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

no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval

system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,

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without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2004

Published by The Boydell Press

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and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

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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

vii

Foreword

Roy Clare

Abbreviations

xii

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

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

Daniel Finamore

4 Cape to Siberia: the Indian Ocean and China Sea trade in equids

William Gervase Clarence-Smith

5 Aden, British India and the development of steam power in the

Red Sea, 1825–1839

Robert J. Blyth

6 The heroic age of the tin can: technology and ideology in British

Arctic exploration, 1818–1835

Carl Thompson

7 The proliferation and diffusion of steamship technology and the

beginnings of ‘new imperialism’

100

Robert Kubicek

8 Lakes, rivers and oceans: technology, ethnicity and the shipping of

empire in the late nineteenth century

111

John M. MacKenzie

9 Making imperial space: settlement, surveying and trade in northern

Australia in the nineteenth century

128

Jordan Goodman

10 Hydrography, technology, coercion: mapping the sea in Southeast

Asian imperialism, 1850–1900

142

Eric Tagliacozzo

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

century

159

Marjory Harper

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

173

Robert Bickers

13 Toward a people’s history of the sea

195

Marcus Rediker

Select bibliography

207

Index

223

CONTENTS

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, commod-
ity 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

preparing a book on the scientific voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in the mid-
nineteenth 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

CONTRIBUTORS

viii

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 co-
authored 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.

CONTRIBUTORS

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 non-
specialist 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

Abbreviations

ADM

Admiralty, Public Record Office

ANRI

Arsip Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian State Archives)

ARA

Algemeene Rijksarchief (Dutch State Archives)

British Library

CMC

Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service

Colonial Office, Public Record Office

Foreign Office, Public Record Office

HNL

Henley Papers, National Maritime Museum

IOL

British Library, India Office Records

IOL, VC

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

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

xii

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,

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.

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.

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 revolu-
tionise 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000),

pp. 100–1.

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.

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 misconcep-
tion of the actual functioning of the maritime system of power’.

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’.

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.

Thus it was

only in the nineteenth century, when Britain’s European naval hegemony

INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

P.J. Marshall, ‘A Free Though Conquering People’: Eighteenth-century Britain and its Empire

(Aldershot, 2003), p. x.

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.

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.

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 admin-
istrators, 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.

Kru from the coast of West Africa – one

of John MacKenzie’s ‘maritime races’ – served on naval ships and also on

MARITIME EMPIRES

A list would be extensive; see the entries in Andrew Porter, ed., Bibliography of Imperial,

Colonial and Commonwealth History since 1600 (Oxford, 2003).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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

INTRODUCTION

Diane Frost, Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers since the

Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 1999).

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).

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.

Felix Driver, Geography Militant, p. 38.

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.

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.

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 com-
munications 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 under-
stood, 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

John Harrison’s long struggle to perfect the chronometer has been splendidly written

about by Dava Sobel, Longtitude (London, 1996).

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’.

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 relation-
ships 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, particu-
larly 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 transat-

lantic 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,

INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

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).

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 chal-
lenge 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.

The advances in marine technology did not only affect imperial commerce,

they also had a direct impact upon the direction of British imperial expan-
sion. 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

INTRODUCTION

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).

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.’

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 cartog-
raphy 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’.

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;

what was left in the nineteenth century was

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, 1983 [1902]), p. 33.

See Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750

(New Haven and London, 1997).

the painstaking and precise job of creating detailed charts, complete with
information on tides, currents and winds, to support the growing global mar-
itime 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 con-
trolling Stanley’s surveys half a world away.

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).

INTRODUCTION

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

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’.

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 British-
registered 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 revolu-
tionised 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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 29.

From slaves to palm oil

Afro-European commercial relations in the

Bight of Biafra, 1741–1841

PAUL E. LOVEJOY AND DAVID RICHARDSON

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 Afro-
European 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.

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.

This trend appears to have continued beyond

the closure in 1841 of the export slave trade from the Bight of Biafra as slaves

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.

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.

increasingly became producers of commodities for trade rather than commodi-
ties 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.

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.

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 short-
lived. 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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).

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.

transition involved a ‘crisis of adaptation’, as Hopkins has claimed, has been
debated.

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 com-
mercial institutions and relationships.

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’.

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.

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

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

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.

David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern

Nigeria (Oxford, 1978), pp. 190–1.

Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, p. 60.

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.

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.

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 imme-
diately 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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

Ibid.

two-thirds of their annual value in the two decades before 1807.

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.

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.

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, non-
British 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 back-
ground that one needs to assess how the transition from slaves to palm oil was
achieved.

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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’.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, p. 64.

Ibid., p. 63.

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.

reinforced trade.

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.

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.

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

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

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.

Ibid., p. 346.

Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change, pp. 19, 73–4.

Bight of Biafra were concerned, events in 1807 represented a break with the
past.

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.

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’.

Moreover, it is also recognized

that what happened at Old Calabar applied with equal force at Bonny in the
eighteenth century.

Credit was, therefore, a central feature of commer-

cial 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

Dike, Trade and Politics, pp. 79–80, 90–3.

A.J.H. Latham, Old Calabar, 1600–1891 (Oxford, 1973), p. 27.

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.

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.

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.

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

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

The following draws on Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, pp. 347–49, which also lists

the relevant literature.

Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 29–30; Monday E. Noah, Old Calabar: The City States and the

Europeans, 1800–1885 (Uyo, Nigeria, 1980), p. 30.

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.

Echoes of this conflict continued through the 1770s and beyond,

damaging Ekpe’s potential to enforce repayment of debts.

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.

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.

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 capac-
ity through 1807.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

See Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, for further discussion and a review of the literature

on this event.

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.

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.

See Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds, Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical

Perspective (Boulder, Colorado, 1994) for a general survey.

This and the ensuing discussion draw on Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, pp. 349–53.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How

such matters were handled in the community largely escaped the attention of
contemporary visitors and thus of historians. On one issue, however, observers

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

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.

On Okonko, see Hargreaves, ‘Political Economy of Bonny’, p. 111.

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: South-
eastern 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.

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).

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.

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.

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 insti-
tutions as external trade grew.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

For an elaboration of these arguments see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Horrid Hole’.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Institute of Economic

Affairs, occasional papers, 106 (London, 1999), p. 22.

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.

Serge Daget, ed., Répertoire des Expéditions Négrièrs Françaises à la Traite Illegale

(1814–1850) (Nantes, 1988), pp. 129–30.

Ibid., p. 392.

Ibid., p. 424.

R.M. Jackson, Journal of a Further Residence in the Bonny River (Letchworth, Hertfordshire,

1934), pp. 73, 77.

right to levy duties on trade and his liability for debts incurred by traders
recommended by him.

This treaty is sometimes seen as an effort by William

Dappa Pepple to gain British recognition as Amanyanabo,

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.

Whether used impartially or not, and regardless of the

changes in personnel involved in trade, the power of the Amanyanabo to regu-
late 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 influ-
ence 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Hargreaves, ‘Political Economy of Bonny’, p. 200.

Lynn, ‘Factionalism’, p. 177.

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).

Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’; idem, ‘Protection’.

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’, accord-
ing to Latham, controlling all the major political offices and by the 1820s
effectively monopolising collection of ‘coomey’ or duty on European trade.

This, in turn, perhaps helped to underwrite his reputation for ‘legendary credit-
worthiness’ 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.

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, excep-
tional, 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.

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

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 48, 79.

Daget, Repertoire, p. 380.

Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’, p. 349.

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.

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.

In seeking to recover debts, British traders also resorted at times to other local
mechanisms such as ‘panyarring’ or taking traders hostage.

But the admission

of Britons into Ekpe represented an important innovation after 1807, trans-
forming 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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).

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.

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).

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 credit-
protection 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 pre-
ferred 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 adap-
tation of such institutions to changing circumstances of trade in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, particularly British withdrawal from slave
carrying in 1807.

FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL

‘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, 1934

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 rain-
forest. 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 African-
Caribbean slaves who had been brought to Central American forest camps to

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

hunt for, cut down, and drag out the massive mahogany trees have been
investigated through archives and archaeological sites.

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 nineteenth-

century 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.

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 temporar-
ily evacuated due to threat of Spanish invasion), the wood was imported duty
free when it arrived in British bottoms.

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.

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

‘PIRATE WATER’

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.

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’.

BL Add. 34,903 F.166–170, Nelson Papers; ‘Dyer to Your Lord’.

