not just in the Arctic, perhaps, that the new food technology endorses and subtly underwrites British expansionism in the early nineteenth century. British imperial and colonial attitudes in the 1820s and 1830s are marked by a new swagger and self-confidence, and by a corresponding upsurge in inflexibility and intolerance towards other cultures. In India, for example, some commentators see a shift from an ‘orientalist’ to an ‘anglicist’ attitude occurring more or less contemporaneously with the Arctic expeditions discussed in this paper: where ‘orientalists’ had sought to work within the existing institutions and social structures of the Indian sub-continent, the ‘anglicists’ increasingly sought to transform those institutions, reforming them in accordance with British norms and expectations.34 Is this change in outlook in any way related to the technological advances in food preservation that are made in this period? On the face of it, this seems a preposterous question, and one must of course acknowledge the far more important factors which generate the new British bullishness vis-à-vis the wider world: global military pre-eminence following victory in the Napoleonic Wars, the impact of utilitarian and evangelical ideas in the 1820s and so forth. Yet tin cans and the preserved foodstuffs they contain are not entirely without consequence in effecting a change in British attitudes. As Alan Bewell has noted, the imperialist and

34 See Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992), p. 77, and also E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies (Oxford, 2001), pp. 13–92, on the shift from ‘rule in an Indian idiom’ (p. 14) to ‘rule in a British idiom’ (p. 51).

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colonialist discourses of the late eighteenth century exhibit ‘primary fears about whether the physiology and health of the European body . . . might be changed through diet’.35 In travelogues, exploration narratives and medical treatises alike, the anxiety is expressed that ‘to consume a colonial environment . . . is ultimately to risk being consumed by it’ – that is to say, either physically weakened by the foreign diet, so that one is more susceptible to disease, or else somehow changed morally, and subtly orientalized.36 To bring one’s own food to a remote or exotic region is to go a considerable way in allaying such fears. E.M. Collingham has recently postulated a link between the increasingly ‘anglicist’ attitudes adopted in India and the increased consumption, in the same period, of preserved foodstuffs imported from Britain; it is in this spirit, perhaps, that we need to calculate the larger rhetorical effects of Donkin’s preserved meats.37 The ability to dine even in the Arctic wastes on familiar dishes such as ‘hare soup and purée of carrots’ does not only enable exploration and expansion at a practical level: the new food technology also enables a new conviction as to the possibility, and propriety, of transporting British notions of order and improvement to even the most desolate regions of the world.

35

Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999), p. 149. See also, more generally, ch. 3, ‘Colonial Dietary Anxieties’, pp. 131–60. 36 Ibid., p. 154. 37 See Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp. 69–71. 99

7

The proliferation and diffusion of steamship technology and the beginnings of ‘new imperialism’ ROBERT KUBICEK

‘It is tempting to suggest’, Gordon Jackson has observed, that ‘the surge of imperialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century . . . owed most to changes in European technology, especially the triple-compound-engined steel ships around 1880 and the subsequent dramatic fall in freight rates’. Given the proliferation of explanations that abound in the literature on the so-called new imperialism of the late nineteenth century (Professor Jackson alludes to several), it is controversial to assign technology generally and steel ships in particular a dominant deterministic role.1 To clarify and pursue the assertion further one must start with the discussion of nineteenth-century British imperialism developed in the work of Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, which appeared in 19932 and which not only triggered an outpouring of reviews in historical journals but a book of essays as well, edited by Raymond Dumett.3 The latter book offers a number of critiques of the Cain–Hopkins work while the two authors are provided the opportunity of an afterword or rebuttal. Here the two authors use the occasion to rethink a working definition of the term imperialism. They distinguish between two forms of power in the international system. One, structural power, refers to the way in which a dominant state shaped the framework of international relations and specifies the ‘rules of the game’ needed to uphold it. The

1

Gordon Jackson and David M. Williams, eds, Shipping, Technology and Imperialism (Aldershot, 1996), p. 5. Jackson also mentions as contributors ‘Hilferding’s financiers and Schumpeter’s atavistic elites, [and] the short-term cynicism of Bismarck’s adventures’. For more on the subject of technology and empire see Robert Kubicek, ‘British Expansion, Empire, and Technological Change’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. III (Oxford, 1999), pp. 247–69. 2 Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, British Imperialism, I: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London, 1993). 3 Raymond Dumett, ed., Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London, 1999). 100

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other, relational power, deals with the negotiations, pressures and conflicts that determine the outcome of particular contests within this broad framework.

Structural power, or the rules of the game, was shaped and imposed by the imperial or metropolitan state’s preferences and policies buttressed by organized coercion (i.e. military and naval force). Relational power features one or other of a broad range of responses to these impositions by dependent or subordinate states on the periphery.4 Whatever the forms of relational power (and some could allow for considerable peripheral initiative and advantage), structural power, Cain and Hopkins argue, was significantly ascendant. And, moreover, they argue ‘the principal controllers of structural power were gentlemanly capitalists’. In their rebuttal Cain and Hopkins also rehearse their definition of gentlemanly capitalists. The City lay at the heart of this complex both because of its intimate links with landed society and because it was the economic hub of the great wheel of elite service occupations and interests, focused on London and the south-east, that were transforming and expanding the gentlemanly capitalist core. Within the City itself, only a very small, rich and privileged minority [city bankers] . . . was admitted to these exalted circles. But the rest of the congregation . . . aristocrats, . . . a network of professional, religious, administrative, commercial and financial groups . . . [and the higher grades of civil servants] . . . can also be described as being gentlemanly capitalists either because they were directly connected with the privileged City, through business or personal ties, or because, in their eyes, the City represented the key element in the British economy.5

What follows is an argument that adapts or adjusts the Cain–Hopkins analysis to accommodate what may be identified as another complex, one distinct from that of the gentlemanly capitalists. We call this other complex the ship nexus. In its construction I am influenced by David J. Starkey’s injunction to cast my net widely, to consider ‘all aspects of man’s relationship with the sea’ in writing about maritime history.6 The nexus constructed also takes on board various maritime activities in the late nineteenth century and other activities linked to these endeavours. These latter undertakings worked under the aegis of or with shipping firms and included metal manufactures, coal suppliers, commodity producers, import/export merchants and local bankers and, of course, shipbuilders, marine architects and engineers. This complex network of shipping interests and linked enterprises was centred not in the

4

Ibid., pp. 204–5. Ibid., p. 200. 6 David J. Starkey, ‘Introduction’, in David J. Starkey and Alan G. Jamieson, eds, Exploiting the Sea: Aspects of Britain’s Maritime Economy Since 1870 (Exeter, 1998), p. 1. 5

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south-west but in several locations in the north of the United Kingdom and its web subsumed many overseas locations centred on the globe’s ports. It underwent several developmental stages which not only altered the nexus but impacted as well on the structural and relational powers, the components of imperialism identified by Cain and Hopkins. The timing and features of these stages that the nexus underwent cumulatively represented a revolution in transport and were, I argue, major contributors to that phase of European and particularly British expansion identified as the new imperialism.

The nexus – shipowners At the core of the nexus were the eleven main shipowners, including the eight which Gordon Boyce identifies as controlling the largest undertakings.7 All eleven were significantly responsible for the rise of large-scale enterprise in British shipping and contributed significantly to the profusion and diffusion of steamships on the waterways of the globe in the late nineteenth century. These luminaries were John Burns (first Lord Inverclyde) (1829–1901), Charles Cayzer (1843–1916), Donald Currie (1825–1909), J.R. Ellerman (1862–1933) Chistopher Furness (1825–1912), Alfred Holt (1829–1911), Alfred Jones (1845–1909), James Mackay (first Lord Inchcape) (1852–1932), William Mackinnon (1823–1893), Owen Philipps (later Lord Kylsant) (1863–1937) and Thomas Sutherland (1834–1923). The origins and activities of these developers or controllers of Britain’s major shipping enterprises by 1910–14 are instructive for our purposes. Burns, from a distinguished Glasgow family, had become chairman of the venerable Cunard Steamship Company of which his father had been a founding partner.8 He and his successor, George Burns, the second Lord Inverclyde, steered the company through stiff competition on the Atlantic runs from both British and American rivals. Cayzer, son of a Cornish school master who established Glasgow as his base, developed a line between Liverpool/Glasgow–Bombay with Scottish bank and East Indian merchant capital. By 1890 he had founded the Clan Line Association Steamers which by 1903 had twenty-five to thirty ships at sea and whose ports of call included southern Africa and Australasia as well as India and Sri Lanka.9 Currie, the son of a barber from Belfast, also came from a modest background. ‘Scottish resources were Currie’s lifeline as he sought to carve out a niche for himself as a shipowner, first in Liverpool

7

Gordon Boyce, Information, Mediation and Institutional Development: The Rise of LargeScale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870–1919 (Manchester, 1995), p. 128. 8 Anthony Slaven and Sydney Checkland, eds, Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography, 1860–1960, II (Glasgow), 1990. 9 Ibid. 102

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then in London.’10 A substantial Welsh coal owner and mining engineer also backed Currie. He formed the Castle Line operating to South Africa which was amalgamated with the Union Steamship Company in 1900. Currie, with his self-promoting skills, argued successfully for subsidies for his schemes designed, he said, to promote the interests of empire. J. R. Ellerman, born in Hull, the son of a corn merchant and ship broker from Hamburg and educated in Birmingham, established himself in London as a self-made financier and shipowner. He would become Britain’s wealthiest individual. He entered shipping in 1892 and, allying himself with established owners, by 1914 he controlled lines operating in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean.11 Furness’s home town was Hartlepool whose shipbuilders were instrumental financial contributors to the development of his transatlantic liner services.12 Later, as his enterprises expanded on the Atlantic and eastward, financial resources were drawn from Hull, London, Liverpool and New York. Holt, a trained engineer, was based in Liverpool and drew on its Unitarian merchants and shippers for financial support. His Ocean Steamship Company with close ties to trading houses Butterfield and Swire in Hong Kong and Mansfield and Company in Singapore, operated in most of the leading international ports in Asia and Australia.13 Jones, another self-made shipping magnate operating out of Liverpool, dominated West African shipping. By 1900 this ‘shipping Napoleon’ managed ninety-five vessels of a gross 300,000 tons. He ‘retained control of the ordinary shares of his companies but was quite prepared to allow other individuals and firms to take part’.14 Mackinnon, like Holt, operated extensively in the Asian trade. By the early 1880s his companies, especially British India Steam Navigation (BISN), ‘straddled a large part of the globe’ dominating the India coast trade from Chittagong round the peninsula to Bombay and Karachi, providing a service from London to China and Australia, operating in the Persian Gulf as well as the rice trade between Rangoon and Calcutta.15 Mackay, born in Arbroath, Scotland, worked for twenty years in Mackinnon’s establishments in India before heading up BISN and becoming, with its merger with Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) in 1914, ‘the greatest shipowner in the land’.16 Prior to the merger, the P&O was headed by Sutherland who had joined the company as an office boy and with stints in company offices in the Far East had worked his way within its folds to managing director in 10

Andrew Porter, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and Southern Africa (London, 1986), p. 9. 11 David J. Jermy, ed., Dictionary of Business Biography, II (London, 1984). 12 Boyce, Information, pp. 48–9. 13 Malcolm Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A History of the Ocean Steam Ship Company, 1865–1973 (London, 1990). 14 Peter N. Davies, Sir Alfred Jones, Shipping Entrepreneur (London, 1978). 15 George Blake, B.I. Centenary, 1856–1956 (London, 1956). 16 Stephanie Jones, Trade and Shipping: Lord Inchcape (Manchester, 1992). 103

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1872.17 Philipps, through his Oxbridge brothers, obtained entry into London’s gentlemanly capitalists circles which facilitated his takeover in 1903 of the venerable Royal Mail Steam Packet Company with which he acquired ‘rival operators in its South American trades and expanded widely into the Far East, African, Mediterranean and UK coastal routes’.18 With the exception of Philipps, these first-generation shipowners and managers possessed few of the characteristics associated with London-centred gentlemanly capitalists. Their bases of operation were, for the most part, outside London in the north in Liverpool, Glasgow and the Newcastle areas and several were, as well, deeply engaged overseas through their own or others’ agencies or cargo-booking companies.19 Several started as family-run firms and were so maintained. Religious affiliation as Dissenters or Presbyterians extended networks of ownership to co-religionists as in the case of Currie and Holt. Their external capital sources, as well as commercial information and business opportunities were also nurtured or mobilized regionally by merchants in the export–import trades, shipbrokers, freight agents, shipbuilders, coal firms and banks. Some of them did find ‘London banking circles and its stock exchange essential’ but reliance on such sources came belatedly, that is after substantial firms had been established and as part of a pattern of mergers in the industry after 1900 – mergers such as between BISN and P&O (1914), Union and Castle (1900) and the takeovers initiated by Royal Mail and Packet (after 1903). Shipowners ‘were not’ concludes Boyce, ‘an homogenous lot, and only some were accepted as gentleman capitalists before 1914’.20 Those that could be so designated: Ellerman, Mackay and Philipps, were accepted into the London financial establishment at the end of the period of high imperialism for what they had previously accomplished.

The nexus – shipbuilders Unlike other service-sector interests, these shipowners had extensive contacts and developed an interdependence with industrial capitalism, i.e. with shipbuilders which were also an essential part of the ship nexus. Rapid industrialization underpinned much Victorian activity and not the least of that activity was provided by shipbuilding as metallurgical developments threw up new materials suitable for hulls, engines and boilers. These had through 17 David Howarth and Stephen Howarth, The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (London, 1986). 18 Boyce, Information, p. 131. 19 ‘Overseas agents who booked cargo at distant ports played a vital role in supporting the early growth of steam lines.’ Boyce, Information, p. 64. For agency houses and their functioning see Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 4. 20 Boyce, Information, p. 301.

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the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century seen coal-guzzling paddle wheelers superseded by larger and more efficient screw-driven compoundengined vessels with higher pressure boilers. These developments were superseded in the last quarter of the century. In the 1880s steel replaced iron as the preferred material for boiler and hull construction for cargo tramps as well as liners. With engines running more economically, and ever larger ships moving faster through the adoption of triple and even quadruple expansion, a new, even revolutionary, stage in sea transport developed.21 The shipbuilding industry, like many shipowning firms ‘remained’ as Sydney Pollard and Paul Robertson have observed, ‘until 1914 a family industry, into which little outside capital or outside influence was allowed to penetrate. Firms were owned by successive generations of fathers, sons, and brothers. Even when they were turned into limited liability companies, they generally remained private, and the shares were held by only a handful of people.’ To the extent these firms were penetrated by outsiders these often came from ‘related industries including shipping and engineering’.22

Responses to turbulence Turbulence was pervasive in the ship nexus. The rapid adaptations of mechanization and metallurgical innovations saw the industry and the tools it produced drive a destabilizing competition. If you did not build big and better or obtain big or better ships you were vulnerable to competitors who would drive you out of business or production. Some in the shipping business would make do with established or slightly altered technologies – witness the improved efficiency obtained in freight-carrying sailing ships. Others would acquire hand-me-downs, older passengers liners, for example, being converted to cargo use. Still others upgraded with new engines and/or boilers. But driving many shipping entrepreneurs was the perceived need not to adapt but to replace vessels they possessed with ones which were more efficient, that is which were larger and faster. No better example of the force of technological innovation was the experience of the Holts. They entered the China trade with compound-engined ships which gave them an initial advantage. But John Holt’s unwillingness subsequently to acquire yet larger and faster ships driven by triple-expansion engines put the Ocean Steam Ship Company at a distinct

21

See Denis Griffiths, ‘Triple Expansion and the First Shipping Revolution’, in Robert Gardiner, ed., The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship Before 1900 (London, 1993), pp. 106–25. 22 Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson, The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 72–3. See also Boyce, Information, p. 45: ‘Builders played a vital part in financing shipowners, often on the understanding that exclusive dealing would enable them to “grow their customers”’. 105

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disadvantage only overcome when the firm belatedly followed the competition.23 A byproduct of the introduction of new transport was fluctuating and declining freight rates which over the long haul stimulated trade but in the short run disturbed cash flows and made the timing of the decision to build new tonnage problematic. The disruptions were ameliorated but not contained by several developments. First, leading shipping companies built larger corporate structures by extensive acquisitions and mergers as we have noted previously to cope with the management and costs of the behemoths they acquired. 24 Second, big shippers developed extensive feeder systems to ensure access to cargo. Alfred Jones, for example, was particularly successful acquiring controlling interests in West African boat firms and inshore establishments. British India obtained agreements with both Indian railway and river steamer undertakings.25 A third initiative was the emergence of combinations or shipping rings which saw shipping companies attempt to stabilize or control freight rates. 26 Fourth, and as previously noted, shipping firms and shipbuilders (who also were subject to the vagaries of supply and demand) sought co-operative initiatives on constructing and ordering tonnage. It was not unusual for builders to invest in shipping or for shippers to invest in building. Shippers not only showed a preference for a particular constructor (acquiring additions to their fleets through special deals) but also took that firm’s advice on configurations. The first ships built for the British and African Steam Navigation Company, a company managed by two Scots, Alexander Elder and John Dempster, were provided by the shipbuilding firm of the former’s brother, a firm that became Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company.27 Barclay, Curle and Company, Fairfields, Robert Napier and J. and G. Thompson took builder shares or shares in Currie’s company.28 Ship builder Alexander Stephen of Linthouse partnered Cayzer in his establishment of the Clan Line.29 Furness had his own shipbuilding yards but this did not prevent him from ordering 23

Francis E. Hyde, Blue Funnel: A History of Alfred Holt and Company of Liverpool from 1865 to 1914 (Liverpool, 1957), pp. 166–8. One notes, as well, loss of shipping through accident was substantial. Cf., for example, losses suffered by the British India Steam Navigation Company as set out in the fleet lists in George Blake, B.I. Centenary, 1856–1956 (London, 1956), pp. 253–6. 24 For example, six liner firms underwent major restructuring involving heavy investment. Boyce, Information, p. 76. 25 Boyce, Information, pp. 109–110; also see Robert V. Kubicek, ‘The Role of Shallow-Draft Steamboats in the Expansion of the British Empire, 1820–1914’, International Journal of Maritime History, VI (1994), 100–1, for four other shipping firms establishing feeder services. 26 B.M. Deakin, Shipping Conferences (Cambridge, 1973). 27 David Hollet, The Conquest of the Niger by Land and Sea: From the Early Explorers and Pioneer Steamships to the Elder Dempster and Company (Abergavenny, 1995), pp. 223–31. 28 Porter, Victorian Shipping, pp. 46, 270. 29 Slaven and Checkland, Dictionary of Scottish Business, II, p. 271. 106

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vessels from Stephen and ‘jointly [financing] speculative orders’.30 Dennys entered into joint-financing arrangements with the Union Steamship Company as well as British India. Among twenty-four owners identified by Boyce, 38 per cent obtained ‘their vessels from a “lead builder” – ten of whom definitely offered financial support. Three owners had family ties with their lead builder.’31 Thus adjuncts of Britain’s iron and steel industry, namely the shipbuilders, were in the late nineteenth century intimately linked with shipowners and ancillary merchants. Shipowners and ancillary merchants, meanwhile, came to have strong affiliations with the regions in which they were based. These locales were in the north, especially about Glasgow (the Clyde) but increasingly around Newcastle (Tyne and Wear) and Belfast (Lagan) with Liverpool (the Mersey) following. Meanwhile London (the Thames) declined as a shipbuilding centre. There were, as well, linkages with the periphery. Several of the major shipowners, witness Mackay and Sutherland, had started their careers abroad and maintained involved connections with expatriate trading firms and directly or through these firms intersected with agents of the imperial state. Mackinnon’s early career in India with the firm established by Robert Mackenzie and his relationship with Sir Bartle Frere, who held administrative positions in India and Africa, is also an example of such linkages.32

Shipping and the imperial factor Having established the existence of a burgeoning and extensive ship nexus, we now pose the question in what ways and with what effects did this complex impact on Britain’s expansionary dynamics in the late nineteenth century? What role, for example, did the high-profile liner companies play in imperial expansion? The most prominent of these was the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company with, in Freda Harcourt’s view, its ‘flagships of imperialism’.33 But its fleet, though perhaps pre-eminent, was not the only major private undertaking facilitating economic expansion. The British India Steam Navigation Company, with which the P&O merged in 1914, and Holt’s Ocean Steam Ship Company (Blue Funnel) were essential elements in the

30

Boyce, Information, p. 183. Ibid., p. 179. 32 J. Forbes Munro, ‘Shipping Subsidies and Railway Guarantees: William Mackinnon, Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, 1860–93’, Journal of African History, XXVIII (1987), 209–30. 33 Freda Harcourt, ‘The P&O Company: Flagships of Imperialism’, in Sarah Palmer and Glyndwr Williams, eds, Chartered and Uncharted Waters: Proceedings of a Conference on the Study of British Maritime History (London, 1981), pp. 6–28. 31

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steamship network facilitating contact with west, south, southeast and east Asia. Several other lines operated in this theatre as well. Then there were the Union and Castle Lines operating into southern Africa which amalgamated in 1900. The African Steamship Company founded earlier by Macgregor Laird based in Liverpool transferred steamers to West African shores and rivers and provided a liner service from the region to Europe. Glasgow-based shipping agents, Elder Dempster, founded a rival firm, the British and African Steam Navigation Company. Alfred Jones, by the mid 1880s, came to control these companies and agencies as well as lines trading to Canada and the West Indies. Also active on the Atlantic were Cunard and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which moved the mails but also were major players in that immense migration of millions of Europeans, especially Britons, to the Americas. 34 Efforts of liner firms which had implications for British economic expansion went beyond the movement of goods, people and information. Several were proactive in the production and marshalling of their ships’ cargoes. For example, Cayzer and his Clan Line worked with Finlay & Co., East India merchants, in increasing the jute and tea trades and establishing the port of Chittagong.35 In the pursuit of profit, these lines lobbied government for aid and work. They got what they wanted. ‘Government support included [not only] postal subsidies [but] loans, payments for use of auxiliary cruisers, hire of troop transports in wartime.’36 Several of the lines moved troops, supplies and equipment for the empire’s colonial wars: in South Asia, the Abyssinia campaign and, of course, the South African war. The Eastern Telegraph Company of John Pender whose cable networks facilitated oceanic movements also garnered state support.37 These enterprises even convinced governments disposed to a laissez-faire market place that oligopolistic combinations were acceptable, even those containing foreign liner companies as revealed in the British government’s dealings with the American controlled International Maritime Marine to ensure access to ships which could be converted to military use in time of war.38 Substantial maritime activity was not, of course, confined to the high-profile shipping lines. As research on the cargo tramps has shown, these were prolific

34 They participated as great people movers in the migrations of 32 million persons from Europe for the neo-Europes especially in the Americas. Cf. Walter Nugent, Crossings, The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, 1992). 35 Slaven and Checkland, Dictionary of Scottish Business, II, p. 7. 36 Eric W. Sager and Gerald E. Panting, Maritime Capital: The Shipping Industry in Atlantic Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 1990), p. 208. 37 Jorma Ahvenainen, The Far Eastern Telegraphs: The History of the Telegraphic Communications Between the Far East, Europe and America Before the First World War (Helsinki, 1981). 38 Boyce, Information, pp. 101–3.

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and essential if diffused players in the development of maritime commerce.39 Moreover, the features of the ships employed even in this sector were subject to rapid innovation as purpose-built oil tankers, meat carriers and banana boats came off the slipways. The British ship nexus stirred would-be emulators who contributed to turbulence. British builders supplied the merchant fleets of other countries; British state assistance to the nation’s shipowners was copied and made more extensive by the governments of Germany, France and Japan.40 In other words, the ship nexus contributed to extensive and intensive commercial rivalries. One might even suggest that this rivalry preceded and contributed to the naval race between Britain and Germany. Advances in the size and speed of private sector ships were adapted for naval purposes. Indeed, several of the major shipbuilders took on very substantial naval contracts as the naval race with Germany heated up.41

Conclusion Changes initiated by technological innovation may be seen as instrumental as the needs of finance capital, the rise of ethnic antagonisms, and the atavistic perceptions of ruling elites in the unleashing of the ‘new imperialism’. The ship nexus we have attempted to portray was crucial to the assemblage and allocation of finance capital as well as the application of technological innovation. Whether empowering the pursuits of economic expansion, shaping state policy, or contributing to the state’s powers of coercion the techno-financial commercial ship nexus, forged by industrialization was a formidable and essential part of the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century. The nexus was not remote from the corridors of power. Persistent lobbying, especially that of the risk-taking shipowners such as Currie, Jones, and Mackinnon stimulated by the rapidly changing means to hand to move goods, information and people, was evidence of that. The state, though often revealing a considerable reluctance to oblige and an ignorance of what was involved, provided to one or other of the lobbyists what they sought. What they obtained or were permitted to do facilitated profit taking. But the trading and communications grids their activities created also added a plethora of empowerments to British expansion. To return to Cain and Hopkins’ twoelement analysis of imperialism, the ship nexus participated in both ‘forms of

39 Robin Craig, The Ship: Steam Tramps and Cargo Liners, 1850–1950 (London, 1980), pp. 11–52. 40 D.H. Aldcroft, ‘The Mercantile Marine’, in D.H. Aldcroft, ed., The Development of British Industry and Foreign Competition, 1875–1914 (London, 1968), pp. 331–42. 41 Firms called upon or who offered to build warships included Armstrong-Mitchell, Barrow, Cydebank, Earle’s, Fairfield, Laird Brothers, Napier, Palmer’s, Scotts, Thames Ironworks, Thornycroft, J.S. White, and Yarrows.

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power in the international system’, in the structural impositions of the British state, and in the relational interactions, in the responses of the periphery to these impositions. As such most of the ship nexus, its builders and shippers and merchants, were not the gentlemanly capitalists identified by Cain and Hopkins. As such the nexus, one might suggest, needs to be considered as a separate but integral element in British expansion. What seems implicit in the recent work of maritime historians, especially those primarily concerned with the business and industrial elements of shipping as regards British imperial activity, needs to be made much more explicit.

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8

Lakes, rivers and oceans Technology, ethnicity and the shipping of empire in the late nineteenth century JOHN M. MACKENZIE

Big Steamers ‘Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers, With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas?’ ‘We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter, Your beef, pork and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese.’ ‘And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers, And where shall I write you when you are away?’ ‘We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec and Vancouver, Address us at Hobart, Hong Kong, and Bombay.’ . . . ‘Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers, Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?’ Send out your big warships to watch your big waters, That no one may stop us from bringing you food. For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble, The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve, They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers And if anyone hinders our coming you’ll starve!’1

This is not perhaps one of Kipling’s best poems. It was written especially for a school text book published in 1911 and was therefore intended for a juvenile audience. As part of the propaganda of a maritime empire, it is perhaps fascinating to deconstruct it. The steamers, it may be observed, are big. Indeed, in the original the repeated titular refrain of Big Steamers is always capitalised. They run on and they carry British coal. But the stress is entirely on food, not industrial raw materials. The fundamental message is that the British are fed

1

C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, A School History of England (Oxford, 1911), pp. 235–6. See John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester, 1984), pp. 195–6, footnotes 35 and 61, for the ways in which this book was recommended through the twentieth century. 111

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by imports, and that starvation faces those who do not provide an adequate, protective Big Navy to deal with big waters, not piffling channels. Inevitably, all the places mentioned are in the formal British Empire. It is, in short, a combined paean of praise to the merchant marine, supposed imperial economic integration, and the activities of the Navy League. Although the poem never appeared in Kipling anthologies until comparatively recently, the text continued in print and was repeatedly recommended for use in schools down to at least the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, the popular Clydeside maritime historian George Blake lamented that the British did not know enough about the ships and the sea on which they depended. This was in his short book for popular consumption, British Ships and Shipbuilders, and indeed 1946 was perhaps a curious year to make such an assertion of ignorance. Everywhere, he wrote, there are pictures of ships by the hundred, tales and legends of celebrated exploits and vessels. But still there are, he suggested, in a splendidly regional insult, lots of people in ‘the unkind and sodden Midlands’ who had never seen a ship. Such people ‘do not care much about . . . the ship afloat, the nature of the community it really is, its specific job, its quirks as of a human being, the play upon it of storm and tides, the temperament of its master, its precise function in the national economy, its engines, its looks’.2 It is intriguing that what links Kipling to Blake is their personification of the ship. He could have added, of course, the role of the ship in the construction and maintenance of the British Empire itself, in 1946 still, just, intact. Kipling and Blake link neatly to much of my past research, which has been concerned with examining the ways in which British imperialism was projected to the public and the extent to which propaganda, information and education made that public aware of, concerned about, and reconciled to imperial issues or wider, less specific, concerns. This is a reconciliation that may or may not have influenced their political behaviour, or perhaps more significantly the fundamental values of political faction and party from the nineteenth century to the 1950s. More recently, I have been interested in environmental issues of empire and the manner in which these also received a wider dissemination in society. And the prominence of Scots in the technical services of empire, not least those relating to the environment, has led me to think about the role of Scots in empire, particularly the manner in which Scottish intellectual traditions, education, and resulting specialisms, together with social and economic circumstances served to produce distinctive roles within the imperial complex. In 1986, Andrew Porter, in what was a pathbreaking book for its time, remarked that it was very easy to obscure the fact that ‘industrial and commercial expansion, an extensive awareness of a wider world, and cultural or religious assertiveness, were as characteristically Scottish

2

George Blake, British Ships and Shipbuilders (London, 1946), p. 8. 112

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as they were English in the mid-nineteenth century’. 3 That now sounds extraordinarily tentative and we might well wish to reverse the formula and propose that the English were occasionally permitted to intrude into a British Empire which was in many respects Scottish. This is no idle piece of special pleading, for maritime history reveals this proposition to the full. But if the Scots often provided technical and environmental services within the British Empire, maritime employment also called into being a sequence of ethnic specialisms among the indigenous peoples of empire. These have never been fully researched, and in this essay I can only offer a starting-point for consideration of the manner in which shipping companies, including highly localised ones, brought forth a whole range of such supposedly distinctive and people-specific employments. Deep-sea fleets were noted for this phenomenon, clearly central to their profitability, but very little attention has ever been paid to the less visible shipping of empire, the companies that plied the coasts, lakes, and rivers, which tied the entire imperial maritime project together. Such companies and their employees were of little interest to propagandists like Kipling and Blake, but they deserve much more historical focus than they have hitherto received. This essay is therefore concerned with a number of related themes, with propaganda, with ethnicities, both imperial and colonial, with visions of the environment, and with the manner in which ‘metropolis’ and ‘periphery’ constituted each other in the maritime, as in so many other fields. In order to provide some kind of integration for this varied agenda, it seems to me that we have to develop the concept of the socio-technical complex, together with the environmental metaphors that go with it, and we also have to think rather more about issues of race and ethnicity in imperial maritime history. If nothing else is, at least the maritime rhetoric is clear. Leaving aside the concerns with reform and the celebrated legislation which led to the various improvements in the conditions of seafarers and passengers in the midnineteenth century, any survey of works on maritime issues published between 1850 and 1914 reveals a transparent set of propagandist intentions. From W.S. Lindsay’s Victorian History of Merchant Shipping4 to F.A. Talbot’s significantly entitled The Steamship Conquest of the World of 1912,5 the message was clear. British shipping was supreme and should remain so, for the protection of the metropolitan and imperial economies, for the sake of the transfer of migrants and of administrative, technical, and religious personnel, and through the interaction of the merchant and naval complexes for the defensive security of the whole. If the British had wrested shipbuilding and the early exploitation

3

Andrew Porter, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and Southern Africa (Woodbridge, 1986), p. 30. 4 W.S. Lindsay, History of Merchant Shipping, vol. IV, 1816–1874 (London, n.d., 1870s). 5 Frederick A. Talbot, The Steamship Conquest of the World (London, 1912). 113

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of steam from North America in the early nineteenth century,6 others now threatened their national supremacy. Governments should be encouraged to remain vigilant in support. Controversies over mail contracts and other forms of subsidy were invariably acknowledged, but even if the taxpayer had been sometimes taken for a sail around a fairly large imperial bay, still the end justified occasionally dubious means. Such rhetoric was of course not only endorsed but also promoted by shipowners themselves. Sir Donald Currie, through his manipulation of his parliamentary connections, through his papers to the Royal Colonial Institute and the Royal United Services Institution, and his constant lobbying of ministries appeared to be a fervent adherent, particularly in stressing the relationship between a healthy (which of course meant profitable) merchant marine and naval preparedness for times of threat or war.7 His fellow Presbyterian, Sir William Mackinnon, may have emphasised rather more the humanitarian and Christianising objectives of empire – in his case often philanthropy plus at least 10 per cent – but the objectives were the same.8 Sir Alfred Jones took up the cause of imperial pressure groups like the new provincial geographical societies of the 1880s, encouraging his employees to join and make the voice of the shipping interest loudly heard, as well as promoting the infant study of tropical medicine and the processes of ethnographic collection.9 Lord Brassey was similarly engaged, while Lady Brassey became one of the great ethnographic collectors of the age, sweeping up artefacts into that taxonomising process in which world cultures were engrossed and thereby subjected to a maritime and imperial embrace. These were of course merely the most notable examples of much wider activities on the part of those extraordinary networks of family and capital, social, cultural and religious connections, through which the energies of late nineteenth-century maritime affairs were released. But the shipowners went further in ways that are much less well known. No doubt partly inspired by the activities of Thomas Cook and the publications of such expansive and celebrated publishers as John Murray, Macmillan, Edward Stanford and others, they began to issue guide books. The appearance of such handbooks coincided with the larger size, greater speed, and improved comforts of the vessels of the late nineteenth century. While emigrant guides had of course been around for a long time, they were mainly concerned with recruitment and with the opportunities of territories of settlement. Until the 1870s and more particularly the 1880s, the voyages 6

Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping (London, 1990), p. 271 and passim. Porter, Victorian Shipping, passim. 8 George Blake, B.I. Centenary, 1856–1956 (London, 1956), and more particularly the forthcoming work of J. Forbes Munro; also John S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa (Cambridge, 1972). 9 John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Provincial Geographical Societies in Britain, 1884–1914’ in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan, eds, Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 105–6. 7

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themselves were something to be glossed over, dangerous and unpleasant experiences to be endured for the sake of a more prosperous future. Andrew Hassam’s studies of the letters and diaries of such voyagers has given us some insight into their experiences.10 But in the last decades of the century, ocean passages, though still hazardous if the statistics of losses and wrecks are anything to go by, could be promoted as pleasurable and educational, repeated reminders of a maritime and imperial history that had led almost ineluctably to a contemporary ease and confidence in supremacy. Through these guide books, the shipowners pressed the services of print capitalism to their economic and supposedly patriotic objectives. They were also, it seems to me, attempting to create a global ‘imagined community’ that far transcends the community of the nation for which Benedict Anderson invented that phrase.11 The guide book, through its ever-growing number of pages (and I find that all guide books had a tendency to expand exponentially), engrossed not only the census, the map and the museum (to use Anderson’s categories), but also the statistics and prognoses of the geologist, the agronomist, as well as the economic and capital analyst. From 1875, Thomas Cook’s handbooks were selling no fewer than 10,000 copies per year.12 Edward Stanford published the Orient Line Guide from 1882 and it went through many editions.13 It not only offered detailed information about opportunities in Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand, but also stressed the maritime and naval history through which an Orient Line voyage became an imperial trail that even incorporated such out-of-the-way posts as Perim, Socotra and Diego Garcia. It also offered astonishingly detailed information on technical aspects of the ships of the Orient Line, their engines, electricity and other technological marvels. Donald Currie first issued a Handbook and Emigrants’ Guide to South Africa in 1888, but in 1893, he heard of a new publication, Brown’s Guide to South Africa, a private venture produced by two brothers.14 This guide was designed to encourage emigration to South Africa and investment in the gold fields. It is alleged that it was even sold from hawkers’ barrows outside the Stock Exchange in London, and within a few weeks the entire first edition of 2,000 copies had been sold. Opportunist as ever, Currie promptly bought out the two editors and it became the Castle (later of course Union-Castle) Guide to South Africa and continued to be published in surprisingly similar form right through until the 1960s. East Africa

10

Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Manchester, 1994). 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991 [1983]). 12 Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, 1991), p. 272. 13 Orient Line Guide, Chapters for Travellers by Sea and by Land, edited for the Managers of the Line by W.J. Loftie (London, 1882). The Guide was reissued in 1882, 1888, 1890, 1894, and 1901. 14 Marischal Murray, Union-Castle Chronicle, 1853–1953 (London, 1953), pp. 311–12. 115

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was added in 1910 and the guide passed through what can only be described as a process of elephantiasis.15 These are just two examples of what became a common maritime information service. There were others and I find it very interesting that perhaps the most detailed in terms of commercial and capitalist opportunity were issued in relation to informal empire in South America.16 These guidebooks, often issued annually and selling remarkably large numbers of copies, clearly added a good deal of information and analysis which supplemented the maritime propaganda of geographical and services pressure groups, to which I have already referred. They must, at the very least, have had a wide circulation among middle-class imperial travellers, administrators, technical officers, missionaries, educationalists, settlers and businessmen.17 Yet another means for the transmission of imperial maritime rhetoric was the sequence of imperial exhibitions which were such a feature of late Victorian and also Edwardian and Georgian (that is, Georges V and VI) times. These exhibitions extensively featured imperial products and, inevitably, the means by which they were transferred. This was greatly helped by the development of the detailed, refined, and often strikingly beautiful scale builders’ models now being produced. These were not only significant in terms of naval architecture, but also became the adornments of boardrooms, booking offices and sometimes railway stations. Together with the development of the builder’s model went the idea that the interiors of passenger vessels should be subjected to design values and should be adorned with furniture from the finest makers, such as Gillows of Lancaster. It might be expected that such shipping displays would be found in Glasgow rather than in Blake’s ‘unkind and sodden Midlands’, but nonetheless the great sequence of exhibitions that took place in that city were symptomatic. And there were of course many other exhibitions in important port cities, including Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh (so close to Leith) and London. The first of the Glasgow series took place in 1888 and both shipbuilders and shipping companies had extensive stands. Fairfield’s display, for example, featured no fewer than thirty ship models, together with a working model of a triple expansion engine, still almost the latest engineering wonder. William Denny of Dumbarton offered

15 The Guide to South Africa for the Use of Tourists, Sportsmen, Invalids and Settlers with Coloured Maps, Plans, and Diagrams, edited annually by S. Samler Brown and G. Gordon Brown for the Castle Packets Co. The seventh edition appeared in 1899–1900. The Guide to South and East Africa, 18th edition, 1911–1912. The South and East African Yearbook and Guide, 48th edition, 1948. It was later divided into two: The Year Book and Guide to Southern Africa, 1957; The Year Book and Guide to East Africa, 1957. 16 See for example The South American Handbook, 7th annual edition, 1930, ed. H. Davies, founded upon The Anglo-South American Handbook of the late W.H. Koebel (London, 1930). 17 I examine this material in greater detail in ‘Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism’ in a forthcoming volume to be edited by John K. Walton.

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an elaborate carved and painted dining saloon within a two-storey mock-up of a deck house. In 1901, the Machinery Hall again featured many ships, including even a display on the humble yet so important dredger, vital both to the economy of Renfrew in the fairly specialist yards of Lobnitz & Co. and William Simons & Co. and to the development of ports worldwide. The exercise was repeated yet again in 1911 and in the Empire Exhibition of 1938, with the turbine and diesel motor propulsion being strongly featured respectively.18 Somewhat outside of our period, the Wembley Exhibition of 1924–5 contained much maritime propaganda and one of the many books published in association with it was Sir Charles McLeod’s and Adam Kirkaldy’s The Trade, Commerce and Shipping of the British Empire, which I would judge marked the climax of the late nineteenth-century imperial maritime rhetoric.19 But of course, in many ways, the strongest rhetoric of all lay in the ships themselves. Blake remarked that no one who lived on the Clyde could be unaware of the significance of the vast numbers of ships of all sorts and sizes and destinations with which they shared their lives and horizons. 20 The dredging and canalising of the Clyde brought such ships right into the centre of the city to the countless quays and docks constructed there over many miles, all visible from the free ferries that carried workers back and forth to their grinding lives in the yards and tenements of the riverside streets of the city.21 Aberdeen’s harbour, still with some imperial connections, penetrated to the centre of the city. The so-called Scottish Samurai, Thomas Blake Glover, brought shipbuilding orders from the Far East to his native city.22 Dundee’s connections with Bengal through jute and with whaling were obvious to all,23 while the distant Straits Steamship Company brought many of its orders to the Caledon yard on the Tay.24 Leith remained a significant port and at least one second-rank imperial shipowner, Ben Line, kept its headquarters there even as many others transferred to London.25 Such a tour of the rhetorical

18

Perilla Kinchin and Juliet Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions, 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988 (Wendlebury, 1988). 19 Sir Charles Campbell McLeod and Adam W. Kirkaldy, The Trade, Commerce and Shipping of the British Empire (London, 1924). 20 Blake, British Ships, pp. 8–9. 21 John M. MacKenzie, ‘“The Second City of the Empire”: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’ in Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, 1999), pp. 215–37. 22 Alexander McKay, Scottish Samurai: Thomas Blake Glover, 1838–1911 (Edinburgh, 1993). 23 Christopher A. Whatley, David B. Swinfen, Annette M. Smith, The Life and Times of Dundee (Edinburgh, 1993); Gordon T. Stewart, Jute and Empire (Manchester, 1998). 24 K.G. Tregonning, Home Port Singapore: A History of the Straits Steamship Co. Ltd., 1890–1965 (Singapore, 1967), pp. 35–6, 71, and passim. 25 George Blake, The Ben Line: The History of a Merchant Fleet, 1825–1955 (London, 1955). See also R.S. McLellan, Anchor Line, 1856–1956 (Glasgow, 1956). The Anchor Line maintained its headquarters in Glasgow throughout its history. 117

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visibility of ships and shipbuilding could obviously be continued through Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester and Salford after the building of the ship canal, the many ports and yards of the Tyne and the Tees, the string of ports in South Wales, and of course, above all, the vast complex of London. K.G. Tregonning has a phrase about the manner in which all the many vessels of the Straits Steamship Company constituted outlying corners of Britain in the many places in the eastern archipelagos where they were to be found during their hey day.26 In the days when ships spent many days in port bunkering and handling break-bulk cargoes, when they queued up in anchorages, or anchored off-shore in order to discharge into lighters, the largest objects built by man which actually moved constituted PR with propellers, symbolic power with steam plant. Imperial maritime rhetoric could be found in the most humble of forms. Few who ate bananas, or perhaps more rarely pineapples, in the late nineteenth century can have been unaware that they came from distant and exotic imperial places. Peter Davies has demonstrated the massive growth in the consumption of such tropical fruit, the ways in which production shifted from the Canaries to the Caribbean, and the manner in which Joseph Chamberlain and the shipping companies, particularly Fyffes, encouraged imperial production.27 The cooling plants which made all this possible, together with the refrigeration that encouraged the transport of dead meat, were often elaborately and proudly described in the guide books. At the so-called periphery, the rhetoric of power symbolised by the steam vessel has often been described. Its alleged capacity to overawe and intimidate indigenous coastal peoples was very much part of that rhetoric. It is probably true that the anti-slavery squadron on the East African coast was a good deal more significant in political than in humanitarian terms. More time was often spent in Zanzibar than at sea and the figures of captures and releases of slaves are strikingly small. Indeed, it is intriguing that vessels of the squadron chose to fire salutes to visiting dignitaries directly opposite the palace of the Sultan. Perhaps intimidation was more important than reception. Meanwhile, in the creeks and channels of the Persian Gulf, along the West or East African coasts, in Southeast Asia, the islands of the Far East, or in the Pacific, the appearance of steam shifted the balance of power in respect of local maritime traditions. Gun boats in the Gulf and on the East African coast, where shallow draught was at least as important as their moderate and often inefficient power plants, had the measure of dhows in ways in which their

26

Tregonning, Home Port Singapore, p. 109. Peter N. Davies, Fyffes and the Banana: Musa Sapientium, A Centenary History, 1888–1988 (London, 1990). See also Geoffrey Alderman, ‘Joseph Chamberlain’s Attempted Reform of the British Mercantile Marine’, Journal of Transport History, vol. 1 (1971–2), 169–84. 27

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lumbering sailing predecessors could not possibly have matched.28 The same was true of the great maritime traditions and important building types of western India, Burma, Southeast Asia and the Far East. Yet it is precisely in these apparent confirmations of Daniel Headrick or Michael Adas that the rhetoric begins to break down.29 For, of course, this long exegesis of maritime technological rhetoric, which could have been extended into the romanticism of Masefield or the oft-repeated myths of the genius of the island race, the particular seafaring competence of the British and so on, merely unveils a propaganda which invariably diverges from the reality in striking ways. The patriotism and imperial chauvinism of shipowners was often subservient, once the imperial chips had been played, to their commercial and capitalist objectives. Although clannish behaviour was alleged to help Scots in their activities around the empire, the fact is that the common Scottishness and Presbyterianism of Currie and Mackinnon did nothing to allay their bitter rivalries, particularly in their efforts to extend their services up and down the East African coast. As the nineteenth century wore on, maritime capital developed a notably international dimension. Moreover, the conference system became as much an international as a national device since otherwise it would have been virtually meaningless. There are also at least some good examples of international technological exchange, even if some developments – maybe the testing tank for hull forms is one – stayed for a period within a nationalist technological tradition. Moreover, even if we accept some resonant phrases, such as Freda Harcourt’s celebrated reference to the P&O as ‘the flagships of imperialism’ or Forbes Munro’s suggestion that Mackinnon and the BISN line constituted ‘the servant and agent of empire’, there are problems with too close an adherence to the notion of the pure and simple convergence of imperialism with shipping interests.30 The fact is that as imperial rivalries hardened at the end of the nineteenth century, the British imperial government became much more hardnosed in its susceptibility towards the claims for subsidies. That long British tradition of Treasury parsimony seemed often to outweigh the approaches and the apprehensions of the imperial enthusiasts. However assiduously Currie,

28

Nigel Robert Dalziel, ‘British Maritime Contacts with the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, 1850–1900’, PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, 1989. See also Antony Preston and John Major, Send a Gun Boat (London, 1967). 29 Daniel R. Headrick, Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989). 30 Freda Harcourt, ‘The P and O Company: Flagships of Imperialism’ in Sarah Palmer and Glyndwr Williams, eds, Charted and Uncharted Waters: Proceedings of a Conference on the Study of British Maritime History (London, 1981). See also J. Forbes Munro, ‘Scottish Overseas Enterprise and the Lure of London: The Mackinnon Shipping Group 1847–1893’, Scottish Economic and Social History, VIII (1988), 73–87 and forthcoming book. 119

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Mackinnon and others cultivated what we would now call their networks, they were often doomed to disappointment. Moreover, although some shipbuilding traditions received serious setbacks or were virtually destroyed – those of eastern Canada31 and western India come to mind – indigenous seafaring often made remarkable adaptations to new conditions, operating as feeders or even as competitors. Dhow trades in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean and local shipping in the Far East and the Indonesian islands reflect this. Indigenous rulers also made strenuous attempts to muscle in on steam technology. After all, it was the Sultan of Zanzibar’s steamship, the Kilwa, which was seized by the Portuguese in the Minengani incident of the mid-1880s. The British intervened on his behalf to get it returned, even although it was officered by Germans.32 The King of Burma got hold of paddle vessels from the Italians and also, in 1876, had a stern-wheeler built by Yarrow and Hedley on the Thames. The Sultan of Oman also went into steam. The Persians tried to create a steam navy, though the British did everything to frustrate them. The Straits Steamship Company incorporated Chinese capital and had Chinese directors for much of its history. And adopting steam was part of the Siamese bid to avoid imperial takeover. Supremely, the Japanese supplied themselves with vessels from the Clyde and from Vickers in Barrow and were soon building for themselves. The intimidating novelty of this technology seemed to wear thin remarkably quickly. Yet perhaps we should not allow this scepticism to go too far. The development of the compound engine, fairly soon developed into the triple expansion, heralded, in Frank Broeze’s et al.’s telling phrase, ‘the torrent-like diffusion of steam navigation throughout the Indian Ocean’,33 not to mention other oceans of the world. But the imperial socio-technical complex, which we can also characterise as an economic and religio-cultural complex, was advanced in ways that were less spectacular than those maritime issues that have repeatedly caught the imaginations of historians. These would generally include the extraordinary growth in world trade, albeit with cyclical swings in the period from 1850 to 1914; the shift from sail to steam; the rapid advances in steam technology; the striking emergence of an extraordinary range of companies, many of them remaining in surprisingly private, family ownership, in Liverpool, Glasgow, London and South Wales; the rapid growth in the size of ships from the 2,000 tonner of 1880 or so to the leviathan of the early

31 Rosemary E. Ommer, ‘The Decline of the Eastern Canadian Shipping Industry, 1880–95’, Journal of Transport History, 5, 1 (1984), 25–44. 32 For this incident, and surrounding events, see Parliamentary Command Papers, C 4940 ‘Further correspondence respecting Zanzibar’; C 5315, ‘Further correspondence respecting Zanzibar’; and C 5822, ‘Further correspondence respecting Germany and Zanzibar’. 33 Frank Broeze, Peter Reeves and Kenneth McPherson, ‘Imperial Ports and the Modern World Economy: The Case of the Indian Ocean’, Journal of Transport History, 7, 2 (1986), 2.

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twentieth century; the deepening and widening of the Suez Canal from its rather inconvenient initial dimensions in 1869; the lowering of freight rates and the appearance of the conference system; and the extraordinary development of ports. Just as with Kipling, big ships, big waters and big trades have attracted most attention. Yet perhaps one of the most important technological developments for the emergence of what I now call the socio-cultural-technical complex was the development of the pre-fabricated ship, famously taken to its highest point by Denny’s of Dumbarton. Whereas early steamships had been steamed out to the East, involving expensive hull strengthening and temporary boarding, which still did not entirely avert the danger to such relatively small vessels, they could now be moved in sections. By the 1880s, hulls were bolted together in the builder’s yard with service bolts, ensuring, as Chubb and Duckworth put it, the correct shaping, lining-up and fitting of the plates.34 This was then dismantled. The plates and sections were sent for galvanising, were suitably marked for re-erection, and then shipped out. Engines could also be shipped in pieces and only the boilers, which had to be transported whole, presented any real difficulty. Other yards had already used this technique for the very smallest of lake steamers. The results of this technique were dramatic across a wide range of activities. The problems that David Livingstone had with the Ma-Robert and the Lady Nyassa are well known, but the growth of steam shipping on the Zambezi, the Shire, and the East African lakes was extraordinary in the partition period. In 1875, Yarrow and Hedley of Millwall, built the Ilala for the expedition of the Free Church of Scotland to Lake Nyasa. Dr Laws, the leader of the party, actually went to Millwall to see the vessel dismantled, so that he could help to supervise her reconstruction in south-central Africa.35 Although originally intended to have three boilers, she had to make do with one because of the problems of transportation. Apparently, her Scottish engineer exclaimed in delight ‘eight knots and only wan biler’. Other missionary steamers soon followed, including those for the established Church of Scotland and for the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. The Charles Janson was launched on the lake in 1884, a mobile mission station with chapel, dispensary, and even at times a printing shop on board. The later Chauncy Maples was also, in effect, a floating church and it was of course the presence of the steamers which enabled the Universities’ Mission to cover the extensive shorelines of the Lake, establish their headquarters on Likoma Island and build their

34 Captain H.J. Chubb and C.L.D. Duckworth, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company Limited 1865–1950 (National Maritime Museum, Maritime Monographs and Reports, No. 7, 1973), p. 32. 35 W.P. Livingstone, Laws of Livingstonia: A Narrative of Missionary Adventure and Achievement (London, n.d. [1924?]), pp. 42, 45.

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cathedral there.36 So far as the missionaries were concerned, it was not just the Bible, but also the ‘biler’ that preceded the flag. By the time of Sir Harry Johnston’s first report on the British Central Africa Protectorate in 1895–6, he was able to record that the African Lakes Corporation’s Good News sailed on Lake Tanganyika, while there were five steamers, two of them gun boats, on Lake Nyasa. On the Lower Shire and the Zambezi there were, by this time, no fewer than sixteen steamers, most of them very small it is true, owned by three companies and the Church of Scotland.37 In the following year, Sir Alfred Sharpe reported that the ALC were building the Queen Victoria, by far the largest steamer to appear on the Lake, sent out from Ritchie, Graham and Milne of Whiteinch, Glasgow.38 By that time, the river boasted a new and comfortable steamer, perhaps inevitably called the Sir Harry Johnston. In 1899, the administration launched the Guendolen, the largest vessel on the Lake, equipped with six-pounder Hotchkiss guns, and built at Rennie and Co. of Greenwich. Like other vessels on lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, she was to participate in the mini-naval actions of the First World War.39 By the early years of the twentieth century, a quite remarkable sequence of steamers began to appear on Lake Victoria. This development was of course made possible by the building of the Uganda railway, of which the vessels constituted the extension from Kisumu to Port Bell. Between 1900 and 1913, these rapidly grew in size from 500 to no less than 1,300 tons displacement. They were named after Foreign Office officials like Percy Anderson and Clement Hill or the Imperial British East Africa Company founder William Mackinnon. The largest from the pre-First World War era, the Usoga, was still sailing until comparatively recently. These vessels were all built at Bow and McLachlan of Paisley.40 For the visiting parliamentary under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, in 1906, the experience of travelling on one of these lake steamers, the Clement Hill, was an extraordinary one: I woke the next morning to find myself afloat on a magnificent ship. Its long and spacious decks are as snowy as a pleasure yacht. It is equipped with baths, electric light and all modern necessities. There is an excellent table, also a well selected library. Smart blue jackets with ebony faces are polishing the brasswork, dapper

36

For these steamers and their activities, see A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The History of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 1859–1909 (London, 1909), passim. 37 Parliamentary Command Papers, C 8254 (1896), Report by Commissioner Sir H. Johnston on the Trade and General Condition of the British Central Africa Protectorate (1895–6), 16–17. 38 C 8438 (1897), Report by Consul A. Sharpe on the Trade and General Condition of the British Central Africa Protectorate (1896–7), 23 39 John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Naval Campaigns on Lakes Victoria and Nyasa, 1914–18’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 71, 2 (1985), 169–84. See also John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Tanganyika Naval Expedition of 1915–16’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 70, 4 (1984), 397–410. 40 L.G. Dennis, The Steamers of East Africa (Egham, 1996). 122

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white-clad British officers pace the bridge. We are steaming at ten knots across an immense sea of fresh water, as big as Scotland and uplifted higher than the summit of Ben Nevis.41

Steam vessels were soon dominating Lakes Kivu, Albert and Kioga as well as the three great lakes of East Africa. The vast numbers of steamers that were, by now, being produced for lakes and rivers throughout formal and informal empire called into being new companies to supply them. One little-known one was Richard Smith and Company of Lytham in Lancashire. This was founded in 1889, later becoming the Lytham Shipbuilding and Engineering Company.42 It supplied literally hundreds of shallow draught craft to South America, Burma, Africa and India. By the inter-war years, interestingly, it was specialising almost entirely in Africa, with 88 per cent of its building going there; 50 per cent of all its output went to Africa in the lifetime of the company (it was wound up in 1954). It almost always had full order books, and the roll-call of its customers is extraordinary, including Lever Bros., F & A Swanzy, Rea Transport, and East African Railways. It also supplied vessels for the Tigris and Euphrates. These went up to over 600 gross tons and, in the West African case, were generally steamed out to their river destinations because of their relative proximity. Although, as is well known, the operation of inland steamers in West Africa had been common from at least the discovery of the Niger mouth in 1830, it was the appearance of these vast numbers of vessels later in the century which ensured that the region was truly integrated into international trade patterns. As has become apparent, specialist builders producing vessels for inland waterways and lakes could be found in many parts of Britain. The concept of the prefabricated ship was also transferred to Germany, France, and the Netherlands, though the Belgians initially brought their orders to Britain. However, despite opportunities for international tendering, British companies often established tight and loyal relationships. We have already seen that, because of personal connections in management, the Straits Steamship Company brought a number of orders to the Caledon yard in Dundee, but they took many others elsewhere. Only the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company (IFC), after an initial period of experimentation with other Clyde yards, placed its orders exclusively with Denny.43 The reason was of course a close management tieup with shared directors and a common chairman. Indeed, it is a fascinating fact that if Nyasaland (Malawi) was virtually a Scots colony as a result of the

41

Winston S. Churchill, My African Journey (London, 1962 [1908]), pp. 57–8. Jack M. Dakres, A History of Shipbuilding at Lytham (Kendal, 1992). This contains interesting lists of vessels built, the ordering companies, and their destinations. 43 Alister McCrae and Alan Prentice, Irrawaddy Flotilla (Paisley, 1978); Chubb and Duckworth, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. 42

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predominance of the Scottish missions there, Burma was similarly dominated by Scots in economic and personnel terms. The engineers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla, which at its peak had no fewer than 267 powered units, were almost all recruited in Dumbarton. A high proportion of the captains were also Scots, as was almost all of the local management. The astonishing scale of this operation is well represented in the fact that its Dalla engineering dockyard had no fewer than 3,000 employees, while the Rangoon foundry employed another 1,500.44 The IFC was also strikingly aggressive in seeing off all opposition, including fleets created locally. Moreover, the Flotilla Company reflects the extent to which any distinction between the commercial and the military, initially propounded by the journal Maritime History, is unreal.45 As is well known, its role in the Burmese wars was crucial, as was that of the Thomas Cook fleet in the Sudan campaigns. Burma was also served by the deep sea fleets of Paddy Henderson, also tied in with the IFC through capital and personnel. If the BISN was generally kept away from Burma, the vessels of the ‘scrubby Scotch screw company’ as it was called were active elsewhere in Southeast Asia. If the headquarters of the IFC and of Henderson remained in Glasgow, so too did that of the Burmah Oil Company. If the Straits Steamship Company was much more international in its capital and management, it too recruited strongly in Scotland, and any examination of the lists of its captains and engineers once more reveals large numbers of Scots names.46 Indeed Scots engineers were proportionately dominant in all British shipping companies at the end of the nineteenth century. But there are other aspects of ethnicity and maritime history to which insufficient attention has been paid. Of course deep sea fleets operating to the East and elsewhere were absolutely dependent on so-called Lascar Indian seamen and kept their costs down as a result.47 Chippies or carpenters were always Chinese, while Goanese stewards and caterers were as common as Scots engineers.48 When reflecting on the conservatism of the Harrison Line, which continued to operate ships with triple expansion engines right through to the

44

There are very useful personnel lists as well as various statistics of the scale of the company’s operations in Chubb and Duckworth, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, pp. 18–21; McCrae and Prentice, Irrawaddy Flotilla, p. 121. 45 David M. Williams, ‘The Progress of Maritime History, 1953–93’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd series, 14, 1 (1993), 129. 46 Tregonning, Home Port Singapore, and passim. Note the captains mentioned on pp. 180–1: Caithness, Sutherland, McAlister and McNab. Names are not of course infallible as indicators of ethnic origin, but these seem highly likely to be Scottish in one way or another. 47 Marika Sherwood, ‘Race, Nationality and Employment among Lascar Seamen, 1660–1945’, New Community, 17, 2 (1991), 229–44; Rosina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, 2002), ch. 8. 48 These ethnic specialisms were still to be found on the last BISN ship, M.V. Dwarka, which continued to sail from Bombay to the Persian Gulf until 1982. 124

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inter-war years when so many of their competitors had switched to turbines or diesel motor propulsion, it comes as no surprise to find that they crewed their labour-intensive engine rooms with Indians.49 But there are other intriguing ethnic divisions. We are all familiar in imperial history with the theory of martial races, but what of the notion of maritime races, in which specialisms seem to have been even more pronounced? To return to the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, Anglo-Burmese, that is men of mixed race, became junior engineers or were the engineers on the smaller vessels of the fleet. Clerical tasks were always performed by Burmese, the truly menial tasks by Madrassis. But the butlers or catering pursers were also usually Madrassis, while the deck crews were often from East Bengal, known locally as Chittagonians. The serangs or bosuns were also East Bengalis and some of these were able to rise to the position of masters on the smaller vessels, particularly in the delta. In the Straits Steamship Company, the serangs were always Malay, and they too could rise to command vessels of up to 75 tons, later raised to 100 tons. The supercargoes and other clerical functionaries were always Chinese.50 As always, laundry was traditionally done by Chinese men. Thus the crewing of vessels, the running of engine shops, and the manning of local offices were maintained by striking hierarchies, reflecting invented traditions of ethnic specialism. We need to know far more about what this meant in terms of pay structures and the influence of these arrangements on efficiency and profitability, not to mention upon the communities from which these people were drawn. Although the rhetoric of empire seldom penetrated so far, it was surely the vast network of river, lake, and coasting vessels which truly constituted the complex that we can see as bearing not just economic, but also social, military, cultural, and religious significance. Wherever vessels put into port in Asia, the Pacific, or on the coasts of Africa (including lakeshores and river banks), they tended to become temporary clubs for the local white population. Irrawaddy Flotilla Company ships were bazaars and also, sometimes, floating post offices. Such examples of extraordinary diversity of function can be multiplied many times. We only have to think of the remarkable range of Australian coasting companies that came into being in the late nineteenth century, as well as such dominant Pacific concerns as Burns Philp, founded of course by Scots, whose power is well reflected in the architecture of their Sydney headquarters. Such companies and their large numbers of small to medium size vessels were certainly the local agents of a de-centred imperialism not always directly linked to the distant metropolis. If not the flagships, they were at least the bumboats, lighters, dredgers, tugs, and cutters of empire, the equivalent of

49

Francis E. Hyde, Shipping Enterprise and Management, 1830–1939: Harrisons of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1967), pp. 150–2. 50 These specialisms are laid out in Tregonning, Home Port Singapore; Chubb and Duckworth, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company; and McCrae and Prentice, Irrawaddy Flotilla. 125

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all those smaller craft without which ports (for which read empire) simply could not operate.51 As such, they had an importance which has never been fully recognised by serious historians. One area which has been scarcely noticed is the presence of women in this predominantly male world. In the marine bazaars of Burma, as elsewhere, the traders were often women. The Straits Steamship Company had a female agent in Burma after the Second World War, while it was alleged that many local women passengers travelled in an advanced state of pregnancy in order, if possible, to give birth to a child under the Red Ensign, receiving a captain’s certificate to this effect. This was also a characteristic event in the BISN trades.52 The interlocking complex of local vessels and deep sea trades can be likened to a tree with all the small roots drawing sustenance to the principal tap root. To change the metaphor to an appropriately hydrographic one, no river can be fully understood except through the complexities of its entire watershed, through the many streams and tributaries that contribute to the major flow. Yet all of these metaphors leave me uneasy. They all imply unidirectional systems and it seems to me that if we put together the full extent of the technical complex as I have described it we have to think in terms of networks that have two-way flows, even if inequalities of political power ensure that such flows operate in ways in which different aspects of the economic and social and cultural technical complex shift in contrary and unbalanced ways. Such flow patterns, often more mutually draining than reciprocally fecundating, can no doubt still be identified within world maritime systems. In maritime research, as the chapters in this volume illustrate, we are clearly moving into a new phase which emphasises much more inter-regional connections, cultural significances, environmental dimensions, and the beginnings of a maritime history from below, all of which may be called decentred and interactive imperialism. The ‘island story myths’ of Sir Arthur Bryant, Kipling and others are long since dead (although some new right historians occasionally try to resurrect them) and some have seen their demise as lying at the root of the British identity crisis. The early phase of British maritime history, highly professional as some of its company and economic histories have been, has tended to emphasise what has been called the UK’s ‘majestic rise from the azure main’.53 But it is now necessary to move into a much wider range of maritime experiences, into centres and circles reflecting

51 For a popular and anecdotal account, see H.M. Tomlinson, Malay Waters (London, 1950). 52 My source for this is Captain Granville Hankin of the Dwarka, interviewed in 1979. It was even alleged that prostitutes often travelled on BISN labour migrant vessels, whose passengers were, of course, predominantly male. 53 In a speech by Chris Patten, EU Commissioner, at the British Council, reported in the Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2001.

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a fuller complexity of marine relationships. Kipling’s Big Steamers, Big Waters, Big Navies, Big Foodstuffs, and Big Starvations, all of them Brito-centric and apparently xenophobic, should be academically as dead as diffusionist theory. We need a greater understanding of smaller ships, smaller trades, and smaller people, but all perhaps embraced by bigger ideas.

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9

Making imperial space Settlement, surveying and trade in northern Australia in the nineteenth century1 JORDAN GOODMAN

This chapter is grounded in the proposition that maritime trade needs to be historicized not only in terms of flow – people, ships, commodities, payments and so on – but also in terms of enabling processes, specifically those associated with making the space, literally and figuratively, within which trade, on the terms that it is constructed, could proceed. That is the reason for the title of the chapter. The issue is settlement and naval surveying in northern Australia in the first half of the nineteenth century with special reference to Melville Island, Port Essington, the Torres Strait and Cape York. I will be making two arguments: first, that naval surveying, alongside other simultaneously enacted scientific practices made imperial space within a specific imperial-commercial discourse; or, to put it in a slightly different way, nautical scientific practices, in which I include activities such as naval charting, land surveying – including coastal representations – tidal and meteorological observations, plus natural history and ethnography, historically underpinned and were underpinned by making empire. Second, I will be arguing that settlement and surveying were different practices, which could, in specific places and times, be enacted together, separately or as substitutes, the choice depending on historical circumstance. I maintain that during the first half of the nineteenth century, as the commercial space within which Australia existed shifted eastward, settlement gave way to surveying as the preferred method of establishing British power.2 I also hope the chapter will contribute in a tentative manner to a growing body of work that is reviewing and reassessing the history of empire, partic-

1

I would like to thank the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust for supporting the research on which this chapter is based. 2 Michael Roe, ‘Australia’s Place in the Swing to the East’, Historical Studies, 8 (1958), 202–13. 128

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ularly its contingent processes.3 Two such contributions come to mind. The first of these is to explore the articulation between the making of imperial space away from the metropolis and within the metropolis itself. I’m thinking here, for example, of the articulation between the colonial environment and landscapes and metropolitan museums through the agency of natural history, ethnographic collections and painting. The surveying of colonial waters and the publication of Admiralty charts may also be explored in this way. The second aim is to try to decentre empire, to pluck it from the stiff, constrained and overarching discourse in which it has been lodged for some time and allow it more free-standing, flowing and, especially, contingent possibilities.

