The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The canal made all the difference, therefore, and it also opened up the route East to smaller ships that could not have coped with the Cape route. Holt charged ahead, smashing competition by building steamships at a furious rate. This paid off: by 1875 his managers insisted that they had run out of space for cargoes yet again, so that they needed three more ships; these cargoes were dominated by Lancashire cotton and woollen cloths (the cotton cloth being made largely out of imported Indian fibres, now re-exported as finished goods). Passengers were also carried: on the return leg, Muslim pilgrims were picked up and conveyed to Jiddah, from where they could reach Mecca for the haj, and this became big business for several British shipping companies; well over 13,000 Muslim pilgrims sailed on Blue Funnel ships in 1914, setting out from Singapore and Penang.17 Journey times were slashed, falling as low as fifty-five, even forty-two, days out from England. The advantages of steam navigation became most obvious when Holt’s ships joined the annual tea race, bringing the fresh crop as fast as possible to London. They not merely outpaced the tea clippers, which was to be expected, but they beat the steamships of rival companies. In 1869 his ships carried nearly 9,000,000 lb of tea to England, and, having beaten all competitors, Holt was able to take advantage of a seller’s market and dispose of his tea at 2d per pound more than his late coming rivals.18 In 1914 the Blue Funnel Line, as Holt’s company came to be known, used more berths in Liverpool docks than any other cargo line and was the most frequent user of the Suez Canal, dominating the export of British textiles to east Asia.19

  Holt’s operations in China were boosted by his decision to work alongside a British merchant company based in China, Butterfield and Swire, which set up an office in Shanghai on 1 January 1867, and specialized not just in tea but in raw American cotton, which formed the bulk of the cargo of the Achilles when it left Shanghai a couple of weeks later.20 The relationship with John Swire enabled the Blue Funnel line to draw goods from deeper inside China, as Swire’s steamboats penetrated down the Yangtze River, bringing Chinese goods to Shanghai for trans-shipment. Swire was a great advocate of the Conference System, an agreement among competing shipping firms that they would set the same freight rate on outward cargoes, which left Holt uneasy, as there were pluses and minuses to this, especially after competition from faster ships than his own became a problem. After their pioneering start, the managers of the Blue Funnel Line sometimes displayed the conservatism that had delayed the introduction of steam power to other shipping companies: they were slow to follow the move over to steel from iron, and new types of engine were ignored.21 Although the Blue Funnel Line is long gone, the Swire family remains a powerful force in the trade of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong to this day, though its best-known fleet now consists not of ships but of the aeroplanes of Cathay Pacific.

  Holt was unnerved by competition from P&O. The company had come into being to serve routes towards Spain, Gibraltar and the eastern Mediterranean, and began to deploy its paddle-driven steamships either side of Suez even before the canal was built. This enabled the shipping line to gain the contract to run a mail service from Great Britain to India and Ceylon. A pride of the fleet was the Hindostan (mentioned above), which was sent out to the Indian Ocean in 1842 to service the route between Suez and British India. She even offered showers, hot or cold, for the passengers, which was a marvellous innovation. And she could cope with monsoon showers as well, blithely sailing from Calcutta to Suez through the thick of the monsoon in 1845, in just twenty-five days. The building of the Suez Canal should have made it still easier to send mail to and from India, but the mail contract insisted that letters had to be sent overland from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea: the mail was unloaded at Alexandria, sent overland to Suez, and reloaded there, or vice versa. Despite the objections of P&O, this bizarre comedy was maintained for several years until the bureaucrats realized how pointless it was.22

  One major difference between P&O and Cunard was the quality of food. In January 1862 the menu aboard the P&O Simla bound from Suez to Ceylon included almost every variety of meat one can imagine – turkey, suckling pigs, mutton, geese, beef, chicken – all prepared, with the exception of curry, in a stalwart British fashion, but oddly no fish. Live animals were kept on board so that fresh meat could be served. The range of clarets brought a glow of pride to the cheeks of P&O officials.23 P&O understood the need to diversify, in the face of competition. Ancillary short-distance routes were developed: the Canton ferried goods up and down the Pearl River between Hong Kong and Canton itself, though it was also put to good use in 1849 fighting Chinese pirates who attacked European ships from their junks – the waters around Hong Kong, and the new town on Victoria Island too, were notoriously unsafe at this period, and pirate raids on shipping slowed the growth of Hong Kong.24

  Another side to P&O’s activities that produced handsome revenue in its early days was cruising. The company’s historians have claimed that P&O invented deep-sea cruising in 1844. These included trips from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, as far as the coast of Ottoman Palestine, though this came to an end with the Crimean War. Then, towards the end of the century, a number of shipping lines took cruise passengers on trips as far away from England as the West Indies: the Orient Company advertised a Caribbean ‘Pleasure Cruise’, departing in January 1898, and spending sixty days afloat while the ship called in at Madeira, Tenerife and Bermuda; and it also ran cruises to the Norwegian fjords. Once again the use of steamers meant that one could keep, or try to keep, to a timetable, and this made cruises viable.25