An Act for granting additional Duties on Mahogany not imported from the Bay of Honduras

. . . 20 April 1812, Geo. III, CAP XXXVI.

times measured with a formula applied to convert to an estimated weight, and
then to the approximate contents in board feet.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

Henley Papers, HNL/119/15 Charterparty for ship Trusty, October 1804.

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 trust-
worthiness 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.

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’.

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’.

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.

‘PIRATE WATER’

HNL/77/51 Hunter to Henley, August 1806.

HNL/59/82 Horry to Henley, Barbados, 26 April 1809.

CO123/14 pt.2, anonymous letter fragment, 23 December 1784.

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.

Although one can imagine the length and diameter of logs varying consid-
erably 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.

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.

In October 1810,

before the Oeconomy was sent to the Caribbean for mahogany, the master com-
plained ‘our main rigging I am afraid of it giving way and our square main sail
is very thin and tender’.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

The Victorian Cabinet-maker’s Assistant: 417 Original Designs with Descriptions and Details

of Construction (New York, 1970; first edn 1850), p. 38.

HNL/86/4 Charterparty of ship Mary, October 1804; HNL/83/7 Charterparty of ship

Lord Rodney, September 1812.

HNL/101/3 Humber, 11 October 1810, Darby to Henley.

HNL/69/25 1796 Sketch plan, Heart of Oak stern.

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 nego-

tiating 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.

Carpenters and mates negotiated wages between £6 and £7 per month.

Although nationalities were not recorded, crew lists include names indi-

cating 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.

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 replace-
ment captain from shore was appointed to complete the voyage.

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.

‘PIRATE WATER’

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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’.

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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’.

‘PIRATE WATER’

HNL/68/12 Disbursements of the ship Hawke, 1812.

HNL/122/5 Bone to Henley, 27 June 1790.

HNL/59/83 Bill of Sale, James Stanes, China and Staffordshire warehouse; crew list and

articles, ship Freedom, 1809.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

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.

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

‘PIRATE WATER’

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.

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/.

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

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.’

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.

‘PIRATE WATER’

PRO CO 137/59 Spanish Commandant of Port Omoa, Orders to take English vessels,

13 December 1752.

HNL/119/33 Weller to Henley, 21 June 1819.

HNL/43/3 Horry to Henley, 6 October 1812.

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.

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 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

HNL/82 40 Robert Horry, deposition at Honduras, 1813.

HNL/43/3 Horry to Henley, 6 October 1812.

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.

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.

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 prob-
ably were bought for the voyage home, that averaged

⁄

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.

‘PIRATE WATER’

HNL/83/4 Douglas to Henley, 14 November 1813.

HNL/28/12 Boys indentures, ship Adventure, James Mather master, October 1806 to

October 1808.

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’.

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’.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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’.

HNL/101/3 Watson to Henley, 6 November 1810.

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.

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 autho-
rized them to draw on you for the amount of the charges of the doctor and
lodgings.’

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.

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

‘PIRATE WATER’

HNL123/1 ‘Itemized list of lighters used to transport wood to ship’, ship Valiant,

November 1804.

HNL/77/51 Pearson to Henley, 3 January 1807.

HNL/116/11 Medical bill for February 1811.

purchased ‘Some quick lime for twixt decks’ and ‘Two sheep skins for spounges’,
for hygienic purposes.

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.’

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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 experi-
ence, along with the development of a social and professional network at
both ends of the route. Several masters of ships used their connections devel-
oped 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.

‘PIRATE WATER’

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.

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.

Horses were mainly bred in relatively dry and temperate lands, conducive to

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.

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.

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 influ-
ence. 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.

Russian and Chinese expansion into

Inner Asia blocked or diverted old trade routes.

At the same time, the military

stalemate on the Northwest Frontier led Afghan rulers periodically to deny

CAPE TO SIBERIA

Yarwood, Walers, pp. 82–3, 123; C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: A Tactical Textbook for Imperial

Soldiers (London, 1990 [1906]), pp. 402–9.

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.

G.J. Alder, Beyond Bokhara: The Life of William Moorcroft, Asian Explorer and Pioneer

horses to the infidel, as prescribed by the tenets of Islam.

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.

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.

Moreover, Chinese demand diverted

many Tibetan horses eastwards.

The British thus imported horses from the Persian Gulf (see Table 4.1), a

trend reinforced by elite ‘Arabomania’.

The rise of the Wahhabi regime in

the later eighteenth century increased the availability of famous Najd horses
from central Arabia.

However, once the Wahhabi threat of confiscation

declined, it was difficult to persuade Najd breeders to part with their stock.

Horses were thus mainly obtained from tribesmen on the fringes of Iraq,
who specialised in raising and raiding horses and camels.

Oman still sent

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford, 1907–8), vol. 5, p. 53.

C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1990),

pp. 142–3; Gommans, ‘The Horse Trade’, pp. 241–7.

W.W. Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, London (1885–7), vol. 6, pp. 520–1.

Gervais Courtellemont, Voyage au Yunnan (Paris, 1904), pp. 173, 178–9.

Gommans, ‘The Horse Trade’, p. 247.

Karl W. Ammon, Nachrichten von der Pferdezucht der Araber und den arabischen Pferden

(Hildesheim, 1983 [1834]), p. 123.

J.R. Povah, Gazetteer of Arabia (Calcutta, 1887), p. 75.

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

Table 4.1 Persian Gulf exports of horses to India, 1810s–1913 (annual averages;
many gaps)

Kuwait and

Basra and

South Persia

Total

Bahrain

Muhammara

1810s

c.850

1830s

c.250

c.1,000

1860s

c.800

c.300

1870s

c.600

c.500

1885–90

2,780

379

3,159

1891–1900

2,770

308

3,116

1901–10

2,300

295

2,620

1911–13

1,541

1,638

some local horses, but fodder was in increasingly short supply.

Mules were

a speciality of southern Persia, while large white riding donkeys came from
the hinterland of Bahrain.

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.

A Persian decree of 1823 exempted British subjects from paying any dues on
horse exports, ‘excepting such as long-established usage authorizes’.

There was a marked quickening of Indian imports after 1781, when the

East India Company decided to develop its own cavalry forces.

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.

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.

Foes of the British, such as the

Marathas and Mysore, also imported Gulf horses.

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.

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.

However, Gulf exporters generally failed to meet

CAPE TO SIBERIA

and of Eastern and Southern Asia, Commercial, Industrial and Scientific (Madras, 1871) (2nd
edn), vol. 2, pp. 614–17.

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.

J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia (London, 1908–15),

Appendix T.

Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 74–5, 105–10, 160–1, 171–2, 237–8.

A.K.S. Lambton, Qajar Persia: Eleven Studies (London, 1987), pp. 113, 130–2.

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.

Yarwood, Walers, pp. 29–30, 41. A hand equals four inches.

Ahmad M. Abu-Hakima, The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965 (London, 1983),

pp. 98, 101, 105; Ammon, Nachrichten, pp. 278–82.

R.J. Barendse, ‘Reflections on the Arabian Seas in the Eighteenth Century’, Itinerario,

25, 1 (2001), 27, 30.

Yarwood, Walers, ch. 5.

George Blake, B. I. Centenary, 1856–1956 (London, 1956), pp. 100–4, 118.

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.

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.

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.

Kuwait, with a policy of virtual free trade, sent about 800 horses a

year to India on sailing vessels in the 1860s.

However, the Ottomans occu-

pied northeastern Arabia in 1871, seizing control of trade routes inland from
Kuwait.

Exports of horses and mules from southern Persia remained modest,

despite the interest of the Indian army in the region’s mules.

A terrible

drought decimated livestock in 1869–72, and mules were snapped up for local
transport.

As for British attempts to resurrect the Omani trade from 1866,

they foundered on the scarcity and poor quality of local horses.

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.

In the 1840s, exporters of horses were

reported to import African slaves.

Local sailing vessels, built and manned by

Gulf Arabs, carried many horses to India, although British steamers carried

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 176–7; Lorimer, Gazetteer, App. T.

Abu-Hakima, The Modern History, p. 103.

Fattah The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 118–20.

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.

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.

Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, p. 174; Robert G. Landen, Oman Since 1856

(Princeton 1967), p. 147.

Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 65–83, 162–73, 180–3.

Abu-Hakima, The Modern History, p. 103.

increasing numbers from the 1860s.

In Bombay, Gulf Arabs owned most

stables and acted as indispensable brokers for European buyers.

Even in

the fairs of northern India, Arabs were well known as horse dealers in the
1830s.

