The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Circumstances have caused the Mediterranean Sea to play a greater part in the history of the world, both in a commercial and a military point of view, than any other sheet of water of the same size. Nation after nation has striven to control it, and the strife still goes on. Therefore a study of the conditions upon which preponderance in its waters has rested, and now rests, and of the relative military values of different points upon its coasts, will be more instructive than the amount of effort expended in another field. Furthermore, it has at the present time a very marked analogy in many respects to the Caribbean Sea, – an analogy which will be still closer if a Panama canal-route ever be completed.33

  He had a good understanding of the strategic importance of the choke-points at the edges of the Mediterranean: the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles and now the Suez Canal as well. All this pointed to the obvious conclusion that America needed its own canal through Panama. Mahan’s approach was founded upon a particular view of international relations as a great game in which nations competed for power and influence, expressing their power through control of the sea routes and using their power to promote trade. Rivalry was the fundamental concept. His book was a call to the United States administration to wake up to global realities, after a century of slumber.

  Mahan’s arguments were backed up by events. The USS Oregon had been sent from San Francisco to join the fray in the Atlantic when news arrived of the destruction of the Maine in Havana. The painfully slow voyage round Cape Horn to Palm Beach, Florida, took sixty-seven days. What more needed to be said in defence of a canal through Central America? On the other hand, Roosevelt, now Assistant Secretary of the Navy, wrote to Mahan in 1897 saying that he believed in the Nicaragua route. Congress was still enthusiastically discussing this option when Vice-President Roosevelt suddenly became president in 1901 following the assassination of McKinley. But new reports on the feasibility of different routes, along with the chance to buy out the property of the rump company in France that had taken over the now dormant Panama Canal project, led to a sudden change of policy in Washington. The Colombian government was also well disposed to the idea. The cost would be up to $40,000,000, but the big prize was to be the concession of permanent control over a canal zone either side of the waterway all the way across Panama.34 Here was an opportunity to make real Mahan’s insistence that the United States needed to assert its dominance within its maritime backyard, the Caribbean, while creating an express route to its new possessions in the Pacific, and to markets in the Far East. And yet, while we may read this as proof of the will to create an American overseas empire, the canal project was not seen in those terms; rather it was proof that the United States, an inherently virtuous nation, was acting on behalf of all mankind, ‘something bigger and better than empire’, for how could the perfect republic be imperialist?35

  This was the beginning, not the end, of over a decade of high drama, during which the USA gave its support to a revolutionary regime in Panama and the isthmus broke away from Colombia, still leaving the Americans with full authority over the canal zone, expressed before long in the despatch of American ships and the landing of American troops in order to secure the railway line across the isthmus. It was also a period of continued argument about the best route, as it became obvious that the French had made too many mistakes: the taming of the River Chagres was one of the most important and difficult issues, but it was managed by the building of a great dam and the creation of the Gatun Lake, spread across a large area of the canal zone, while a series of locks brought ships over the Panamanian ridges through which earlier excavators had somehow imagined they could slice their way. Meanwhile the US government constructed the all-American towns of Balboa and Colón to service their needs in the canal zone. The zone required and was provided with schools, hospitals, post offices, churches, prisons, public restaurants, laundries, bakeries, street lamps, roads, bridges. Much of the female labour was employed within the newly built hospitals.36

  The implantation of the Americans in Panama is sometimes seen as the crucial moment when the United States became committed to a world role, although there were earlier imperial acquisitions in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the acquisition of the canal zone was in many ways the consequence of these new responsibilities and ambitions. Roosevelt’s view that the building of the canal was a dramatic step forward in the progress of humanity proved to be true in an important respect: hard work on the ground identified malaria and yellow fever as insect-borne diseases, and a massive effort to eradicate mosquitoes and other carriers of disease by thorough fumigation and by the removal of tainted water had impressive results; simple acts like removing ornamental trees that were growing in water-filled pots destroyed the breeding ground of the insects.37 The building of the canal was a key moment in the medical history of mankind.

