The Indian Ocean (56 page)

On the other side of the ocean, in the Comoros, we have been left an oral tradition to do with the origins of the leading Indian merchant family there. So much of his story is familiar to us; it could stand as a pattern of life beneath the imperial umbrella. Hadji Yakub Ismael was born in Gujarat, in Kutch Mandvi, and was from a family of cloth merchants. Undercut by European machine-made cloth, he was forced to travel, first to Zanzibar, then to Iraq, Madagascar, and other parts of Africa. Zanzibar was his base for many years, but once he was blown off course and ended up in one of the Comoro islands. He saw opportunities. Returning to Zanzibar, he loaded up with cloths (that is, manufactured goods) and in Grand Comoro exchanged them for sisal, coir and other primary products. This was in the 1880s. Much later, when the French acquired the islands, he had extensive dealings with them, but he also continued to travel and trade up and down the East African coast and offshore islands.
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Alan Villiers sailed on a dhow in 1938–39 on what seems to be a typical peddling voyage. Essentially it went where there was opportunity, and where the monsoons would let them go. It set off in August 1938 from Kuwait, and went to Basra to get dates for Mukalla. On the way they called at Muscat. From Mukalla it went on to Aden to take on goods and passengers, then back to Mukalla for more of the same. They then set off for Africa, and did some smuggling at Haifun, in northern Somalia. There was no trade in Mogadishu, so they went straight on to Lamu and Mombasa where cargo and passengers were landed, then to Zanzibar where they arranged to load mangrove poles in the Rufiji delta, then to Zanzibar again and finally back to Muscat and so to Bahrain, where the mangrove poles were sold. They got home to Kuwait in June 1939.
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A recent example was a fleet of eleven prahus found off Ashmore Reef in north-western Australia in 1968. They were collecting trepang, clams, various other fish, and trochus shells. Based in Madura, they had sailed around east Java peddling bits and pieces. After leaving Ashmore Reef, hopefully with a full cargo of dried fish, they intended to go to Makassar via Timor, and sell the whole cargo in exchange for coconuts and copra to sell in Surabays, after which they hoped to get back home to
Madura. The whole voyage usually would take five lunar months. This sort of pattern goes back some centuries at least, certainly long before white colonisation in Australia.
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Beneath the imposing imperial edifice there were also westerners who travelled and did the best they could. Somerset Maugham travelled widely in the 1920s, and always had something acute, or mordant, or supercilious, to say about his fellow passengers. On a trip from Bangkok he 'soon discovered that I was thrown amid the oddest collection of persons I had ever encountered. There were two French traders and a Belgian colonel, an Italian tenor, the American proprietor of a circus with his wife, and a retired French official with his.' The circus man was another pedlar. He had spent twenty years travelling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama – Aden, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Rangoon, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Saigon, Hue, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shanghai. Soon after, on his way from Haiphong, he met another American, this one a Jew (some gratuitous anti-Semitic remarks follow) who travelled in hosiery and had gone from Jakarta to Yokohama for twenty years.
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We have looked at a variety of people travelling on, or living near, the ocean; we have spent a lot of time describing life aboard the great liners. However, there was and still is another layer below the commanding heights of the P&O, and we can now turn to this level. We are dealing with tramp steamers, and local ferry boats. There is a marked ebb and flow of the ownership of these lower level craft. To World War II the larger ones, the tramp steamers let us say, were nearly all owned by people from outside the ocean, but after independence this changed. Yet even today much of the traffic in the ocean is generated by foreign registered ships. Taking account of the merchant fleets of all the countries around the ocean (and thus excluding China and Japan) there has been some renaissance since 1945. In 1939 these countries had about 185,000 GRT out of a world total of 58,000. By 1957 it was 879,000 out of 110,000, by 1971 it was 5,324 out of 247,000, and by 1982 it was 27,000 out of 424,000.
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The conclusion is presumably that from a lamentable base of total subordination, the region has made some progress, but much remains to be done.