Capers on the Indian market

South Africa’s presence on the Indian market was precocious, with the first
recorded shipment of ‘Capers’ in 1769.

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.

Donkeys arrived from the Cape Verde

Islands in the eighteenth century, giving rise to mule breeding in Malmesbury
district.

Horses passed into indigenous hands from 1822, the Sotho becoming

the most successful breeders in southern Africa.

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.

However, the trade

was already significant for certain farmers.

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.

CAPE TO SIBERIA

Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 26–7, 60, 66–7, 104–5, 110–11, 157, 173; Blake,

B. I. Centenary, p. 118.

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.

George W. Earl, The Eastern Seas (Singapore, 1971 [1837]), p. 188.

Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, p. 58.

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.

Official Year Book of the Union, and of Basutoland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland

(Pretoria, 1922), vol. 5, p. 495.

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.

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.

George M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, London, 1897–1905, vol. 17, pp. 488–91;

vol. 32, p. 478.

Yarwood, Walers, pp. 2, 30–1; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, pp. 52–3, 58.

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.

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.

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.

Capers were chiefly bought in Bombay and Madras presidencies, but also
reached Calcutta and Ceylon.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

Yarwood, Walers, p. 79; Official Year Book, p. 495.

Official Year Book, p. 497.

Yarwood, Walers, p. 102.

Table 4.2 Horse exports from South Africa to all destinations, 1827–1918

Cape ports only

South Africa

1827

319

1833–39 average

284

1841–50 average

234

1857–61 average

1,096

1865

1870

175

1875

1880–85 average

1911–18 average

788

zebras as a natural reservoir, caused African horse sickness and extended further
south.

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.

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.

This increase also casts doubt on alleged competition for

pasture from merino sheep, goats and ostriches.

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.

‘Horse-whims’, large wooden

wheels powered by equids, raised ore from open diamond pits in Kimberley.

More significant was surging demand from transport riders, who harnessed
horses, donkeys, mules, and even domesticated zebras.

The opening up of

the continent also redirected exports overland, for example to Angola and the
Rhodesias.

Breeders no longer strove to meet the requirements of Indian

artillery units, since they could easily find local purchasers for smaller horses.

Although plans to send Caper remounts to India lingered on till the 1890s,
the trade was over.

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.

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.

CAPE TO SIBERIA

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.

Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, Table C11.

Epstein, The Origin of the Domestic Animals, vol. 2, p. 477; Yarwood, Walers, p. 123.

Yarwood, Walers, p. 102; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, p. 50.

Rosenthal, Encyclopaedia, p. 235 (and illustration).

Marylian and Sanders Watney, Horse Power (London, 1975), pp. 90–1; Wallace, Farming

Industries, p. 316.

Dirk Postma, De Trekboeren te St. Januario Humpata (Amsterdam, 1897), p. 237; Watney,

Horse Power, p. 90.

Somerset Playne, Cape Colony (Cape Province): Its History, Commerce, Industries and

Resources (London, 1910–11), p. 619; Tylden, Horses and Saddlery, p. 60.

Wallace, Farming Industries, pp. 314, 319.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

Yarwood, Walers, pp. 15, 24, 32–4, 53–60, 80–5.

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

New S.

Victoria

Queensland

South

Western

Wales

Australia

Total

1861–70

108

729

n.a.

213

1,055

1871–80

2,418

142

2,615

1881–90

292

3,366

100

3,867

1891–00

1,145

3,034

762

131

–

5,072

1901–10

1,279

2,570

3,419

347

–

7,615

1911–20

1,974

2,120

5,894

1,249

–

11,237

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.

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.

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.

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

CAPE TO SIBERIA

Yarwood, Walers pp. 22–4, 33–64, 80–123, 141–65, 199.

Blake, B. I. Centenary, pp. 116–20, 204.

IOL, VC.

of sugar cane required many animals for cartage, and there were horse-powered
sugar mills on Réunion before the introduction of steam.

The British urged

the use of horses to cope with problems caused by the abolition of slave imports
in the early nineteenth century.

Mauritians also developed a passion for

horse-racing early in the nineteenth century.

Not until the spread of light

railways around 1900 did the demand for equids begin to falter.

Neither Mauritius nor Réunion became breeders of equids on any scale,

even though the Dutch brought horses to Mauritius in 1666.

Donkeys came

in the eighteenth century under the French, who also took horses on to the
Seychelles.

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.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

André Schérer, La Réunion (Paris, 1985), p. 50.

Theal, Records of the Cape, vol. 32, p. 478.

Charles G. Ducray et al., Ile Maurice (Port Louis, 1938), pp. 79–83.

Schérer, La Réunion, pp. 81–2; Encyclopaedia Britannica (NY, 13th edn, 1929), vol. 15,

p. 109.

P.J. Moree, A Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 1598–1710 (London, 1998) p. 78.

Deryck Scarr, Seychelles Since 1770: History of a Slave and Post-slavery Society (London,

2000), pp. 12, 17.

The Mauritius Almanac and Colonial Register, 1926–27, Section A, p. 57; Fielding and

Krause, Donkeys, p. 90.

Barendse, ‘Reflections on the Arabian Seas’, p. 30.

Landen, Oman, p. 147; Mauritius Blue Books.

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.

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.

Argentina replaced Uruguay as the chief source

of mules in the late 1890s.

Complicating the picture was a late nineteenth-

century re-export trade in mules from Mauritius to India, of uncertain size.

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.

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.

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.

Walers continued to dominate the Mauritian turf,

however, until just before 1914 when the island turned to European race-
horses.

(See Table 4.4 for numbers of all equids imported to Mauritius

between 1833 and 1913.)

CAPE TO SIBERIA

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.

Table 4.4 Mauritian imports of equids, 1833–1913 (annual averages; some years
missing; 1851–60 decade missing)

Horses

Mules

Donkeys

Equid total

1833–39

423

1,040

(with mules)

1,463

1841–50

403

1,553

(with mules)

1,956

1861–70

416

1,092

1,538

1871–80

650

2,079

2,808

1881–90

499

966

142

1,607

1891–1900

371

948

1,380

1901–10

741

477

1,300

1911–13

286

102

388

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.

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.

Sailing ships from Mauritius visited the Lesser Sundas till 1914, but

did not return thereafter.

Réunion seems to have dropped out earlier, after

the imposition of French protectionist duties in the 1880s.

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.

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 entre-
pots, redistributing animals to smaller ports.

Malayan imports initially came

from Indonesia, where the Dutch favoured their own flag.

Batak, Gayo and

Minang ponies from the Sumatran highlands were known as ‘Deli ponies’, as
they were shipped from east coast ports.

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.

‘Java ponies’ provided most

of the draught power for Singapore’s cabs up to the 1880s.

They were also

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

Mauritius Blue Books.

H. Kistermann, ‘De paardenhandel van Nusa Tenggara, 1815–1941’, unpublished

student graduation paper, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1991, pp. 50, 59.

Schérer, La Réunion, pp. 68–9, 80.

Amarjit Kaur, Bridge and Barrier, Transport and Communications in Colonial Malaya,

1870–1957 (Singapore, 1985).

Straits Settlements Annual Reports, Singapore.

Frank J.A. Broeze, ‘The Merchant Fleet of Java, 1820–1850: A Preliminary Survey’,

Archipel, 18 (1979), 251–69.

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.

Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië (The Hague, 1917–21), vol. 3, pp. 151, 227–9;

Straits Settlements Annual Reports.

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.

the staple of early horse-racing. After experiments with Burmese, Chinese and
Australian horses, Singapore turned increasingly to Australian supplies from
the 1890s.

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.

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.

Among the Lesser Sundas, Sumbawa already

exported more than a thousand a year prior to the catastrophic eruption of
Mount Tambora in 1815.

South Sulawesi’s large horses were prized by the

Dutch armed forces, although exports withered away from the 1860s.

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

CAPE TO SIBERIA

Allen, eds, The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes and Plantation Workers
(Singapore, 1990), p. 131.

Eric Jennings, The Singapore Turf Club (Singapore, 1970).

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.

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.

Gerrit Kuperus, Het cultuurlandschap van West-Soembawa (Groningen 1936), p. 21.

Koloniaal Verslag 1857 (The Hague), p. 142; Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, vol.

3, pp. 151, 227–8.

Table 4.5 Horse exports from the Lesser Sunda Islands, 1880–1918 (annual
averages by decade; very approximate; mostly to Java)

Bali and

Sumbawa

Sumba

W. Timor and

Total

Lombok

dependencies

1821–30

n.a.

c.200

–

129

1831–40

n.a.

c.250

–

248

1841–50

n.a.

c.1,000

680

336

1851–60

c.1,000

c.4,000

n.a.