‘The fifth quarter of the globe’ Sir John Barrow, Secretary of the Admiralty, appears fleetingly in this story. I do, however, want to open with three selections of his words; the first and second are taken from his opening address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 (and subsequently published in the first issue of the Society’s journal); and the third is taken partly from a communication to the Colonial Secretary in 1837 and partly from an article he wrote for the Quarterly Review of 1841. Australia . . . . Hitherto, a country as large as Europe has been represented on our maps as a blank. Yet . . . this extensive territory will, in all probability, in process of time, support a numerous population, the progeny of Britons, and may be the means of spreading the English language, laws and institutions over a great part of the Eastern Archipelago . . .4 On the exactitude of the minutest details of Hydrography must always depend the safety of Commerce and Navigation . . . These, it is true, may not be ranked among brilliant discoveries; but the smallest obstruction, whether rock or shoal, that exists in the ocean, may have been, and, so long as its exact position remains unascertained, is still likely to be, the cause of destruction to life and property. Every accession to hydrographical knowledge – a real danger discovered – a fictitious one demolished – or a peculiarity ascertained – must be of great importance to navigation, and a fit object for promulgation by the Society.5

3 See, for example, John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997), 614–42; Raymond E. Dumett, ed., Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London, 1999) and the references in notes 7 and 8 below. 4 Christopher Lloyd, Mr. Barrow of the Admiralty: A Life of Sir John Barrow, 1764–1848 (London, 1970), p. 160. 5 John Barrow, ‘Observations’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1 (1831), viii.

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The whole of this great continent should be held under one undivided power, and that Great Britain, which first planted colonies on its shore, should be that power . . . we ought not to stop until a ring-fence has been drawn round the great continent of Australia, and a stake driven into every part of the fence to keep out intruders.6

Space cannot be taken for granted, geographers constantly remind us. Spatial history, when elided with imperial history, would claim that the process of surveying, mapping and archiving the knowledge gained, however imperfect, constructed a naturalized, totalized, essentialized and unmessy representation of an ‘other’ space that could be managed and controlled from afar, in both a practical and emotional sense. Speaking of India, Matthew Edney in his book Mapping and Empire remarks: Mapmaking was integral to British imperialism in India, not just as a highly informational weapon wielded strategically by directors, governors, military commanders, and field officials, but also as a significant component of the ‘structures of feeling’ which legitimated, justified, and defined that imperialism. The surveys and maps together transformed the subcontinent from an exotic and largely unknown region into a well-defined and knowable geographical entity . . . The empire might have defined the map’s extent, but mapping defined the empire’s nature.7

Paul Carter, another and earlier practitioner of this discipline, showed brilliantly in his study of the European exploration of Australia, The Road to Botany Bay, the tortuous and conflicting ways by which a European space was created out of an aboriginal blank onto which a new history could be imprinted.8 Space, like a stage, needs to be set before the play proceeds. It needs to have directions, names and goals. The whole area of northern Australia, running from Melville and Bathurst Island in the west to Cape York in the east, belonged and was incorporated within European, but specifically British, history as part of a large spatial and temporal process involving agencies such as the Dutch and English East India companies; the governments of Holland, France and Britain; the European explorers and discoverers, such as Cook, Bougainville and La Pérouse; indigenous traders such as the Bugis, Macassans and Malays; practising imperialists such as John Barrow and Stamford Raffles; surveyors

6

Lloyd, Mr. Barrow, p. 164 and John Barrow, ‘The Australian Colonies’, Quarterly Review, 68 (June 1841), 133–4. 7 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India (Chicago, 1997), p. 340. 8 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York, 1987). 130

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such as Flinders, King, Stokes, Blackwood and Stanley; and men of the Admiralty such as the hydrographer Francis Beaufort . As the process continued, both on land and at sea, new spaces for commerce – geocommercial regions I would like to call them – were constructed and stabilized. The idea of establishing a British presence in the northern part of Australia began to be formed in the period following the relaxation of the East India Company’s trade with Asia, excluding Canton, in 1813, and the founding by Stamford Raffles of the free port of Singapore, in 1819. A loose association of private merchants, styled as the East India Trade Committee and stoutly opposed to the East India Company’s monopoly, began, in 1823, to petition the Colonial Office and then the Board of Trade to occupy northern Australia for commercial and strategic reasons: the former, in order to cash in on a lucrative trade in trepang, or sea-cucumber, an expensive marine delicacy supplied by Macassan fishermen (that is from the island of Sulawesi or Celebes in the Indonesian Archipelago) from northern Australian waters to Chinese consumers; and the latter, in order to buffer Dutch imperial interests in the region.9 By a complicated bureaucratic route, the several petitions found their way onto John Barrow’s desk.10 Barrow was, at the time, Second Secretary at the Admiralty, a staunch free trader (and therefore sharp critic of the East India Company) and a strong believer in colonies as critical nodal points in maritime supremacy. Critically, the petitions were also assessed for navigational issues by Phillip Parker King, marine surveyor and son of Philip Gidley King, the Governor of New South Wales, who had just completed a hydrographic survey of the very coast that the traders had their eyes on. Events moved quickly. On behalf of the Admiralty, Barrow instructed Captain John Gordon Bremer to set sail for Australia in order to claim the northern part of the continent for Britain and establish a fortified post in the area. Although in 1818 King had singled out Port Essington, a long and broad bay measuring 50 miles by an average of 10 miles, as a place of great commercial and colonial possibilities, Bremer was instructed by Barrow to establish a garrison on Apsley Strait, running between Bathurst and Melville Island. 11 Bremer set sail for Australia in February 1824 and sailed into Port Essington near the end of September, formally annexed all the land between 129°E and 135°E, declared it unsuitable for settlement because of the lack of drinking water and

9

James Cameron, ‘The Northern Settlements: Outposts of Empire’, in Pamela Statham, ed., The Origins of Australian Cities (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 271–3. On the trade of the Macassans, see C.C. Macknight, The Voyage to Marege (Carlton, Victoria,, 1976) and Heather Sutherland, ‘Trepang and Wangkang: The China Trade of Eighteenth-Century Makassar c. 1720s–1840s’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-,Land- en Volkenkunde, 156 (2000), 451–72. 10 The story is told in Cameron ‘The Northern Settlements’. 11 J. Campbell, ‘Geographical Memoir on Melville Island and Port Essington’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 4 (1834), 162 and J.M.R. Cameron, ‘Traders, Government Officials and the Occupation of Melville Island in 1824’, The Great Circle, 7 (1985), 95. 131

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promptly set sail for his intended destination. He arrived here six days later on 26 September 1824 and promptly began constructing Fort Dundas. 12 Considering that King claimed Port Essington as a suitable site, it is perhaps surprising that Barrow and the Colonial Office chose Melville Island. Perhaps, as one historian has noted, it came down to a strategic argument: Melville Island was closer to Timor and therefore the Dutch.13 Melville Island may have been a good strategic choice, but as a place for a settlement it certainly was not. King’s recommendations were being perilously ignored. The site of the settlement on Apsley Strait turned out to be a total failure: the strait was difficult, if not impossible to navigate; the local Tiwi people were anything but welcoming; and Macassan traders, with their rich booty, the raison d’être of the commercial argument, were nowhere to be seen. (Phillip King, it should be pointed out, had clearly commented that trepang fishing was carried out in Port Essington. Surveyors, as the word implies, surveyed all they could see, and not just the sea.) All this was clear to the Colonial Office within a year of the establishment of the Melville Island site and, in 1827, the decision was taken in London to move further east to Raffles Bay where the construction of Fort Wellington was begun.14 For the following two years, both Fort Dundas and Fort Wellington tottered towards extinction, or so thought the Colonial Office from the intelligence it received from New South Wales. It had heard that two-thirds of the garrison were on the sick-list. This, as we now fully understand, was the kind of news that really alarmed the Colonial Office – northern Australia was a white man’s grave, like the West Indies, Africa and India.15 In truth, however, the garrison’s ill-health was being managed and conditions were beginning to improve but news of this reached the authorities only after the decision to abandon had been taken. The price of retention was too great. In 1829, all British personnel were removed from Fort Dundas and Fort Wellington, leaving the Tiwi and Iwaidja people to their own devices. As one officer wrote about Fort Dundas: the British soldier soon exhibits the symptoms of a valetudinarian State and totters beneath the weight of his firelock which he seems with difficulty to sustain . . . . It seems, therefore, vain, delusive and chimerical to expect that Melville Island can ever become . . . either the resort of trade, the emporium of commerce, the seat of laborious industry, or the theatre of healthful and successful enterprise; . . . it will

12

Cameron, ‘The Northern Settlements’, p. 276. Campbell, ‘Geographical Memoir’, p. 97. 14 John Bach, ‘Melville Island and Raffles Bay, 1824–9’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 44 (1958), 229. 15 See Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); Mark Harrison, ‘“The Tender Frame of Man”: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1996), 68–93. 13

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only prove to British Subjects an infirmary for one portion of its population, a cemetery for the other.16

Other voices, but expressing similar sentiments about the torrid zone, were heard throughout the British Empire.17 Things were certainly not looking good for the British on the northern Australian coast. A geocommercial region had not yet been achieved and the Macassan trepang trade, touted at the time as being valued at an annual average £200,000 (but more realistically £28,000), was still in the hands of Malay fishermen.18 There has been a fair amount of discussion in the literature about why the Melville Island and Raffles Bay settlements did not work and were abandoned, but all seem to agree that it was a combination of internal factors: climate (an old favourite), bad management, hostile locals, etc. No doubt this is all true but what interests me is why the decision was taken to abandon the settlements. Here I would venture an explanation that sidesteps internal conditions and looks much more at the construction of space. My argument would be that the decision to abandon in 1829 was taken because of the absence of a network in which the British space of the western extent of the Malay Archipelago existed. There was, in a word, no one who could speak for the space as a whole, just a diffracted voice of strategy, another unconnected one of commerce. All this was about to change.

Geocommercial space In the early 1830s a number of changes taking place primarily in London had a profound affect on the configuring of what I have termed geocommercial space. Some of the more important of these were: the appointment of Francis Beaufort to the post of Hydrographer of the Navy in 1829; the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1831; the ending of the East India Company monopoly of trade with China in 1834; and the successful emergence of a group of imperialists with substantial geographical, ethnological and linguistic knowledge who knew and understood the Far Eastern world – men such as Roderick Murchison, John Crawfurd and George Windsor Earl.19

16 Gerald S. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean: A Study of Maritime Enterprise 1810–1850 (Oxford, 1967), pp. 411–12. 17 See the references in note 15 above plus; David N. Livingstone, ‘Tropical Climate and Moral Hygiene: The Anatomy of a Victorian Debate’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32 (1999), 93–110; and Dane Kennedy, ‘The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990), pp. 118–40 18 J. Allen, ‘Port Essington – A Successful Limpet Port?’, Historical Studies, 15 (1972), 343. 19 For Murchison, see Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge, 1989); and for Earl, see C.A.

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In spatial terms, the changes above enlarged the scope of northern Australia in geocommercial terms, being seen now increasingly not just as a strategic buffer but as a pivotal section of an imperial space from the western Pacific to the Far East. And the geographical key to that was now a different kind of settlement on the northern shores plus the urgent surveying and, therefore, taming of two stretches of imperial waters: the Torres Strait, the narrow and highly dangerous (for non-indigenous shipping) stretch of shallow water separating Cape York, the northernmost part of the Australian continent, from New Guinea, the only conduit bringing West and East together; and the inner passage of the Great Barrier Reef – the stretch of water, some 2,000 kms long between the eastern coast of Australia and the reef itself. Until the 1830s, both the Torres Strait and the inner passage of the Great Barrier Reef had not been fully surveyed. Ships venturing into these waters were frequently at risk of wrecking with a terrible loss of life. Both stretches of water were, in European geography, relatively recent phenomena. The Torres Strait was ‘discovered’ by the Spanish navigator, Luis Vaez de Torres, in 1606 but its existence remained a navigational secret until 1762 when it was chanced upon by Alexander Dalrymple, Hydrographer to the East India Company and the first Hydrographer to the Admiralty, who named the stretch of water in Torres’ honour.20 James Cook was the first British navigator to pass through the Strait successfully in 1770 and William Bligh, in his post-mutiny launch, was the next to do so in 1789. The inner passage through the Great Barrier Reef – though only a part of it – was first explored by James Cook in 1770 (he called the part through which he navigated ‘The Labyrinth’) and it claimed its first victim in 1791: HMS Pandora, conveying the Bounty mutineers to England.21 Phillip Parker King, during his survey of Australia between 1817 and 1821, was the first naval surveyor to travel the length of the inner passage and pass through the Torres Strait, though, in terms of surveying, this was not his major official duty. Rather, he seems to have wanted to do it. Aside from producing the first chart of the passage, he also began a debate that lasted for more than 50 years as to whether the inner or outer passage of the Great Barrier Reef was the more effective route between Sydney and southeast Asia. At the time and despite King’s accomplishments, neither the Great Barrier Reef nor the Torres Strait were seen as surveying matters of great urgency. Surveys were not ordered without regard to other concerns and the real

Gibson-Hill, ‘George Samuel Windsor Earl’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 32 (1959), 105–53 and Bob Reece, ‘The Australasian Career of George Windsor Earl’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 65 (1992), 39–67. Very little has been written on Crawfurd but see the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. 20 Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802 and 1803 (London, 1814), p. x. 21 Ian Nicholson, Via Torres Strait (Nambour, Queensland, 1996). 134

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urgency to survey both stretches of water came only during the 1830s. John Barrow was, again, first off the mark and urged, in an article published in 1834 in which he celebrated the ending of the East India Company’s monopoly over the China trade, that the security of a route through Torres Strait was now a matter of national concern and that the Dutch were coming perilously close to the Australian coastline with their settlement on the New Guinea coast.22 Following on closely from that, and in the same year, Major John Campbell, who was commandant at Melville Island between 1826 and 1828, addressed the Royal Geographical Society on two occasions, relating to the members the sorry tale of both early settlements, correcting, as he saw it, misunderstandings and misreadings of the actual conditions there, and outlining his vision of another, new and potentially much more successful settlement on the northern coast; namely, Port Essington, the one that had been passed over in the previous attempts at colonization. Campbell was quick to give the big, spatial picture into which everything slotted. Northern Australia was no longer the eastern end of a southeast Asian geocommercial region. Rather, in his mind, it would become the centre of a much larger area, with Port Essington as its pivot. As he put it to his audience in London in 1834: Port Essington commands the passage from the South Seas through Torres’ Strait, to the Indian Ocean; it would be a rendezvous in time of war for all vessels trading in the Indian Archipelago; it would be a place of refreshment for our ships of war, on their way from Port Jackson to India . . . and a place of call for conveying troops to India from Sydney . . . . It would also be a rendezvous for our whalers in the Timor Seas and amongst the Polynesian Isles . . . from its contiguity to New Guinea . . . it might possibly carry on a lucrative trade with it also . . . as also to the southeast of New Guinea – as New Ireland, New Britain, Solomon’s Isles, New Hebrides, and New Caledonia . . . . There are some fine islands also in the Torres Strait . . . they might contribute materially towards facilitating the safer passage of ships through those straits, the approach to which is attended with much danger, and demands much caution.23

Attaching the western Pacific and the Coral Sea by way of Torres Strait to the Arafura Sea and beyond was, of course, a spatial vision that could not be conceived properly while the East India Company held sway. That was one thing. But the other was that Campbell used the Royal Geographical Society as the theatre for his performance. In the audience, no doubt smiling and approving, was John Barrow, and not far from him, no doubt taking note of a rising responsibility, was Francis Beaufort. Roderick Murchison, King of

22

J.M.R. Cameron, ed., Letters from Port Essington (Darwin, Northern Territory, 1999), p. 2. 23 Campbell, ‘Geographical Memoir’, p. 180. 135

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Siluria and President of the Geological Society attended with an open mind. Murchison would in a few years be making a speech, by then as President of the Royal Geographical Society, outlining his concept of a huge geocommercial gulf – essentially the Coral Sea – bordered on the east by the coast of New South Wales, on the west by New Caledonia and New Hebrides, on the north by the Solomon Islands and the southern coast of New Guinea, all of it funnelling through the Torres Strait eastwards – a perfect echo of Campbell’s vision.24 The decision to survey the inner passage of the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait was taken by the Admiralty in 1837 in response to a growing chorus of urgent opinion that something needed to be done to ensure safe shipping through the waters. In 1835, the Charles Eaton, a barque bound for Canton from Sydney, was wrecked on reefs in the inner passage and tales that her crew and passengers (husband, wife and two small boys) had either been murdered and eaten or had been enslaved by Aboriginals quickly spread to Sydney, Singapore, Calcutta and, eventually, London.25 A year later reports started to come in that the Stirling Castle, a Greenock ship, had hit reefs just north of present-day Fraser Island on the northeast coast of Queensland and that similar outrages had occurred.26 Stories of wrecks such as these, especially when they involved the encounter and captivity (or worse) of white women by Aboriginal men, fed a growing discourse of white superiority and native savagery and demanded action from the protectors.27 That was one source of pressure. Another came from John Barrow and his insistence that the interior of Australia needed to be surveyed from the northwest and that a settlement was immediately required – the latter, he argued, would act to increase the security of the lives and property of Britons in that part of world.28 To make his pitch for settlement stick (an effective antidote to the memory of previous failure), Barrow turned to George Windsor Earl, a devotee and disciple of Raffles, a man well-versed in the ethnology and geography of the Indonesian Archipelago.29

24

Roderick Impey Murchison, ‘Address’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 15 (1845), lix. 25 Allen McInnes, ‘The Wreck of the “Charles Eaton’’’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 11 (1983), 21–50. 26 John Curtis, The Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle (London, 1838); J.S. Ryan, ‘The Several Fates of Eliza Fraser’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 11 (1983), 88–112; and Elaine Brown, ‘The Legend of Eliza Fraser – A Survey of the Sources’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 15 (1994), 345–60. 27 Lynette Russell, ‘‘‘Mere Trifles and Faint Representations”: The Representations of Savage Life Offered by Eliza Fraser’, in Ian J. McNiven, Lynette Russell and Kay Schaffer, Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser’s Shipwreck (Leicester, 1998), pp. 51–62. 28 Cameron, Letters from Port Essington, p. 6. 29 Ibid., p. 5. 136

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To conduct the survey of the Torres Strait, the Admiralty commissioned HMS Beagle to return to sea for its third voyage. The instructions to Captain Wickham, the ship’s commander, made clear the vital importance of this survey: You will proceed by the inner route to Torres Strait, where the most arduous of your duties are yet to be performed. The numerous reefs which block up that strait; the difficulty of entering its intricate channels; the discordant result of the many partial surveys which have from time to time been made there, and the rapidly increasing commerce of which it has become the thoroughfare, call for a full and satisfactory examination of the whole space between Cape York and the southern shore of New Guinea . . . . In this latter survey you will cautiously proceed from the known to the unknown.30

The survey of the Great Barrier Reef was to be left to another, future, mission. As it turned out, however, the Torres Strait survey did not go ahead, certainly not in the detail that was ordered. When it became clear to Beaufort that problems on the Beagle were going to influence the completion of the ship’s tasks, he set about commissioning another ship, HMS Fly, under the command of Captain Francis Blackwood, to pick up where Wickham and Stokes had left off. The Fly set sail from England in 1842 and commenced its survey of the Great Barrier Reef in December of that year. Throughout the ship’s survey, Beaufort kept reminding Blackwood of the extreme importance of getting to know the inner passage of the Great Barrier Reef in the minutest details. ‘Do not hurry’, he wrote, ‘over the hidden dangers which lurk and even grow in that part of the world’.31 The context for this survey was the larger geocommercial picture – to quote from the hydrographic instructions to Blackwood: Whereas it being the usual practice of vessels returning from Europe from the Australian Colonies, or from the South Sea to proceed to India via Torres Strait, and most of these vessels preferring the chance of finding a convenient opening in the Barrier Reefs to the labour of frequent anchorage in the in shore passage, it [is] thought fit . . . to determine which [is] the best opening that those reefs would afford, and to make such a survey thereof as would ensure the safety of all vessels which should continue to adopt that mode of reaching the Strait.32

30 J. Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia; With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in the Years 1837–38–39–40–41–42–43 (London, 1846), p. 12. 31 United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, Taunton (UKHO), Letter Book 12/127. 32 UKHO, Minute Book 6/1.

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By the time Blackwood received his commission, the third attempt at a British settlement on the north coast of Australia was in full swing. John Barrow and George Windsor Earl, with support from Beaufort and the Admiralty, launched their plan for the settlement in 1837 and, a year later, John Gordon Bremer set sail for Port Essington arriving there in October 1838.33 This was primarily an Admiralty scheme, though the involvement of the Colonial Office was expected in time. The Port Essington settlement was founded on different principles from that of its two predecessors.34 This was not to be just a northern outpost of the Australian colony but another pole of it. As Barrow argued, Port Essington would, he hoped, become the centre of a thriving tropical region, whose southwestern boundary was near the present-day city of Broome in western Australia.35 The climate was temperate and the land was fertile, the soil ‘adapted for raising all the valuable products of the Indian Archipelago, the Dutch islands [and] the Malay islands; such as sugar, rice, indigo, cotton, pepper and other spices, with the choicest fruits of the East.’ 36 Labour was no problem. ‘Any number of labouring Chinese or of Malays would easily be procured, and at a cheap rate’, he commented.37 By implication, Europeans would not or could not work there and the land was empty. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, Barrow arranged that John Armstrong, a gardener/ botanist with Kew credentials, should join the expedition and supervise the growing of crops. Rhetoric came cheap. Earl was the high prophet, the Raffles of Port Essington, but he had strong support from the commandant of the garrison and John Gordon Bremer. In their despatches and reports Port Essington came across as a slice of paradise. Earl fed the multitude and the powerful. To Captain John Washington, Secretary to the Royal Geographical Society and a future Hydrographer to the Admiralty, he wrote the following typical words in 1841: ‘Everything is going on most favourably. We have a nice little town [with] gardens which supply us abundantly with vegetables, while the ships which call occasionally to see what is done here, furnish us with all the luxuries we may wish for.’38 Earl was upbeat but in reality the settlement was sinking. When Blackwood arrived in Port Essington, John MacGillivray, one of the naturalists on board and someone who had spent several months in the environs collecting natural history specimens, had not a good word to say

33

Cameron, Letters from Port Essington, p. 7. The history of the settlement has been well covered in Peter G. Spillett, Forsaken Settlement (Melbourne, 1972). 35 Barrow, ‘Observations’, p. 133. 36 Ibid., p. 133. 37 Ibid., p. 135. 38 Cameron, Letters from Port Essington, p. 87. 34

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about the place. And he was not afraid to proclaim this. He published his observations in the Sydney Morning Herald of 15 October 1845. ‘Delusive hopes’, ‘ruinous appearance of the place’, ‘the climate of Port Essington is decidedly unhealthy, – the burying-ground of this settlement tells this tale in language not to be misunderstood’: these were MacGillivray’s words.39 As MacGillivray published his damning thoughts in Sydney, the powers in London were beginning to see matters his way. Beaufort began asking his best and most informative surveyors for their thoughts on the subject, primarily Blackwood and Owen Stanley, who had accompanied Bremer to Port Essington on a sister ship in 1838, and not a good word was being uttered.40 Even Earl was beginning to use words such as ‘unhealthy’.41 But while Earl was recommending moving the garrison to another bay, Blackwood, MacGillivray and Stanley were talking about yet another location, far removed from Port Essington and an altogether different proposition – not so much a settlement as a station – at Cape York, the point where the Great Barrier Reef passage meets Torres Strait. Blackwood had surveyed the Great Barrier Reef, or as Beaufort called it ‘that monstrous chain of reefs which lies eastwards of Australia’. 42 He had found a passage to the north of Raine Islet which could be used by all kinds of shipping to enter the inner passage and erected a beacon, with the help of convict labour, to aid navigation. Despite his efforts to keep to schedule, Blackwood did not accomplish all of his instructions, leaving the Torres Strait largely uncharted. Beaufort now called on Owen Stanley to proceed to Australia in HMS Rattlesnake for that purpose, which he did late in 1846. Steam communication was in the air and the wrecking on the reefs of commercial, military and communication vessels was to be avoided at all costs. The Legislative Council of New South Wales convened a select committee to hear evidence about routes north and eastward from Sydney, which met in 1846, 1848 and 1850.43

39

(John MacGillivray), ‘Remarks on Port Essington’, The Sydney Morning Herald (15 October 1845). On the health conditions of the settlements in northern Australia, including Port Essington, see the following: Brian Reid, ‘The Surgeons of Melville Island: Pioneering Attempts to Establish Western Medicine in Northern Australia’, in John Pearn, ed., Health, History and Horizons (Brisbane, 1992), pp. 15–27; Brian Reid, ‘Malaria in the Nineteenth-Century British Military Settlements’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 3 (1992), 41–54; and Bev Phelts, ‘Did Water Defeat the British on the Northern Territory Coast?: Why Did the Three British Colonies Fail?’ unpublished paper, 2001. 40 Captain Francis Blackwood to Sir George Gipps, Mitchell Library, A1267/22; J.B. Jukes, ‘Observations on the Advantages and Practicability of Establishing a Port, or Small Settlement in Torres Strait’, Mitchell Library, MS Q645; and UKHO, Minute Book 5/130–31. 41 UKHO, Letter Book 13/234. 42 UKHO, Letter Book 12/70. 43 British Parliamentary Papers, XXXV, (1851), 123–83. 139

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Stanley first returned to the inner passage and filled in details between 12°S and 14° 30′S and then turned his attention to the Torres Strait, using Cape York itself as the staging post for the surveys. These surveys occupied about 9 months of dreary work in 1848 and 1849. By January 1850, when the surveys had been completed, Stanley had charted a relatively safe passage which enabled ships from New South Wales and the western Pacific to enter the Torres Strait and pass through into the Arafura Sea and beyond. The vision of a Coral Sea geocommercial region, evocatively described by Murchison, finally seemed real. Cape York would now become the eyes of the British Empire, surveying and attending to the flow of goods and people through this now tamed, Europeanized body of water. John MacGillivray, the Rattlesnake’s naturalist, was given the job of surveying the natural history of the tip of Cape York, recommending it for settlement, in contrast to his denouncement of Port Essington, several years earlier. Port Essington was abandoned in 1849, the third British failure at settling the torrid zone of northern Australia. While the gardens, as George Windsor Earl maintained, may have supplied some produce, the idea of the settlement as a tropical plantation was fantasy. The environment simply refused to be tamed.44

Conclusion Stanley’s surveys and the spatial shift to Cape York have been viewed in a kind of continuum of naval presence in and around Australia from the time of James Cook. That there is a line between the two cannot be doubted but the historical contexts were altered. Stanley’s survey of the inner passage and Torres Strait was performed in response to the geocommerce of the western Pacific, the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, itself a result of changes that have been discussed, plus the technological developments in shipping, particularly the arrival of steam navigation. Making imperial space was a historical process, in which surveying, natural history collecting, physical sciences observations, geography and colonial settlement played crucial integrative roles. It was not, however, disembodied things and ideas that directed the imperial practices but rather specific people in specific places and times. Relationships were at the very core of making imperial space: how, where and when. Stanley’s surveying of the inner passage and the Torres Strait, for example, was enveloped within a social metropolitan world which included a coterie of Francis Beaufort, Roderick Murchison, William Hooker, Robert Owen, George Airy, John Herschel and the

44 As to the reasons for failure, see Spillett, Foresaken Settlement and Phelts, ‘Did Water Defeat’.

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institutions which they headed.45 Though Stanley was 15,000 miles and four months distant from London, the outstretched arms of his masters ensured he was never alone.

45 Robert A. Stafford, ‘The Long Arm of London: Sir Roderick Murchison and Imperial Science in Australia’, in R.W. Home, ed., Australian Science in the Making (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 69–101.

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Hydrography, technology, coercion Mapping the sea in Southeast Asian imperialism, 1850–1900 ERIC TAGLIACOZZO1

Historiography on imperial mapping has never dealt with the sea as ardently or efficiently as it has with cartography on land. There have been good reasons for this. Approximately 90 per cent of the earth’s land mass came to be controlled by Europeans by 1914, and historians no doubt felt they had their hands full in trying to explain these terra firma conquests alone. Land was the ‘ground zero’ of cultural contact; surely the terrestrial realm was the best place to formulate interpretations of domination. Yet these processes of conquest and incorporation were also very important by sea, and epistemological translations of ‘space’ into maps also took place in this realm. 2 This happened globally, but it especially happened in archipelagic settlings, such as were found in island Southeast Asia (the area currently comprised by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines).3 Here a ‘rounding off’ of sorts took place, as Europeans hydrographically cordoned off empires that were separated by open sea. Colonial powers eyed each other warily in these arenas, competing

1

I wish to thank the organizers and participants of the conference, Maritime Empires at the National Maritime Museum (UK) for their helpful comments and advice on this chapter. An earlier version of this piece has appeared in the journal Archipel: Etudes Interdisciplinaires sur le Monde Insulindien, 65 (2003), 89–108. 2 See Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York, 1995) for a general overview, and John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York, 1982), especially pp. 128–60. 3 For some of the global manifestations of these historical processes, encompassing Hawaii, Canada, and East Africa, see Simo Laurila, Islands Rise From the Sea: Essays on Exploration, Navigation, and Mapping in Hawaii (New York, 1989); Stanley Fillmore, The Chartmakers: The History of Nautical Surveying in Canada (Toronto, 1983); US Mississippi River Commission, Comprehensive Hydrography of the Mississippi River and its Principal Tributaries from 1871 to 1942 (Vicksburg, 1942); Edmond Burrows, Captain Owen of the African Survey: The Hydrographic Surveys of Admiral WFW Owen on the Coast of Africa and the Great Lakes of Canada (Rotterdam, 1979); C.G.C. Martin, Maps and Surveys of Malawi: A History of Cartography and the Land Survey Profession, Exploration Methods of David Livingstone on Lake Nyassa, Hydrographic Survey and International Boundaries (Rotterdam, 1980). For Southeast 142

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and sometimes also cooperating in the maritime division of the world. Contemporary historians have begun to peer at these mapping processes as well, looking at piracy as a form of resistance against the expanding colonial state; Japanese maritime surveying as a precursor to later armed aggression in Southeast Asia; and other such themes.4 Scholars, in fact, are now going back to the archives to re-examine the sea as a site of complicated cultural exchange.5 These new enquiries tie together imperialism, science, and the colonial interface in a variety of places and contexts. This chapter will contribute to this burgeoning literature by examining the intertwined roles of hydrography, technology, and coercion in late nineteenthcentury Southeast Asia. I focus specifically on the waters of what we would now call Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, which stretched from Aceh east to New Guinea, and from Java north to Sulu. In this vast maritime domain, the size of the continental United States, improvements in hydrographic knowledge went hand in hand with the advancing imperial presence. Though the evolution of sea maps was partially conditioned by expanding trade (metropoles, after all, knew that greater hydrographic knowledge equalled fewer marine disasters, and hence more revenue), this evolution was usually linked to colonial expansion as well. We will view these inter-relationships in three sections. First, we will examine how a ‘seepage’ of vessels, autochthonous and otherwise, crossed the evolving spheres of British and Dutch maritime space, continuing freewheeling patterns of trade and shipping which area regimes now eyed very warily. Second, we will analyse how both colonial powers began to explore and map these marine domains, using hydrography as a tool in order to better understand the dimensions of their emerging empires. Finally, we will see how this advancing knowledge was applied to statecraft and coercion, as British Singapore and Dutch Batavia, respectively, divided Southeast Asia’s seas into realms that each increasingly – though still imperfectly – controlled.