  The ironclad steamship transformed business in other parts of the Far East than China. Penang, under British encouragement, emerged as the new port of call in the approaches to the Malacca Strait. As it drew in ships that, in the days of sail, might have rounded Sumatra and entered the South China Sea through the Sunda Strait, business was diverted from the Dutch East Indies back to the traditional route past a now sleepy Melaka to the flourishing port of Singapore. In 1870 a ship reached Singapore from Marseilles by way of Suez in twenty-nine days. This is not simply a history of express voyages from Europe to the Far East, for within the Indian Ocean the British India Steam Navigation Company linked Singapore to Batavia in Java, and linked India to the Persian Gulf; steamships now ploughed their way along the route that 4,000 years earlier had tied Mesopotamia to the Indus cities.26 To all this can be added the business that Holt conducted in Malaya, which was emerging as the great centre of rubber production, following the introduction of rubber trees by the British, as well as being a valuable source of tin.

  III

  Looking westwards, Liverpool was also the base of Samuel Cunard’s British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, established in 1840, with four ships linking England to New York, Boston and Halifax. However, Cunard began in the days of wooden-hulled paddle boats, and tried to improve their performance, before finally accepting the inevitable and moving over to screw-driven ironclad steamships from 1852 onwards. Like Holt’s, Cunard’s company fell prey to a Conference System, designed to standardize transatlantic fares and freight rates. Here the issue was not so much cargo as passengers. Steerage fares were cheap, but they were good business, given the numbers wishing to set sail for New York. In the early days, Cunard ships were the Ryanair option for travel: the assumption was that passengers would always choose the cheapest fare, but facilities were basic, even for those travelling in cabin (or first) class. Food was provided, but in first class it was nothing special, and in steerage it was especially dire. But no modern airline could get away with Cunard’s failure to implement Board of Trade standards that even the shareholders felt were being shamefully ignored. At the start of the new century an effort was at last made to improve the third-class accommodation, which became notorious for overcrowding and lack of hygiene. Cunard just about balanced the books on its voyages to America, while the cost of commissioning new ships was always a drain on company funds. In 1886 one of the faster ships, the Etruria, made a profit of ov
er £7,000, but that was exceptional, and on some of the less prestigious ships only the profit from carrying freight kept the voyage financially above water.27

  This issue became more and more significant as the volume of traffic increased at the end of the nineteenth century: Poles, Swedes, Russian Jews, Irish, Italians. The evil human traffic of past times had been replaced by a humane traffic of refugees escaping persecution and migrants looking for a better condition of life. With the rise in migration out of eastern Europe, speeded further by pogroms and economic misery, Cunard was faced with energetic rivals, the German shipping firms. In 1891 the Hamburg–Amerika Line carried nearly 76,000 steerage passengers across the Atlantic, 17 per cent of total numbers, and Cunard carried 6 per cent, over 27,000 people.28 The scale of migration to North America dwarfed the scale of passenger traffic out of Europe in other directions, such as Australia and New Zealand, all the more so as it came by 1900 to embrace just about every European nationality. This formed part of a wider development, as passenger traffic became more important, whether migrants, businessmen or tourists, and freight (even if it made all the difference to the Cunard profits) was less often the motive for setting up a new route. In the age of the steamship, these routes were serviced by ‘liners’, a term that expressly meant that they followed a regular line according to a timetable; and in time this term would become attached to the big ocean-going steamships of the great international shipping lines.

  In the British Isles, the boom in shipbuilding that followed the development of metal-hulled steamships transformed the economy of regions such as Clydeside, downriver from Glasgow, which became a major shipbuilding centre, as did Tyneside, in north-eastern England. But the most remarkable success story was Belfast, already established as the linen capital of the world and the only industrial boom town in Ireland. But one cannot construct ships out of linen, and old Belfast could only offer mediocre shipbuilding facilities until the 1840s. Its shipbuilders understood that their craft was turning into a major industry, as shipbuilders made more use of iron and steel and added steam engines to their vessels. This advanced thinking gave Belfast a lead, despite the lack of local supplies of either iron or coal, and despite the lack, at the start, of the skilled labour force that the new shipbuilding techniques required.29 One company was dominant. Edward Harland had acquired his first Belfast shipyard in 1858, and three years later combined forces with his deputy, Gustav Wolff, who was of German Jewish origin. They established a company whose massive gantries have become the symbol of Belfast. The great trio of RMS Titanic, RMS Olympic and RMS Britannic were the largest ships ever built, and required brand new dockyards. Even when disaster struck the Titanic, this did not hamper business at Harland and Wolff, any more than the political troubles that were tearing Ireland apart, though the company did set up additional dockyards in Great Britain as Ireland became more unstable. The introduction of new safety standards meant that there was plenty of work to be done in Belfast bringing existing ships up to scratch, and the dockyard was busier than ever on the eve of the First World War, producing nearly 10 per cent of British merchant shipping, while commissions from the Royal Navy kept it very active during the next war as well – and made Belfast a target for German air attacks.30