597

1861–70

n.a.

c.2,000

c.750

1,187

1871–80

n.a.

c.2,000

2,966

1881–90

c.350

n.a.

1,851

1,120

1891–1900

c.100

c.6,000

c.3,000

c.750

c.10,000

1901–10

c.10

4,357

1,302

c.750

c.6,500

1911–20

c.1,000

5,065

2,520

c.2,000

c.10,000

subjects. British shippers lost out, initially to the benefit of Hadhrami Arabs,
legally Dutch subjects, who owned European rigged ships.

For several

decades, Arab ships even fought off competition from Dutch steamers, intro-
duced 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 tran-

sients 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Broeze, ‘The Merchant Fleet of Java’.

100

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.

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

CAPE TO SIBERIA

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.

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 even-

tually 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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

CAPE TO SIBERIA

126

Coates, China Races, pp. 31, 35, 72, 207, 244.

127

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.

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 race-
horses 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

CAPE TO SIBERIA

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.

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 unre-
liable. 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

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.

in general it took two years to receive a reply to a letter sent to India.

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.

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 metro-
politan departments of state or commercial interests, which promoted the
initial stages of this communications revolution.

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. Never-
theless, 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,

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

D.R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth

Century (New York, 1981), p. 130.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

For details of the Enterprize’s voyage, see Searight, Steaming East, pp. 23–9; Hoskins, British

Routes, pp. 95–6.

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 imagi-
nation 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.

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 intro-
duced 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.’

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 trans-
portation, 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

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

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.

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.

Malcolm, however, was additionally well placed to proceed with steam com-
munications. 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 posi-
tioned 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’.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Melvill to Malcolm, 18 September 1828, NMM, MAL/3.

Hoskins, British Routes, p. 117; Khan, ‘Attempts’, p. 150.

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.

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.

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

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 experi-
enced 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-a-
half 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’.

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 under-
taking, 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

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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

provision of coal in the Red Sea, to a courts martial for landing too little at
Jeddah but later relented.

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.

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.

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 thou-
sand tons annually, even allowing the other vessel[s] to have engines of less
power.

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

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.

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.

Extract from Marine Letter from Bombay, 21 June 1830, IOL, L/MAR/C/576.

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.

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 prob-
able 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Barker to Court of Directors, 19 February 1833, enclosed in Mathew to Malcolm, 23

July 1834, NMM, MAL/4.

Wilson, On Steam Communication, p. 9.

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.’

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.

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.

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

Capt. Pepper to commander, Hugh Lindsay, Aden, n.d. [November 1829], NMM,

MAL/4.

Wilson to Malcolm, 29 May 1830, NMM, MAL/4.

Wilson to Court of Directors, Suez Roads, 22 April 1830, NMM, MAL/4.

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 envis-
aged by Wilson. Moreover, boats and labour were more abundant at Mocha
than at Aden or Jeddah, where loading was performed ‘in a dilatory manner’.

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’.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Wilson to Malcolm, 29 May 1830, NMM, MAL/4.

E. Owen to Malcolm, Penang, 12 August 1830, NMM, MAL/5b.

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.

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.

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.’

Indeed, external

developments advanced the project rather than an internal Company break-
through.

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

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

R. Campbell and J.G. Ravenshaw (Marine Dept) to Lord Clare, 14 March 1832, IOR,

L/MAR/C/576.

W.S. Clarke and J.R. Carnac (Marine Dept) to Lord Clare, 26 August 1835, IOR,

L/MAR/C/576.

Marine Dept to Govt of Bombay, 25 September 1833, enclosed in Mathew to Malcolm,

23 July 1834, NMM, MAL/4.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

Clarke and Carnac to Lord Clare, 23 December 1835, IOL, L/MAR/C/576; Hoskins,

British Routes, pp. 125–7, chs 8–9.

Malcolm to C.B. Greenlaw, Bombay, 26 February 1838, NMM, MAL/6.

Hoskins, British Routes, pp. 217–18.

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.

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.

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’.

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 gov-
ernment 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.

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’.

This certainly

met Grant’s objectives, although Malcolm’s instructions to Haines did some-
what 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,

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

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.

Low, II, p. 116.

J.P. Willoughby to Malcolm, Bombay, 25 November 1837, NMM, MAL/8; Gavin,

Aden, p. 30.

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.

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.

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 peace-
fully. 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

Gavin, Aden, pp. 31–7.

subsequent development and success of the ‘overland’ route and the wide-
spread 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.

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.

ADEN, INDIA AND STEAM POWER IN THE RED SEA

Cable, History of P&O, chs 11–12; Hoskins, British Routes, ch. 10; Low, History of the

Indian Navy, II, passim.

On the subsequent development of Aden under British rule, see Gavin, Aden, passim.

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.

Ross’s tone here is interesting. Even as he acknowledges the surprising trans-
formation 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’.

John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of the North-West Passage (London,

1835), p. 109.

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.

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

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

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

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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).

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).

were initially regarded as luxury items, selling to a highly fashionable clientele
that included even the Royal Family.

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 anti-
scorbutic 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.

Both men stress that preserved meats mean preserved

men, a claim that is to some extent supported by remarkably low rates of mor-
tality 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.

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

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

In the second place, we need also to recapture a contemporary sense of aston-
ishment 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.

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).

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:

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

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.

Lyon, The Private Journal, pp. 397–8.

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.

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

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

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

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 playful-
ness 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 transforma-
tion 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.

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.

The georgic mentalité understood such interventions

as a benevolent, beneficient act of ‘improvement’ (another contemporary buzz-
word).

Rather than plundering nature, after the fashion of earlier European

MARITIME EMPIRES

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.

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.

See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1983),

pp. 160–1.

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’.

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.

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 tidi-
ness 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

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 270.

Appert, The Art of Preserving, pp. 161–2.

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 expensively-
produced 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 expe-
ditions. 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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 expla-
nations 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).

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’.

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.

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.

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

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

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).

Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. 124.

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.

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 226.

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 explo-
ration 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?

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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

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’.

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.

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 cross-
questioned 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.

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.

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

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. 279.

Ibid., pp. 279–80.

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 246.

Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal’, in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology

(London, 1975), p. 251.

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’.

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’.

Ross in 1818 was more

blunt: ‘the habits of this people appear to be filthy in the extreme’.

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.

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,

MARITIME EMPIRES

See Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London, 1996),

p. 187.

Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. 286.

Ross, A Voyage of Discovery, p. 133.

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 358.

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.

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’.

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).

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo

(London, 1966), p. 35.

Lyon, The Private Journal, p. 240.

Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, p. 257.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

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).

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’.

In travelogues, exploration narratives and medical

treatises alike, the anxiety is expressed that ‘to consume a colonial environ-
ment . . . 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.

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.

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.

THE HEROIC AGE OF THE TIN CAN

Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, 1999), p. 149. See also, more

generally, ch. 3, ‘Colonial Dietary Anxieties’, pp. 131–60.

Ibid., p. 154.

See Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp. 69–71.

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.

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 1993

and which not only triggered an outpouring of

reviews in historical journals but a book of essays as well, edited by Raymond
Dumett.

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

100

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.

Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, British Imperialism, I: Innovation and Expansion,

1688–1914 (London, 1993).

Raymond Dumett, ed., Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate

on Empire (London, 1999).

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.

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.

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.

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

STEAMSHIP TECHNOLOGY AND ‘NEW IMPERIALISM’

101

Ibid., pp. 204–5.

Ibid., p. 200.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

102

Gordon Boyce, Information, Mediation and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-

Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870–1919 (Manchester, 1995), p. 128.

Anthony Slaven and Sydney Checkland, eds, Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography,

1860–1960, II (Glasgow), 1990.

Ibid.

then in London.’

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.

Furness’s home town was Hartlepool whose shipbuilders

were instrumental financial contributors to the development of his trans-
atlantic liner services.

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.

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’.

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.

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’.

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

STEAMSHIP TECHNOLOGY AND ‘NEW IMPERIALISM’

103

Andrew Porter, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle

Line and Southern Africa (London, 1986), p. 9.

David J. Jermy, ed., Dictionary of Business Biography, II (London, 1984).

Boyce, Information, pp. 48–9.

Malcolm Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A History of the Ocean Steam Ship Company,

1865–1973 (London, 1990).

Peter N. Davies, Sir Alfred Jones, Shipping Entrepreneur (London, 1978).