  Roosevelt saw the acquisition of the canal zone as the greatest achievement of his first administration, a decade before the canal itself was even completed. In November 1906 he became the first US president to leave the country while in office, when he sailed down to Panama aboard the grandest American battleship, the USS Louisiana. It was a remarkable visit for other reasons. He chose to come when conditions would be bad, during the rainy season, so he could witness the difficulties the engineers and labourers were facing. He visited the sick, unannounced. He was able to report optimistically to Congress, while greatly enjoying the positive publicity his visit had generated.38 All this work was being carried out at the expense of the American government, at a cost of $352,000,000, four times the cost of the Suez Canal.39 The American government invested hugely in massive new machinery able to run on newly constructed rails, as well as a vast labour force, in which this time not Jamaica but Barbados provided many of the best workers. The labour force was divided into ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ categories, American citizens counting as ‘gold’, although Americans of colour often found themselves demoted, at least unofficially, and the many Barbadians were relegated to ‘silver’. ‘Silver’ was clearly a euphemism, but conditions did improve with time.40 The fearful mortality of the days when the French were trying to build the link was a distant memory by the time the canal opened on the eve of the First World War. The outbreak of war limited its takings, with only four or five ships a day making the crossing, but after the war ended the boom began, catching up with Suez and eventually taking the annual figure to over 7,000 ships on the eve of the next world war.41

  As with the Suez Canal, there had been last-minute blockages, and the new lake had to be filled with a massive Atlantic in-flow; but by April 1914 light cargo traffic was being towed through, beginning with a consignment of tinned pineapples from Hawai’i, another important if outwardly modest symbol of the new technology of the industrial era. The opening ceremony was quite muted, not nearly as grand as the opening of the Suez Canal, which had been attended by Empress Eugénie of France and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. Nonetheless, the ceremony featured not merely the president of the United States but the USS Oregon, which was recognized, justly enough, as the ship whose voyage from California to Florida by way of Cape Horn in 1898 had done most to demonstrate that a canal was urgently needed.42 With the building of the two canals, Asia and Africa had been divided by a waterway, and North and South America were also physically divided; but the oceans were now joined together.

  49

  Steaming to Asia, Paddling to America

  I

  The building of first the Suez Canal and then the Panama Canal, along with the increasing use of steamships, did not bring to an end more traditional ways of crossing the oceans. Clippers and windjammers continued to sail vast distances carrying tea, grain and other basic goods. The wind was free, but coal had to be bought. Nonetheless, by the late nineteenth century massive changes in the use of ships had become visible. Passenger traffic across the Atlantic, increasingly carried on large ocean liners, grew prodigiously as migrants, fleeing famine in Ireland, poverty in Italy or persecution in Russ
ia queued to be allowed past the newly dedicated Statue of Liberty into New York with its welcoming inscription by Emma Lazarus. The statue itself was cast in France, not America, and was carried in pieces to New York in 1885, aboard a French steamship. It goes without saying that the scale of this migration far exceeded the earlier trickle of Europeans across the Atlantic. Accompanying the stream of migrants, though generally in much more comfortable parts of the ship, could be found businessmen, along with more leisured visitors to the USA, willing to spend a week or so aboard a vessel that would adhere to a reasonably reliable timetable, and that would have a high standard of comfort and safety. Standards of safety proved less good than the public had been led to believe when the ‘unsinkable’ RMS Titanic foundered in 1912; but the inevitable response to the disaster was to look more closely at those standards, particularly lifeboat provision.