Asia, especially colonial Indonesia, see Christiaan Biezen, ‘“De Waardigehid van een Koloniale Mogendheid”: De Hydrografische Dienst en de Kartering van de Indische Archipel tussen 1874 en 1894’, Tijsdchrift voor het Zeegeschiedenis, 18: 2 (1999), 23–38. 4 Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘”Kettle on a Slow Boil”: Batavia’s Threat Perceptions in the Indies’ Outer Islands’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 31: 1 (2000), 70–100; J.L. Anderson, ‘Piracy in the Eastern Seas, 1750–1856: Some Economic Implications’, and Ghislaine Loyre, ‘Living and Working Conditions in Philippine Pirate Communities’, both in David Starkey, E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga, and J.A. de Moor, eds, Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Exeter, 1997); Kunio Katayama, ‘The Japanese Maritime Surveys of Southeast Asian Waters Before the First World War’, Institute of Economic Research Working Paper, 85 (Kobe, 1985). 5 See, for example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). 143

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I argue here that imperial consolidation could only have been achieved with great difficulty in Southeast Asia without these concomitant advances in marine mapping. Though cartographic historiography has traditionally been a land-based avenue of inquiry, in this region the sea and knowledge of the sea were paramount in fashioning the imperial project. Insular Southeast Asia’s topography dictated this equation from the start. With its thousands of farflung islands, broad but shallow seas, and extensive interior river systems, coercion and the projection of imperial power were made possible only through maritime means. Yet local marine environments were not immediatelyreceptive arenas for European political manoeuvres; they needed to be mapped and understood by those who hoped to use them for their own purposes. The processes of tabulating, indexing and surveying local waters, therefore, became of crucial importance to both of these colonial states. How did the British and Dutch envision these vast maritime spaces in the mid-nineteenth century, as opposed to the years around the fin de siecle? How central was hydrography to cooperating and competing imperial projects in this part of the world? In central Asia in the late nineteenth century, Imperial Russia, Britain, and China raced to map the desert spaces of the high steppe.6 In much of Africa during this same period, colonial powers struggled to chart the interior worlds of the rainforest belt, across the vast equatorial centre of that continent.7 In Southeast Asia, however, the contested terrain – both intellectually and politically – was predominantly maritime in nature. This milieu ensured a highly specific set of circumstances, which helped dictate the ways in which power, knowledge, and politics meshed over half a century.

‘Seepage’ and surveillance The archipelagic world of Southeast Asia was on the cusp of massive change by the mid-nineteenth century, the beginning years of this essay. The remarkably open maritime trading cadence of the region, which has been remarked upon by many historians through different lenses, was starting to change significantly by this time.8 In the early part of the century, the first paper manifestation of this change was felt through the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, which divided the Straits of Melaka into northern and southern components. The British inherited influence over lands and seas north of this

6

Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York, 1992). See Samuel Nelson, Colonialism in the Congo Basin, 1880–1940 (Athens, 1994); for some of the primary sources here, see Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (Malden, 1999). 8 The fullest explication of these centuries immediately prior to our period can be found in Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450 to 1680, 2 vols (New Haven, 1988 and 1993). 7

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imaginary dividing line, while the Dutch were free to expand outward from their base in Java to the southern reaches of the insular world. Though there were practical ramifications to this agreement (most notably the swapping of Dutch Melaka on the Malay Peninsula for British Bengkulu in West Sumatra), the abilities of Britain and the Netherlands to police the entirety of this maritime frontier was still quite limited. Over the next several decades, these abilities started to grow slowly, however, and the imposition of a new treaty in 1871 began to make concrete what had existed mostly in name a half-century earlier. The Treaty of 1871 gave Batavia a free hand at expansion in the remaining indigenous areas of Sumatra, in exchange for guaranteed British commercial privileges south of the original Straits dividing line. Aggression and expanding influence proceeded quickly after this in both Malay and ‘Indonesian’ waters. In 1873 the Dutch attacked Aceh, the last remaining sultanate of any size in the Indies, and in 1874 Britain’s own ‘Forward Movement’ started, with the Pangkor Engagement. In 1878 North Borneo was annexed by the British North Borneo Company, and by 1896 British influence over half of the Malay Peninsula was unchallenged. By the early years of the twentieth century, both the British and the Dutch controlled empires that looked remarkably similar to the independent nation-state boundaries of Southeast Asia today. Despite these developments, problems of enforcing the new geopolitical realities of the maritime frontier existed even until the early twentieth century.9 This was apparent nearly everywhere along the emerging AngloDutch divide in the region. In the Straits of Melaka, Sultan Taha of Jambi’s men were continually able to cross the maritime boundary, bringing back food and weapons from Singapore to feed Taha’s highland resistance project against the Dutch.10 These supply journeys were successful enough by the 1880s that the Dutch consul in Penang asked Batavia to require oaths from passing traders, stating that they were not carrying any contraband bound for the resistance forces in Sumatra.11 Dutch attempts to concretize the imaginary line across the Straits eventually led to a chorus of outrage from merchants under the British flag, however, as the latter saw their economic opportunities being undercut by any stricter imposition of the frontier.12 By the years approaching the turn of the twentieth century, when Dutch naval patrols were becoming better able to police the Straits against trade movements crossing these shallow

9

Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Secret Trades of the Straits: Smuggling and State-Formation Along a Southeast Asian Frontier’, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1999. 10 Algemeene Rijksarchief (Dutch State Archives, the Hague, hereafter, ARA), Dutch Consul, Singapore to Gov Gen NEI, 26 Dec 1885, No. 974 in 1885, MR No. 802; see Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Sumatraans Sultanaat en Koloniale Staat: De Relatie Djambi-Batavia (1830–1907) en het Nederlandse Imperialisme (Leiden, 1994). 11 ARA, Dutch Consul, Penang to Gov Gen NEI, 29 March 1887, No. 125, in 1887, MR No. 289. 12 ARA, 1894, MR No. 298. 145

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waters, this outrage had reached beyond the local authorities and was even heard back in Europe. London’s official policy by this time, however, was to let the Dutch subdue the indigenous sultanates of Sumatra, even if this meant a temporary decline in trade for Britain’s own merchants in the Straits.13 The maritime frontier, therefore, became more rigid over time, and this happened at least partially through the compliance of British diplomacy, which sought a long-term solution to trade stability in the region. The Straits was not the only important arena in this regard, however. In and around the massive island of Borneo there was also a huge amount of ‘trade seepage’ across nominally separate spheres, at least until the turn of the twentieth century. We have already noted that the treaties of 1824 and 1871 set the diplomatic parameters of the Anglo-Dutch frontier in Southeast Asia, drawing a fixed line between the two evolving colonial projects. Yet the relatively little amount of historiography that presently exists on the border regions shows us clearly that these lines were transgressed in a variety of ways, including by way of rivers that cut across this huge forest wilderness. James Warren has shown, for example, how the historical figure of Captain Lingard (who would later become famous in Joseph Conrad’s novels) bartered opium, salt, and guns into the interior of East Borneo, during his travels up local rivers. Lingard set off a ‘seepage effect’ of movement and trade from the North Borneo Company’s expanding dominions as indigenous merchants headed south into Batavia’s sphere.14 Warren has also shown how Bugis trade settlements in Eastern Borneo overlapped Taosug forts in the interior, connecting outstretched networks of alliance, competition, and commerce across the emerging frontier.15 Working on the opposite side of the border in British Sarawak, Daniel Chew has brought to light the boundary-crossing activities of interior Chinese traders as well, who fled outstanding debts to more prominent Chinese merchants downriver, and disappeared silently across the Dutch frontier.16 Other authors have shown how powerless the Dutch often were to stop these ‘transgressions’ in the late nineteenth century, as Batavia was unsure where the border precisely lay, or had few civil servants on the ground to check on such movements.17

13

See the plea by the Penang Chamber of Commerce to the British authorities, 18 August 1893, in PRO/FO Confidential Print Series No. 6584/16(i). 14 James Francis Warren, ‘Joseph Conrad’s Fiction as Southeast Asian History’, in James Francis Warren, At the Edge of Southeast Asian History (Quezon City, 1987), p. 12. 15 James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore, 1981), pp. 83–4. 16 Daniel Chew, Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontier (1841–1941) (Singapore, 1990), pp. 115–17. 17 Reed Wadley, ‘Warfare, Pacification, and Environment: Population Dynamics in the West Borneo Borderlands (1823–1934)’, Moussons, 1 (2000), 41–66; G.J. Resink, ‘De Archipel voor Joseph Conrad’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde (1959), ii; F.C. 146

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The phenomenal growth of trade and of even very small-scale shipping in Southeast Asia, therefore, presented two paradoxical phenomena.18 Shipping could be used as an engine of growth and coercion by the state if harnessed, but it could also be used by those who wished to trade outside of the state’s vision. By the 1880s and 1890s, therefore, a renewed effort was made on the part of the colonial state to try to control these processes and bend maritime growth toward the state’s own ends. In the Dutch East Indies, the KPM (or Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, the Dutch Colonial Packet Service) was given its inaugural contract in 1891, with orders from Batavia to expand shipping links to the rest of the archipelago.19 A Campo has shown how KPM expansion slowly snaked up Borneo’s rivers, and towards some of the more distant coasts of the Indies, binding the archipelago into a grid over the next several decades.20 The Dutch used the KPM, and a series of exclusionary shipping rules called the scheepvaartregelingen, to try to monopolize trade and shipping patterns throughout their maritime empire in Southeast Asia. Yet even as the marine transport arm of the colonial state expanded, British, French, Chinese and indigenous Southeast Asian shipping continued to ply through Batavia’s archipelago. These craft connected ports across the frontier, and still managed to carry large quantities of commodities of nearly all descriptions.21 Some of these goods travelled outside ‘official’ channels, which worried Batavia a great deal. Revenue was one of the pillars of the colonial state; without it, there was little way to finance the imperial armies that were needed to maintain the imperial status quo. Yet there were also politics involved in these matters as well. Pointing to Dutch complaints about the levels of smuggling across the Straits, a British envoy in the Indies suggested that many Dutchmen stood to lose money if the business of steam shipping was conducted in a completely even-handed way. The scheepvaartregelingen limited certain forms of foreign participation in these carrying trades; indeed, Batavia Backer Dirks, De Gouvernements Marine in het Voormalige Nederlands-Indie in Haar Verschillende Tijdsperioden Geschetst 1861–1949 (Weesp, 1985), p. 173. 18 Chiang Hai Ding, A History of Straits Settlements Foreign Trade, 1870–1915 (Singapore, 1978), 6, pp. 136, 139. 19 ARA, 1888, MR No. 461. The KPM was only the latest incarnation of steam-shipping services in the Dutch East Indies. Two companies, the first called Cores de Vries, and the second the NISM (Nederlandsch-Indische Stoomvaart Maatshcappij), had preceded it. Neither of these two companies, however, was charged with helping Batavia conquer and maintain its East Indian possessions to the degree that the KPM was from its very beginnings (indeed, the NISM, despite its name, was British-owned). 20 The KPM’s reach, by 1902, stretched all the way to Merauke in Dutch New Guinea; see ARA 1902, MR No. 402. Also see the maps reproduced in Joop a Campo, Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij: Stoomvaart en Staatsvorming in de Indonesische Archipel 1888–1914 (Hilversum, 1992), pp. 697–9. 21 H. La Chapelle, ‘Bijdrage tot de Kennis van het Stoomvaartverkeer in den Indischen Archipel’ Economist, De, 2 (1885), 689–90. 147

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explicitly pointed to the fact that too much trade fell outside of legal channels in explaining their imposition.22 The control of maritime trade and movement therefore became a serious policy concern for the Dutch, and this was especially so in regard to merchant shipping emanating from the neighbouring British possessions. By the turn of the twentieth century, the maritime expansion of the two colonial states had reached the entire width of what we today call Malaysia and Indonesia, and the need to tabulate, understand, and define these marine spaces had become crucial, especially for Batavia. Steam shipping outweighed sail in Singapore’s port statistics only two years after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, yet the rising volume of prahu and junk traffic also meant that the sea-lanes were alive with a wide variety of ships.23 Both local European governments, but especially the Dutch, decided that it was high time to know the character and dimensions of these seas as thoroughly as possible.

Exploration and marine mapping One of the ways that the British and Dutch started to change long-term patterns of shipping was through the exploration and mapping of the maritime frontier.24 This happened in a variety of places, but we can concentrate our field of vision for now on the maze of islands in the southernmost reaches of the South China Sea. Indigenous polities on some of these islands had been known to the Dutch for a long time, and many of these peoples had significant contacts with larger Malay politics and trade in the region. Scholars have shown this for Bangka in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for Riau in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the maritime area just south of Singapore.25 Other scholars have worked on the ways in which these islands were gradually incorporated into the regional web of trade and alliances through mining and the Chinese presence, both of which only grew in the nineteenth century.26 Bangka and Belitung were especially important centres

22

British Consul, Oleh Oleh to Gov SS, 29 June, 1883, No. 296, in ‘Traffic in Contraband’, vol. 11, in PRO/FO/220/Oleh-Oleh Consulate (1882–5). 23 See George Bogaars, ‘The Effect of the Opening of the Suez Canal on the Trade and Development of Singapore’, Journal of the Malay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 28: 1 (1955), 104, 117. 24 Much of the science, as well as the bureaucratic organization of hydrography in the Dutch Indies, has been described in F.C. Backer Dirks, De Gouvernements Marine, pp. 269–75. 25 Barbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu, 1993); Carl Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore 1784–1885 (Singapore, 1979); Barbara Watson Andaya, ‘Recreating a Vision: Daratan and Kepulaunan in Historical Context’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde, 153:4 (1997), 483–508. 26 Mary Somers Heidhues, Bangka Tin and Mentok Pepper: Chinese Settlement on an 148

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for trade and production well before mid-century, making explorations there essentially a matter of filling in spaces already known for the Dutch.27 Yet the island groups of Anambas, Natuna, and Tambelan, all in the lower reaches of the South China Sea, were much more distant from the international shipping crossroads and received only scant attention from Batavia until later in our period. The Dutch knew that these islands were populated by a mix of Malays, Orang Laut, Bugis, and Chinese, but they had little idea about everyday life there, including the details of maritime contact and other trading activities.28 By the late 1890s, however, this aura of ‘benign neglect’ in the northernmost islands of the Dutch Indies’ possessions was quickly changing. Ship captains’ notations on the geography of the islands started to be compiled and collated. New bays and creeks were noted, the depth of water in fathoms was shown and the sources of drinking water were all pointed out, rendering the islands more transparent to traders and statesmen alike. 29 Exploratory expeditions conducted between 1894 and 1896 were especially instructive, showing that earlier maps of the area contained islands that did not really exist, or that were simply drawn in the wrong place, to the detriment of travellers. Though this information was compiled by Dutchmen, the source of these reports was potentially problematic. Most of the corrections came from British Admiralty charts of the area, which had been completed a few years earlier. Though these charts had been made with the permission of Batavia, Dutch hydrographers stated that Dutch explorers should have been the ones to make these measurements, as the islands (after all) were inside the territorial waters of the Dutch East Indies.30 The vocabulary lists of area peoples, photographs of local coastal topography, and ethnographic notes that followed brought Dutch knowledge of the northern parts of the archipelago to a new degree

Indonesian Island (Singapore, 1992); Ng Chin Keong ‘The Chinese in Riau: A Community on an Unstable and Restrictive Frontier’, unpublished paper, Singapore, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang University, 1976. 27 See, for example, H.M. Lange, Het Eiland Banka en Zijn Aangelegenheden (Bosch, 1850); P. van Dest, Banka Beschreven in Reistochten (Amsterdam, 1865); and Cornelis de Groot, Herinneringen aan Blitong: Historisch, Lithologisch, Mineralogisch, Geographisch, Geologisch, en Mijnbouwkundig (Hague, 1887). 28 R.C. Kroesen, ‘Aantekenningen over de Anambas-, Natuna-, en Tambelan Eilanden’, Tijdschrift Bataviaasch Genootschap 21 (1875), p. 235 passim; A.L. van Hasselt, ‘De Poelau Toedjoeh’, Tijdschrift Aardrijkskundige Genootschap, 15 (1898), 21–2. 29 ‘Chineesche Zee: Enkele Mededeelingen Omtrent de Anambas, Natoena, en TambelanEilanden’, Mededeelingen op Zeevaartkundig Gebied over Nederlandsch Oost-Indie (1896) 1 August 4, pp. 1–2. 30 On the evolving international law of territorial waters, and its effect on maritime Southeast Asia, see Gerke Teitler, Ambivalente en Aarzeeling: Het Belied van Nederland en Nederlands-Indie ten Aanzien van hun Kustwateren, 1870–1962 (Assen, 1994), pp. 37–54. 149

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of sophistication.31 In these same years at the turn of the twentieth century, in fact, more general directives started to arrive from Batavia, asking administrators of far-flung groups to send as much of this kind of data as possible to the capital. Important information, hydrographic and otherwise, could thus be tabulated, systematized and reviewed by the centralizing state.32 By the years around 1900, exploration and hydrographic surveying of the South China Sea island groups became part of a coherent, top–down development programme in the region. Mining interests took the lead in new surveying operations and expeditions, mapping Bangka down to minute detail. Belitung, and even the tiny islands off Belitung’s coasts, quickly followed after 1894.33 The waters around Blakang Padang, facing Singapore in the Riau Archipelago, were also extensively surveyed at this time. Though the island had formally been seen as a useless scrap of land by Batavia (with few natural resources, and only a small population), by the turn of the century Dutch planners were seeing Blakang Padang as a complementary port for Singapore, with coal sheds, docking complexes, and a series of interconnected lighthouses.34 This sort of maritime exploration, with a systematic program of ‘development’ attached to it, was the last stage of the European ‘discovery process’ along the length of the Anglo-Dutch frontier. Even reefs and atolls along the maritime boundaries of Malaya and the Netherlands Indies, from Aceh eastward to Sulawesi and Sulu, began to be explored and chronicled by oceanographers in the decades leading up to the twentieth century.35 Some of

31

A.L. van Hasselt, ‘De Poelau Toedjoeh’, pp. 25–6. These directives had been issued for some time already, but were particularly important around this time. See ARA, Directeur van Onderwijs, Eeredienst, en Nijverheid to Gov Gen NEI, 21 March 1890, No. 2597, in 1890, MR No. 254. 33 The extensive surveying of Bangka began even earlier, in the 1870s. See ARA, 1894, MR No. 535; and H. Zondervan, ‘Bijdrage tot de Kennis der Eilanden Bangka en Blitong’, TAG, 17 (1900), 519. 34 ‘Balakang Padang, Een Concurrent van Singapore’, IG, 2 (1902), 1295. 35 J.F. Niermeyer, ‘Barriere Riffen en Atollen in de Oost Indische Archipel’, TAG (1911), 877; ‘Straat Makassar’, in Mededeelingen op Zeevaartkundig Gebied over Nederlandsch OostIndie, 6 (1 May 1907) ; Sydney Hickson, A Naturalist in North Celebes (London, 1889), pp. 188–9; and P.C. Coops, ‘Nederlandsch Indies Zeekaarten’, Nederlandsche Zeewezen, 3 (1904), 129. See also Adrian Lapian, Orang Laut-Bajak Laut-Raja Laut: Sejarah Kawasan Laut Sulawesi Abad XIX (Yogyakarta: Disertasi pada Universitas Gadjah Mada, 1987). The reporting of reefs, atolls, and submerged rocks became an important subset of Western navigational literature by the later years of the nineteenth century. The notices presented here describe a series of ten reefs northeast of Bangka island, along the sea-routes between Singapore and Batavia. For further descriptions across the length of the archipelago in the 1870s, see Tijdschrift voor het Zeewezen, 1871, pp. 135–140 (Java Sea); 1872, pp. 100–1 (Melaka Strait); 1873, pp. 339–40 (Natuna and Buton); 1874, p. 306 (Makassar Strait); 1875, pp. 78, 241 (East Coast Sulawesi and Northeast Borneo); 1876, p. 463 (Aceh); 1877, pp. 221, 360 (West Coast Sumatra, Lampung); 1878, pp. 98, 100 (West Borneo, Sulu Sea); and 1879, p. 79 (North Sulawesi). 32

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this interest was purely scientific, or was fuelled by the emerging nationalist impulse to mark off the boundaries of the archipelago with Dutch and British flags. Yet a significant portion of it was also economic and utilitarian, as exploration was bent to the service of the state to locate new resources and wealth. Mapping the sea became the policy and business of the colonial state, and increasingly it was more and more difficult to separate the two paradigms. We can see this process especially clearly at two points on either side of the frontier: at British Labuan, off the coast of Western Borneo; and at Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. No serious maps existed of Labuan’s topography even thirty years after the colony’s foundation in the 1840s: the island was hydrographically surveyed as part of the chart of sea-routes leading to China, but not surveyed in its own local detail and context, an omission which limited British imperial vision in Western Borneo’s waters.36 This situation would remain almost unchanged until the turn of the twentieth century, when government officials and businessmen alike complained that local hydrographical inadequacies were actually impeding trade and policing alike.37 The crucial importance of the hydrographic project to Dutch expansion can be seen best in Aceh, where sea-mapping was a matter of life and death for the invading Dutch armies. Reconnaissance voyages by the Dutch marine started triangulations of the coasts, while other ships steamed up Aceh’s rivers to map interior waterways where resistance forces hid.38 Both of these missions – coastal and riverine – were crucial to European military expansion in Aceh. Batavia’s forces couldn’t maintain a concerted presence on shore for the first ten months of the war, so reconnaissance information had to be gathered by other means.39 Mapping the sea, and mapping coastlines from the sea, therefore, was one of the most important steps in imperial processes of subjugation in Southeast Asia. This happened early in some regional arenas, as in Aceh, though these protocols took longer in other European island outposts, like Labuan. Local exigencies, funding and immediate imperial needs conspired to dictate the pace of hydrographic evolution. A final place where we can view these hydrographical mapping imperatives is in and around the major ports of the region. Important harbours often received cartographic attention at an early date because of their value to colonial trade; this is very evident in the 1870s and 1880s, though records for soundings go back even to the early seventeenth century.40 By the end of the 36

Colonial Office PRO (hereafter CO), Surveyor General R. Howard, Labuan, to Col. Secretary, Labuan, 6 May 1873, CO 144/40. 37 See Government Pilot of Labuan to Labuan Coalfields Co, 4 October 1903; Labuan Coalfields Co. to BNB Co. HQ, London, 20 November 1903, both CO 144/77. 38 Kruijt, Twee Jaren Blokkade, pp. 169, 189. 39 See H. Mohammad Said, Aceh Sepanjang Abad (I) (Medan, 1981), pp. 675–753; Perang Kolonial Belanda di Aceh (Banda Aceh, 1997), pp. 87–104. 40 See the Straits Times (9 October 1875); the Singapore Daily Times (2 May 1879); and the Singapore Daily Times (9 May 1882). 151

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nineteenth century, as frontier areas became a priority and were increasingly hydrographically mapped (such as Labuan, Aceh, and the South China Sea islands, all of which we have discussed above), the major ports of Southeast Asia were once again revisited, in order to perfect Batavia and Singapore’s knowledge locally. We can see these improvements especially on the British side of the Straits. In July of 1899, Penang received permission to undertake extensive maritime surveys of her harbour, while two years later Malacca began to prepare for similar improvements.41 In 1902, Singapore itself, the seat of British power in the region, started to carry out blasting operations at the mouth of the Singapore River, in order to better the shipping channel leading into one of the world’s busiest ports.42 These kinds of activities also took place on the banks and coral outcrops lying outside these centres, as with the Ajax Shoal on the approaches to Singapore.43 The colonial powers, both British and Dutch, were gradually bringing the entirety of their domains into the realm of maritime vision. This improved vision also pushed forward trade, policing and imperial control, however, from the waters of the imperial capitals all the way out to the nautical frontier.

Hydrography and the wider world By the turn of the twentieth century, maritime cartography in Southeast Asia had become a much more sophisticated and international science than even fifty years previously. This growth and development happened as the result of several inter-related factors. First and foremost, as we have seen, were the combined imperatives of imperial coercion and imperial business, both of which pushed hydrography forward as a necessary tool for the colonial state. Other linked reasons for cartographic evolution can be traced both to the science’s expanding popular interest, and to national pride. Imperial cartographers attended international congresses with their data on Southeast Asia’s seas, and presses back in Europe picked up on their discoveries as well, fanning the new knowledge out to a wider reading public. 44 Even as early as the 1870s Batavia was beginning to make its maritime notices available to the British across the Straits, data which then appeared as warnings and

41

‘Penang Harbour Improvements’, Straits Settlements Legislative Council Proceedings (hereafter, SSLCP) (1899), C341; Messrs. Coode, Son and Matthews to Gov SS, 23 December 1901, in SSLCP (1902), C32. 42 ‘Report on the Blasting Operations Carried Out in 1902 Upon Sunken Rocks at the Mouth of the Singapore River’, in SSLCP (1903), C131. 43 ‘Survey of the Ajax Shoal’, SSLCP (1885), C135. 44 C.M. Kan, ‘Geographical Progress in the Dutch East Indies 1883–1903’, Report of the Eighth International Geographic Congress (1904/5), 715; W.B. Oort, ‘Hoe een Kaart tot Stand Komt’, Onze Eeuw, 4 (1909), 363–5. 152

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notifications in regional British newspapers.45 By the same token, the Dutch Ministry of Marine funded translations of English-language soundings and sightings, so that Dutch mariners would also have up-to-date charts of the region.46 The final factor driving expansion can be found in the contentious nature of the maritime frontier itself. As both the British and Dutch wrangled over where their frontier would eventually be laid, accurate hydrographic readings became more and more important to international diplomacy. We can see these evolving priorities reflected in hydrographic maps of the period, especially in places like Eastern Borneo which abutted the frontier.47 Relationships were needed with the many small polities existing along the Anglo/Dutch frontier in order for these colonial states to be able to undertake their hydrographic measurements. Yet as European power was still comparatively underdeveloped until late in the nineteenth century, especially hydrographically, complex arrangements were formulated to bind these relationships.48 In Jambi, for example, the Sultan was made responsible by contract for the safety of shipwrecked Dutch seamen, who were occasionally washed up on Jambi’s shores.49 The Sultan of Gunung Tabur in East Borneo was punished for his involvement in sponsoring piracy, meanwhile, as cartographers and traders sometimes disappeared off his shores, apparently at the connivance of the ruler himself.50 In Riau, surviving Indonesian-language

45 See the Penang Guardian and Mercantile Advertiser (23 October 1873), p. 4. British interest in Indies discoveries was very widespread; see also the Singapore Free Press (28 June 1860, 27 September 1860, and 3 September 1863), as well as the Straits Times (14, 15, and 16 August 1883; 19 March 1884; and 15 April 1885). 46 ARA, 1871, MR No. 464. 47 For a time-sensitive comparison on hydrographic evolution, see the two British maps of Darvel and St. Lucia Bays in East Borneo, approximately thirty years apart on both sides of 1900. Both can be found in CO 874/998. 48 Britain’s Asia-stationed ships were often described as being ‘leaky’ or in ‘dilapidated condition’, while steam-launches were desperately sought after by Singapore to keep an eye on illegal trading in local waters. See PRO/ADM, Vice Admiral Shadwell to Secretary of the Admiralty, 16 April 1872, No. 98, in No. 125 China Station Correspondence No. 21; Gov. SS to CO, 8 January 1873, No. 2, in CO 273/65; Gov SS to CO, 14 January 1875, No. 15, in CO 273/79; Gov SS to CO, 16 July 1881, No. 260, and CO to SS, 20 August 1881, both in CO 273/109. 49 ‘Overeenkomsten met Inlandsche Vorsten: Djambi’, IG, 1 (1882), 540; ARA, 1872, MR No. 170. For examples of the kinds of contracts concluded between Europeans and Southeast Asian states, see FO, Dutch Consul, London to FO, 20 August 1909, and FO to British Consul, Hague, 26 August 1909, both in FO/Netherlands Files, ‘Treaties Concluded Between Holland and Native Princes of the Eastern Archipelago’ , FO37, No. 31583. 50 ARA, 1872, MR No. 73, 229; ‘Overeenkomsten met Inlandsche Vorsten: Pontianak’, IG, 1 (1882), 549. Penalties for the protection for pirates was also mentioned in Dutch/Riau

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letters also show how mapping expeditions were forced upon local rulers, who increasingly had little say as to whether their domains should be surveyed or not.51 Both Batavia and Singapore were required by treaty to send copies of all agreements signed with local potentates to each other, so that their metropolitan capitals could appraise the nature of contacts along the border.52 This did not stop either side from manoeuvering within these obligations, however, as each would often respond late (or sometimes not at all) over new contracts that had been closed. Indigenous area rulers also paid close attention to the evasive possibilities of this complicated system, sometimes trying to play off one European power against another to further their own independence.53 As Britain’s understanding of the region’s maritime topography grew, her claims to local lands and seas became more and more specific, forcing the Dutch to catch up cartographically. This happened only slowly, however. A diplomatic incident in 1909, in which the Dutch envoy to London himself seemed not to understand the nature of Dutch maritime claims in Eastern Borneo, acted as an alarm for the Hague to acquaint all of her foreign service personnel with the Indies’ ‘true boundaries’.54 The Dutch ambassador, Baron Gericke, was confused as to the extent of Dutch coastal territory in East Borneo where an act of offshore piracy had necessitated Anglo-Dutch naval cooperation in 1909. Private correspondence between the Dutch ministers for the Colonies and Foreign Affairs later stressed the importance of their envoys being familiar with the outlines of Dutch authority in the Indies. Atlases, maps, and charts were sent shortly thereafter to Dutch representatives in a variety of world capitals, including Berlin, London, Tokyo, Peking, Paris, Constantinople, St Petersburg and Washington. This information on the nature and exact location of the maritime frontier was shared across the AngloDutch border as well. As early as 1891, in fact, Batavia had ordered the Resident of Western Borneo to send maps of the frontier, as well as soundings

contracts going all the way back to 1818; see the contract dated 26 November, Article 10 in Surat-Surat Perdjandjian Antara Kesultanan Riau dengan Pemerintahan (2) V.O.C. dan Hindia-Belanda 1784–1909 (Jakarta, 1970), p. 43. 51 Arsip Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian State Archives, hereafter ANRI), ‘Idzin Pembuatan Peta Baru Tentang Pulau Yang Mengililingi Sumatra’ (1889), in Archief Riouw, No. 225/9 (1889) [Jakarta Repository]. 52 FO to CO, 29 Sept 1871, in CO 273/53. 53 See the complaint of the Sultan of Sulu to the British in Labuan, in which an alliance is sought with the British to counteract the growing influence of Spain: Gov. Labuan to CO, 15 August 1871, No. 33, in CO 144/34. 54 See ARA, Minister for the Colonies to Minister for Foreign Affairs, 15 July 1909, No. I/14735; Ministry for Foreign Affairs Circulaire 26 November 1909, No. I/23629, all in (MvBZ/A/277/A.134); also ARA, First Government Secretary, Batavia, to Resident West Borneo, 20 February 1891, No. 405, in 1891, MR No. 158. 154

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of the local river systems, to Charles Brooke, the Rajah of neighbouring Sarawak. Hydrography and cartography therefore became crucial to the conduct of diplomacy in the region, and were used to solve political problems and crises in the international arena. Yet there were still serious deficiencies in colonial hydrographic knowledge by 1900. Major international waterways, such as the eastern half of the Makassar Strait, and even much of the maritime route between Singapore and Java, were still inadequately surveyed and dangerous to passing maritime traffic by the turn of the twentieth century.55 In British waters, according to local accounts, the approach to Labuan remained ‘neither safe nor easy’ as late as 1900, with rocks and low shoals imperilling navigation.56 Europeans in parts of maritime Southeast Asia simply still could not see properly, and ships which sailed through their dominions, in turn, were often invisible to the state. To make matters worse from the state’s point of view, shifting politics often made fixing these situations extremely difficult. The different administrative entities in British waters – the Straits government, the British North Borneo Company, the Rajah of Sarawak and the Federated Malay States – constantly quarrelled over who should incur the costs for necessary hydrographic improvements.57 This becomes abundantly clear in the correspondence that went back and forth between these various centres, much of which concerned who would pay for what in terms of hydrographic mapping. In an atmosphere such as this, it was not wholly difficult for ‘smugglers’, ‘pirates’, and ‘rebels’ (or any other actors defined as ‘transgressive’ by these colonial states) to sail through the region without much interference at all. Though there were cordons of ‘safe water’ where state vision was well maintained, significant stretches of insular Southeast Asia remained outside of these channels until after the turn of the twentieth century. One of the factors that eventually led to better hydrographic vision, especially in the Dutch sphere, was the rising spectre of an arms race among the colonial powers, especially one undertaken by sea. The advancing pace of technology in world naval capabilities acted as a catalyst in Dutch maritime policy circles around this time. By the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1895, dispatches were being sent out to Dutch envoys around the globe to find out how much the major powers were spending on their respective naval forces, and what form these overhauls took. These appeals went out to Dutch ambassadors in Europe, but they also were sent to the Hague’s envoys in the rest of the world, to see how non-European states were integrating nautical

55

‘De Uitbreiding der Indische Kustverlichting’, IG, 2 (1903), 1172. Board of Trade to CO, 12 January 1900, No. 16518, in CO 144/74. 57 For just a few examples, see Charles Brooke to CO, 11 January 1907, in CO 531/1; Trinity House to CO, 10 January 1887, No. 42204/86, in CO 273/149; BNB Co. HQ to CO, 26 October 1899, in CO 144/73. 56

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changes into their navies.58 From the Dutch envoy in Paris, Batavia learned that French fleet expansion was imminent, with the improvement of colonial ports especially targeted for immediate action.59 From the Dutch representative in Berlin, further information was received about German naval capabilities in the Pacific, which was important to Batavia because of Berlin’s expanding interests in shipping in the area.60 Yet it was the obvious inadequacy of the Indies’ marine in comparison to British naval strength in the Straits which really alarmed the Dutch. British armour-plate experiments, steam-engine trials and shallow-draught hull constructions were quickly making Dutch ships obsolete in the archipelago. This state of affairs was disagreeable even while amity existed between the two powers, but it was judged to be downright dangerous for the longer term.61 Intelligence shortly after the turn of the twentieth century that Japan was building ships of even greater technological sophistication than Britain’s deepened these fears even further, as the Dutch came to realize that their marine presence in the region was obsolete compared to the Indies’ neighbours.62 All of these developments helped to inject more money, and greater attention, into Dutch surveying of their colonial waters. If the Indies were to become a maritime battlefield, policy-planners in Batavia and the Hague felt, then the Dutch would at least know these waters better than any other colonial power.