George Blake, B.I. Centenary, 1856–1956 (London, 1956).

Stephanie Jones, Trade and Shipping: Lord Inchcape (Manchester, 1992).

1872.

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’.

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.

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’.

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 impe-
rialism for what they had previously accomplished.

The nexus – shipbuilders

Unlike other service-sector interests, these shipowners had extensive con-
tacts 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

104

David Howarth and Stephen Howarth, The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental

Steam Navigation Company (London, 1986).

Boyce, Information, p. 131.

‘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.

Boyce, Information, p. 301.

the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century seen coal-guzzling paddle
wheelers superseded by larger and more efficient screw-driven compound-
engined 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.

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’.

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

STEAMSHIP TECHNOLOGY AND ‘NEW IMPERIALISM’

105

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.

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”’.

disadvantage only overcome when the firm belatedly followed the compe-
tition.

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 devel-

opments. 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.

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.

A third

initiative was the emergence of combinations or shipping rings which saw
shipping companies attempt to stabilize or control freight rates.

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 con-
structing 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.

Barclay, Curle and

Company, Fairfields, Robert Napier and J. and G. Thompson took builder
shares or shares in Currie’s company.

Ship builder Alexander Stephen of

Linthouse partnered Cayzer in his establishment of the Clan Line.

Furness

had his own shipbuilding yards but this did not prevent him from ordering

MARITIME EMPIRES

106

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.

For example, six liner firms underwent major restructuring involving heavy investment.

Boyce, Information, p. 76.

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.

B.M. Deakin, Shipping Conferences (Cambridge, 1973).

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.

Porter, Victorian Shipping, pp. 46, 270.

Slaven and Checkland, Dictionary of Scottish Business, II, p. 271.

vessels from Stephen and ‘jointly [financing] speculative orders’.

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.’

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.

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’.

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

STEAMSHIP TECHNOLOGY AND ‘NEW IMPERIALISM’

107

Boyce, Information, p. 183.

Ibid., p. 179.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 trans-
ports in wartime.’

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

108

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).

Slaven and Checkland, Dictionary of Scottish Business, II, p. 7.

Eric W. Sager and Gerald E. Panting, Maritime Capital: The Shipping Industry in Atlantic

Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 1990), p. 208.

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).

Boyce, Information, pp. 101–3.

and essential if diffused players in the development of maritime commerce.

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.

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.

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’ two-
element analysis of imperialism, the ship nexus participated in both ‘forms of

STEAMSHIP TECHNOLOGY AND ‘NEW IMPERIALISM’

109

Robin Craig, The Ship: Steam Tramps and Cargo Liners, 1850–1950 (London, 1980),

pp. 11–52.

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.

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

110

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!’

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 juve-
nile 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

111

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.

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 eco-
nomic 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’.

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 path-
breaking 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

112

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

as they were English in the mid-nineteenth century’.

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 distinc-
tive 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 mid-
nineteenth 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 Shipping

to F.A. Talbot’s signif-

icantly entitled The Steamship Conquest of the World of 1912,

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

LAKES, RIVERS AND OCEANS

113

Andrew Porter, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle

Line and Southern Africa (Woodbridge, 1986), p. 30.

W.S. Lindsay, History of Merchant Shipping, vol. IV, 1816–1874 (London, n.d., 1870s).

Frederick A. Talbot, The Steamship Conquest of the World (London, 1912).

of steam from North America in the early nineteenth century,

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.

His fellow Presbyterian, Sir William Mackinnon, may have empha-

sised 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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

114

Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping (London, 1990), p. 271 and passim.

Porter, Victorian Shipping, passim.

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).

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.

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.

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.

The guide book, through its ever-growing number

of pages (and I find that all guide books had a tendency to expand exponen-
tially), 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.

Edward Stanford published the Orient Line Guide from 1882 and it

went through many editions.

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.

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

LAKES, RIVERS AND OCEANS

115

Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British

Emigrants (Manchester, 1994).

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (London, 1991 [1983]).

Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, 1991), p. 272.

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.

Marischal Murray, Union-Castle Chronicle, 1853–1953 (London, 1953), pp. 311–12.

was added in 1910 and the guide passed through what can only be described
as a process of elephantiasis.

These are just two examples of what became a common maritime infor-

mation 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.

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.

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 exten-
sive 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

116

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.

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).

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.

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 respec-
tively.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dundee’s

connections with Bengal through jute and with whaling were obvious to all,

while the distant Straits Steamship Company brought many of its orders to
the Caledon yard on the Tay.

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.

Such a tour of the rhetorical

LAKES, RIVERS AND OCEANS

117

Perilla Kinchin and Juliet Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions, 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938,

1988 (Wendlebury, 1988).

Sir Charles Campbell McLeod and Adam W. Kirkaldy, The Trade, Commerce and

Shipping of the British Empire (London, 1924).

Blake, British Ships, pp. 8–9.

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.

Alexander McKay, Scottish Samurai: Thomas Blake Glover, 1838–1911 (Edinburgh,

1993).

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).

K.G. Tregonning, Home Port Singapore: A History of the Straits Steamship Co. Ltd.,

1890–1965 (Singapore, 1967), pp. 35–6, 71, and passim.

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.

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.

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 pro-
duction.

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

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118

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.

lumbering sailing predecessors could not possibly have matched.

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.

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.

The fact is that as imperial rivalries hardened at the end of the

nineteenth century, the British imperial government became much more hard-
nosed 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,

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119

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).

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).

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.

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 Canada

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.

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’,

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

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120

Rosemary E. Ommer, ‘The Decline of the Eastern Canadian Shipping Industry,

1880–95’, Journal of Transport History, 5, 1 (1984), 25–44.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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

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121

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.

W.P. Livingstone, Laws of Livingstonia: A Narrative of Missionary Adventure and

Achievement (London, n.d. [1924?]), pp. 42, 45.

cathedral there.

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.

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.

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.

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 displace-
ment. 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.

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

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122

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.

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.

C 8438 (1897), Report by Consul A. Sharpe on the Trade and General Condition of

the British Central Africa Protectorate (1896–7), 23

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.

L.G. Dennis, The Steamers of East Africa (Egham, 1996).

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.

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.

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 out-
put 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.

The reason was of course a close management tie-

up 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

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123

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.

Alister McCrae and Alan Prentice, Irrawaddy Flotilla (Paisley, 1978); Chubb and

Duckworth, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chippies or carpenters were

always Chinese, while Goanese stewards and caterers were as common as Scots
engineers.

When reflecting on the conservatism of the Harrison Line, which

continued to operate ships with triple expansion engines right through to the

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124

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.

David M. Williams, ‘The Progress of Maritime History, 1953–93’, Journal of Transport

History, 3rd series, 14, 1 (1993), 129.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 multi-
plied 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

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125

Francis E. Hyde, Shipping Enterprise and Management, 1830–1939: Harrisons of Liverpool

(Liverpool, 1967), pp. 150–2.

These specialisms are laid out in Tregonning, Home Port Singapore; Chubb and

Duckworth, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company; and McCrae and Prentice, Irrawaddy Flotilla.

all those smaller craft without which ports (for which read empire) simply
could not operate.

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.

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 fecun-
dating, 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 de-
centred 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’.

But it is now necessary to move into a

much wider range of maritime experiences, into centres and circles reflecting

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126

For a popular and anecdotal account, see H.M. Tomlinson, Malay Waters (London,

1950).

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.

In a speech by Chris Patten, EU Commissioner, at the British Council, reported in the

Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2001.

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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127

Making imperial space

Settlement, surveying and trade in northern

Australia in the nineteenth century

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.

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-

128

I would like to thank the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust for supporting the

research on which this chapter is based.

Michael Roe, ‘Australia’s Place in the Swing to the East’, Historical Studies, 8 (1958),

202–13.

ularly its contingent processes.

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 . . .

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.

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

129

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.

Christopher Lloyd, Mr. Barrow of the Admiralty: A Life of Sir John Barrow, 1764–1848

(London, 1970), p. 160.

John Barrow, ‘Observations’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1 (1831), viii.

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.

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.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

130

Lloyd, Mr. Barrow, p. 164 and John Barrow, ‘The Australian Colonies’, Quarterly Review,

68 (June 1841), 133–4.

Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India

(Chicago, 1997), p. 340.

Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York,

1987).

such as Flinders, King, Stokes, Blackwood and Stanley; and men of the
Admiralty such as the hydrographer Francis Beaufort . As the process con-
tinued, 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.