Frank Broeze was the great authority on Indian shipping in the modern period. He shows how India between the two world wars was able to make some progress, as the British slowly relaxed some of their control and allowed at least a little competition. The Scindia line was founded in Mumbai in 1919, and given some access to coastal trade. Equally important, the company began to train, in India, its own engineers, rather than relying on British expertise. Yet even so the important Government of India Act of 1935 specifically forbade any discrimination by India against British shipping. Even by 1939 there still had been no agreement to allow Scindia to have half of India's coastal trade, let alone any to Europe or Japan. At the outbreak of World War II India had 132,000 GRT of shipping, less than 0.2 per cent of the world's total, and 120,000 of this was owned by Scindia. At this time traditional craft probably totalled roughly the same tonnage.
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Some progress has been made since then. By 1983 India had shipping of 6.24 million GRT; on the other hand the country was, compared with Japan or Singapore, very late to enter the container age.

We can survey Indian Ocean shipping in the twentieth century by going down in
size, starting then with substantial passenger and cargo ships, and ending with traditional sailing craft. We will concentrate on passengers again, with economic data to do with cargoes and cargo ships being covered later in this chapter.

One way to get into the subject is to consider the journey of the English journalist Gavin Young, who set off in August 1979 with the aim of travelling from Europe to Guangzhou by sea. It took seven months and was a very difficult task. He had to travel by land quite often, for he found that on some sectors of his route there were only cargo ships now, whereas before World War II, or even ten years previously, he could have done the whole route by passenger ship. It is revealing that he used the ships of Swire and Sons line sometimes, but by 1979 they had almost no passenger-cargo ships, as airlines had taken over. This shipping company, significantly, at that time also owned the Cathay Pacific airline!
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Somerset Maugham in the late 1920s travelled on a typical humble cargo-passenger ship from Bangkok.

I left Bangkok on a shabby little boat of four or five hundred tons. The dingy saloon, which served also as a dining-room, had two narrow tables down its length with swivel-chairs on both sides of them. The cabins were in the bowels of the ship and they were extremely dirty. Cockroaches walked about on the floor and however placid your temperament it is difficult not to be startled when you go to the wash-basin to wash your hands and a huge cockroach stalks leisurely out. We dropped down the river, broad and lazy and smiling, and its green banks were dotted with little huts on piles standing at the water's edge. We crossed the bar; and the open sea, blue and still, spread before me. The look of it and the smell of it filled me with elation.
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Fifty years later Young had a similar passage, one that brought back to him the same Maugham. He was on the 1,400 ton
Perak
, going from Singapore to Kuching. He found his cabin.

Somerset Maugham would have been satisfied; a bunk, a dressing table and mirror, a wardrobe, two armchairs covered in white leatherette and a stool. The two portholes were square wood-framed windows with curtains; a thermos of ice water hung in a wall bracket, and on the ceiling a large fan rotated inside a cage designed to protect abnormally tall passengers like myself from a scalping. I took my copy of Maugham's Short Stories out of my bag and laid it on the dressing table, where it looked at home.

Young was the only passenger, therefore rather a relic, as also the 'Information for Passengers' on his cabin door, which said 'There is normally a quiet period at sea when passengers, and also officers off duty, may be resting. If parents would be kind enough to aid in maintaining this atmosphere, it would be very much appreciated.'

This was part of a dying trade. Young had earlier gone from Chennai to Port Blair, in the Andamans. He went on a substantial Shipping Company of India boat of
10,300 tons, with 950 passengers. Young got breakfast in the spacious dining room, 'cornflakes, eggs, bacon, Madrasi cakes with curry sauce.' After Port Blair he went on to Kolkata, again on a modern Shipping Co. of India ship, and enlivened a very pleasant voyage by checking the complaint book, finding such gems as 'I am glad to certify that the service given me by the staff is really good. I feel just homelike comfort and this is due only from their sweet association.' Others complained of 'certain indecent and unruly passengers in drunken condition' and that 'Stewards attend cabins at their own whims and favours. Passengers boarding ship should be instructed about correct methods to use heads, and socio-economic conditions keep some in dark.'
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Today Port Blair can only be reached by air from either Chennai or Kolkata. So also in the Arabian Sea, where the regular Mombasa–Mumbai route has vanished in favour of air travel. Western travellers used to end their odysseys with voyages on precarious passenger ferries in Indonesia. These continue to ply their way from island to island, a reflection obviously of the fact that Indonesia, being all islands, is much more hospitable to the continuance of this mode of transport. For a time small steamers went from Chennai to Penang and Singapore, mostly carrying Tamil and other Indian settlers to and from Malaysia. This route survived for a time because the passengers usually had very heavy baggage, too much to take by air.