Conclusion In his classic study Technics and Civilization, the prominent theorist Lewis Mumford has commented that ‘as a practical instrument, the machine has enormously complicated the (human) environment’. Mumford went on to compare the ‘cobblestones of the old-fashioned street, set directly into the earth, with the cave of cables, pipes, and subway systems that run under the asphalt’, in explaining his vision of how machines have altered not only our lives, but human surroundings as well.63 There is certainly some truth to Mumford’s assertion, but the link between science and the natural world

58

See, for example, ARA, MvBZ Circulaire to the Dutch Envoys in London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington, 1 February 1895, No. 1097. 59 ARA, Dutch Consul, Paris, to MvBZ, 14 February 1900, No. 125/60, in (MvBZ/A/421/ A.182). 60 ARA, Dutch Consul, Berlin to MvBZ, 3 August 1904; 22 May 1903; 5 April 1902; 6 July 1899; 17 June 1898; 13 July 1897, and 30 November 1896, all in (MvBZ/A/421/A.182). 61 ‘The Navy Estimates’ in The Times (3 March 1897), enclosed in ARA, Dutch Consul, London, to MvBZ, (5 March 1897), No. 113, in (MvBZ/A/421/A.182). 62 ‘The Destroyer Yamakaze’ in The Japan Times (4 June 1910), enclosed under ARA, Dutch Consul, Tokyo, to MvBZ, 13 June 1910, No. 560/159, in (MvBZ/A/421/A.182). 63 See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963); both quotations can be found on p. 357. 156

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runs in the opposite direction as well. Machines, while complicating human interactions with our surroundings, simplified the environment as well. Epistemologically-useful tools such as hydrographic surveying vessels rendered nature legible and malleable to state-makers everywhere. As a means toward empire-building, they were particularly valuable to the state, since it was the state that most controlled machines and used them for its own purposes. This is what happened in maritime Southeast Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonial regimes, in this case the British in Malaya and the Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies, respectively, used science and technology to gain power over the local environments, as well as over their inhabitants.64 Though these processes have usually been catalogued on land, the mechanics of imperial control also demanded facility with these tools and concepts by sea. Hydrographic mapping allowed these Western empires to reorder some of the fluid maritime realities of Southeast Asian culture and contact, and to refashion coercively this world into a template more suitable to colonial control.65 This process happened over decades, however, and always imperfectly. There was no ‘turning point’ in this process, no moment when sea maps decisively swung the pendulum of imperial control irrevocably toward Europeans.66 In Aceh, hydrography was used from the initial Dutch assault, figuring prominently in the campaign to overrun the Malay world’s last real challenge to Western control. By contrast in Labuan, hydrography was employed locally only at the very end of the nineteenth century, and was used only to situate the colony along Britain’s larger imperial maritime routes. Far-flung frontiers, theatres of war, and outlying commercial ports saw these technologies applied at different paces, therefore. Yet hydrography allowed both colonial states to gradually see their marine environments better then they once had, and to translate this knowledge into allocations of manpower, materiel, and surveillance that furthered imperial policies. In 1850, European 64 The majority of governments making use of these technologies in the late nineteenth century were colonial; for the American/Philippine example, see Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, 31 January 1900 (Washington, DC, 1900–1901), vol. 3, pp. 157–200. Siam, the only regional polity which escaped conquest and domination, also began to experiment with hydrography at this time; see Luang Joldhan Brudhikrai, ‘Development of Hydrographic Work in Siam From the Beginning up to the Present’, International Hydrographic Review, 24 (1947). 65 Of course, these processes are also utilized in our own time as well, as states try to use hydrographic mapping to lay claims to islands, reefs, and resource-rich sea beds in a variety of locations around the world. For a discussion of contemporary events, see G. Francalanci and T. Scovazzi, Lines in the Sea (Dordrecht, 1994); Dorinda Dallmeyer and Louis DeVorsey, Rights to Oceanic Resources: Deciding and Drawing Maritime Boundaries (Dordrecht, 1989). 66 For the notion of ‘turning points’ in technological processes, especially in how machines have been applied to human history, see D.S.L. Cardwell, Turning Points in Western Technology: A Study of Technology, Science, and History (New York, 1972), especially pp. 140–95.

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state conceptions of maritime space were very limited, and actions over the control of these spaces were even more difficult to impose. Yet by 1900, the mapping of this vast archipelagic region was fully underway and the effects of this process, especially in the realm of economic and political coercion, were profound and widespread.

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Pains, perils and pastimes Emigrant voyages in the nineteenth century MARJORY HARPER

‘There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1879, reflecting on his crossing of the Atlantic in the steps of his mistress and future wife, Fanny Osborne. His fellow passengers he described as ‘a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal’. Yet, rather incongruously, he continued, ‘it must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene . . . was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety.’1 Stevenson’s juxtaposition of image and reality was replicated in many other accounts of emigrant travel in the nineteenth century, and the relationship between expectations and experiences is a recurring theme in this analysis of the voyage, viewed primarily through the eyes of emigrants from Scotland to North America, Australia and New Zealand. By the time Robert Louis Stevenson went to America, steam had eclipsed sail and transatlantic travelling times had been slashed. Nevertheless, a voyage in an emigrant ship was still a test of endurance rather than a luxury cruise, and did nothing to build up the passengers’ strength for the challenges of the new life that lay ahead. Modern perceptions of the privations of the emigrant voyage have been neutralised by generations of airline travel which, for all its discomforts, has certainly shrunk the globe, making it difficult to appreciate the tedium and the trials of overseas travel in the nineteenth century, particularly by sailing ship, but also in the faster, more reliable age of steam and rail.

A wealth of sources Our lack of comprehension is certainly not attributable to deficient evidence, for the actual process of emigration was always a subject of great interest. It 1

Robert Louis Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado (Cambridge, MA, 1966), pp. 10–12. 159

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generated innumerable eye-witness accounts, since keeping a diary was, if nothing else, a strategy for coping with boredom during a long sea passage, at least for cabin passengers. Emigrants’ journals can be supplemented by captains’ logs, along with instructions and advice frequently offered in pamphlets and guidebooks and the evidence of official enquiries that exposed fraudulent practices or picked over the pieces of shipping disasters. This wealth of material demonstrates how emigrants arranged their passages, how they coped on the journey to the port, as well as during the voyage itself, how they were received on disembarkation, and how they made their way to their final destination. It also discusses the differences between cabin and steerage travel, transatlantic and Antipodean voyages, fraudulent and honest agents and captains, and officious and helpful immigration officials. By the 1850s it is possible to detect the effects of technological development on travel by both sea and land, as steam replaced sail on the high seas, and the bullock cart was displaced by the iron horse on the transcontinental trek.

Advising, serving and protecting the traveller Even before the nineteenth century, would-be emigrants were well aware that crossing the threshold from the old to the new world was a major leap of faith that required careful planning, stamina and a strong stomach. There was no shortage of advice available to them on how to prepare for the voyage, while those in the opposite camp sought to deter them with dire warnings of its grave, perhaps mortal, dangers. Today, the major tourist attraction in Pictou, Nova Scotia, is a commemoration of the Hector, otherwise known as Canada’s Mayflower, which in 1773 brought out almost 200 highlanders from Wester Ross to Nova Scotia and inaugurated large-scale Scottish settlement of the Maritime Provinces. The waterfront complex, with a replica of the ship as its centrepiece, focuses on oral traditions describing the trials and tribulations of a ten-week voyage, during which measles and smallpox broke out, eighteen children died, provisions rotted and the passengers whiled away the time by picking wood out of the rotting hull with their fingernails.2 In the nineteenth century, the publication of warnings and advice developed into a major industry. There was an implicit consensus that the emigrant voyage was to be endured rather than enjoyed, and advice centred on issues such as when to leave, how to avoid being defrauded, and how to cope with seasickness. Until 1835 transatlantic passengers were told to prepare for a 12-week voyage, and to leave as early in the season as possible in order to plant a crop and effect a settlement before the onset of winter. Those going to Canada were advised, if they could afford it, to enter the country via New York

2

Donald MacKay, Scotland Farewell: The People of the Hector (Toronto, 1980, new edn, 1996). 160

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and the Great Lakes, thus avoiding the hazardous St Lawrence Seaway, which was also ice-bound between October and May.3 There was certainly no shortage of vessels plying the Atlantic. Many of them were timber ships which picked up their bulky cargoes in Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and the St Lawrence and deposited them at ports right round the British Isles, where they then collected emigrants for the return voyage. Although it has sometimes been assumed that these ships were disease-infested, overcrowded and leaky tubs that were on their last legs, recent research has demonstrated that many were in fact new, top-grade vessels, registered A1 at Lloyd’s, and therefore the best available ships of the time.4 Shipowners went to considerable lengths to locate passengers, with a network of agents springing up in the hinterland of the embarkation ports, and it seems that it was the reliance of the emigrant trade on timber ships that helped to ensure the continuation of the preferential tariff arrangements on North American timber until the 1840s. Fares averaged £3–£4 in the steerage and £10–£12 in the cabin, and advertisers were often at pains to reassure hesitant passengers by emphasising the commodious conditions or the good order that prevailed on board their vessels. In the second half of the century, when steam replaced sail, emigrant sailings became much more focused on a few ports, especially Liverpool, which was already the major embarkation port for Britain and Europe. Steamship passages cost about a third more than those in sailing ships, but it was money well spent, for the time at sea was slashed. In the new age of steam, emigrant transport came to be dominated by names like the White Star, Allan, Anchor, Dominion and P&O lines whose agents, scattered across the length and breadth of the country, recruited the emigrants and sent them to the embarkation ports by means of the new network of railways. For the emigrants’ protection, the voyage was regulated by a series of passenger acts between 1803 and 1855. The legislation attempted to tackle problems such as delayed departures, overcrowding, mixed sleeping arrangements, lack of water closets and cooking facilities, and poor or non-existent medical attendance.5 The passenger acts were easier to enforce on government-chartered ships to Australia than on the Atlantic run, where there was no regulatory agency, and improved conditions in the 1850s were due more to the combined effects of a fall in the number of emigrants and the advent of the safer, quicker

3

Contemporary publications that offered Scottish emigrants advice on the voyage included Counsel for Emigrants (Aberdeen, 1832, 1838) and The Emigrant’s Friend: Scriptural Instruction for a Long Voyage (Montrose, 1851). The transmission of advice is discussed in E.C. Guillet, The Great Migration: The Atlantic Crossing by Sailing Ship since 1770 (Toronto, 1963), and Helen Woolcock, Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1986). 4 Lucille H. Campey, ‘The Regional Characteristics of Scottish Emigration to British North America, 1784 to 1854’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1998). 5 Ibid. 161

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steamships than to legal requirements. Self-regulation was probably more effective than government intervention, since shipowners and captains who wanted to generate repeat business needed to maintain a good reputation and most of them were not the unscrupulous fly-by-nights that opponents of emigration made them out to be. Yet that is not to deny that emigrants were vulnerable to fraud, particularly if their embarkation port was a long way from home and they were subject to delays before they were allowed to embark. Liverpool had the unenviable reputation of being Britain’s worst port in terms of the prevalence of fraud and assault on naïve emigrants, who were warned to avoid the swarms of ‘runners’ who frequented the railway station and docks, changing emigrants’ money into dubious dollars and taking them to squalid lodging houses, where they were charged exorbitant accommodation fees. On the other side of the Atlantic, New York had a similar reputation, and wherever they landed, newly-arrived emigrants were generally advised to leave the port for their final destination as soon as possible. These hazards could be reduced if the emigrants were chaperoned and suitable arrangements were made for their reception. Some emigrant parties were recruited and led by clergymen, who often inspired remarkable loyalty among their followers. Particularly notable was Norman Macleod, a rusticated presbyterian cleric and schoolmaster from Assynt in Sutherland, who over a thirty-year period led his flock half way round the world, beginning in 1817 when he persuaded four hundred Highlanders to build six ships and cross the Atlantic with him to Pictou in Nova Scotia. A year later, two hundred of these ‘Normanites’ built another boat and moved on to St Ann’s in Cape Breton, where they remained until 1851. Between then and 1860 Macleod persuaded about nine hundred of his followers to build six more ships and accompany him to South Australia, Victoria and ultimately New Zealand, where they eventually established a one thousand-strong Gaelic-speaking community at Waipu in the North Island.6 Tight supervision also surrounded the exodus of Mormons from Britain, which reached a peak in the 1840s and 1850s. Lancashire was a fertile source of Mormon recruits, and most of their ships sailed from Liverpool. Matthew Rowan’s journal offers a glimpse into the procedure followed on the Mormon ships in 1855. The evening previous to our embarking, all the Pastors and Presidents of Conferences were called to meet with F. D. Richards [a Mormon missionary] at his lodgings for the purpose of getting instructions as to how to conduct ourselves and those on shipboard during our passage. It was prophicied [sic] by F. D. Richards and Daniel Spencer that if we on board did right we would be preserved, and not a soul of us would die; but if we did wrong it would be otherwise with us. On the 21st our arrangements were made, and the ship was divided into 7 wards and each ward had

6

Flora McPherson, Watchman Against the World (Toronto, 1962). 162

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a President, I being appointed to preside over the 5th ward, in which chanced to be quite a number of my old Scotch acquaintances. The Presidents of each ward had each 2 counsellors, and in each ward were appointed 2 Teachers, to visit and keep the Saints in good order etc. Strict discepline [sic] was observed, cleanliness rigidly so, and the order was to retire to berths by 9 P.M. and get up in the morning by 5 A.M.7

The Mormons’ arrival was equally well orchestrated. Ships were met at New York by church agents who protected the new arrivals from fraudsters, as well as ensuring that they were fitted out with provisions and transport to Utah.

The voyage experience: pain Many emigrant diaries provide a detailed account of the entire process of leaving and arriving, from embarkation to final settlement.8 Pain, in various forms, was a recurring preoccupation of the diarists, who often opened their accounts with a description of the trauma of parting. Jane Burns was only twelve when she sailed with one of two pioneer parties of Scottish settlers to the presbyterian colony of Otago in New Zealand in 1847. Her father, the Reverend Thomas Burns, nephew of Scotland’s national bard, after promoting the new colony at meetings all over the country, threw in his lot with the pioneers and emigrated himself as their pastor. In December 1847 he shipped his wife and children aboard the Philip Laing at Greenock in a party of 247 emigrants under Otago’s other main promoter, Captain William Cargill. Jane later recalled the incessant rain, the life-threatening illness of one of her siblings and the solemnity of the relatives who came to bid them farewell. Never while I have the power of memory shall I forget that sad dreary day. I cannot describe the discomfort around us. The poor passengers looked so dispirited and weary; women weeping and little children looking so home-sick . . . I heard some one say – I think it was the mate – ‘The one half of these poor people will never cross the line’. I turned down into our cabin . . . to be out of the way of so much sadness and discomfort. But things did not seem much better there.9

7

F.S. Buchanan, ‘The Emigration of Scottish Mormons to Utah, 1849–1900’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Utah, 1961), pp. 82–3, from Matthew Rowan, Journal, 55. 8 For an analysis of emigrants’ diaries, see Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-century British Emigrants (Manchester, 1994). 9 National Library of New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull Library (hereafter NLNZ, ATL), aMSS-0131, Jane Bannerman (née Burns), retrospective account of a voyage from Scotland to Otago in 1847. 163

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The next pain experienced by most passengers was that of sea sickness. While it was no respecter of persons, it would have been more tolerable in the privacy of a cabin than in the fetid, overcrowded steerage. It was certainly an ordeal that loomed large in the memories and writings of most emigrants who recorded their experiences. John Mann of Perthshire, who sailed from the Clyde to New Brunswick in 1816, claimed that it was common practice for ships’ captains, on vessels which supplied provisions, to feed the passengers on the first day with porridge and molasses, so that they would be sick and therefore unlikely to demand their due ration thereafter.10 Thomas Fowler of Aberdeen complained bitterly about the quality of the food supplied by the captain on a three-week voyage to Quebec in 1831. During most of that period Fowler remained prostrate in his cabin, showing little sympathy for the sufferings of the steerage passengers, ‘because we were frequently disturbed with the noise they made’.11

Perils The pain of seasickness was compounded by the peril of stormy weather, when the passengers were often in mortal terror. Their fears were well founded, for shipwreck was a very real danger, as was fire, particularly on wooden vessels with open braziers and unguarded oil lamps. Not surprisingly, these frequently fatal catastrophes rarely feature in diaries, but the details can be found in official investigations and press accounts. Lurid emigrant shipwreck was grist to the mill of many Victorian newspapers and journals, not least the Illustrated London News. Between 1847 and 1851, forty-four ships were wrecked on the transatlantic crossing, and 1,043 people were drowned, including 248 who died in 1847 when the Exmouth was driven ashore on the coast of Islay shortly after leaving Londonderry for Quebec and 176 who died when the Ocean Monarch caught fire in the Mersey, still in sight of Liverpool, also in 1847. On 28 September 1853 the Annie Jane, sailing from Liverpool to Quebec with a cargo of iron and around four hundred steerage passengers, was wrecked off the Hebridean island of Vatersay. Although she was a newly built A1registered ship, she had already returned once to Liverpool for repairs after a gale. Then she was dismasted again by another equinoctial storm, this time foundering in the surf and rocks of Bagh Siar on Vatersay. The vessel broke into three pieces and about 350 people were drowned. Naked and mutilated bodies were washed ashore and were buried in a common pit overlooking the

10 John Mann, Travels in North America, particularly in the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada and New Brunswick, and in the States of Maine, Massachusets [sic] and New York (Glasgow, 1824), pp. 1–2. 11 Thomas Fowler, The Journal of a Tour through British North America to the Falls of Niagara (Aberdeen, 1832), p. 13.

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site of the disaster. By the end of the year an enquiry had blamed the tragedy on two factors: improper stowage of cargo, and too small a crew that was also, being French Canadian, unable to understand orders given in English. According to one of the survivors, Glasgow blacksmith Angus Mathieson, a petition had been drawn up and presented to the captain, asking him to make for the nearest port after the ship was dismasted and labouring in heavy seas but, he went on, ‘instead of reading or paying any attention to it, he pitched it overboard, observing that they (the passengers) had got him to put about on a former occasion, but that he would have satisfaction out of them the second time’.12 Other perils of the voyage were more unambiguously man-made. Emigrants who were brave enough – or foolhardy enough – to cross the Atlantic during the Napoleonic Wars were advised to travel in well-armoured ships, and as late as 1837 a clergyman sailing from Leith wrote in his diary of the danger of piracy on the high seas. The main cabin of his ship, the North Briton, was furnished with guns and cannon as a defence against pirates, who, he claimed, were prevalent in tropical latitudes, attacking becalmed ships, murdering all on board, stealing the cargo and sinking the ship with the passengers shut in the hold.13 In fact, disease was a much more serious and persistent peril than piracy. Epidemics could spread like wildfire in the squalid, unventilated steerage, particularly among passengers whose resistance had been worn down by poverty, reduced further by unwholesome food and water, and aggravated by unhygienic shipboard practices. Jessie Campbell, en route to New Zealand in 1840, was horrified at the habits of Highlanders who constituted a large percentage of the steerage passengers on the Blenheim. Capt Gray and the doctor complaining woefully of the filth of the Highland emigrants, they say they could not have believed it possible for human beings to be so dirty in their habits, only fancy using the dishes they have for their food for certain other purposes at night, the Dr. seems much afraid of fever breaking out among them, this would really be a judgment on us, poor as I am no consideration on earth would tempt me to trust my little family in a ship with Highland emigrants if I still had the voyage before me.14

To her horror, one steerage passenger was subsequently diagnosed with smallpox, but fortunately the infection did not spread and he later recovered. Twenty-two years later, in 1862, John Anderson gave a graphic account of the 12

British Parliamentary Papers, PP 1854, LX (296). Report on the wreck of the Emigrant Ship Annie Jane and alleged grievances of the Emigrant passengers on board; with appendices. See also Bob Charnley, Shipwrecked on Vatersay! (Portree, 1992). 13 National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), MS 1412, diary of the Revd Mr Tait, 1837. 14 NLNZ, ATL, q-MS-0370, Jessie Campbell diary, 12 September 1840. 165

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outbreak of illness and the callous attitudes on board the City of Dunedin, where the floor of the hospital was three inches deep in water and where the attitude of the doctor and captain left a lot to be desired. ‘If you live you live and if you die you die it is all one to them’, was his observation.15 For some emigrants the voyage was an end rather than a beginning. Children were particularly vulnerable, and their demise could pass relatively unnoticed and unmourned, at least by passengers and crew who were not personally involved in those tragedies. Robert Cromar from Aberdeenshire, who kept a diary of his voyage to Quebec in 1840, simply listed dispassionately the burials at sea, including one of a child whose committal to a watery grave at 5.30 one morning was witnessed by none but the father, two passengers and the seamen. ‘I was too late of getting up to see the funeral ceremony’, he wrote, ‘but one of the sailors told me that the corpse was merely laid on one of the hatches and turned overboard into the sea without any ceremony whatever than a hearty curse from the Captain to one of the sailors for not turning the hatch in the proper way. I thought he might have let the cursing alone until the corpse was out of sight at any rate.’16 Not surprisingly, the recollections were much more poignant if the writer had experienced a personal tragedy. Alexander Robertson sailed from Aberdeen to Quebec in 1846 with his pregnant wife and seven children. Fourteen days into the voyage, Ann Robertson gave birth prematurely; child and mother died within two days and were buried at sea. These events were described in a detailed and surprisingly articulate journal kept by 13-year-old Charles, the eldest of the Robertson children. This child’s-eye-view of everyday life aboard an emigrant sailing ship reflects the way in which Charles’s sentiments lurched between hope and despair in tandem with the lurching of the ship and his mother’s fluctuating condition. It also gives us an insight into the crushing nature of his bereavement, as does a letter from Alexander Robertson to his parents-in-law, written during the final stage of the voyage up the St Lawrence. ‘I often lean on the side of the ship that my poor wife was last seen’, he told them and, after describing the circumstances of his wife’s death, he concluded dolefully, ‘I often wish that we would be driven against some rock, that we might all have the same grave.’17 While conditions on the government-chartered Antipodean ships were generally better than on the less carefully regulated Atlantic passage, passengers were cooped up for much longer periods, and the death toll could be considerable on a four-month voyage to the other side of the world. After potato famine had struck the West Highlands and Hebrides in the 1840s and

15 NLNZ, ATL, MS Papers 2534, Diary of a passage from Glasgow to Otago by John Anderson, steerage passenger. 16 Wellington County Museum, Fergus, Ontario, MU 8 975.82.1, Journal of Robert Cromar. 17 National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, MG 24 I 193.

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1850s, a quasi-government agency, the Highland and Island Emigration Society, sent five thousand emigrants to Australia between 1851 and 1858. Unfortunately, mortality rates were high, probably because the emigrants were destitute and included a high proportion of children. In December 1852 the Admiralty ship Hercules was stormbound in Rothesay shortly after leaving Campbeltown with a contingent of Highlanders. Even at that stage, reported the captain, ‘we have fever, smallpox and measles on board’. During the subsequent voyage fifty-six passengers and crew died and there were several attempts at suicide.18 Worse still was the plight of the thirty-six St Kildans who were forced to wait in Liverpool for several weeks before they could board the Priscilla for Melbourne. According to contemporary reports, the passengers were robust on embarkation, but during the voyage over half of them died because these isolated islanders did not have the immunity to disease that mainland emigrants had built up, particularly to measles. Their mortality rates were much worse than their fellow passengers, the St Kildans accounting for 12 per cent of the passengers but 45 per cent of the deaths.19 Cabin passengers were not immune from such tragedies. Jessie Campbell lost the youngest of her five children, a twin girl, after a shipboard illness of three weeks in 1840. My dear little lamb lingered in the same state all night [she wrote on 23rd October]. She expired this morning at 8 o’ clock; she resigned her breath as quietly as if she were going to sleep without the slightest struggle. What would I give to be on shore with her dear little body, the idea of committing it to the deep distresses me very much, she has made a happy change from the cares and miseries of this world, it is hard to say what misfortune may await us from which she has escaped. The Doctors did not seem to understand what her complaint was, both agreed it was brought on by teething and that she would have had the same on shore.20

Pastimes Shipwreck, raging epidemic and death were dramatic punctuation marks in the emigrant voyage, but they were exceptional experiences and many emigrants had incident-free voyages. Not surprisingly, a comparison of diaries reveals a huge disparity between conditions in the cabin and the steerage. When little Isabella Cameron first fell ill, the doctor ordered her into a warm bath, a luxury not available to the steerage passengers. Cabin passengers had their accommodation cleaned at their convenience, but steerage passengers

18

National Archives of Scotland (hereafter NAS), GD371/232/1, McNeill Papers. Eric Richards, ‘St Kilda and Australia; Emigrants at Peril, 1852–3’, Scottish Historical Review, 71 (1992), 129–55. 20 Jessie Campbell diary, 23 October 1840. 19

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were forced on deck irrespective of the weather and took turns at cleaning duties themselves. The captain of the Blenheim, according to Jessie Campbell, had considerable trouble keeping the Highlanders in the steerage in order, and used a cane to drive them on to the deck in good weather. Robert Ogilvie, who went from Greenock to Quebec in 1847, was equally scathing about the habits of Highland emigrants. ‘They are a Lousy, Lazy, Indigent, Ignorant Set, & such eaters that they had troughs like pigs which they ate out of’, he wrote.21 Not surprisingly, the perspective from the steerage was rather different. According to Isabella Henderson, who went steerage to Dunedin in 1863, steerage passengers were treated like slaves, forced out of bed at 5 a.m. onto decks swimming with water, and were treated with impertinence by the ship’s crew.22 There were major contrasts in food as well as accommodation. Cabin passengers on the fast packets between Liverpool and New York had a varied menu, often with champagne. Those in the steerage were either given their daily rations by the ship’s cook or steward from barrels which were brought up on deck or into the steerage, or they competed with each other to cook their own supplies on ineffective stoves on the wet foredeck. Livestock killed during the voyage was fed to the passengers: the best cuts to the cabin, the inferior cuts to the steerage. For Robert Louis Stevenson, the main advantages of a berth in the second cabin were air fit to breathe, more varied food, and the sense of status. His main impression of the steerage was of its squalor and ‘atrocious’ stench. To visit these nether regions of the ship ‘required some nerve’ for ‘each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese’. He elaborated on the scene: If it was impossible to clean the steerage, it was no less impossible to clean the steerage passenger. All ablution below was rigorously forbidden. A man might give his hands a scour at the pump beside the galley, but that was exactly all. One fellow used to strip to his waist every morning and freshen his chest and shoulders; but I need not tell you he was no true steerage passenger. To wash outside in the sharp sea air of the morning is a step entirely foreign to the frowsy, herding, overwarm traditions of the working class . . . Thus, even if the majority of passengers came clean aboard at Greenock, long ere the ten days were out or the shores of America in sight, all were reduced to a common level, all who here stewed together in their own exhalations, were uncompromisingly unclean.23

21

Glasgow City Archives (Mitchell Library), AGN 1577, Robert D. Ogilvie’s journal, 1847. 22 NLNZ, ATL, 88–222, Isabella Ritchie Henderson diary, 31 July 1863. 23 Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado, pp. 6, 23, 52. 168

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For the duration of the voyage – particularly on the long run to the Antipodes – the ship became a floating village, a microcosm of life on land. Births and marriages were celebrated as well as deaths mourned, schools were organised for the children and religious services were an integral part of many voyages. Public worship was conducted twice a day among Otago’s presbyterian pioneers aboard the Philip Laing in 1847, but sixteen years later Isabella Henderson deplored what she called the ‘mimicry of God’s worship’ on her voyage to Dunedin. ‘The preacher plays cards and drinks brandy all the week through, and then takes the place of minister on the Sabbath’, she complained.24 While public worship encouraged some emigrants to ponder on their eternal destiny, for others it was simply a way of passing the time. At the end of his journal John Anderson, who went to Otago with his wife and baby daughter in 1862, wrote to its unnamed recipient, ‘You wanted me to keep a diary. I have given you every day as near as I could but I think you will soon tire of it as it is always the same thing every day.’25 Anderson’s suggestion that many emigrants found the voyage tedious was reinforced by Alexander Turner, in a diary written during a voyage from Glasgow to Queensland in 1883. ‘It is rather a wearrisom [sic] life this [with] nothing to do but be about the deck and read and smoke’, he wrote, and, like many emigrants, the recurring theme of his journal was a constant preoccupation with weather and sea conditions.26 Various strategies were adopted for passing the time. Transatlantic passengers looked out for icebergs, Antipodean ones for flying fish, and the long passage to the southern hemisphere was enlivened by the traditional dressing up of Neptune and associated celebrations when the ship crossed the Equator. On all routes there were daily sweepstakes to guess the latitude and longitude, dancing was popular, and letters were written to those at home for delivery, if possible, to homeward-bound ships. In good weather passengers gathered on deck to play dominoes or draughts, rain water was collected to wash bodies and clothes, and occasional lectures were given concerning the emigrants’ destination. On one occasion Alexander Turner and his fellow passengers ‘rigged up a bat and ball and wickets and had a regular game at cricket, the only bother we had [was when] our ball went over board every two or three minutes but for all that we passed a very enjoyable afternoon’.27 It was generally up to the captain to make sure that activities did not get out of hand and that discipline was maintained among passengers, as well as crew. Much of this involved the segregation of single men and women. Jane Findlayson, who went to New Zealand in 1876, spoke of fairly tight discipline on board the Oamaru.

24 25 26 27

Isabella Ritchie Henderson, diary, 2 August 1863. John Anderson, diary, September 1862. NAS, GD1/806, Alexander Turner’s diary, 23 July 1883. Ibid., 6 September 1883. 169

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We have plenty of good music [but] we have no communication with the young men so its [sic] only a female dance. They are in the fore part of the ship we in the after part and the married quarters between, it’s a married man who gets up beside us to play the fiddle. Agnes and I were thinking that we had often heard of young women getting acquainted with young men on board ship and afterwards getting married after landing but that sort of work is utterly impossible here, we only see them at a distance, and those who have brothers on board have to get permission from the Doctor to meet half way along the deck and have a chat.28

As in any community, shipboard life was not always harmonious, and tensions and disputes were frequently reflected in the passengers’ diaries. Jessie Campbell’s dislike of Highlanders extended to her fellow cabin passengers, notably the two doctors. One, who came from Caithness, was small, plain and ‘not . . . I should think a clever youth’. The other, she observed, ‘may be a good doctor but you would never think so from his manner, he speaks with such a Highland accent and expresses himself so ill you would think he had not spoken English till he was at least twenty’.29 Discipline was often meted out to crew and passengers alike. Jessie Campbell spoke of one incident early in the voyage of the Blenheim, when an emigrant involved himself in a dispute between the captain and one of the sailors, after the sailor had been put in irons for being lousy, eating the lice and assaulting the captain.30 On another New Zealand bound ship, in 1862, there were two skirmishes involving passengers. One involved two male steerage passengers who came to blows over a female cabin passenger during a dance, but the other, more unusually, involved a drunken cabin passenger who was put in irons after falling down the cabin stairway, struggling with the boatswain and calling the captain a ‘damned swindler’.31 Another emigrant diarist, blacksmith William Shennan from Kirkcudbright, reported that there was ‘nothing but quarrelling and fighting from morning till night’ aboard his Melbourne-bound ship in 1870. The worst offenders were a large contingent of Cornishmen.32 Occasionally there were tangible scandals, usually involving illegitimate births. In 1876 Jane Findlayson and her friend Agnes shared a mess with six other girls, two Scots, three Irish and one English. All were ‘agreeable clean girls’, she commented at the beginning of the voyage, but two months later she had a different tale to tell. I am ashamed to tell you that one of our girls was confined of a daughter last night . . . the doctor sent us all off from where he was, our place is sort of two apartments

28

NLNZ, ATL, MS Papers 1678, Jane Findlayson, diary, transcript, 4 October 1876. Jessie Campbell, diary, 13 December 1840. 30 Ibid., 3 September 1840. 31 John Anderson, diary, 18 August 1862. 32 NLA, MS 596, diary of William Shennan, 21 March 1870, transcribed by Mrs M.R. Shennan, 1987. 29

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with only a short stair between us so just fancy 28 girls put out of our place . . . This has caused a talk all over the ship, when any of us goes out the men will pass remarks such as ‘Who is likely to be laid up among the single girls’. The girl is from Ireland, a farmer’s daughter and had she not come away her father would have shot her, it was unfeeling of them to banish her away amongst strangers. . . . God knows what will become of her when she is well and landed.33

Two days later, however, the baby was found dead, apparently accidentally smothered by the mother. In Jane Findlayson’s opinion, ‘it’s best away as it puts us off our sleep for an hour or two’.