By a complicated bureaucratic route, the several petitions found their

way onto John Barrow’s desk.

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.

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

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

131

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.

The story is told in Cameron ‘The Northern Settlements’.

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.

promptly set sail for his intended destination. He arrived here six days later
on 26 September 1824 and promptly began constructing Fort Dundas.

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.

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.

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.

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

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132

Cameron, ‘The Northern Settlements’, p. 276.

Campbell, ‘Geographical Memoir’, p. 97.

John Bach, ‘Melville Island and Raffles Bay, 1824–9’, Journal of the Royal Australian

Historical Society 44 (1958), 229.

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.

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

Other voices, but expressing similar sentiments about the torrid zone, were
heard throughout the British Empire.

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.

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.

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

133

Gerald S. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian Ocean: A Study of Maritime Enterprise

1810–1850 (Oxford, 1967), pp. 411–12.

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

J. Allen, ‘Port Essington – A Successful Limpet Port?’, Historical Studies, 15 (1972), 343.

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.

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.

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.

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

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134

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.

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.

Ian Nicholson, Via Torres Strait (Nambour, Queensland, 1996).

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.

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.

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

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

135

J.M.R. Cameron, ed., Letters from Port Essington (Darwin, Northern Territory, 1999),

p. 2.

Campbell, ‘Geographical Memoir’, p. 180.

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 geocom-
mercial 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

136

Roderick Impey Murchison, ‘Address’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 15 (1845),

lix.

Allen McInnes, ‘The Wreck of the “Charles Eaton’’’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society

of Queensland, 11 (1983), 21–50.

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.

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.

Cameron, Letters from Port Essington, p. 6.

Ibid., p. 5.

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.

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’.

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.

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

137

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.

United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, Taunton (UKHO), Letter Book 12/127.

UKHO, Minute Book 6/1.

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.

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.

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 south-
western boundary was near the present-day city of Broome in western
Australia.

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.’

Labour was

no problem. ‘Any number of labouring Chinese or of Malays would easily be
procured, and at a cheap rate’, he commented.

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.’

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

138

Cameron, Letters from Port Essington, p. 7.

The history of the settlement has been well covered in Peter G. Spillett, Forsaken

Settlement (Melbourne, 1972).

Barrow, ‘Observations’, p. 133.

Ibid., p. 133.

Ibid., p. 135.

Cameron, Letters from Port Essington, p. 87.

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.

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.

Even Earl was beginning to use words such as ‘unhealthy’.

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’.

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.

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

139

(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.

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.

UKHO, Letter Book 13/234.

UKHO, Letter Book 12/70.

British Parliamentary Papers, XXXV, (1851), 123–83.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

140

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

Defeat’.

institutions which they headed.

Though Stanley was 15,000 miles and four

months distant from London, the outstretched arms of his masters ensured he
was never alone.

MAKING IMPERIAL SPACE

141

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.

Hydrography, technology, coercion

Mapping the sea in Southeast Asian imperialism,

1850–1900

ERIC TAGLIACOZZO

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 trans-
lations of ‘space’ into maps also took place in this realm.

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).

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

142

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.

See Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York, 1995) for a general overview, and John Noble

Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York, 1982), especially pp. 128–60.

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

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.

Scholars, in fact, are now going

back to the archives to re-examine the sea as a site of complicated cultural
exchange.

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 nineteenth-
century 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 (metro-
poles, 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.

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

143

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.

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).

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).

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 far-
flung 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 immediately-
receptive 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.

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.

Southeast Asia, however, the contested terrain – both intellectually and polit-
ically – 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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

144

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).

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).

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 remain-
ing 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.

This was apparent nearly everywhere along the emerging Anglo-

Dutch 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.

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.

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.

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

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

145

Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Secret Trades of the Straits: Smuggling and State-Formation Along a

Southeast Asian Frontier’, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1999.

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).

ARA, Dutch Consul, Penang to Gov Gen NEI, 29 March 1887, No. 125, in 1887, MR

No. 289.

ARA, 1894, MR No. 298.

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.

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.

Warren has also shown how Bugis trade settle-

ments in Eastern Borneo overlapped Taosug forts in the interior, connecting
outstretched networks of alliance, competition, and commerce across the
emerging frontier.

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 promi-
nent Chinese merchants downriver, and disappeared silently across the Dutch
frontier.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

146

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).

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.

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.

Daniel Chew, Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontier (1841–1941) (Singapore, 1990),

pp. 115–17.

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.

The phenomenal growth of trade and of even very small-scale shipping in

Southeast Asia, therefore, presented two paradoxical phenomena.

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.

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.

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.

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

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

147

Backer Dirks, De Gouvernements Marine in het Voormalige Nederlands-Indie in Haar
Verschillende Tijdsperioden Geschetst 1861–1949 (Weesp, 1985), p. 173.

Chiang Hai Ding, A History of Straits Settlements Foreign Trade, 1870–1915 (Singapore,

1978), 6, pp. 136, 139.

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).

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.

H. La Chapelle, ‘Bijdrage tot de Kennis van het Stoomvaartverkeer in den Indischen

Archipel’ Economist, De, 2 (1885), 689–90.

explicitly pointed to the fact that too much trade fell outside of legal channels
in explaining their imposition.

The control of maritime trade and move-

ment 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 expan-
sion 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.

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.

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.

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.

Bangka and Belitung were especially important centres

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148

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).

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.

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.

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.

Mary Somers Heidhues, Bangka Tin and Mentok Pepper: Chinese Settlement on an

for trade and production well before mid-century, making explorations
there essentially a matter of filling in spaces already known for the Dutch.

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 inter-
national 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.

By the late 1890s, however, this aura of ‘benign neglect’ in the northern-

most 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.

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.

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

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

149

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.

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).

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.

‘Chineesche Zee: Enkele Mededeelingen Omtrent de Anambas, Natoena, en Tambelan-

Eilanden’, Mededeelingen op Zeevaartkundig Gebied over Nederlandsch Oost-Indie (1896)
1 August 4, pp. 1–2.

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.

of sophistication.

In these same years at the turn of the twentieth century,

in fact, more general directives started to arrive from Batavia, asking admin-
istrators 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.

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.

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.

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.

Some of

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150

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.

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.

‘Balakang Padang, Een Concurrent van Singapore’, IG, 2 (1902), 1295.

J.F. Niermeyer, ‘Barriere Riffen en Atollen in de Oost Indische Archipel’, TAG (1911),

877; ‘Straat Makassar’, in Mededeelingen op Zeevaartkundig Gebied over Nederlandsch Oost-
Indie, 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).

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 explo-
ration 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 topog-
raphy 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.

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.

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.

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.

Mapping the sea, and mapping coastlines from the sea, there-

fore, 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.

By the end of the

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151

Colonial Office PRO (hereafter CO), Surveyor General R. Howard, Labuan, to Col.

Secretary, Labuan, 6 May 1873, CO 144/40.

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.

Kruijt, Twee Jaren Blokkade, pp. 169, 189.

See H. Mohammad Said, Aceh Sepanjang Abad (I) (Medan, 1981), pp. 675–753; Perang

Kolonial Belanda di Aceh (Banda Aceh, 1997), pp. 87–104.

See the Straits Times (9 October 1875); the Singapore Daily Times (2 May 1879); and the

Singapore Daily Times (9 May 1882).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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‘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.

‘Report on the Blasting Operations Carried Out in 1902 Upon Sunken Rocks at the

Mouth of the Singapore River’, in SSLCP (1903), C131.

‘Survey of the Ajax Shoal’, SSLCP (1885), C135.

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.

notifications in regional British newspapers.

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.

The final factor driving expansion can be found in the conten-

tious 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.

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.

In Jambi, for example, the Sultan was made responsible

by contract for the safety of shipwrecked Dutch seamen, who were occasion-
ally washed up on Jambi’s shores.

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.

In Riau, surviving Indonesian-language

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

153

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).

ARA, 1871, MR No. 464.

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.

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.

‘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.

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

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.

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.

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 indepen-
dence.

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’.

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 Anglo-
Dutch 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

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154

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.

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].

FO to CO, 29 Sept 1871, in CO 273/53.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

155

‘De Uitbreiding der Indische Kustverlichting’, IG, 2 (1903), 1172.

Board of Trade to CO, 12 January 1900, No. 16518, in CO 144/74.

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.

changes into their navies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is certainly some truth

to Mumford’s assertion, but the link between science and the natural world

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156

See, for example, ARA, MvBZ Circulaire to the Dutch Envoys in London, Paris, Berlin,

and Washington, 1 February 1895, No. 1097.