The end of passenger ships has also occurred on coastal routes. The preferred way to get to Goa from Mumbai used to be a ferry which spent a leisurely day chugging down India's west coast for a picturesque dawn arrival at the estuary of the Mandovi. Gavin Young did this trip in 1979. Nearing Goa he wrote about

Bingo in the second-class dining room. The second officer calls out the numbers to a packed and sweating audience bent over slips of squared and numbered paper. 'Grandmother's age – eight zero . . . Republic Day – twenty-six... Punjab Day – number five . . . a round dozen – number twelve. . . Hockey sticks – seventy-seven.' Sikhs played cards on the perfectly scrubbed deck; Indian families made little picnics. Hippies peeled oranges, slept or studied pornographic pictures in sex magazines. Four miles away the green coastline moved by. On time, Captain Kadir brought the ship into Goa in a blue morning mist, passing through a fleet of trawlers with light roofs. 'We're going right inside,' he said, like a surgeon announcing his next probe. An old fort, a white church, land becoming reddish and lumpy, a line of broken water under a cliff.

He was told that the route was no longer profitable.
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True enough, the steamers stopped, to be replaced by a jet cat, which also failed. It was felt not to be picturesque enough, and one had a bumpy ride usually out of sight of land. Those on the aisle seats had packets of vomit from those sitting alongside them passed across to be collected by stewards. Goa can now be reached only by plane or train.

We can trace the career of what may be a typical humble cargo ship, thanks to some devoted amateur research. The ship in question operated for years off the Western Australian coast. It was of 2,425 tonnes, built in Sunderland, and in 1892
started life named the SS
Darius
. After years in the Indian horse trade from Australia, it was bought by the Western Australian government in 1912 and given an Aboriginal name, the
Kwinana
. From this time it shunted back and forth up and down the coast, taking general cargo to northern ports, and bringing back live cattle from the Kimberley region. Sometimes it went as far as New Zealand, South Africa and China, with cargoes of hardwood and sandalwood. In the eight years to December 1920 it had made an impressive total of ninety-six voyages from Fremantle. Then it caught fire, was declared of no further use, and was subsequently used for explosives training. Such a humble and undramatic career must typify the bulk of trade and shipping around the shores of the ocean.
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Steam, as we have commented already, was not and still is not totally dominant. Sailing ships still have some role. In 1979 Gavin Young sailed from Colombo to Tuticorin on a schooner, a 'great heavy-timbered three-master' of 220 tons. There was no engine, and indeed they were becalmed for a time.
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Arriving in Tuticorin Young found a fleet of about forty-seven seagoing thonis, some up to 500 tons, and no engines. They took salt and fertilisers to the west coast, coming back in ballast. From April to August they took imported wheat, fertilisers and rice up the east coast to Chennai and Kolkata, and they also went to Colombo. The high cost of diesel meant they were still viable. So also in Saurashtra, where there has developed a booming business making 400 tonne wooden ocean-going vessels.
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The main survivors are the famous dhows, whose partial demise has attracted endless attention from romantic westerners. Alan Villiers in 1939 wrote a somewhat premature requiem:

In the great days of the Arab navigators, Arab dhows covered the eastern seas; now it was half a century since one had rounded the southern tip of Ceylon. Ancient methods, the old instruments, the old mathematics – in which the Arabs had so long excelled – all these were lost, and nothing had come to take their place, nothing but discarded steamship compasses bought in a junk-yard in Bombay, and uncorrected out-of-date Admiralty charts. Yet the Arabs still sailed, though they had lost much of their knowledge and some of their glory. Their voyages consisted largely of petty coastal trading and smuggling.
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