Journey’s end The voyage was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and most passengers were eager to reach their destination. Excitement usually arose when land was sighted, and there was immense frustration if the ship was detained in quarantine. For the majority of emigrants the journey was not over when the ship docked. In Canada, although Quebec was the main port of landing, most emigrants were bound for Upper Canada, several hundred miles further west, or, by the 1870s, for the prairies. The onward journey was often as long, arduous and expensive as the sea crossing, even in the railway age when Robert Louis Stevenson gave a very unappetising description of crossing the United States on the iron horse. Some newly arrived emigrants became strangers in a strange land. Having forged friendships – or at least associations – during the voyage, they were obliged to disperse once the ship had docked, making their solitary way as backwood or prairie farmers, artisans, businessmen or domestic servants. Some, who had emigrated in extended family or community groups, or under the auspices of a sponsoring society, settled communally in pre-arranged locations, while others teamed up with friends made on board ship. Still others – including a significant number who had come out with the aid of remittances or prepaid tickets – joined kin, friends and neighbours who had already emigrated, in a chain movement that was always a key part of the whole emigration business. For all these individuals, the transitional period of the voyage, with all its discomforts, challenges, and contrasts between expectation and experience, was now over. The emigrant had become an immigrant, and the real process of settlement could now begin. In the course of the nineteenth century over ten million people emigrated from the British Isles to overseas destinations. Emigration was a subject of regular political and public debate, not least among imperialists, as well as a practical issue which reshaped the lives of millions of people from all corners

33

Jane Findlayson, diary, 7 December 1876. 171

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of the country and all walks of life. The voyage was always an essential part of the business of emigration, connecting old and new worlds with increasing speed and efficiency. The multifaceted communications revolution which saw sailing vessels give way to ocean-going steamships, railways criss-cross new continents and the telegraph and faster postal links further shrink the globe, also witnessed an explosion of information, which alerted would-be emigrants not only to new opportunities overseas but also to the means of taking advantage of them as either temporary sojourners or permanent settlers.

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Ordering Shanghai Policing a treaty port, 1854–1900 ROBERT BICKERS

Maritime empires are based on ports, many of them beyond the bounds of formal empire, or only latterly incorporated into it. Such ports might be described as bridgeheads – base areas for deeper incursions into indigenous societies.1 In practice, of course, the greatest benefit was often derived from the bridgehead itself. Securing those ports in ways favourable to trade on British terms required a broad repertoire of techniques and a range of collaborators subject to varying degrees of state influence and control. Ronald Robinson’s ‘ideal prefabricated collaborator’ – the settler – was a vital agent even beyond the world of formal colonisation.2 To take one example, British community identity, preserved and manifested in Buenos Aires, underpinned the power of British merchants to protest against, and influence Argentine government policy.3 Michael Reimer’s Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882 (1997) examined a different process, which saw incremental accretions to the power of a transnational foreign power base in the decades up to 1882. Sanitation and public order concerns led to the establishment of transnational bodies which arrogated, in part to consular control, the sovereignty of the Alexandrian authorities.4 The petty regimes established in the Chinese treaty ports took this process a step further. Partly based on precedents for foreign sojourner self-regulation in Qing imperial practice, small municipal administrations developed in the concessions and settlements of China as ports were opened to foreign trade and residence. As well as some

1

John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997), 614–42. 2 Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe, eds, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (Harlow, 1972), p. 124. 3 Vera Blinn Reber, British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810–1880 (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 38–54. 4 Michael Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882 (Boulder, 1997). 173

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absurdly tiny outposts5 there were British Municipal Administrations with tax-raising powers and a full panoply of municipal services in Hankou and Tianjin; Britons dominated an International Settlement administration at Xiamen (Amoy). But Britain’s Chinese jewel was Shanghai.6 The city’s International Settlement shared control of the city with a French concession and Chinese municipal structures but overshadowed this competition, dominating China’s biggest and most important port city and gateway to the world. Britons controlled the settlement. This essay looks at the settlement administration: the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), and its Shanghai Municipal Police force (SMP). British informal imperialism in China developed a range of specific techniques for maintaining the new system set up after 1842. That year the Treaty of Nanjing opened the first treaty ports to foreign trade and residence, ceded the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity to Britain, introduced extraterritoriality and allowed for the posting of British consuls to the open ports working under a Superintendent of Trade in Hong Kong. British diplomats defended this and later treaties and worked, sometimes on their own initiative, to extend the geographical extent and the other frontiers of the treaty world. Consuls fought this battle at the local level and aggressively maintained the dignity of British empire invested, as they saw it, in their persons.7 Beyond this, maintenance of the new system against popular or state resistance was triple-layered. The ships and marines of the Royal Navy’s China Station and (after 1900) locally stationed troops in Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai, delivered the capability for on the spot policing, intimidation or reassurance; secondly, Hong Kong served as first source of reserve forces; thirdly, in dire emergency, units could be despatched from India.8 And so they were in 1856–7, 1900, and in 1926–7. The China coast itself was partly pacified after the wild years of the Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion by the Royal Navy’s China Station, but it was also incorporated into international trade and shipping networks through the work of the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs service (CMC). Morris Langford, Staff Surgeon, RN, benefited from it on 20 October 1904, when he and a companion on a shooting expedition fled to a Light House at

5 Jiujiang (Kiukiang) and Zhenjiang (Chinkiang) on the Yangzi: Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 140–3. 6 On China and the British empire see, most recently, Bickers, Britain in China; Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Britain and China 1842–1914’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 146–69; Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘China’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 643–66. 7 P.D. Coates, The China Consuls: British Consular Officers, 1843–1943 (Hong Kong, 1988). 8 Gerald S. Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy, 1830–1860 (Oxford, 1978); Christopher J. Bowie, ‘Great Britain and the Use of Force in China, 1919 to 1931’, unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1983.

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Chaopeitsui in Shandong province from a gale which had blown down their tent. They had nothing but praise for the Chinese staff at what he declared was the ‘cleanest house seen in China’.9 This lighthouse was part of a system of lights established by the Customs Service, and the ordering of Shanghai took place within the context of the British ordering of the China coast and those of her rivers opened to navigation. After 1863 the Customs was in the hands of Robert Hart, who recruited from the progeny of his Ulster neighbours and serious civil service talent from London.10 Hart was a servant of the Qing state, and his British successors were mostly loyal servants of its Chinese successors. The CMC mapped and named the Chinese coast: here was Elgar Island, there was Middle Dog Light Station, here South West Horn and there Bonham Island (named for the Hong Kong governor).11 The service built lighthouse stations and placed lightships; it set out buoys and marked channels. (In the aftermath of the 1900 Boxer War the Tianjin Commissioner of Customs set up a lighthouse at Qinhuangdao to facilitate the movement of foreign naval traffic.)12 It established harbour conservancy boards and observed the weather. The CMC negotiated treaties, and acted as a buffer between the Qing state and foreign traders. It was a revenue and statistic collecting machine that published fat volume after fat volume detailing China’s imports and exports, as well as other works classifying and cataloguing China, its natural products and its boats. The genius of the CMC, was that although it was plainly dominated by Britons, and although British diplomats expected British occupancy of the top job, it was a multinational agency of the Qing state. But any analysis of the British presence in China which looks only at the agents of the British or Qing states seriously misunderstands the nature of those new establishments on the China coast. In particular, it misunderstands Shanghai where settlement Britons and the SMC carved out a robust semiautonomous position. Shanghai superseded Hong Kong in all ways as the headquarters of the British presence in China, developing a character and an autonomy all of its own.13 Hong Kong had been envisioned as the island depot, a safe haven for British trade in British hands, from which the China trade

9 China: No.2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, Series 679 (1), file 4173, ‘Chaopeitsui visitors book, 1892–1936’. 10 T. Roger Banister, The Coastwise Lights of China: An Illustrated Account of the Chinese Maritime Customs Lights Service (Shanghai, 1932); Stanley F. Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs (Belfast, 1950); John King Fairbank et al., eds, The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs 1868–1907, 2 vols (Cambridge MA, 1975). 11 China: No. 2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, Series 679 (1), file 4124. 12 China: No. 2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, Series 679 (1), file 297, Tientsin Commissioner to Coast Inspector, No. 96, 15 December 1903. 13 Robert Bickers, ‘The Shifting Roles of the Colony in the British Informal Empire in China’, in Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot, eds, Hong Kong’s Transitions (London, 1997), pp. 33–61.

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could be safely undertaken. But it was overtaken by its northern sister, the mother in turn – and this was the language used in fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the opening of the port in 1893 – of the treaty ports established along the Yangzi and in the north after 1860. Shanghai drew in most of the head offices of British China commerce, the mission presence, and a large population of men and women in various service occupations. It did so because it was better positioned for the Yangzi trades, being closer to the northern ports, and because it was already an important trading centre before 1842. But it did so also because it was ordered and orderly. This chapter explains how a local history grounded in a global context needs to be understood if we are to understand the projection of British power into nineteenth-century China. In particular it asks: how was Shanghai made safe for British and international trade?

Shanghai, the SMC and the police The Municipal Council of the Foreign Settlements north of the Yang King Pang – to give it its official name – was formed in 1854, within days of the establishment of British control of the nascent customs service. The first British Consul had landed at Shanghai in November 1843, opening it to British traders six days later. Britons and other subjects of the British empire (British Indians, Southeast Asian Chinese) began to settle in rented houses along a small strip by the banks of the Huangpu river.14 The boundaries of what became a regular settlement were demarcated in a set of Land Regulations, promulgated by the local Chinese administrator (the Daotai) on 29 November 1845. In 1848 the boundaries of the settlement were moved further west, and were again extended in 1899. To the 138 acres administered in 1846 the British settlement added 470 in 1848, another 1,309 in 1863 and 3,804 in 1899.15 The number of Britons increased and developed in demographic complexity over the next five decades, as a settler community grew, overshadowing a more short-term sojourner community.16 Britons remained the largest foreign community up until 1915. ‘British’ remained a far from simple category even after the end of the treaty era in the mid-twentieth century. The British presence in Shanghai at various times also comprised Parsis, Iraqi Jews (via Bombay), overseas Chinese, elements of the Sindhi diaspora, Sikhs and Eurasians.17

14

Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, pp. 155–75; Coates, China Consuls, pp. 25–6. F.C. Jones, Shanghai and Tientsin: With Special Reference to Foreign Affairs (London, 1940). 16 Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai, 1842–1937’, Past and Present, no. 159 (1998), 161–211. 17 On different facets of this world see: Chiara Betta, ‘Silas Aaron Hardoon (1851–1931): 15

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Road building was often the first act of organised colonial activity in areas that fell under colonial control or influence. Shanghai was no different. A ‘Committee of Roads and Jetties’ was formed in 1846 to deal with practical problems faced by the community as houses and godowns were constructed, and as a network of streets grew. The Committee was the forerunner of the council, a body elected, when nominations were contested, by the foreign Land Renters. Britons predominated, both as electorate and council. The literature on the SMC is underdeveloped, and the nineteenth-century archives are still closed.18 Kerrie MacPherson has produced the only detailed lengthy study of council activities. In A Wilderness of Marshes: the origins of Public Health in Shanghai, 1843–1893,19 she argues the case for the overriding importance of sanitary science in making Shanghai ‘healthy, viable, and profitable’. Pre-treaty Shanghai was not a city capable of supporting population growth, and the new dispensation developed a municipal organisation, the SMC, that established an infrastructure for growth and for engagement with the world. Within this MacPherson discusses the role of the activities of British medical experts in the settlement in relation to such issues as sanitation, water supply, campaigns against cholera and venereal diseases, etc. This is convincing, and echoes similar processes elsewhere, for example in Alexandria. In the later nineteenth century the SMC became increasingly bureaucratic and structured along the lines of an English urban council. It increased the territory it administered, in both physical, and social terms, as its public health, construction, law enforcement, licensing, and educational activities took its authority into ever more areas of Chinese and foreign life in the settlement, and in the surrounding districts. For this it needed a police force.

Marginality and Adaptation in Shanghai’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1997); Maisie J. Meyer, From the Rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: A Century of Sephardi Jewish Life in Shanghai (Langham MD, 2003); and two essays in Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot, eds, New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953 (Manchester, 2000): Chiara Betta, ‘Marginal Westerners in Shanghai: The Baghdadi Jewish Community, 1845–1931’, and Claude Markovits, ‘Indian Communities in China, c.1842–1949’, pp. 38–74. 18 Recent additions to the literature include the discussion of the SMC’s engagement with Chinese society in Bryna Goodman, ‘Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read Multiethnic Participation in the 1893 Shanghai Jubilee’, Journal of Asian Studies 59:4 (2000), 889–926, and with Chinese nationalism in Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, 1995), and parts of Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History 1849–1949 (Cambridge, 2001); earlier works include: G. Lanning and S. Couling, History of Shanghai, vol. 1 (Shanghai, 1921) and vol. 2 (printed but suppressed as its language was not in tenor with changing times); F.L. Hawks Pott, A Short History of Shanghai (Shanghai 1928). 19 Kerrie L. MacPherson, A Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai, 1843–1893 (Hong Kong, 1987). 177

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Shanghai Municipal Police The history of colonial policing is also still somewhat under-studied. David Arnold’s history of policing in Madras – a study which aimed to ‘show the central importance of the police to an understanding of the history of modern India’ – paved the way for a series of works on policing in the British empire and dominions.20 Unlike many aspects of imperial history, there has been systematic examination of the role of metropolitan institutions (notably the Royal Irish Constabulary or RIC) in the development of overseas agencies.21 The fact also that the modern police was a recent innovation in the metropole itself makes the study of policing a fruitful field for examining the mechanisms by which ideas and personnel were circulated.22 As Arnold also noted, colonial policing had to seek compromises with – or dispense with – existing institutions. It touched most indigenous lives in ways few other colonial institutions could, and it was often left unreformed by new, post-colonial regimes. In some aspects Shanghai was no different but we still know very little about International Settlement practice, especially in the nineteenth century. Most studies have looked at the settlement as an issue or agent in Sino-British relations, rather than in terms of a local, internationalised, history. The SMP was of course just one instrument, and policing just one form, of social control in the International Settlement but it was the body which came to have daily responsibility for its physical functioning.23 The 1845 Land Regulations allowed the foreign community to employ watchmen but made no mention of a police force.24 However, by July 1853 the rapidly growing settlement faced a refugee problem as a result of the social dislocation caused by the Taiping crisis; some twenty thousand Chinese are estimated to have sought the sanctuary of foreign military protection after the Chinese city of

20

David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986), p. vii; David Anderson and David Killingray, eds, Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester, 1991), and the same editors’ Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–65 (Manchester, 1992). 21 Richard Hawkins, ‘The “Irish Model” and the Empire: A Case for Reassessment’, Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire, pp. 18–32. 22 Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd edn (London, 1996); David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (Manchester, 1997). 23 For the role of Chinese institutions see, for example, Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation; Leung Yuen-Sang, The Shanghai Taotai: Linkage Man in a Changing Society, 1843–90 (Honolulu, 1990). The only work available which looks at the early history of the SMP, and which was composed with access to the early archives is the chapter in the suppressed second volume of Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, vol. 2, pp. 264–81. 24 Hawks Pott, Short History of Shanghai, p. 17. 178

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Shanghai was seized by the rebellious Small Sword Society in September 1853. Ten thousand Chinese took refuge in a shanty town along the banks of the Yangjingbang. The Committee of Roads and Jetties recommended that a European police force should be established, as the streets are infested with beggars and perambulatory cookshops, and in case regulations are to be put into force to prevent leading horses, blocking up the ways with building materials and the transportation of mud in open bushels over the roads.25

These issues illustrate the growing complexity of affairs in the Europeans’ residential and business reserve. Chinese residents were there to stay. They were ‘too numerous in existing circumstances to be removed en masse, and too respectable and closely connected with the foreign trade to make it either necessary or expedient’.26 The Committee had previously tried to employ Chinese to deal with such problems but Europeans would take no notice of Chinese, nor would Chinese be prepared to recognise any authority invested in their compatriots by foreigners.27 Similarly, a European police was formed in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1868 specifically to deal with the problem of European rowdies in the city.28 So, unlike most colonial police forces, the SMP had a substantial body of European constables. The first meeting of the Foreign Renters under the new Land Regulations of 1854 took the decision to establish a foreign police force.29 The old Committee had increased its nominal stature, and was beginning a century-long process of self-aggrandisement of powers and responsibilities in the city. The first contingent of men arrived from Hong Kong where they had been recruited from the Colony’s force, and were on patrol by September 1854; fifteen men and two superintendents were in operation by November.30 Twenty-four men manned the SMP in June 1856; eight of them were on duty for eight hours at any one time. Some idea of the duties of the police can be gleaned from the monthly reports published in the North China Herald from July 1855 onwards. In the fortnight before 7 July that year, for example, Chinese miscreants were charged with assault, petty theft, and creating a disturbance. There was a murder (but the defendant had escaped) and one foreign seamen was caught stealing a gold watch and chain. The European was sentenced to a year’s gaol with hard labour in Hong Kong. The Chinese were gaoled, deported from the settlement, bound over, or handed over to the local

25

North China Herald (hereafter NCH), 30 July 1853, 205. Great Britain: Public Record Office (hereafter PRO): FO 228/195, Shanghai No. 24, 15 February 1855. 27 NCH, 30 July 1853, p. 207. 28 Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 144. See also Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, p. 70. 29 Pott, Short History of Shanghai, pp. 35–7. 30 NCH, 2 September 1854, 18; 11 November 1854, 59. 26

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Chinese authorities.31 The force’s morale was appalling in the early years. In 1859 dismissals and resignations were ‘too frequent’ and even ‘two of the oldest members of the force, who had previously borne a good character’, deserted.32 The police were paraded weekly before the members of the Council, whose Chairman routinely upbraided them for persistent drunkenness, or less frequently, applauded their good behaviour.33 The earliest set of regulations barred the men from entering brothels, or accepting refreshment. It also enjoined them to go to church at least once every Sunday, the Inspector being further obliged to note down the names of those attending, and those defaulting.34 This was not an injunction peculiar to Shanghai, which early acquired an unwholesome reputation.35 The crisis of the Taiping drive towards Shanghai after 1860 led to a further massive influx of Chinese refugees. So crowded was the Settlement in 1862 that refugees were to be found ‘camping out on the Bund’ itself.36 New drafts of European soldiers and seamen were brought into the city; a massive increase was also necessary in the police force to deal with the ‘depredations’ of ‘gangs of miscreants’. In 1864 ‘Shops were robbed by daylight, sycee was stolen in the streets, and various outrages committed’.37 Ninety-two men had been recruited from the British Army’s 31st Regiment in May 1863. At one point 155 men were employed at the SMP’s three stations, but the police force itself constituted a significant law and order problem and the hope that the army recruits would be ‘settling down creditably in their new career’ was misplaced.38 In 1863 constables came before the Consular Court on no less than 61 occasions, in a year when there were 386 court cases. Most of the men were charged with drink-related offences. Other charges included assault, bribery, attempted extortion and absence from duty.39 So recruiting on the spot, the only option initially for the nascent police forces of informal empire, produced no better results in Shanghai than elsewhere, for example in Alexandria.40 The undermining of discipline by drunkenness was not confined to Shanghai; nor did the British have a monopoly of bad-behaviour. Out of 2,800 constables serving in London’s Metropolitan Police in the mid-1830s, 2,338 had been dismissed by 1834, four-fifths of them allegedly for drunkenness.41 Ex-members of the

31

NCH, 7 July 1855, 197. NCH, 25 February 1860, 31. 33 NCH, 16 March 1861, 42; 11 May 1861, 75. 34 PRO FO 671/6, [Rules] for the Guidance of the Shanghae Municipal Police Force (n.d.). 35 Taylor, The New Police, pp. 53–4. 36 PRO FO 228/329, Shanghai No.129, 9 June 1862. 37 NCH, 8 October 1864, 162. 38 SMC, Annual Report 1863–64, p. 9. 39 PRO FO 97/111, Shanghai Police Sheets, 1863 passim. 40 Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 144. 41 Clive Emsley, ‘The English Bobby: An Indulgent Tradition’, in Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 132–3 n.6; Taylor, The New Police, pp. 57–9. 32

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former American settlement’s force were accused of a spate of crime in 1861.42 The first Superintendent of the SMP was himself charged with extortion in 1860.43 After the founding batch of men from Hong Kong, early recruits had largely been discharged seamen, and this factor was blamed for their unreliability.44 When the established strength was increased, soldiers were preferred as possibly more reliable. This hope being soundly disproved, a new Superintendent with fifteen years’ experience at Scotland Yard arrived from Britain with an Inspector and a Sergeant in 1864.45 Another large batch of men was recruited directly from British forces in 1883–4, while a new Chief Inspector was recruited from Hong Kong in response to a highly critical report on the force’s effectiveness and efficiency.46 As in English forces, there was no systematic training of recruits until the early years of the twentieth century.47 This cyclical pattern of decay and reform of the force through the infusion of experienced new blood was played out many more times thereafter. In 1865 a Chinese component was added, and in 1884 a detachment of Sikhs was recruited for the first time. Various policing functions were ‘raced’. As neither Sikhs nor Chinese were considered ‘trustworthy’ by virtue of their ethnicity, and because of notions about character imported with the personnel, Europeans performed a supervisory role, overseeing the Chinese beat constables and the Sikhs (who were mostly put to traffic policing). Differences in notions of trustworthiness, and worth as well as expense, were stratified in the same way: Europeans were considered more trustworthy than Sikhs, who were in turn more expensive and trustworthy than Chinese. Europeans, as in India for example, were also used in situations where there was more interaction with European residents but they were also primarily a patrolling force themselves.48 There was also an element of affectation and conspicuous consumption in this on the part of the settler elite – councillors expected to be saluted in the street and to have the men stand to attention when they entered police stations – but there was still felt to be a practical need to have Europeans available to deal with European seamen.49 Foreign racism and an

42 NCH, 22 June 1861, 98; 28 September 1861, 155. The American and British settlements were combined in 1863 to form the International Settlement. 43 NCH, 24 November 1860, pp. 186–7. 44 Hong Kong had no better luck: Henry Lethbridge, Hong Kong: Stability and Change (Hong Kong, 1978), pp. 193–5, 225–6. 45 SMC, Annual Report 1864–65, p. 2. 46 Report of the Watch Committee for 1883 upon the Shanghai Municipal Police Force and Scheme for Reorganisation (Shanghai, 1883), p. 14. 47 Taylor, The New Police, p. 51. 48 Arnold, Police Power and Colonial rule, p. 71. 49 Rules and Regulations for the Guidance and Instruction of the Shanghai Municipal Police (Shanghai, 1881), p. 22.

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inferior physique were considered equally to obstruct the ability of Asiatic personnel to police or arrest Europeans. Using aliens to police aliens was hardly a colonial innovation: English cities were policed by rural recruits, Birkenhead by Irishmen.50 But the Sikh on the Shanghai street was a conspicuous sight and came to symbolise colonial power for Chinese and foreign observers alike. No less alien to the city were many of the Chinese constables. As ‘martial race’ typologies were imported into China and grafted onto existing Chinese regional and provincial characterisations, so northern Chinese were preferred for the Shanghai police service, as being more ‘loyal’ and of better physique. Language was, as a result, not only a problem for European constables – who were not required to learn the local dialect until 1899 – and Sikhs, but for many Chinese recruits as well.51 The SMP grew steadily in numbers. By 1862 there were 62 men, by 1865 there were 62 Europeans and 42 Chinese. Thereafter the number of Europeans settled at around 30 until 1883, these men supervising about 100 Chinese. The foreign establishment was increased to 50 in that year, and the number of Chinese more than doubled. In 1890 there were 389 men (60 Europeans, 49 Sikhs, 280 Chinese), and by 1900 there were 795 police (75 Europeans, 159 Sikhs, and 561 Chinese). The SMP hierarchy – ‘race’ apart – was pretty flat, even after the 1883 reform doubled the number of inspectors. Inspectors, often appointed from the ranks, ran the individual stations but there was no real officer corps and, until the appointment of James McEuen as Captain Superintendent in 1884, the police force stood wholly outside polite society in the settlement. The Shanghai policeman’s lot, he complained – as others complained elsewhere – was not a happy one. The climate, the cost of living and the parsimony of the ratepayers, and the isolation men felt were themes which surfaced again and again.52 A policy of recruiting the ‘backbone’ of the European force from British police forces was embarked on in 1883–4, but although their ‘fine, stalwart forms and military bearing were a distinct acquisition to the appearance of the streets’, these men were soon talking of striking.53 The problem was not merely pay. The recruits complained about their ambiguous status: ‘the social position of a Constable in Shanghai is not to be compared with that of one in England, where a man is treated with courtesy and respect, and is in an English-speaking community’. They found themselves isolated amongst the Chinese population, and subject to the 50

Emsley, English Police, pp. 197–9. SMC, Annual Report 1899, 34. Police regulations noted that Chinese characters ought to be accurately recorded on charge sheets, and that if they were unsure officers were to ask those arrested to write their own names down, which might have been useful for the quickwitted: Rules and Regulations for the Guidance and Instruction of the Shanghai Municipal Police (Shanghai, 1884), 26. 52 Taylor, The New Police, 69; Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, vol. 2, pp. 266–8. 53 NCH, 15 May 1885, 555. 51

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disdain of the foreign elite. By June 1884 seven of these recruits had deserted, resigned, or been dismissed, and eight more were due to go. The men complained that they had no chances of promotion and also that they were required to do military drill (so that they could act as a military defence force if the Settlement was attacked). They also complained that neither of these facts had been made clear to them in London, nor had they been made aware of the high cost of living. The Council retorted that there was a market price for constables, and that conditions were the same in Hong Kong and Singapore. Too true, was the retort: eleven men from Singapore had bolted to the Melbourne police in 1883.54 All told, sixteen of the expensive intake of British recruits left in 1884. Stationmaster’s son Harry Drew was one of these. An ex-City of London constable, he served in Shanghai for all of eight months before moving on to join the New South Wales Police in July 1884. He served there until 1923 – including a stint in the NSW Contingent in the Sudan campaign. Altogether his was a familiar empire trajectory, and it took in Shanghai en route.55 The SMP throughout its history maintained contacts with British colonial forces, especially in Hong Kong, with the RIC and with domestic forces. These contacts were sometimes merely occasional, and there is no consistent pattern. The chiefs of police were drawn, in the nineteenth century, from the Royal Hong Kong Police, the British army, the Metropolitan Police force, the Royal Navy and Hong Kong harbour police, and – on secondment for two years in 1898–1900 – the RIC. A senior officer corps was only created with the establishment of a cadet scheme in 1900. There was no single pattern or model – ‘actual imitation has been carefully avoided’ noted the 1883 report of their contacts with the Hong Kong police.56 The Hong Kong force was itself modelled on the Met; the RIC was certainly a source of direct recruitment at times, but haphazardly. And one of the first actions of the officer seconded from the RIC to reform the force after 1898 was to visit Hong Kong to inspect the force there.57 So even the Irish connection looks less like an obvious search for a model, and more like the exploitation of good links. Perhaps, more significantly, the SMP was a model force. The Municipal Council at Nagasaki requested a copy of its regulations in 1861. In 1898 a detachment was sent off to set up a force in the new British leased territory of Weihaiwei.58 Men had previously been seconded to the British concession at Hankou, or at Jiujiang. One senior officer moved on to run the new force in the International

54

NCH, 5 March 1884, 263–9, quotation from 263. The New South Wales Police News, 1 July 1925, 4. I am most grateful to Mrs Valerie Wotton for supplying me with this and other documents about Drew. 56 Report of the Watch Committee for 1883, p. 6. 57 SMC, Annual Report 1898, p. 34. 58 NCH, 17 August 1861, 130; SMC, Annual Report 1899, p. 37. 55

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Settlement at Xiamen when that was established in 1903.59 The SMP, for all its faults, was seen as a reservoir of expertise and model practices for use elsewhere in the British informal empire in China. The SMP rank and file went where the international market took them – Europeans and Sikhs included (the former to the Antipodes, the latter to north America) – unless they were packed off home. The SMP was always considered to be a key element in local defence, to be backed up by a merchant militia, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC), and by naval landing parties. But it might be noted that until 1883 the police did not receive any weapons training, and that the arms they were issued – which some of them did not know how to load – belonged to the SVC.60 By 1897 the Sikhs were openly regarded as being ‘required to be ready to act as a military body in time of need’. They ought, their commander suggested, to be trained to use machine guns; if so trained these ‘born soldiers’ would probably be able to quell disturbances themselves, thus releasing British mercantile assistants from the bother of being called from their posts.61 The 1890s saw serious attention being paid to the defence capability of the International Settlement. Weapons were modernised and capability extended; defence schemes were updated and improved; supplies were laid in for defence installations. This was one reaction to the changing political climate in China, as French, Japanese and then German imperialism exacted heavy new demands on the Qing state. Settler Shanghai armed itself in response. There is nothing in this picture overall which surprises scholars of colonial policing. It might reinforce the need for greater nuance when it comes to assessing the impact of the ‘Irish model’ of policing on colonial forces, or confirm the polyglot variety of practices and models that colonialism demonstrated even within a single empire. The SMP was a promiscuous organisation. It took men and ideas from police and military units in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, British India, the RIC and the UK. It plagiarised Metropolitan Police regulations in its own guide.62 It served to circulate them within Britain’s Chinese raj, and also served as a European showcase force in China’s most dynamic modern city. This chapter might tend to support an interpretation of the SMP as, ultimately, a paramilitary reserve concerned with protecting the settlement by force. But in fact the SMP spent most of its time struggling to order the streets of Shanghai. It was a parochial force.

59 University of Toronto, Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, J.O.P. Bland papers: Box 3, J.O.P. Bland to Burkill, 13 April 1903; Wright, Twentieth-Century Impressions, p. 814. 60 Report of the Watch Committee for 1883, 11; on the SVC see I.I. Kounin, comp., Eighty Five Years of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (Shanghai, 1938). 61 SMC, Annual Report 1896, 35, Annual Report 1900, p. 5. 62 Municipal Council, Shanghai, Police Guide and Regulations (Shanghai, 1896).