ARA, Dutch Consul, Paris, to MvBZ, 14 February 1900, No. 125/60, in (MvBZ/A/421/

A.182).

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).

‘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).

‘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).

See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963); both quotations can be

found on p. 357.

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.

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.

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.

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

HYDROGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY, COERCION

157

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).

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).

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.

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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158

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.’

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

159

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

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.

In the nineteenth century, the publication of warnings and advice devel-

oped 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

160

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

1996).

and the Great Lakes, thus avoiding the hazardous St Lawrence Seaway, which
was also ice-bound between October and May.

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.

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 passen-

ger 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 atten-
dance.

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

PAINS, PERILS AND PASTIMES

161

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).

Lucille H. Campey, ‘The Regional Characteristics of Scottish Emigration to British North

America, 1784 to 1854’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1998).

Ibid.

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.

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

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162

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

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.

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.

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.

PAINS, PERILS AND PASTIMES

163

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.

For an analysis of emigrants’ diaries, see Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard

Diaries by Nineteenth-century British Emigrants (Manchester, 1994).

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.

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.

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’.

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 A1-
registered 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

164

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.

Thomas Fowler, The Journal of a Tour through British North America to the Falls of Niagara

(Aberdeen, 1832), p. 13.

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’.

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.

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.

To her horror, one steerage passenger was subsequently diagnosed with small-
pox, 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

PAINS, PERILS AND PASTIMES

165

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).

National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), MS 1412, diary of the Revd Mr Tait,

1837.

NLNZ, ATL, q-MS-0370, Jessie Campbell diary, 12 September 1840.

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.

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.’

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.’

While conditions on the government-chartered Antipodean ships were

generally better than on the less carefully regulated Atlantic passage, passen-
gers 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

MARITIME EMPIRES

166

NLNZ, ATL, MS Papers 2534, Diary of a passage from Glasgow to Otago by John

Anderson, steerage passenger.

Wellington County Museum, Fergus, Ontario, MU 8 975.82.1, Journal of Robert

Cromar.

National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, MG 24 I 193.

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.

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.

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.

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

PAINS, PERILS AND PASTIMES

167

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.

Jessie Campbell diary, 23 October 1840.

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.

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.

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.

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168

Glasgow City Archives (Mitchell Library), AGN 1577, Robert D. Ogilvie’s journal,

1847.

NLNZ, ATL, 88–222, Isabella Ritchie Henderson diary, 31 July 1863.

Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado, pp. 6, 23, 52.

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.

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.’

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.

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’.

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.

PAINS, PERILS AND PASTIMES

169

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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’.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

170

NLNZ, ATL, MS Papers 1678, Jane Findlayson, diary, transcript, 4 October 1876.

Jessie Campbell, diary, 13 December 1840.

Ibid., 3 September 1840.

John Anderson, diary, 18 August 1862.

NLA, MS 596, diary of William Shennan, 21 March 1870, transcribed by Mrs M.R.

Shennan, 1987.

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.

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

PAINS, PERILS AND PASTIMES

171

Jane Findlayson, diary, 7 December 1876.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

172

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.

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.

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.

Michael Reimer’s Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in

Alexandria, 1807–1882 (1997) examined a different process, which saw incre-
mental accretions to the power of a transnational foreign power base in the
decades up to 1882. Sanitation and public order concerns led to the establish-
ment of transnational bodies which arrogated, in part to consular control, the
sovereignty of the Alexandrian authorities.

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

173

John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’,

English Historical Review, 112 (1997), 614–42.

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.

Vera Blinn Reber, British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810–1880 (Cambridge, MA,

1979), pp. 38–54.

Michael Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882

(Boulder, 1997).

absurdly tiny outposts

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.

The city’s Inter-

national 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 extrater-
ritoriality 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.

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.

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

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174

Jiujiang (Kiukiang) and Zhenjiang (Chinkiang) on the Yangzi: Robert Bickers, Britain in

China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 140–3.

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.

P.D. Coates, The China Consuls: British Consular Officers, 1843–1943 (Hong Kong, 1988).

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.

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’.

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.

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).

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.)

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 semi-
autonomous 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.

Hong Kong had been envisioned as the island depot,

a safe haven for British trade in British hands, from which the China trade

ORDERING SHANGHAI

175

China: No.2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, Series 679 (1), file 4173, ‘Chaopeitsui visitors

book, 1892–1936’.

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).

China: No. 2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, Series 679 (1), file 4124.

China: No. 2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, Series 679 (1), file 297, Tientsin

Commissioner to Coast Inspector, No. 96, 15 December 1903.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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176

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).

Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler

Community in Shanghai, 1842–1937’, Past and Present, no. 159 (1998), 161–211.

On different facets of this world see: Chiara Betta, ‘Silas Aaron Hardoon (1851–1931):

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.

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,

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 enforce-
ment, 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.

ORDERING SHANGHAI

177

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.

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).

Kerrie L. MacPherson, A Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai,

1843–1893 (Hong Kong, 1987).

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.

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.

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.

As Arnold also noted, colonial

policing had to seek compromises with – or dispense with – existing institu-
tions. 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.

The 1845 Land

Regulations allowed the foreign community to employ watchmen but made
no mention of a police force.

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

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178

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).

Richard Hawkins, ‘The “Irish Model” and the Empire: A Case for Reassessment’,

Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire, pp. 18–32.

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).

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.

Hawks Pott, Short History of Shanghai, p. 17.

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.

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’.

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.

Similarly, a European police was formed

in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1868 specifically to deal with the problem of European
rowdies in the city.

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.

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.

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

ORDERING SHANGHAI

179

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.

NCH, 30 July 1853, p. 207.

Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 144. See also Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, p. 70.

Pott, Short History of Shanghai, pp. 35–7.

NCH, 2 September 1854, 18; 11 November 1854, 59.

Chinese authorities.

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.

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.

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 default-
ing.

This was not an injunction peculiar to Shanghai, which early acquired

an unwholesome reputation.

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.

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’.

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 consti-
tuted a significant law and order problem and the hope that the army recruits
would be ‘settling down creditably in their new career’ was misplaced.

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.

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.

The under-

mining 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.

Ex-members of the

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180

NCH, 7 July 1855, 197.

NCH, 25 February 1860, 31.

NCH, 16 March 1861, 42; 11 May 1861, 75.

PRO FO 671/6, [Rules] for the Guidance of the Shanghae Municipal Police Force (n.d.).

Taylor, The New Police, pp. 53–4.

PRO FO 228/329, Shanghai No.129, 9 June 1862.

NCH, 8 October 1864, 162.

SMC, Annual Report 1863–64, p. 9.

PRO FO 97/111, Shanghai Police Sheets, 1863 passim.

Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 144.

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.

former American settlement’s force were accused of a spate of crime in 1861.

The first Superintendent of the SMP was himself charged with extortion in
1860.

After the founding batch of men from Hong Kong, early recruits had largely

been discharged seamen, and this factor was blamed for their unreliability.

When the established strength was increased, soldiers were preferred as possi-
bly 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.

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.

As in English forces, there was no systematic

training of recruits until the early years of the twentieth century.

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 consta-
bles 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.

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.

Foreign racism and an

ORDERING SHANGHAI

181

NCH, 22 June 1861, 98; 28 September 1861, 155. The American and British settlements

were combined in 1863 to form the International Settlement.

NCH, 24 November 1860, pp. 186–7.

Hong Kong had no better luck: Henry Lethbridge, Hong Kong: Stability and Change (Hong

Kong, 1978), pp. 193–5, 225–6.

SMC, Annual Report 1864–65, p. 2.

Report of the Watch Committee for 1883 upon the Shanghai Municipal Police Force and Scheme

for Reorganisation (Shanghai, 1883), p. 14.

Taylor, The New Police, p. 51.

Arnold, Police Power and Colonial rule, p. 71.

Rules and Regulations for the Guidance and Instruction of the Shanghai Municipal Police

(Shanghai, 1881), p. 22.

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.

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 charac-
terisations, 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.

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.

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.

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

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182

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 quick-
witted: Rules and Regulations for the Guidance and Instruction of the Shanghai Municipal Police
(Shanghai, 1884), 26.

Taylor, The New Police, 69; Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, vol. 2, pp. 266–8.

NCH, 15 May 1885, 555.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

ORDERING SHANGHAI

183

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.

Report of the Watch Committee for 1883, p. 6.

SMC, Annual Report 1898, p. 34.