  Early steamships ran risks: in 1840 Samuel Cunard was granted a contract for transatlantic shipping thanks to his insistence on ‘safety first, profit second’; a shipping company lost two steamships because (so it seemed) their captains had tried to prove how fast they could cross the ocean.1 In 1866 the steamship the London went down not far out of Plymouth, with the loss of 270 people, at the start of a long run to Melbourne As well as sixty-nine crew, the ship carried 220 passengers who were looking forward to a new life in Australia. It also carried far too much heavy cargo, maybe as much as 1,200 tons of iron and 500 tons of coal, so that her deck stood only three and a half feet above the surface of the water – in calm conditions.2 This was just one scandalous example of a much wider problem: one in six ships carrying passengers from Europe to America around this time eventually sank (which is not the same as saying that one in six voyages ended in shipwreck), and over 400 ships are said to have foundered off Great Britain in 1873–4.3 As twenty-first-century migration across the Mediterranean shows, people are only too willing to entrust their life to unseaworthy vessels; and this applied just as much to the migrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The enormous growth of maritime traffic during the nineteenth century, particularly across the Atlantic, resulted in more and more maritime disasters; rapid industrialization brought both new benefits and new dangers. Critics insisted that unscrupulous shipowners were only too happy to claim on their insurance policy with Lloyd’s: ‘the wealthy merchant thrives, but what about the priceless freight of precious human lives?’4

  Britain, set fair to become the greatest naval power on earth, mistress of an empire across the three great oceans, and heavily dependent on maritime trade, could not tolerate this state of affairs. It became obvious that Parliament needed to look closely at maritime safety, and the leader of the campaign was Samuel Plimsoll, who had started life as a coal merchant and had no naval background at all. He managed to win a seat in the House of Commons for the Liberal Party, and campaigned long and furiously for improvements in sailors’ safety. He gained a huge popular following: a wool clipper had been named after him in 1873, and songs and poems were composed in his honour:

  A British Cheer for Plimsoll

  The sailor’s honest friend

  In spite of opposition

  Their rights he dares defend

  Tho’ wealth and pow’r united

  To put him down have sought

  His valour has defeated

  The forces ’gainst him brought.5

  Benjamin Disraeli, accused of bending to the will of shipping magnates, was at first hostile to Plimsoll’s demands for legislation, while Plimsoll’s unrestrained and vigorous attacks on a shipowner named Bates, whose boats had a dismal safety record, almost landed him in court.6 But of course Plimsoll was right. Finally, in 1876, the British government acknowledged the need for change, ten years after the wreck of the London. Clause 26 of the Merchant Shipping Act passed that year demanded that (with a few exemptions for small vessels and yachts):

  The owner of every British ship … shall, before entering his ship outwards from any port in the United Kingdom upon any voyage for which he is required to enter her, or, if that is not practicable, as soon after as may be, mark upon each of her sides amidships or as near thereto as is practicable, in white or yellow on a dark ground, or in black on a light ground, a circular disk twelve inches in diameter with a horizontal line drawn through its centre. The centre of this disk shall indicate the maximum load-line in salt water to which the owner intends to load the ship for that voyage.7

  Even so, it was another thirty years before foreign shipping visiting British ports was obliged to follow suit, and the Plimsoll line, as it came to be known, was only adopted as an international standard in 1930. In the USA, Congress was hesitant, and the Plimsoll standard was applied only in 1929 for international shipping and in 1935 for domestic shipping – not a unique example of the United States going its own way for a good while. Plimsoll Days were long celebrated in a number of British towns, in gratitude for what Samuel Plimsoll achieved for British sailors.8 He deserves to be remembered as a great national and indeed international hero.

  Meanwhile, new technology was transforming the world, and its effect on the oceans was felt in another way too: the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, although it soon broke, and only in the 1860s were cables laid that worked reasonably well (using in part Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s magnificent steamship the Great Eastern, which was twice the size of the already impressive Great Britain now preserved at Bristol). Even so, contact was painfully slow by later standards, since Morse code was the only practicable way to send pulses down the cable. The manufacture of thousands of miles of coiled cable was an achievement in itself, and the sense that England and America were now linked in a new way was marked by an exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and the American president on the first day of operation. Other cables were laid in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while London remained the global centre of operations: this was a means to communicate with the Empire, as well as with the United States, and the days when messages to viceroys were out of date before they arrived were coming to an end. Later, when Marconi demonstrated that contact could be made by radio waves rather than by cable, contact across the oceans became even more rapid and communications could reach just about anywhere.