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The business of policing The theme of Chinese resistance to imperialist aggression has heavily influenced many accounts of the Western presence. But recent revisionist works have looked beyond the usual suspects to examine in greater detail the internationalising and innovating impact of the foreign settlements, these enclaves which presented alternatives to the Chinese present on Chinese soil.63 Ye Xiaoqing argued that in nineteenth-century Shanghai ‘relations between Chinese and Westerners were harmonious’.64 But while we can indeed close that historiographical chapter, we can replace it, from the policing evidence, with a far grittier picture of everyday life for Chinese men and women in the settlement that complicates Ye’s harmony. It also complicates the picture of China coast colonialism. Christopher Munn has calculated that between 1846 and 1900 the numbers of Chinese defendants appearing before Hong Kong magistrates – expressed as a percentage of the population – ranged from 5 per cent to 12 per cent, averaging 8 per cent. He concluded that ‘Chinese residents . . . lived under a constantly changing, labyrinthine system of regulatory laws and policing practices, which increasingly criminalized many daily activities and brought thousands of people into direct contact with the law’. For Munn this partly stemmed from the difficulties faced by the colonial government in finding ‘effective collaborators’ in the colony and its resort instead to criminal law.65 By way of direct comparison with Munn’s figures we find the following statistics. In the Shanghai International Settlement, with the same caveats as Munn – namely that there are many repeat offenders, many of the offences are of a minor nature, there was a large transient population, and in Shanghai many of those tried would actually have lived in the French concession or under Chinese administration – we see what seems to be an even more intrusive and punitive regime where actual arrests ranged from a low of 3.23 per cent to a high of 29.43 per cent of the adult Chinese population in the period 1863–1900. Although if we exclude vagrancy and rickshaw offences, we see a more stable range from 2.07 to 7.16 per cent of the adult population. As very few women were arrested (about 1 per cent of the total in 1900) we might even look at the percentage of the adult male Chinese population arrested: which gives us a low of 15 per cent and, in 1895, a high of 58 per cent. These figures are crude, but they do give us a sense of an intrusive policing

63

Rudolf Wagner, ‘The Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere’, The China Quarterly no. 142 (1995), 423–43. 64 Ye Xiaoqing, ‘Shanghai before Nationalism’, East Asian History, no. 3 (1992), 52. 65 Christopher Munn, Anglo China: Chinese people and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1870 (London, 2001), pp. 111–13, and Charts 3.1, 3.2. The sharpness of colonial justice is also a theme in Jung-Fang Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842–1913 (New York, 1993), pp. 114–20. 185

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Table 12.1 SMP numbers and arrests of Chinese, excluding rickshaw offences and vagrancy (per hundred thousand Chinese population)

1863/64 1870* 1876 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900

Chinese population

Total arrests (per hundred thousand)

Arrests excluding rickshaw offences and vagrancy (per hundred thousand)

92,884 76,713 97,335 110,009 129,338 171,950 245,679 352,050

3,233 8,796 7,430 7,871 12,668 28,967 29,428 19,694

2,066 4,428 3,682 2,527 3,369 3,489 5,817 7,164

Source: SMC, Annual Reports, 1863–1900; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian de yanjiu (Research on Population Change in Old Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1980). * After 1870 the International Settlement usually held five-yearly censuses.

regime. Table 12.1 samples these figures in more conventional terms, enabling us to get a more accurate sense of the level of policing. By way of international comparison, the 1900 figure for the Shanghai International Settlement gives us a figure per hundred thousand of population of 7,164 (excluding rickshaw offences), and of 19,693 per hundred thousand including them. The figure for all recorded crime in England and Wales – that is, all reported and recorded offences, not just the arrests which make up the Shanghai figures – was 300 per hundred thousand, itself down from 475 in the first published crime statistics in 1857.66 We might expect that the figures for a rapidly developing industrialising city might be higher, as they might be for a seaport, although such assumptions have been convincingly challenged in the literature on English criminal statistics.67 David Arnold has shown how colonial Madras displayed no greater criminal propensity than its rural

66

Roger Hood and Andrew Roddam, ‘Crime, Sentencing and Punishment’, in A.H. Halsey and Josephine Webb, eds, Twentieth-Century British Social Trends (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 675. V.A.C. Gatrell and T.B. Hadden give slightly different figures, but the overall trend is similar: ‘Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation’, in E.A. Wrigley, ed., NineteenthCentury Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge, 1972), p. 394. 67 David Jones, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth-Century British Society (London, 1982), pp. 4–5; V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in V.A.C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, eds, Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), pp. 238–9. 186

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hinterland.68 But ‘criminality’ in the International Settlement does seem statistically to have been on a markedly different scale. The figures seem to indicate clearly that the SMP’s regime served to criminalise the Chinese male, and disprove the argument that Chinese society in Shanghai was largely unaffected by colonialism.69 One might conclude that the informal imperialism of the Shanghai International Settlement needed to impose itself more sharply on Chinese inhabitants and sojourners, than, for example, the settled colonialism of Hong Kong or Madras. The issue was not urbanization, but the enforcement of foreign rule, foreign norms of behaviour, and the ordering of Shanghai to serve China’s incorporation into the imperial world and international trade. Table 12.2 gives an indication of the proportion of Chinese offenders grouped under three broad categories: offences against property, offences against the person, and social order offences. The ‘other offences’ are predominantly

Table 12.2 SMP numbers and arrests of Chinese, excluding rickshaw offences by category (per hundred thousand Chinese population)

1863/64 1870–71 1876 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 Average 1863–1880 Average 1885–1900

Total offences against property

Total crimes against the person

Total social order

Other

Police strength (per hundred thousand)

1,037 2,022 1,163 931 965 1,031 832 998

183 455 321 268 403 212 236 236

1,279 6,355 5,381 6,571 7,208 16,630 14,350 13,955

734 266 581 189 340 358 576 510

136 153 146 166 232 226 206 226

1,288

307

4,897

443

150

956

272

13,036

446

223

Source: SMC, Annual Report, 1863–1900; Arnold Wright, ed., Twentieth-Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Shanghai and other treaty ports of China (London, 1908), p. 410.

68

David Arnold, ‘Crime and Crime Control in Madras, 1858–1947’, in Anand Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India (Tuczon, 1985), p. 75. 69 Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1999). 187

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related to financial crimes. These figures are not for crimes reported or known to have been committed, but for offenders arrested and charged. (Larceny arrests consistently outnumber reports, largely because of the arrests for offences committed outside the settlement – pawn shops in the settlement served to tempt those wishing to sell on stolen goods.70) The averages broadly indicate that the settlement regime brought down levels of property offences, and made the streets somewhat safer. There are really very few arrests for murder (even a sudden peak in 1896 elicits no need for a comment in the annual report), and little violent crime in general. Of course, one conclusion might be that the low arrest rates might in fact merely indicate that the force was inefficient. However, after the Taiping rebellion the SMC annual reports clearly indicate that serious crime levels were considered to be low, and that the bulk of offenders were being charged with minor offences. Although the force was significantly criticised and reformed at times, there was little doubt that it could do its work after the 1870s. After the 1883 reforms there really is a sharp rise in arrests, as more police – rising from 200 in 1882 to 300 in1885 – who were increasingly freed from non-policing duties, collared more thieves, vagrants and dirty rickshaws than ever before. But overall the most interesting trend is the ever-growing proportion of social order offenders. Clive Emsley has pointed out that these were, of course, the easiest arrests to make (and the 1883 report portrayed a pretty hopeless detective system at work). For David Taylor ‘such offences were a major element in police work’ in England as well.71 But inflected by colonialism, the statistics possibly acquire a darker, oppressive, hue. The foreign arrest figures tell a simpler story. In 1865 the raw equivalent of 68 per cent of the foreign population of 2,300 was arrested. This figure is inflated by the large military and naval presence at that time as a result of the climax of the Taiping Rebellion – and especially those discharged from the foreign-supported mercenary forces which aided the Qing armies in the Shanghai area. The figure also stems, as we’ve seen, from the behaviour of the police. However, three offences alone account for an average of 60 per cent of arrests of foreigners up until 1900: ‘Drunk and riotous’, ‘Drunk and incapable’, and ‘Desertion’. Anecdotal evidence justifies the assumption that most of these arrests involve visiting seamen, who usually numbered about 1,000 at any one time. (There were about 28,000 per annum in the late 1870s). The relatively high rate of arrests would stem from (a) the rowdiness of seamen on shore leave, but also (b) the colonial imperative of protecting the reputation of the foreign community by sweeping up foreign drunks so that they did as little harm to ‘prestige’ as possible in the eyes of the Chinese population,

70

NCH, 5 May 1870, 321. Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (Harlow, 1987), p. 189; Taylor, The New Police, p. 92. 71

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and (c) enforcing social discipline.72 The intimacy of these small communities might suggest that class distinctions were broken down or of less importance, and this is a key strand in settler self-characterisation in Shanghai. However, in these small societies such distinctions became even more important, and regulating the importance of the white working class became a vital strand in the smooth running of British interests. This was a common issue in British colonial states and it has already been shown how big an issue it was for Shanghai police recruits, who were – broadly speaking – confused by their contradictory position: marginal to foreign society, but ‘superior’ to the Chinese.73 The SMP worked to ameliorate the embarrassment the untameable classes might bring their betters in Shanghai. It seems to be clear from these and related statistics that a central feature of the SMP’s activity was the smooth ordering of settlement street life. In particular, from shortly after their introduction in 1875, rickshaws dominate the figures. As early as 1876 the decision was taken to abandon taking rickshaw cases to court – so many constables were giving evidence that the settlement was ‘denuded’ of them – thus simplifying procedures and reducing workloads.74 But this handed over to individual policemen a great deal of power. A ‘bobby’ could confiscate the licence from a rickshaw, or suspend it if a passenger made a complaint. Before 1881 the figures seem to be subsumed within those for nuisances and obstruction. But that year 2,381 arrests were made either because the puller or his vehicle were dirty, or because he was touting for custom, loitering or causing an obstruction. There were 26,260 arrests in 1900, but arrests had peaked in 1895 at 41,781. Most of these men fell under the category: ‘ricksha coolies, dirty or plying for hire with dirty vehicles’. In 1881 there were an average of 1.6 arrests per licence: this figure peaked in 1895 at 12.9 per licence, but was still as high as 3.5 in 1900. In 1890 a special staff of one foreigner and 16 Chinese were organised to deal with rickshaws.75 Not surprisingly rickshaw offences more than quadrupled in number between 1889 and 1891. The rickshaw has come to symbolise urban poverty in pre-1949 China, and unequal power relationships throughout Asia, wherever they were used, between the raggedy puller and the beefy European passenger, and between the policeman and the puller – who was at the mercy of the man who might at any time confiscate his licence (but who might return it swiftly for a small, discreet, consideration). Rickshaw pulling was a simple profession to enter, 72 Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, vol. 2, ch. 28, ‘Rowdysm, Drink and Some Remedies’, pp. 326–32. 73 See, for example, David Arnold, ‘European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7 (1979), 104–27; Kenneth R. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London, 1980). 74 SMC, Annual Report 1876, p. 20. 75 NCH, 13 February 1891, 173.

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provided the puller had enough capital to rent the vehicle from the licensee. But it was risky, and if no fares were gained then the result could be a net loss for a day’s work. It was an entry-level occupation for immigrants to Shanghai. Turnover in personnel was swift as men returned home, or moved up the employment ladder.76 Consequently competition for fares was strong (hence touting loudly for business, and loitering for fares), the rules of the road were not well known (they were written on the licences, but pullers were mostly illiterate men), and the city streets unfamiliar. Most migrants would also not understand the pidgin English used to communicate with them, nor the multiple and polyglot range of names used for the city streets. Getting to your destination might involve a degree of luck; in Revd Darwent’s guide to Shanghai it also involved mastering the puller: the ‘passenger ought in his own interest to watch the coolie and in a way assume command of him’. To aid the assumption of command there is a short vocabulary of pidgin English imperatives: ‘stop’, ‘go quicker’, ‘be careful’.77 As the International Settlement expanded the rickshaw became the prime mode of urban public transport. Europeans rode in nothing else, unless they could afford a carriage. As streets were metalled and macadamised, and the traditional wheelbarrow barred from major routes, a safe, clean, timely ride in a rickshaw, direct to the stated desired destination with no haggle over the fare became the ideal. Shanghai’s continued development depended on the availability of an increasingly sophisticated range of financial and communications services to support its prime position as focal point for China’s foreign trade, and a great deal of domestic trade. It was also increasingly felt to depend on the administrative competence and machinery of the SMC itself. All these service sectors needed to tempt trained and qualified personnel to take positions in the city, and so Shanghai needed to show that it was safe and healthy, more so as it increasingly had to be safe enough for families. Ordering the rickshaw was vital. The police also acted to suppress street cries, remove beggars and vagrants – who could choose in 1871 between deportation across the river or delivery to a Home for the Destitute78 – and enforce regulations controlling the manner and timing of the carriage of nightsoil through the city streets (close fitting metal buckets were prescribed).79 The ears, eyes and noses of foreign residents were thus protected. Fireworks and firecrackers were a considerable firerisk, as was incense burning, but their suppression was also concerned with 76

SMC, Annual Report 1882, p. 31. On the rickshaw world in twentieth-century China see: David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley, 1989), Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights, 67–105, and also Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei people in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 59–61. 77 Revd C.E. Darwent, Shanghai, A Handbook for Travellers and Residents (Shanghai, 1912), pp. xiv, iv. 78 SMC, Annual Report 1870–71, pp. 28–30, 40. 79 SMC, Annual Report 1896, p. 57. 190

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protecting European sensibilities from smell and noise. Specific moves were made to strengthen control of the street. An increase in Chinese offences by 5,280 in 1869 over the previous year, was due to the ‘insertion of three new headings to the schedules of offences’: committing nuisances, obstruction (by wheelbarrows mostly) and vagrancy.80 The SMP worked to dampen and corral Chinese street life, regardless of the social background or political importance of those concerned. When Li Hongzhang stayed in the settlement in 1883 scuffles broke out as Municipal Policemen attempted to prevent his guards firing the required cannons whenever he entered or left his residence. Li noted that on Chinese soil the SMP had no right to interfere with Chinese practice, but so as not to disturb residents he ordered his attendants to desist.81 As a moneyed Chinese elite developed in the settlement so did, for example, new theatres, restaurants, brothels, pleasure gardens and other places of entertainment ‘which have to be controlled’ as the 1883 report noted. 82 Hawkers and rickshawmen congregated outside these, adding to the throng already caused by the private vehicles of those inside, and by bystanders. The SMP worked to suppress such activity, corralling it into approved streets during hours which the Europeans considered respectable.83 ‘Loitering’ at night became a criminal offence after 1870, but anyway, it was claimed, those who loitered were ‘all known professional thieves’.84 The police also acted to enforce regulations barring most Chinese from European pleasure gardens, mostly notably and notoriously the Public Garden on the Bund.85 As old lanes were straightened, metalled and macadamised, or as new areas came under municipal control, the police moved in to enforce the rules of the road (driving on the left, waiting only at approved and assigned stands) and after 1881 European notions of the proper treatment of animals (cases of which rose sharply in 1897). As new foreign houses were built, Chinese were prevented from ‘indecently’ bathing, urinating or defecating in public – ‘a considerable number . . . to their surprise found themselves suddenly in the Mixed Court’ for example when new houses were built on the north side

80

NCH, 5 May 1870, 321. SMC, Annual Report 1883, pp. 169–71. 82 Report of the Watch Committee for 1883, p. 15. There were intermittent missionary drives to have all brothels suppressed – an 1871 report noted that there were 463 in the International Settlement and 250 in the French Concession: NCH, 9 February 1887, 144; Edward Henderson, A Report on Prostitution in Shanghai (Shanghai, 1871), pp. 11–12. A lock hospital scheme was in operation from 1877 to 1899: Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 273–83. 83 SMC, Annual Report 1885, pp. 48, 69; SMC, Annual Report 1886, p. 36. 84 SMC, Annual Report 1870–71, p. 39. 85 Robert Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ‘Shanghai’s “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted” Sign: History, Legend and Contemporary Symbol’, The China Quarterly, 142 (1995), 444–66. 81

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of the Suzhou Creek in 1881.86 Other branches of the council swept and cleaned the main roads twice daily (and alleyways once daily).87 Number plates were fixed to those doors that Chinese constables were enjoined to check were locked at nights. Police beats and Sikhs on point duty established the settled presence of the SMP, and the primacy of the settler presence. That presence smothered. On the streets the SMC attacked Chinese noise on all fronts. In 1899, following complaints from residents, this culminated in a ban on workmen singing as they drove foundation piles.88 Productivity collapsed – by up to 50 per cent according to the council’s Health Officer the following year – and so the ban was lifted. A thirty-five-year campaign to institute a proper prison regime culminated, again in 1899, in the effective imposition of the rule of silence in prison: ‘this latter’, the report noted, ‘the convicts disliked more than anything else’.89 The policing regime worked to make Shanghai orderly, ‘safe’ in specific colonial terms (property, person, propriety), and as un-alien as was possible. It regulated both the indigenous inhabitants, regardless of their standing in society, and white servants of empire (seamen, soldiers, policemen). But it should always be remembered that the colonial context can mislead, and that in enforcing silence on the streets and in the gaol the SMP was importing contemporary European ideas and practice.90 As London, Liverpool and Bristol were ordered and silenced, so was Shanghai and so were other points in the imperial network.

Conclusion By 1900 Shanghai had matured as a settlement, and the foreign community as a community of settlers. What had been the contingent response to the problem of the moment – Chinese refugees, European disorder – became a colonial fact, and underpinned the effective incorporation of Shanghai into British empire, as it did Alexandria, and other such ports, however much they remained Chinese cities, or Ottoman cities. And with that came a hardening of attitudes towards the unresolved intangibles of the settlement position in China – which had once been seen as a great strength – and greater belligerence generally. Obviously this was of a piece with the tenor and actions of the times – Germany had just pounced in Shandong – but it also derived from a decade of assertive Chinese state and popular activism. The SMP was

86 The Shanghae Evening Courier, 20 July 1869, 979, 30 September 1869, 1227; SMC, Annual Report 1881, p. 46. 87 SMC, Annual Report 1897; SMC, Annual Report 1894, p. 178. 88 SMC, Annual Report 1899, p. 73; Shanghai: Municipal Archives, U 1-16-4354, Health Officer to J.O.P. Bland, 27 September 1900. 89 SMC, Annual Report 1899, p. 39. 90 Taylor, The New Police, p. 105.

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responsible in the first instance for guarding the settlement against internal threats (from disease to civil disorder) and external threats. In 1891, in response to Elder Brother Society (Gelaohui) disturbances, the force intensified efforts to ‘obtain early information of approaching danger’, and arrested ‘suspicious characters who could not give a satisfactory account of themselves’.91 In the later 1890s, policing for a while took on some of the semblance of a preparation for war as the SMP trained with its maxim guns, stockpiled defence supplies and updated emergency plans. And of course war came in 1900, although – and perhaps to the regret of the Shanghai ‘insurgents’ who had tried and failed to bring about a more aggressive British policy in the region – the Boxer year was quiet in Shanghai.92 But even so, the International Settlement, and its colonial reflex, developed a hold of its own over British China policy which was to prove difficult to unpick in the twentieth century. For Kerrie MacPherson, the wide clean Western-style streets of the settlement, which so impressed visiting Chinese and neighbouring administrations, stemmed from the ‘functioning of health imperatives’.93 But not only did the SMP keep those streets clear – sweeping up loiterers, moving on loafers, rickshaws, etc, and preventing dangerous use of the civic space (fireworks, firecrackers or incense) – those so swept up often found themselves building new roads or repairing the old in chain gangs. The state and nature of the city street was one of the many standards of civilisation by which China was judged by foreign observers, and the streets of Chinese cities failed on all such foreign counts. They were portrayed as dank and noisome, dark and narrow and deemed, overall, in equal measures simply inefficient and offensive. For early twentieth-century guidebooks the Shanghai walled city was a place of dark danger and mystery. It was often indeed simply excluded from the maps.94 The contrast with the settlement streets is obvious from any map and any photograph, and these miles of wide, well-lit settlement roads, patrolled and ordered by the men of the SMP, were the freelancer’s best advertisement for himself, for investment in his enterprise, and for continuing British state support, or acquiescence.95 The traffic flowed and the drunken tar or the European woman passenger – one of the increasing numbers of settler women – stood a better chance, it was felt, of finding a safe and clean rickshaw. Parades could be organised. Nobody would be urinating near the public garden. As

91 K.J. McEuen, ‘Police’, in Arnold Wright, Editor in Chief, Twentieth-Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China (London, 1908), p. 409. 92 Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York, 1948). 93 MacPherson, A Wilderness of Marshes, p. 267. 94 Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ‘Locating Old Shanghai: Having Fits about Where it Fits’, in Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu, 2000), p. 205. 95 The best recent collection of Shanghai images is: Lynn Pan, ed., Shanghai: A Century of Change in Photographs (Hong Kong, 1993); a contemporary ‘advertisement’ is: Wright, Twentieth-Century Impressions.

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Kristin Stapleton argued in her study of policing in Chengdu, this is what young Chinese reformers also saw, and what influenced their own policy innovations.96 But the SMC looked outwards, not into China, and the SMP made the International Settlement an imperial city, an effective and predictable node in the international networks of empire. And, for all its persistent intrusions into their daily lives on the Shanghai streets, it probably did so largely with the guarded consent of the Chinese populace, without which it would not have been able to function in this grey world of overlapping jurisdictions and sovereignties. In both of these ways it differed significantly from most British colonial police forces. And it was, in the nineteenth century, primarily concerned with policing. Maritime empire was not enough. Shanghai exemplified how dry land sucked in the practices and personnel of a more formal world of empire. Control of the Chinese Maritime Customs, the binding web of treaties, the threat of the gunboat, the naval landing party, or reinforcements from India were on their own inadequate. To create and maintain a developing China bridgehead like Shanghai increasingly required a professionalised local administration, delivering an up-to-date array of services and able to attract talented personnel. The logic of settlement was inexorable. (And the interests of settlement saw themselves as irrefutable.) Jack Tar came ashore, taking jobs in the CMC, in business, and in the police.97 But the discharged seaman was no policeman. The SMC needed a professionalised police force to cope with the challenges urbanisation and assertive Chinese nationalism were to offer it by the end of the nineteenth century. The SMP’s origins were rooted in the frontier days of the new imperialism on the China coast, which coincided with tremendous internal disorder. Initially the force had served to preserve the International Settlement from Chinese refugees, and from incidents which inevitably seemed to accompany the rowdy results of foreign seekers of the good time the city’s racy reputation promised. By the end of the century its functions had changed. Now it served to maintain the dry fact and character of settlement. It took another forty years to unpick this Shanghai knot, and restore to the British presence in China the flexibility that state interests had only ever sought to secure.

96

Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 66–71, 99–107. Haussman’s redrawing of the map of Paris had its Chinese impact, and the reform of narrow streets is a recurring theme in the essays collected in Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City. 97 Two such trajectories are narrated in: A.H. Rasmussen, China Trader (London, 1954); John Pal, Shanghai Saga (London, 1963). 194

13

Toward a people’s history of the sea MARCUS REDIKER

I begin with words written by the West Indian novelist Jamaica Kincaid: In the Antigua that I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals. There was Rodney Street, there was Hood Street, and there was Drake Street.1

‘English maritime criminals’: to many people, in England and throughout the English-speaking world, these words will sound treasonous. I suspect the author meant them to be. In any case, whether they are or they are not, whether we like them or we do not, we nonetheless need to hear them, for they contain an important truth, one that everyone interested in maritime history needs to ponder. Those historical figures some see as heroes, others see as criminals. And the reverse is true: those historical figures some see as criminals, others see as heroes. Lord Nelson, hero to many, is a criminal to Jamaica Kincaid. Conversely, pirates, criminals to many (certainly to Nelson), were heroes, in their own day as in ours, to many. It is all a question of perspective – more specifically, of the power to impose perspective in the interpretation of history, as in the naming of streets, as in the building of museums, as in the writing of books. It is an old question, of course. Well before Jamaica Kincaid was born, Bertolt Brecht asked: Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with the names of kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

Or more to the point, from the same poem: Philip of Spain wept as his fleet Was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?2 1

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York, 1988), p. 24. Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Worker Reads History’, Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willett, Ralph Manheim and Erich Fried, (New York, 1987). 2

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So let us remember the names of Nelson, Rodney, Hood, and Drake, but let us also ask: who sailed their ships? Who made possible their victories at sea? Over whom and with whom did they triumph? At whose expense the victory ball? Or better yet: whose history is it after all? Whose maritime history is it? Who is in? Who is out? We now live, worldwide, in an age of heightened cultural sensitivity. Whether in London or New York, Cape Town or Calcutta, we live in heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, often divided and conflicting societies. The questions raised by Kincaid and Brecht inform deep and current struggles over history, memory, and identity in the modern age. This is why the old maritime history just will not do anymore. By the ‘old maritime history’ I mean the history that has focused almost exclusively on the Nelsons, Rodneys, Hoods, and Drakes, the great and the powerful of the world’s navies and merchant shipping industries; the well-born and the well-heeled; the admirals, the commodores, the captains; the merchants, the businessmen, the entrepreneurs; their battles by sea and their transoceanic imperial adventures; the national glories heaped upon them, the national mythologies made of and through them. Perhaps the best known writer of the old maritime history in America was Samuel Eliot Morison, the Boston patrician, patriotic admiral, and Harvard historian who wrote about the Christopher Columbuses and the John Paul Joneses of the world. This kind of history looks from the top down – history, in my view, as seen from the wrong end of the spyglass. And let us be honest: it is history often marked by a potent and all-too-common mixture of elitism, nationalism, Eurocentrism, and racism. Let us no longer deny that these things have damaged our histories and our societies.3 If Jamaica Kincaid were here with us today, I would be glad to tell her that things are changing, perhaps not as quickly or as deeply as they should, but changing to be sure. Indeed, perhaps the major intellectual trend in the writing of history in the past generation has been one in which ‘the people’ – in all their contradiction and diversity – have been studied intensively, not only as subjects but as makers of history. Thanks to the work of historians such as Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson and the many scholars they inspired, we have managed over the past generation to shift focus from the names of kings and admirals to workers black and white, male and female, of many nations, races, and ethnicities. We now know to ask about the mutineers hanged by Drake, or the Afro-Caribbean woman whose nursing saved Nelson’s life in 1780.4

3 Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston, 1942); idem., John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (New York, 1959). 4 Exemplary works include E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972).

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As a result we have witnessed in the past generation a dramatic democratization of history – so dramatic that it is at last making itself felt in the traditional and conservative field of maritime history. As several scholars have recently pointed out, the number and variety of maritime historians have expanded in recent years, partly as a result of the disciplinary developments I have briefly described. We now have, in maritime history, ever larger numbers of scholars studying an ever-larger variety of subjects: the traditional areas of naval history and the economics of merchant shipping, but also race, gender, and class, in the dockyards, in the port cities, and on vessels of all kinds. We have scholarship that is greater in quantity and more sophisticated in quality. It would seem that we are moving toward a broader, more inclusive definition of maritime history, one that will encompass not only naval history and merchant shipping, but fishing and whaling, privateering and piracy, ship technology, oceanic exploration, and marine archaeology, the docks and ports, and most especially the many and diverse peoples whose labours made all of these possible.5 And yet despite these welcome, long overdue changes, I would also have to say to Jamaica Kincaid that maritime history continues in many ways to be dominated by narratives of great men and national glory. The cult of Nelson shows no sign of abating, despite Barry Unsworth’s harsh but brilliant illumination of its pathology in his recent novel, Losing Nelson.6 And I would also have to say that maritime history remains somewhat provincial, a strange state given that its natural subjects – sailors – have been perhaps the most cosmopolitan people in history of the world. The ‘citizens of the world’ remained trapped in the stories of nations even though they spent their lives traversing their borders. Much of this limitation is self-imposed: many maritime historians acquiesce in the narrow antiquarianism of their studies, and some even exhibit a perverse kind of tribalism, glorying in the romanticized strangeness and self-segregated ‘marginality’ of their subject, steadfastly refusing to address big and important issues to which their subjects were central. They seem to prefer the eddies of the backwaters to the vigorous currents of the mainstream. I should add that I write this essay just having finished two milestones in my own life, both of which colour my current view of maritime history. During the first four months of the year 2001 I sailed around the world on one of the three remaining US-built steamships, the classic S.S. Universe Explorer, meeting a lot of sailors and visiting a dozen of the world’s great port cities in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. I also recently completed a book, written with Peter Linebaugh, that was many years in the making: The Many-Headed Hydra:

5

David M. Williams, ‘The Progress of Maritime History, 1953–1993’, Journal of Transport History 14 (1993), 126–41; Sarah Palmer, Seeing the Sea: The Maritime Dimension in History (Greenwich, 2000). 6 Barry Unsworth, Losing Nelson (New York, 2000). 197

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Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.7 A major purpose of the book was to recover the transnational experiences of workers from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, taking as the unit of analysis not this or that nation, but rather their connecting body of water, the Atlantic Ocean, which was a vast conduit for the circulation of not only commodities, but peoples, cultures, and ideas. I hope that the book will be judged a contribution to ‘a peoples’ history of the sea’.8 I would like to draw upon what I learned in writing this book (and in reading the work of other scholars) to advance five simple, straightforward, interrelated propositions about maritime history. I wish to emphasize that these are not new. I simply hope that some benefit may be gained in putting them all together. Five points. First, remembering Jamaica Kincaid: maritime history is not simply the story of great men. Or to put the same point another way: maritime history has exhibited – and continues to exhibit – class bias. Second: maritime history is not simply the story of white men. Maritime history has exhibited – and continues to exhibit – race bias. Third: maritime history is not simply the story of Englishmen or Dutchmen, Europeans, i.e., men in service of the nation-state or a ‘superior’ civilization. Maritime history has exhibited – and continues to exhibit – nationalist bias and Eurocentric bias. Fourth: maritime history is not simply the story of men, period. Maritime history has exhibited – and continues to exhibit – gender bias. Fifth (and this one is a little trickier): maritime history is not simply the story of landed society gone to sea. Which is to say: we need to learn to see the world’s seas and oceans as real places, where a great deal of history has been made, and indeed is still being made. Many maritime historians continue to see the oceans as unreal places, as voids between the real spaces, which are inevitably lands or nations. So maritime history has exhibited – and continues to exhibit – what, for lack of a better term, I will call terracentric bias, a land-based set of assumptions about place. Putting all of these together: maritime history is not simply the story of great, white, nationloving men in the service of a small promontory of land off the Asian land mass, once called Christendom and eventually ‘Europe’. Maritime history is – no, must become – something more. This, I think, would constitute my thesis. The persistence of these limitations has helped to produce a cruel current paradox: much of the most creative work in ‘maritime history’ in the broadest sense (meaning any history in which the seas and their peoples are central) is now being done by scholars who would not consider themselves to be maritime historians. The work is being done by social and economic and cultural historians who study maritime subjects; likewise, by anthropologists,

7

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). 8 Raphael Samuel, ‘People’s History’, and Peter Burke, ‘People’s History or Total History’, in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), pp. xv–xxxix, 4–9. 198

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sociologists, economists, literary and cultural critics, geographers, and, I would emphasize, novelists. A new generation of scholars and writers is, as we speak, discovering (or rediscovering) the seas. I wish to suggest in the remainder of my essay that maritime historians have much to gain by engaging new scholarship in a variety of disciplines and fields, all of which is objectively expanding the significance of their own field in relation to almost all others. To put the same point another way, what we need now is a new, more inclusive people’s history of the sea, one which would not only include a broader mass of humanity but show its component parts as active agents of history. Let us begin with the question raised rather brutally by Jamaica Kincaid, of great men. Thousands of faceless, nameless seafaring workers are central to The Many-Headed Hydra, primarily because they were essential to the origin and rise of international capitalism – or, to put the matter in more current parlance, to globalization, which is a very old process, and more specifically to the deep-water sailing ships that were its historic engine. Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher who was the first comprehensive theorist of capitalism, and Karl Marx, capitalism’s profoundest critic, agreed that a new phase of human history – world history, global history – began with the discovery of the sea-routes from Europe to Asia and the Americas in the fifteenth century.9 This new epoch of history depended utterly on the labour of sailors, to make the ships go. As the great and mysterious proletarian writer B. Traven, an experienced sailor himself, once explained, ‘A ship can run without a skipper and officers. I have seen ships do it.’ But a ship ‘couldn’t move an inch without the crew’.10 I am happy to report that much has been done in recent years to begin to capture the experience and point of view of the common seaman, the man who did the sea’s death-defying labour aboard the rolling decks of small, brittle wooden ships on the aqueous portions of the globe. I emphasize ‘begin’. One of the tragedies of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences is that many scholars have abandoned this kind of research for the trendier, sexier, study of language and its putative ordering of social life. We need to get back to basics, to careful empirical reconstructions of the lifeways of peoples long rendered silent in the writing of history. We need to keep working to get inside the heads, inside the hearts, of common sailors, to learn about their hopes and dreams, their fears and nightmares: to find out what their lives were all about. Theirs is, in many ways, a forbidding and inaccessible world, not least because of the scarcity of first-person historical sources. But if we wish to understand maritime history, we must first understand the mass of haggard, common men who gave their lives to a difficult calling and succeeded in connecting the continents of the world. They deserve our sympathetic

9 10

Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, p. 327. B. Traven, The Death Ship: The Story of an American Sailor (New York, 1934), p. 110. 199

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understanding, and we deserve the deeper historical understanding that comes of restoring their voices.11 That said, it remains to be emphasized that the importance of the common sailor is even broader than his own experience. Let me illustrate the point by taking a quotation by Captain Charles Johnson, who may or may not have been Daniel Defoe, but who wrote in the introduction to his famous book, General History of the . . . Pyrates, published in 1724: It must be observed, that our speculative Mathematicians and Geographers, who are, no doubt, Men of the greatest Learning, seldom travel farther than their Closets for their Knowledge, &c. are therefore unqualify’d to give us a good Description of Countries: It is for this Reason that all our Maps and Atlasses are so monstrously faulty, for these gentlemen are obliged to take their Accounts from the Reports of illiterate Men.12

Captain Johnson was wrong, in my view, to blame faulty mapping on sailors, but in another, more critical respect he knew exactly whereof he spoke. Gentlemen, from Sir Thomas More to Michel de Montaigne to William Shakespeare and beyond, had long been going down to the docks to talk to, and learn from, sailors. Raphael Hythloday, readers will recall, was a sailor returned from the sea to narrate the story of Utopia. Montaigne’s servant had been a sailor, whose stories of Brazil led the humanist to write his classic essay, ‘Of Canibals’, in which he concluded the lesser civilized people were not the Native Americans but rather Europeans. Shakespeare used the printed and oral tales of the deep-sea voyagers in writing The Tempest. And so on and so on. The African slave-turned-sailor Olaudah Equiano set the abolitionist Granville Sharp in motion, and his fellow anti-slavery activist Thomas Clarkson disguised himself as a sailor and strolled the wharves of Bristol in order to gather stories of the middle passage, which in turn proved to be booming ammunition against the slave trade. The ‘reports of illiterate men’ were thus central to the origin of utopian literature, humanist philosophy, Renaissance drama, and the abolitionist movement, all because ‘Men of the greatest learning’ went down to the docks to talk to sailors, who were, by the way, more literate than most gentlemen knew! These linkages are crucial to a people’s history of the sea . . . and to a people’s history of much more.13

11

Highlights in the social history of maritime workers include Judith Fingard, Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada (Toronto, 1982); Eric W. Sager, Seafaring Labour : The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Toronto, 1990); Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill, 1994). 12 Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London, 1724, 1728), edited and republished by Manuel Schonhorn (Columbia, SC, 1972), p. 7. 13 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, chs 1, 7. 200

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Second, the question of race. It has long been known that the crews of deep-sea vessels were multi-racial in composition, but this knowledge has had but small effect on the writing of maritime history. The Many-Headed Hydra emphasized not only the existence of ‘the motley crew’ on transatlantic ships, but their creative role in numerous big historical events and processes: the English Revolution of the 1640s, a broad cycle of rebellion in the Atlantic during the 1730s, the American Revolution of the 1770s, the age of revolution more broadly. Take, for example, the sailors of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. By 1850 most British seaports had black residents, and indeed many of these people had been living in their waterfront communities for a long time. Those called ‘lascars’, a generic word to designate a heterogeneous mass of ‘Burmese, Bengali, Malay, Chinese, Siamese, and Surati’ sailors, sailed into Britain on East India Company ships beginning in the seventeenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century they numbered 10,000–12,000 and constituted a significant part – as much as 8 to 10 per cent – of Britain’s maritime labour force. And yet they have remained largely invisible in British maritime history until recently. They are what Conrad Dixon has called ‘The Forgotten Seamen’.14 I would emphasize that The Many-Headed Hydra was just one of many new studies making the same point about race and seafaring. Thanks to the work of Laura Tabili, Jeffrey Bolster, David S. Cecelski, and others, we now know that the maritime industries of Britain and America had much larger numbers of African and African-American sailors than we ever imagined.15 I would like to single out for special commendation a scholar named Julius Scott, who has produced what to my mind is one of the greatest peoples’ histories of the sea in many a year in his study, ‘The Common Wind’, a marvellous account of how sailors black, brown, and white spread the incendiary news of the Haitian Revolution throughout the Caribbean and around the Atlantic in the 1790s and after.16 Indeed, some of the most exciting recent work in any field has

14 Norma Myers, ‘The Black Poor of London: Initiatives of Eastern Seamen in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Diane Frost, ed., Ethnic Labour and British Imperial Trade: A History of Ethnic Seafarers in the U.K. (London, 1995), p. 9; Conrad Dixon, ‘Lascars: The Forgotten Seamen’, in Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting, eds, Working Men Who Got Wet (St. John’s, 1980), pp. 265–77. 15 Laura Tabili, We Ask for British Justice: Workers and Racial Difference in Late-Imperial Britain (Ithaca, 1994); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2001). 16 Julius Sherrard Scott III, ‘The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1986. For a spin-off article, see Julius Scott, ‘Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case of Newport Bowers’, in Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey, eds, Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (New Brunswick, 1991).