NCH, 17 August 1861, 130; SMC, Annual Report 1899, p. 37.

Settlement at Xiamen when that was established in 1903.

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.

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.

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 demon-
strated 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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

184

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.

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).

SMC, Annual Report 1896, 35, Annual Report 1900, p. 5.

Municipal Council, Shanghai, Police Guide and Regulations (Shanghai, 1896).

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.

Ye Xiaoqing argued that in nineteenth-century Shanghai ‘relations

between Chinese and Westerners were harmonious’.

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.

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

ORDERING SHANGHAI

185

Rudolf Wagner, ‘The Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere’, The China

Quarterly no. 142 (1995), 423–43.

Ye Xiaoqing, ‘Shanghai before Nationalism’, East Asian History, no. 3 (1992), 52.

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.

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.

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.

David Arnold has shown

how colonial Madras displayed no greater criminal propensity than its rural

MARITIME EMPIRES

186

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., Nineteenth-
Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data
(Cambridge, 1972), p. 394.

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.

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

Chinese

Total arrests

Arrests excluding rickshaw

population

(per hundred thousand)

offences and vagrancy
(per hundred thousand)

1863/64

92,884

3,233

2,066

1870*

76,713

8,796

4,428

1876

97,335

7,430

3,682

1880

110,009

7,871

2,527

1885

129,338

12,668

3,369

1890

171,950

28,967

3,489

1895

245,679

29,428

5,817

1900

352,050

19,694

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.

hinterland.

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.

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 colo-
nialism 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

ORDERING SHANGHAI

187

David Arnold, ‘Crime and Crime Control in Madras, 1858–1947’, in Anand Yang, ed.,

Crime and Criminality in British India (Tuczon, 1985), p. 75.

Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century

(Berkeley, 1999).

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

Total offences

Total crimes Total

Other

Police strength

against against

the

social

(per

hundred

property

person

order

thousand)

1863/64

1,037

183

1,279

734

136

1870–71

2,022

455

6,355

266

153

1876

1,163

321

5,381

581

146

1880

931

268

6,571

189

166

1885

965

403

7,208

340

232

1890

1,031

212

16,630

358

226

1895

832

236

14,350

576

206

1900

998

236

13,955

510

226

Average

1863–1880

1,288

307

4,897

443

150

Average

1885–1900

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.

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.

) 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.

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 repu-
tation 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,

MARITIME EMPIRES

188

NCH, 5 May 1870, 321.

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (Harlow, 1987), p. 189; Taylor,

The New Police, p. 92.

and (c) enforcing social discipline.

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.

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.

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.

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,

ORDERING SHANGHAI

189

Lanning and Couling, History of Shanghai, vol. 2, ch. 28, ‘Rowdysm, Drink and Some

Remedies’, pp. 326–32.

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).

SMC, Annual Report 1876, p. 20.

NCH, 13 February 1891, 173.

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.

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’.

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 Destitute

– and enforce regulations controlling the manner

and timing of the carriage of nightsoil through the city streets (close fitting
metal buckets were prescribed).

The ears, eyes and noses of foreign residents

were thus protected. Fireworks and firecrackers were a considerable fire-
risk, as was incense burning, but their suppression was also concerned with

MARITIME EMPIRES

190

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.

Revd C.E. Darwent, Shanghai, A Handbook for Travellers and Residents (Shanghai, 1912),

pp. xiv, iv.

SMC, Annual Report 1870–71, pp. 28–30, 40.

SMC, Annual Report 1896, p. 57.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Loitering’ at night

became a criminal offence after 1870, but anyway, it was claimed, those who
loitered were ‘all known professional thieves’.

The police also acted to

enforce regulations barring most Chinese from European pleasure gardens,
mostly notably and notoriously the Public Garden on the Bund.

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

ORDERING SHANGHAI

191

NCH, 5 May 1870, 321.

SMC, Annual Report 1883, pp. 169–71.

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.

SMC, Annual Report 1885, pp. 48, 69; SMC, Annual Report 1886, p. 36.

SMC, Annual Report 1870–71, p. 39.

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.

of the Suzhou Creek in 1881.

Other branches of the council swept and

cleaned the main roads twice daily (and alleyways once daily).

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 work-
men singing as they drove foundation piles.

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’.

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.

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

MARITIME EMPIRES

192

The Shanghae Evening Courier, 20 July 1869, 979, 30 September 1869, 1227; SMC, Annual

Report 1881, p. 46.

SMC, Annual Report 1897; SMC, Annual Report 1894, p. 178.

SMC, Annual Report 1899, p. 73; Shanghai: Municipal Archives, U 1-16-4354, Health

Officer to J.O.P. Bland, 27 September 1900.

SMC, Annual Report 1899, p. 39.

Taylor, The New Police, p. 105.

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 them-
selves’.

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.

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 settle-

ment, which so impressed visiting Chinese and neighbouring administrations,
stemmed from the ‘functioning of health imperatives’.

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.

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.

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

ORDERING SHANGHAI

193

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.

Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York, 1948).

MacPherson, A Wilderness of Marshes, p. 267.

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.

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.

Kristin Stapleton argued in her study of policing in Chengdu, this is what
young Chinese reformers also saw, and what influenced their own policy inno-
vations.

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.

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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

194

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.

Two such trajectories are narrated in: A.H. Rasmussen, China Trader (London, 1954);

John Pal, Shanghai Saga (London, 1963).

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.

‘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?

195

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).

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.

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.

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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).

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).

As a result we have witnessed in the past generation a dramatic democ-

ratization 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.

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 illu-
mination of its pathology in his recent novel, Losing Nelson.

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 roman-
ticized 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:

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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).

Barry Unsworth, Losing Nelson (New York, 2000).

Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.

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 con-
tribution to ‘a peoples’ history of the sea’.

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, nation-
loving 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,

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Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,

Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).

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.

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 compre-
hensive 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.

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’.

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

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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.

understanding, and we deserve the deeper historical understanding that comes
of restoring their voices.

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.

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.

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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).

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.

Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, chs 1, 7.

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 revolu-
tion 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 commu-
nities 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’.

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.

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.

Indeed, some of the most exciting recent work in any field has

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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.

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).

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).

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’.

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.

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 multi-
racial 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.

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

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Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.,

1993), p. 4.

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).

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.

all Country’s’ [sic]. When hailed by other vessels, pirates emphasized their
rejection of nationality by replying that they came ‘From the Seas’.

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.

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 nine-
teenth 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

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Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston,

2004).

Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 18.

full integration into the world economy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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David A. Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk,

NY and London, 1997).

Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Dusseldorf, 1995), p. 48.

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.

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).

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.

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’.

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 other-
worldly, 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’.

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

TOWARD A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE SEA

205

Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery,

1720–1870 (Chapel Hill, 2000), pp. 16 and 17

Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (London, 1897) p. 18.

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986), 22–7.

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.

The conference was, in practice, a many-

sided 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.

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 terracen-
trism, 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.

MARITIME EMPIRES

206

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).

Derek Walcott, Poems, 1965–1980 (London, 1992), p. 237.

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222

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

INDEX

224

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,

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,

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,

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

INDEX

225

Isabella, HMS 85, 86
Iwaidja people 132

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

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,

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

Lytham Shipbuilding and Engineering

Company 123

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

INDEX

226

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

INDEX

227

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

INDEX

228

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

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

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

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

INDEX

229

Document Outline

CONTENTS
CONTRIBUTORS
FOREWORD
ABBREVIATIONS
1. Introduction. Imperial seas: cultural exchange and commerce in the British Empire 1780–1900
2. From slaves to palm oil: Afro-European commercial relations in the Bight of Biafra, 1741–1841
3. ‘Pirate water’: sailing to Belize in the mahogany trad
4. Cape to Siberia: the Indian Ocean and China Sea trade in equids
5. Aden, British India and the development of steam power in theRed Sea, 1825–1839
6. The heroic age of the tin can: technology and ideology in BritishArctic exploration, 1818–1835
7. The proliferation and diffusion of steamship technology and thebeginnings of ‘new imperialism’
8. Lakes, rivers and oceans: technology, ethnicity and the shipping ofempire in the late nineteenth century
9. Making imperial sp ace: settlement, surveying and trade in northern Australia in the nineteenth century
10. Hydrography, technology, coercion: mapping the sea in SoutheastAsian imperialism, 1850–1900
11. Pains, perils and pastimes: emigrant voyages in the nineteenthcentury
12. Ordering Shanghai: policing a treaty port, 1854–1900
13. Toward a people’s history of the sea
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

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