  II

  It has been seen that the Suez route from northern Europe to the Far East was shorter and quicker than the route around the Cape of Good Hope, and the chance to make the journey even quicker arose with the development of sturdier types of steamship just as the Suez Canal opened. A pioneer of these new steamship routes was Alfred Holt, whose Ocean Steamship Company operated out of his native city, Liverpool. As he built up his fleet of trading ships he studied iron hulls, steam boilers and screw propellers, convinced that he could push down the cost of long-distance transport aboard steamships below that of sailing vessels. Perfecting the steamship had to be achieved by trial and error, sometimes at great cost – ships went down, taking goods and men with them. His idea that steam pressure could be raised to 60 lb per square inch took the technology of the time to its limits. His decision to build longer iron ships promised to increase cargo capacity, ‘as it is the middle that carries and pays’.9 Iron was certainly much stronger than wood, but making sure the rivets held the ship together was a problem. In the early days, iron steamships sometimes split in two. Holt therefore took the trouble to send the ship he had fitted with an experimental high-pressure engine as far as Brazil and Archangel.10

  Holt’s Liverpool was a city that had transformed itself from being a major base of the slave trade and sugar trade, in the eighteenth century, into the export hub of northern England, taking full advantage of the rapid industrialization taking place in Lancashire. Railways connected its wharves to Manchester, Chester and beyond. Its harbour was large and well situated. Its often infamous trade of earlier years had created a capital base for diversification into shipping business other than the trade in human beings. The links to slavery did not vanish after Parliament forbade the slave tra
de in 1807: the city continued to trade intensively with west Africa, and a mainstay of the city’s business was the import of American cotton, produced on the slave plantations of the Deep South.11 Like other port cities, Liverpool became home to a mixed population that included plenty of Irish, Welsh and Scots, but also Africans and Chinese, many of whom had arrived on the ships of Alfred Holt.12 Liverpool did face local challenges: Manchester became a rival with the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, but the main brokers dealing in imported cotton remained in Liverpool.13 By the start of the twentieth century Liverpool businessmen were confident enough of the city’s primacy to build the imposing Edwardian office buildings that are the city’s great architectural glory.

  In 1866 Alfred Holt announced the launch of his steamship company, with three sister ships, the Agamemnon, the Ajax and the Achilles, each over 2,000 tons. In April the Agamemnon set out for Shanghai, by way of the Cape, Mauritius, Penang in Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong. Holt’s first published timetable estimated the length of the outward voyage at seventy-seven days, with a slightly longer return schedule of ninety days, as the ships were to stop in south-eastern China to load the most important part of their cargo – tea. But this was still much better than the four months a sailing ship would require. Subtract from this the ten days or so that would be saved once the Suez Canal was in operation, and Holt’s company seemed bound to succeed. On the other hand, Holt had to charge higher freight rates to cover his costs, for steamships cost more to build and to operate; and there were still doubts about their reliability, since they could be stopped in their tracks if coal supply stations were not created and maintained, though in the early days they did carry large amounts of sail, just in case.14 But a long sea voyage by steamship was, at least before permanent coaling stations were created, complicated. When the rival Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) sent the Hindostan to Calcutta in 1842, coal supply ships awaited her at Gibraltar, Mindelo in the Cape Verde Islands, Ascension Island, Cape Town, Mauritius and Sri Lanka.15 In the eyes of many traders, the traditional sailing ship was familiar as well as beautiful. This became even clearer when the tea clippers, of which the Cutty Sark, still preserved at Greenwich, is the most famous, came into operation; by the 1850s sailing ships crept back into fashion. As early as 1828 the First Lord of the Admiralty had expressed himself decisively: ‘the introduction of steam is calculated to strike a fatal blow at the supremacy of the Empire.’ But the Royal Navy, unlike the Merchant Navy, was not interested in creating timetables and schedules for passengers and freight.16