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centred on the ‘Black Atlantic’, to use the title of Paul Gilroy’s influential book. In an effort to traverse the boundaries of nations-states, Gilroy ‘settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point’. The ship – ‘a living micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion’ – focuses attention ‘on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs’.17 And geographical knowledge. One result of work on the Black Atlantic has been to focus attention on one of the most important chapters in ‘a peoples’ history of the sea’: the infamous middle passage of the African slave trade. Abolitionists, including (necessarily) sailors, made the middle passage an enduring image and symbol of degradation: suffering, brutality, inhumanity, death. But now we begin to understand that within the vessels of howling misery lay creativity, something new: the defiant, resilient, live-affirming African-American and Afro-Caribbean cultures that originated between the heaving, foul-smelling decks of a ship. (It was said in Charleston, South Carolina, that when the wind blew a certain way people could smell a slave ship before they could see it.) Novelists in particular have done important work in exploring these cultural depths: Caryl Phillips, Charles Johnson, and especially Fred D’Aguiar (Feeding the Ghosts) and Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger). The essays in a recent book called Black Imagination and the Middle Passage also contribute much to the new, emerging peoples’ history of the sea. It must also be remembered that there were many slave trades and many middle passages, involving political prisoners, convicts, indentured servants, sailors, and immigrants of all kinds.18 Third, and closely related to the second proposition: from time immemorial, the social and cultural world of the deep-sea sailor has been not only multiracial but multi-ethnic, international, or, better, transnational. An excellent recent study by the Spanish scholar Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína shows that Atlantic seafaring was this way from the beginning. The sailors whose labours carried Magellan and Cabot around the world were Spanish and Italian and Portuguese, as we might have expected, but also Greek, Venetian, Flemish, German, French, Irish, English, and African.19 Transnationalism has been a fact of social life ever since. Pirate crews were especially motley. The Governor of Jamaica echoed royal officials everywhere when he called pirates a ‘banditti of all nations’. Black Sam Bellamy’s crew was ‘a mix’t multitude of 17 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 4. 18 Caryl Philips, Cambridge (New York, 1992); Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York, 1990); Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (London, 1997); Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (New York, 1993); Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds, Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York, 1999). 19 Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Carla Rahn Phillips (Baltimore and London, 1998), p. 55.

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all Country’s’ [sic]. When hailed by other vessels, pirates emphasized their rejection of nationality by replying that they came ‘From the Seas’.20 In his novel of the sea, Middle Passage, Charles Johnson puts these words in the mouth of his narrator and protagonist, a recently-freed slave by the name of Rutherford Calhoun, who strode through the streets of New Orleans in the year 1830: I turned into the first pub I found, one frequented by sailors, a darkly lit, rum-smelling room about fourteen feet square, with a well-sanded floor and a lamp that hung within two feet of the tables, stinking of whale oil. The place was packed with seamen. All armed to the eyeballs with pistols and cutlasses, scowling and jabbering like pirates, squirting jets of brown tobacco juice everywhere except in the spittoons – a den of Chinese assassins, scowling Moors, English scoundrels, Yankee adventurers, and evil-looking Arabs. Naturally, I felt pretty much right at home.21

British ships – and soon, seaports – were themselves increasingly populated by the same cultural groups in the nineteenth century: African, Chinese, Arab, and East Indian. The S.S. Universe Explorer, I might add, had crew members from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Poland, Greece, and about twenty other countries. The increasingly important areas of Atlantic, Pacific, and global history have each in their own way stressed transnationality. Atlantic history in particular is now proving to be one of the most dynamic new tendencies in modern historical writing, as the explorations proliferate: the Black Atlantic, as suggested above, but also the Green Atlantic (the never-ending Irish diasporas), the White Atlantic (a popular but as yet little-inspected kind of history that based itself on theories of racial Anglo-Saxonism), and, as the Many-Headed Hydra would have it, the motley Atlantic, combining all of these and more. Another example, from the Pacific. Everyone who loves the sea and its literature knows Queequeg, the South Sea island harpooner on the Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Yet how many people know the historical reality of the thousands of ‘kanaka’ sailors who gave rise to the literary image in the first place? David A. Chappell’s important book, Double Ghosts, recovers the lost histories of the Oceanian sailors – Hawaiian, Maori, Fijian, Chamorro, Papuan, Tahitian, Marquesan, and Filipino, collectively called kanakas – who manned European ships in the Pacific from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Chappell describes the full variety of maritime experiences, from forced labour through ‘blackbirding’, to the romantic specimen collection of ‘noble savages’, to harsh, unremitting toil aboard whaling ships and hence

20 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004). 21 Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 18.

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full integration into the world economy.22 A third, more global example. One of the most fascinating pieces of maritime history to be written in many a year is Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, which views the capitalist world economy at the end of the twentieth century from the deck of a container ship. Drawing on and weaving together the work of Walker Evans, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, and Frederick Engels and mixing social photography, art and film criticism, cultural studies, and historical materialism, Sekula examines sea stories of all kinds and finds, not surprisingly, that almost all of them are about authority and hence politics in the broadest sense.23 We also have fine examples of transnational studies of commodities – I think of Sidney Mintz on sugar, Daniel Finamore on mahogany – through which social relations and change have been explored. Transnational studies are, at the moment, one of the cutting edges of scholarship, and seafaring people of many kinds are the sharpest part of the blade.24 Fourth, gender. The Many-Headed Hydra sees women as central to the formation of the Atlantic economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Women? do I hear you ask? What women? Weren’t those grand old wooden ships literally ‘manned’, that is to say, worked by men and men only? Wasn’t the maritime world a male world? The answer to these questions is ‘no’, as rapidly accumulating research, by scholars such as Margaret Creighton, Lisa Norling, Joan Druett, and David Cordingly, is making abundantly clear. Some of the so-called Jack Tars who sailed the ocean deep turn out, on closer inspection, to have been Jane Tars. And of course women were essential to the rise and functioning of the port cities, the nodes of world trade and travel. Maritime history can – indeed must – take into the account the experience of the more numerous part of humanity, the female part.25 It is also important that we understand how women have been ‘hidden hands’ in the world economy – essential hands that took care of business when the ‘invisible hand’ of the market carried the male, seafaring hands away for one, two, and three years at a time. We know, thanks to the pioneering work of Lisa Norling, that the whaling communities of New England could never have survived, much less prospered if not for the women who gave them stability and continuity, based on skills of labour and talents of organizing.

22 David A. Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk, NY and London, 1997). 23 Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Dusseldorf, 1995), p. 48. 24 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); Daniel Finamore, ‘Pirate Water’: Sailing to Belize in the Mahogany Trade, in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, eds, Maritime Empires (Woodbridge, 2004), see Chapter 3 in this volume. 25 Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore, 1996); Joan Druett, She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea (Boston, 2000); David Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History (New York, 2001).

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J. Hector St John Crevecour marvelled at the ability of the women of Nantucket ‘to transact business, to settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and provide for their families’. He wondered ‘what would the men do without the agency of [their] faithful mates?’ What indeed? It is a question that could be asked of almost any maritime community, almost anywhere, in almost any period of history. It is, unfortunately, a question that we have only recently begun to ask. Answers to it promise to take us back to the specific context and community in which maritime men and women lived their lives, and to give an entirely new and altogether necessary dimension to a peoples’ history of the sea, showing seaport women as ‘agents’ of history.26 Let us turn now to what may be considered the strangest of my five propositions: that maritime history is still plagued – and limited – by the assumptions and biases of landed society. Let me introduce the point by reading brief comments about ships and the sea by two writers, each of whom has, in his own way, been profoundly influential, but who could hardly be more different each from the other: the Polish/British novelist Joseph Conrad and the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Conrad, who himself spent considerable time at sea, once called a ship ‘a fragment detached from the earth’.27 When I first read this line, I was struck by its familiarity and currency: yes, this is true; many of us think this way, and rightly so. On second thought, I began to wonder about the ambiguity in the quotation regarding the term ‘earth’, which means on the one hand the soil, the land, and on the other, the world, the planet. It is true, as Conrad implies, that the ship is made by people on land, that it is peopled by sailors who come from the land, and that the relations of landed society are carried aboard. But Conrad’s phrase has an almost studied ambiguity to it, and in the second sense he is wrong: ships are by no means detached from the planet. He implies that the deep-sea vessel – and its workers – somehow exists in a realm apart. They are otherworldly, inhabiting an unreal space (the ocean) between real spaces (the earth). Compare Foucault: a ship is ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself, and at the same given over to the infinity of the sea’.28 A floating piece of space, this is helpful, but floating on what? The rest of the quotation shares the assumption that the sea is no space at all, a ‘no place’ (which was, by the way, the original meaning of utopia). For Foucault the realm apart is infinity, a zone that defies human comprehension. We must get beyond this kind of thinking. A highly creative effort to do so was organized in 2000 by two young German scholars, Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, who brought together scholars from many disciplines and many parts of the world for the

26 Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill, 2000), pp. 16 and 17 27 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (London, 1897) p. 18. 28 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986), 22–7.

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conference, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, c.1500–c.1900. It was an effort to see port cities, ships, the seas, and the oceans as ‘transnational contact zones’ – real places where the cultures and peoples of the world have ebbed and flowed, swirled and crashed and mixed and transformed each other – real places where history has been made.29 The conference was, in practice, a manysided exploration of the famous poem by Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea Is History’. Where are your monuments, your battles, your martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The Sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.30

Walcott’s poem concerns the violence of enslavement, the middle passage, and the loss of African and American history, but like so much of that painful history, it serves as an emblem of something much larger. The poem says to me that we must overcome a deeply inculcated, often unconscious terracentrism, which would have us believe that the oceans are empty places, spaces without history. It is our job to unlock the grey vault and make it give up its deep, hidden secrets. This is the challenge of writing a new, broader, more diverse, more complex, more inclusive, and more democratic people’s history of the sea, and this, in the end, is the only way to answer the challenge thrown down by Jamaica Kincaid.

29

Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York and London, 2004)/Das Meer als kulturelle Kontaktzone: Raeume, Reisende, Repraesentationen (Konstanz, 2003). 30 Derek Walcott, Poems, 1965–1980 (London, 1992), p. 237. 206

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222

Index Aberdeen 117 Aceh 145, 150, 151, 152, 157 Aden 10, 68, 72, 73, 76, 78, 80–3 African Lakes Corporation 122 African Steamship Company 108 agents 32–3, 45, 161 Airy, George 140 Alexander, HMS 86 Alexandria 71, 72, 74, 75, 173, 177, 179, 192 Algeria 59 Allan Line 161 Anchor Line 161 Anderson, John 165–6, 169 Anglo-Boer War, Second, 1899–1902 55 Anglo-Dutch Treaties 144, 145 Annie Jane (emigrant ship) 164–5 Appert, Nicholas 86, 89, 91 Apsley Strait 132 Arafura Sea 135, 140 Arctic 84–98 Argentina 59, 173 Armstrong, John 138 Auckland, Lord 81, 82 Australia 56–7, 61–5, 125, 128–9, 130–41, 161, 162, 166, 167 Bahrain 50, 51 Ballantyne, R.M. 11 Bangka 148, 150 Banks, Sir Joseph 90, 94 Barbados 33 Barclay, Curle and Company 106 Barrow, Sir John 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138 Basra 50, 51, 52 Batavia 145, 146, 147, 149, 152 Beagle, HMS 5, 137 Beaufort, Francis 11, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140 Beijing 174 Belfast 107, 118 Belgium 123 Belitung 148, 150

Belize 30, 33, 42 Ben Line 117 Bengkulu 145 Benin, Bight of 16 Bentinck, Lord William 71 Biafra 7, 13, 14, 17, 19, 28 Bikol peninsula 63 Blackwood, Captain Francis 131, 137, 138, 139 Blakang Padang 150 Blake, George 112, 117 Blane, Gilbert 87 Blenheim (emigrant ship) 165, 168, 170 Bligh, William 134 Bold, Jonas 20 Bombay 51, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82 Bone, Captain 37 Bonny, Rio Real 14–16, 18–27, 29 Borneo 145, 146, 147, 151, 153 Bounty, HMS 134 Bow and McLachlan, Paisley 122 Brassey, Lord and Lady 114 Brecht, Bertolt 195 Bremer, Captain John Gordon 131, 138 Bristol 5 British and African Steam Navigation Company 106, 108 British Central Africa Protectorate 122 British India Steam Navigation (BISN) 51, 57, 103, 104, 106, 107, 119, 124, 126 British Municipal Administrations 174 British North Borneo Company 145, 146, 155 Brook, Charles, Rajah of Sarawak 155 Brown, Robert 46 Brunei 142 Buenos Aires 173 Bugis 130, 146, 149 Burmah Oil Company 124 Burns, George, 2nd Lord Inverclyde 102 Burns, John, 1st Lord Inverclyde 102 Burns, Revd Thomas and family 163 Burns Philp 125 223

INDEX Bushire 51 Butterfield and Swire 103 Calcutta 51, 53, 56, 69, 70, 71 Calcutta Steam Committee 69 Caledon yard, Dundee 117, 123 Cameron, Isabella 167 Campbell, Colonel 73 Campbell, Jessie 165, 167, 168, 170 Campbell, Major John 135 Canada 3, 84, 86, 128, 160, 171 Cape of Good Hope 53–6, 59, 70 Cape Town 70 Cape Verde Islands 53 Cape York 128, 139, 140 Card, Jonathan 43 Carey, William 10 Cargill, Captain William 163 Case, George 20 Castle Line 103, 104, 108 Cayzer, Charles 102, 106, 108 Celebes 131 Chamberlain, Joseph 118 Chaopeitsui, Shandong province 175 Chapman, William 45 Charles Eaton (emigrant ship) 136 Charles Janson (Lake steamer) 121 Chauncy Maples (Lake steamer) 121 Chengdu 194 Childers, Erskine 12 China 49, 63, 64, 65, 120, 173, 174, 175 see also Hong Kong; Shanghai Chittagong/Chittagonians 108, 125 Church of Scotland 121 Churchill, Winston 122–3 City of Dunedin (emigrant ship) 166 Clan Line 102, 106, 108 Clare, Lord 78, 79 Clarkson, Thomas 200 Clement Hill (lake steamer) 122 Clyde 117, 120 coal 34, 68, 70, 72–8, 80, 81, 82, 101, 111, 112 Colonial Office 6, 32, 131, 132 communications 6, 9, 68–9, 79, 139 conference system 119, 121 Conrad, Joseph 10, 12, 146, 205 convoys 42–3 Cook, James 93, 130, 134 Cook, Thomas 114, 115, 124 Coote (EIC ship) 76 Coral Sea 135, 136, 140 Cornwall (merchant ship) 40, 41, 43, 44 Cosseir 72, 74, 80

Crawfurd, John 133 credit 20–1, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29 Crimean War, 1854–6 52 Cromar, Robert 166 Cuba 16 Cummings, Maria 43 Cunard Steamship Company 102, 108 Currie, Archibald 57 Currie, Sir Donald 102–3, 104, 106, 109, 114, 115, 119, 120 Dalla 124 Dalrymple, Alexander 134 Darwent, Revd C.E. 190 Defoe, Daniel 12 Dempster, John 106 Denny’s of Dumbarton 107, 116, 121 disease 2, 24, 45–6 Dixon, John 46 Dominion Line 161 Donaldson, Peter 46–7 Donkin, Bryan 85, 86, 88, 91 Donkin, Gamble and Hall 86 Donkin’s preserved meats 87, 89, 91, 94–9 Douglas, Captain 40 Drew, Harry 183 Duke family 19, 26–7 Dundee 117 Duowari 23 Duria Dowlat (ship) 81 Dutch see Netherlands Earl, George Windsor 133, 136, 138, 140 East India Company 4, 51, 53, 68–83, 130, 131, 133, 135, 201 East India Trade Committee 131 Eastern Telegraph Company 108 Edinburgh 116 Efik 19, 20, 22, 27 Egypt 66, 81, 82 Ekpe society 21–2, 23, 27, 28 Elder, Alexander 106 Elder Brother Society (Gelaohui) 193 Elder Dempster 108 Ellerman, J.R. 102, 103, 104 Elphinstone, Mountstuart 71 emigrants 8, 9, 108, 115, 159–71 Empire Exhibition, 1938 117 Endeavour, HM Bark 5 Enterprize (EIC ship) 70, 72, 73 Equiano, Olaudah 200 equids 7, 48–66 ethnicity 113, 124, 125, 201–2 ethnography 114, 129, 149 224

INDEX Euphrates, river 123 Exmouth (emigrant ship) 164 exploration 5, 92, 199 Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company 106, 116 Farish, James 82 Fellete, Captain 33 Findlayson, Jane 169, 170–1 Finlay & Co. 108 Fitzgibbon, John, Earl of Clare 74, 75 Flinders, Matthew 131 Fly, HMS 137 food technology 9, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 94, 98 Fort Dundas 132 Fort Wellington 132 Fortunee (French ship) 25 Foucault, Michel 204, 205 Fowler, Thomas 164 Fox (French ship) 25 France 1, 16, 58, 59, 123, 130, 147, 165 Franklin, John 86 Freedom (merchant ship) 44, 46 freight rates 100, 106, 121 Frere, Sir Bartle 107 Furness, Christopher 102, 103, 106–7 Fury, HMS 84, 85, 86, 88 Fyffes 118 Gale & Sons 36 Gallillee, Captain 36 Garand, Daniel 38 Gericke, Baron 154 Germany 123, 156 Gillows of Lancaster 116 Glasgow 104, 107, 116–17, 120, 122, 124 Glover, Thomas Blake 117 Goa 124 Good News (lake steamer) 122 Goodwin, James 46 Grant, Sir Robert 81, 82 Great Barrier Reef 134, 136, 137, 139, 140 Greenlaw, C.B. 80 Greenwich Hospital 46 Grenston, Peter 39 Griper, HMS 86 Guam 63 Guendolen (Lake steamer) 122 guidebooks 114–15, 116, 160 Guimbert, Jean Jacques 25 Gunung Tabur 153 Guthrie (apprentice) 36

Haines, Commander Stafford Bettesworth 80, 81, 82 Haiti 201 Hankou 174, 183 Harrison Line 124 Hart, Robert 175 Havelock, Sir Henry 49 Hawke, HMS 45, 47 Hecla, HMS 86, 88 Hector (emigrant ship) 160 Henderson, Isabella 168 Henderson, Paddy 124 Henley family 32, 43, 46 Henty, G.A. 12 Hercules (emigrant ship) 167 Herschel, John 5, 140 Hickey, Mary 32, 47 Highland and Island Emigration Society 167 Hobhouse, Sir John 79, 82 Hodson, George 49 Holt, Alfred and John 102, 103, 104, 105 Home, Ann 44 Honduras 30, 31, 32, 33, 43–4, 47 Hong Kong 65, 174, 175–6, 179, 183, 187 Hooker, William 140 Horry, Robert 35–6, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45 horses see equids Horwood, Charles 36 Hugh Lindsay (EIC ship) 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 Hui 64 Hunt, James 35, 46 Hyde, James 32 hydrographic surveying 11, 93–4, 128–40, 142–58 Ilala (lake steamer) 121 Ilocos 63 Imperial British East Africa Company 122 Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs (CMC) 122, 174, 175 imperialism 98–101, 107–10, 112, 116–19, 130, 143, 144, 192, 194 India 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 59, 68, 79, 83, 98, 99 Indonesia 60, 63, 120, 131, 142, 143, 148 Inglis, Ellis & Co 32 International Maritime Marine 108 Inuit 95, 96, 97, 98 Iraq 50 Irrawaddy Flotilla Company (IFC) 123, 124, 125 225

INDEX Isabella, HMS 85, 86 Iwaidja people 132

Lytham Shipbuilding and Engineering Company 123

Jacobs, John 38 Jamaica 33, 43 Jambi 153 Japan 65, 120, 143, 156 Java 60, 61, 62, 145 Jeddah 72, 74, 78, 80 Jiujiang 183 Johnson, Captain Charles 200, 202, 203 Johnston, Sir Harry 122 Jones, Sir Alfred 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 114

Ma-Robert (lake steamer) 121 Macassans 130, 131, 132, 133 McEuen, James 182 MacGillivray, John 138–9, 140 Macgregor Laird 108 Mackay, James, 1st Lord Inchcape 102, 103, 104, 107 Mackenzie, Robert 107 Mackinnon, Sir William 51, 57, 102, 103, 107, 109, 114, 119, 120 McLeod, Sir Charles 117 Macleod, Norman 162 Macmillan (publishers) 114 Maculla 74, 76, 80 Madeira 33 Madras 51, 53, 70, 71, 178, 186–7 Madrassis 125 mahogany 7, 30–7, 41, 44–5, 47 mail services 71, 108, 114 Makassar Strait 155 Malacca 152 Malays 125, 130, 133, 149 Malaysia 60, 63, 133, 142, 143, 145, 148, 157 Malcolm, Captain Sir Charles, RN 71–5, 78, 80, 81, 83 Malcolm, Sir John 72, 74 Malcolm, Admiral Sir Pulteney 72 Manchester 118 Manchester Ship Canal 118 Manchuria 64 Manila 63 Mann, John 164 Mansfield and Company 103 Manwaring, Richard 38 Marathas 51 maritime history 195–206 democratisation 198, 205–6 gender 204–5 race 198, 201–2 transnationalism 198, 202–4 Marx, Karl 199 Mary (merchant ship) 40, 43, 44 Mascarenes 57–60 Massawa 58 Mathieson, Angus 165 Mauritius 49, 58, 59, 60 Melaka, Straits of 144, 145, 146, 152 Melvill, Sir James Cosmo 71, 72 Melville, Herman 203 Melville Island 128, 132, 133

Kalawari 23 Keene, Vachel 32 Kilwa (steamship) 120 Kincaid, Jamaica 195, 206 King, Philip Gidley 131 King, Philip Parker 131, 132, 134 Kingston, W.H.G. 11 Kinnear, James 37 Kipling, Rudyard 111, 112, 126 Kirkaldy, Adam 117 Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM) 62, 147 Kuwait 50, 51 Labuan 151, 152, 155, 157 Lady Juliana (merchant ship) 33, 34, 35, 37 Lady Nyassa (lake steamer) 121 Lahej 76, 77, 81, 82 Lambeth, John 39 Langford, Morris, RN 174 Laws, Dr 121 Leith 116, 117 Lever Bros. 123 Li Hongzhang 191 lighthouses 174–5 Likoma Island 121 Lindsay, W.S. 113 Lingard, Captain 146 Linnaeus, Carolus 94 Liverpool 16, 18, 19, 104, 107, 116, 118, 120, 161, 162 Livingstone, David 121 Lobnitz & Co. 117 London 47, 107, 116, 120, 121 Lord Nelson (merchant ship) 42 Lord Rodney (merchant ship) 34, 43 Lubang 63 Lyon, George 88, 91, 96, 98

226

INDEX metal manufactures 101, 104, 105 Mindoro 63 Minengani incident 120 Mocha 72, 74, 78, 80 Montaigne, Michel de 200 More, Sir Thomas 200 Moresby, Commander Robert 72, 74 Morison, Samuel Eliot 196 Mormons 162–3 Muhammad Ali, Pasha of Egypt 81–2 Muhammara (Khurramshar) 50, 52 Murchison, Roderick 133, 135, 136, 140 Murray, John 114 Mysore 51 Nagasaki 183 Nanjing, Treaty of, 1842 174 Napier (Robert) 106 naval architecture 101, 116 Naval Stores Act, 1721 31 navigation 6, 42–3, 129 Neptune (merchant ship) 46 Netherlands 1, 123, 130 and equid trade 61, 62, 63 and Southeast Asia 143, 144–5, 155–6 Netherlands East Indies 149, 150, 157 New Guinea 135 New Zealand 56–7, 65, 66, 162, 163, 166, 168 Newcastle upon Tyne 104, 107, 116 North Briton (emigrant ship) 165 Nova Scotia 160, 162 Nyasa, Lake 121, 122 Nyasaland (Malawi) 123–4 Oamaru (EIC ship) 169–70 Ocean Monarch (EIC ship) 164 Ocean Steam Ship Company (Blue Funnel) 103, 105–6, 107 Oeconomy (merchant ship) 34, 38 Ogilvie, Robert 168 Okonko 23 Old Calabar 14–16, 18–21, 23, 24, 27, 29 Oman 50, 58, 120 Opuwari 23 Orang Laut 149 Orient Line 115 Ottomans 51 Owen, Admiral Sir Edward 78 Owen, Robert 140 palm oil 7, 13, 14, 17, 25 Palmerston, Lord 82 Pandora, HMS 134

Pangkor Engagement, 1874 145 Parry, William Edward 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98 Paslow, Thomas 47 pawning 22–3, 24, 26, 27, 28–9 Pearson, William 36, 37 Penang 60, 152 Pender, John 108 Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) 103, 104, 107, 119, 161 Penny, James 20 Pepper, Captain 76, 77 Pepple family 24, 25, 26 Percy Anderson (lake steamer) 122 Perim 80 Persian Gulf 50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 69, 120 Peterson, Thomas 39 Philip Laing (EIC ship) 163, 169 Philippines 63, 64, 142 Philipps, Owen, Lord Kylsant 102, 104 Pickstock, Thomas 47 Pictou, Nova Scotia 160, 162 Pilgrim (merchant ship) 33 piracy 153, 154, 165, 202–3 Poingdestre (James & John) 47 Port Essington 11, 128, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 140 Porter, Andrew 112–13 ports 4, 117, 121, 151, 174, 176, 204, 206 see also named ports Portugual 16 Potts, John 32 Priscilla (emigrant ship) 167 propaganda 111, 112, 119 Qing armies 188 Qinhuangdao 175 Queen Victoria (lake steamer) 122 race see ethnicity Raffles, Stamford 130 Raffles Bay 132, 133 Rangoon 124 Rattlesnake, HMS 11, 139 Rea Transport 123 Red Sea 69, 70, 80 refrigeration 118 Rennie and Co., Greenwich 122 Réunion 58, 60 Riau 148, 150, 153 Ritchie, Graham and Milne 122 Robertson, Alexander and family 166 Robin family 26 227

INDEX Ross, James Clarke 96 Ross, Captain John 84–98 Rowan, Matthew 162–3 Royal Geographical Society 133, 135 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) 178, 183 Royal Mail Steam Packet Company 104, 108 Royal Navy 68, 71, 112, 174 Russia 49, 65 St Ann’s, Cape Breton 162 Sapphire, HMS 38 Sarawak 146, 155 Savannah (US ship) 69 Scots 112, 113, 119, 124, 125 scurvy 87 seamen 4, 35–47, 199–200 ethnicity 4, 5, 35, 124, 125, 201–2 Shakespeare, William 200 Shandong province 175 Shanghai 65, 173–94 International Settlement 176, 184, 186, 193 Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) 174, 176, 177, 183 Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) 174, 178–92 Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC) 184 Sharp, Granville 200 Sharpe, Sir Alfred 122 Shennan, William 170 shipbuilding 2, 9, 101, 104–7, 113–14 shipowners/companies 101, 102–4, 106, 107, 113 shipping 34–5, 45, 61–2, 106–9, 113, 120, 143, 147, 149 ships 5, 116, 117, 120–1, 206 container 12, 203 emigrant 161–2 engines 9, 70, 77, 101, 105, 121, 124–5 equid transport 58–9 local 118, 120, 125, 126 prefabricated 121–3 special cargoes 109 technical development 104–6, 120–3 timber trade 34 Siam 120 Sikhs 181, 182, 184, 192 Siluria, King of 135–6 Simons (William) & Co. 117 Singapore 60, 142, 143, 150, 152, 183 Sir Harry Johnston (lake steamer) 122 slave trade 7, 13, 28, 30, 44, 52, 118, 200–2, 206

Small Sword Society 179 Smith, Adam 199 Smith (Richard) and Company, Lytham 123 smuggling 147 Socotra 80 Somerset, Lord 53 Sotho 53 South Africa 54, 55, 56, 66, 115 see also Cape South America 59, 116 South China Sea 148–9, 152 South Persia 50, 51 South Wales 118, 120 Spain 1, 16, 63 Stanford, Edward 114, 115 Stanley, Captain Owen 11, 131, 139, 140 steam power 57, 68, 82, 83, 111, 118, 120–1, 123, 147–8, 161 Stephen, Alexander, of Linthouse 106, 107 Stevenson, Robert Louis 159, 168, 171 Stirling Castle (merchant ship) 136 Stokes, John Lort 131 Straits Steamship Company 117, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126 Sudan 124 Suez 70, 72, 74 Suez Canal 53, 54, 83, 120–1 Sulawesi 131, 150 Sulu 150 Sumatra 60, 145, 146, 151 Sumbawa 61 Surry (merchant ship) 33, 35, 37, 39 Sutherland, Thomas 102, 103, 107 Swanzy, F & A 123 Sydney 139 Taha of Jambi, Sultan 145 Taiping 174, 178, 180 Talbot, F.A. 113 Tanganyika, Lake 122 Taosug 146 technology 9, 100, 109–10, 119, 143, 155–6 see also under ships Terese, Peter 37 Thetis (EIC ship) 72, 76 Thompson (J. and G.) 106 Tianjin 174, 175 Tigris, river 123 timber 30, 31, 34, 61, 161 see also mahogany Timor 64 228

INDEX tin cans 85–91, 94, 95, 98 Tiwi people 132 Tobin, John and Thomas 18, 19 Torres Strait 128, 134, 136 trade 2–3, 120, 143–7, 149, 151, 176 see also equids; mahogany; palm oil; slave trade; trepang Trapp, Jane 44 Travancore 51 trepang (sea cucumber) 131, 132, 133 troop transport 34, 108 tropical medicine 114 Trusty (merchant ship) 32, 38 Turner, Alexander 169

Vickers (Barrow) 120 Victoria, Lake 122 Victory, HMS 84 voyages 34–47, 114–15, 159–71

Uganda railway 122 Union Steamship Company 103, 104, 107, 108 Union-Castle Line 57 United States 55, 64 Universe Explorer, SS 197, 203 Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 10, 121 Unsworth, Barry 197, 202 urban transport 48, 49, 186, 189–90 Uruguay 59 Usher, William 32 Usoga (Lake steamer) 122 Utah 163 Valiant (merchant ship) 38, 42, 43, 46

Wahhabi regime 50 Waldron, James 32, 84 Wall, Peter C. 32 Ward, Richard 37, 38, 43, 45–6 Washington, Captain John 138 Weihaiwei 183 Weller, John 36, 41 Wembley Exhibition, 1924–5 117 West Indian (brig) 34 whaling 117, 203, 204 White Star Line 161 Wickham, Captain 137 Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel 10 William Mackinnon (Lake steamer) 122 Wilson, Captain James 73, 74, 76, 77, 78 women 8, 126, 204 World War I 65, 122 wrecks 41 Xiamen (Amoy) 174, 183–4 Yangzi 176 Yarrow and Hedley 120, 121 Zambales 63 Zanzibar 118, 120

229