  IV

  One of the interesting features of the history of shipping and maritime trade is that apparently small players sometimes prove to have been rather more important actors than is easily assumed. Lack of resources at home sent Norwegians and Greeks far from their homeland, and led to the creation of merchant fleets out of all proportion to the size and political or economic importance of their home nation. Population outstripped home resources, so labour costs were low, while both Norway and Greece had age-old connections with the sea, generated by the geography of their countries: the jagged, mountainous coasts of Norway and the scattered islands of Greece, which in each case made the inhabitants heavily dependent on travel by sea.31 One way of measuring which are the largest maritime nations is to calculate deadweight tonnage (dwt) for every thousand inhabitants. In 2000 Norway and Greece were at the top of the scale, with a figure of over 12,000 dwt; the world average was a mere 121 dwt. But in 1890 Norway could already boast a figure of 1,100 dwt, twice the next largest figure, for the much more heavily populated United Kingdom, and seven times the figure for the country next door, which, at the end of the nineteenth century, was Norway’s overlord, Sweden.

  It has been seen how the Swedes became very active in the international tea trade by the nineteenth century. The Norwegian subjects of the kings of Sweden benefited especially from the presence of Swedish consuls out in Asian ports, and slowly and without ostentation built their own impressive network of shipping routes. Ancient links with Great Britain continued – the standard route followed by Scandinavian migrants to America brought them across the North Sea to Hull before being packed on to trains bound for Liverpool.32 But the secret of Norway’s success lay in the fact that it was a global operation. Following the opening of the Suez Canal, Norwegian ships began to appear in the Far East. By 1882 their ports of call included Java, Singapore and Rangoon; within twenty years their ships were appearing in the Philippines and Shanghai, as the axis shifted from Malaya and Indonesia towards China. The domestic market back home did not count for a great deal, so they inserted themselves in the carrying trade, ferrying rice from Vietnam to Hong Kong and along the coast of China. Their role in this trade has been described as nothing less than a ‘stranglehold’; by 1902 this intra-Asian business accounted for more than 50 per cent of Norwegian trade in Asia.33 Their ability to achieve this depended on their quick understanding of the radically new conditions under which maritime trade was now being conducted, following the opening of the Suez Canal and the introduction of long-distance steamer services.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Norwegian ships were a familiar sight in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and the re-creation of the Norwegian kingdom in 1905 accelerated this development. The achievements of Amundsen and Nansen in polar exploration further strengthened the special reputation of the Norwegians. As profits grew, a new business elite back in Norway commissioned brand new boats and gained the confidence of the western Pacific powers, Russia, Japan and China, all jostling for position in the western Pacific, and all anxious to find different commercial partners to the traditional, and often menacing, European intruders led by Great Britain. Norway was neutral, but it was not exactly unimportant: by the start of the twentieth century it ranked third in the world in tonnage.34 There was an enormous spike in business at the very start of the new century, stimulated by the brief Russian–Japanese War of 1904–5, which was a disaster for Russia. Instead of gaining a year-round port on the Pacific, as the Russians had intended at the start of the campaign, the Russians lost much of their fleet, as well as control of Port Arthur, and they even lost half the island of Sakhalin, to the north of Hokkaido. Such conflicts provided the perfect conditions under which a neutral body of traders could insert themselves into the region.35

  One of those who took advantage of the new opportunities was Haakon Wallem, a giant Norwegian born in Bergen who arrived in the Russian port of Vladivostok in 1896, made his way to China, and then established himself in Shanghai, buying his first ship, the Oscar II, in 1905. Wallem hit the jackpot during the Russian–Japanese War, because freight rates shot upwards, and also because the Japanese were so grateful for the unspecified and mysterious help he had given them that they awarded him a prize of ¥100,000 or, if he preferred, a grand decoration; but, businessman that he was, he took the money rather than the medal. He showed extraordinary resilience, keeping his company afloat in what were increasingly difficult times: he survived revolution in China and the loss of his first ship, becoming not just a prominent shipowner but a leading shipbroker, buying vessels for clients, and managing to carry on business during the First World War, during which Norway remained neutral.36 His business career had many ups and downs, but its main characteristic was his
constant determination to get back on his feet whenever there was a setback (notably during the post-war depression). He was, as his biographer concisely states, ‘a survivor’, but so was the entire Norwegian shipping industry.37