Indian traders and merchants and officials played a large role on the East African coast. Zanzibar was a main centre: in 1886–87 forty-four per cent of the island's exports went to India, and 40 per cent of its imports came from there, handled mostly by Indian firms.95 The longer distance intercontinental trade was done by European and American firms. In 1857 there were six European and three American firms represented in Zanzibar, but they used local Indian agents to sell their imports and collect their exports. Richard Burton in this same year noted that
Ladha Bamha farms the customs at Zanzibar; at Pembe Island his nephew Peru has the same charge; Mombasa is in the hands of Lakhmid and some of his co-religionists; Pangani is directed by Tulsidas... even S'aadani has its Banyan; Ramji, an active and intelligent Banyan, presides at Bagamoyo and the customs at Kilwa are collected by Kishandas. I need hardly say that almost all of them are connected in blood as well as trade.96
While Indian shipping certainly declined, the British pax over the ocean did facilitate Indian finance, albeit that the cost of the pax was borne by Indian taxpayers. Indian financial houses, often Gujaratis, as Burton also noted, backed Indian traders and money lenders, often kin members or at least community members, all around the littoral of the western ocean. Sir Bartle Frere in 1873 described all this: 'Hardly a loan can be negotiated, a mortgage effected, or a bill cashed without Indian agency.' And:
Everywhere, wherever there is any foreign trade, it passes through the hands of some Indian trader; no produce can be collected for the European, American or Indian market, but through him, no imports can be distributed to the natives of the country, but through his agency... it is difficult to convey to those at a distance an adequate idea of the extent or completeness of the monopoly.97
Indians also settled in the Aden colony, where they ran businesses that dealt with Somalia and Ethiopia as well as working as an administrative class for the British. The Cowsaji Dinshaw firm, based in Aden with branches in Zanzibar and Mumbai, even ran a steamer service between Aden and East Africa. They also helped pay for the construction of a Zoroastrian fire temple in Aden, which is in itself a good example of the types of encounters with the alien that occurred during this period. There had not been a Zoroastrian presence in South Arabia since the Sassanian conquest, but a new one was created both there and in Zanzibar as a consequence of British influence. The pop star Freddy Mercury was one such Parsi, from Zanzibar, and in typical fashion he was educated in India and found fame and fortune in the West.
The other people who operated in this way were the Chinese in southeast Asia, who especially in Malaya and Indonesia controlled most of the retail sector, and important parts of the import and export trades. Tin mining in Malaya, and rubber cultivation in Indonesia, were both largely dominated by Chinese.
In other areas also Europe was not totally in control. In Mauritius and Madagascar the colonial powers had to learn from indigenous people how to engage successfully in agriculture. Many local trades continued: the Chinese junk trade to Thailand, dhow trade all around the shores of the eastern ocean, peddling all through the ocean. Earl noted in Bangkok in 1833 that 'The brig we found at Bankok belonged to natives of the Coromandel coast; and many of the Kling seamen had goods of their own, which they hawked about the towns further in the interior, exchanging them for sugar, ivory, gamboge etc, and their vessels consequently remain several months in the river.'98
Nor were all Europeans in the ocean lords of all they surveyed. There were many European common seamen, and soldiers, whose lives were rough indeed. The sealers in the far southern ocean perhaps lived lives no better than the poorest peasant in Java or India. These men were left on St Paul and Amsterdam islands, to kill and skin seals. After some months, or even years, the ship would come back to collect them and the skins. On these isolated islands, some 1,500 sea miles from Africa, Antarctica, Sri Lanka and Australia, the men subsisted on meat and eggs alone. Their lives were extremely hard. An account of 1797 said
the seabears were killed while they were warming themselves in the sun on the rocks along the shore and the wide bay. Because only the skins had value for them, they left the skinned bodies lying rotting on the ground in such masses that it was difficult not to stand on these bodies as one went ashore. Each step there revealed a highly revolting sight and everywhere there was a foul stench of rotting flesh [which] poisoned the air.
In 1820 an American ship found two men who had been left behind in a 'cave which was a wretched hovel to be sure, built in the cavity of the rock, with a kind of shrub matted together for a front, and a couple of square holes left in it to let the lights in. The... bed, which was two sealskins, was a pigstye and everything else there in one room. The whole was a picture of human misery.' So efficient was this industry that by about 1810 the seal population had been exterminated, as also the original flora and fauna, which fell victim to fires and the introduction of new species like pigs, which soon went feral, and deer, goats and rabbits. The pigs also plundered seabird nests and ate the eggs and the young birds. In sum, the islands once 'were green, now they are brown, desolate and despoiled.'99
These sealers, and whalers also, travelled long distances from their homes in America and Europe to the hunting grounds, then back to Guangzhou to sell the catch, and then home again, where they hoped to use their profits to buy a farm and give up the sea. Who else travelled over our ocean? The general point is that in previous times people travelled by sea to be sure, but not that many, and most of them came from, and visited, only littoral areas. Now there were many more people travelling. Some of them came from inland, such as bonded labourers, and some came from right outside, that is Europeans bound for the settlement colonies in the southern ocean: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Our travellers include pilgrims, religious exemplars, troops, bonded labourers, westerners travelling within their empires or back home to the metropole, and slaves. We will discuss slaves first.
There was always a considerable internal slave trade within Africa, but we will focus on long-distance trade by sea. This trade had existed for many centuries. The greatest flow was from Africa to the Middle East. Among the early Europeans the Dutch were the main traders, bringing in quite large numbers from Africa and India to work as domestics and on plantations in Indonesia, and from Madagascar for the Cape. The Portuguese were also involved, but to a lesser extent. However, the trade grew exponentially once plantations had been established by Europeans on the islands of the ocean. We lack authoritative estimates of the numbers involved, but certainly some hundreds of thousands were sent to the European islands, and many more to Brazil and Cuba. French planters in the Mascarenes brought in slaves from Madagascar, and then from the East African coast. Later the Seychelles also required slave labour. Mauritius and the Seychelles became British in 1814, but the slave trade continued until the British abolished it in 1834. Even after this there was an extensive illegal trade, especially to the French island of Bourbon. Meanwhile there were two other main streams: from Portuguese Mozambique to Brazil, and from Zanzibar to the Middle East and the northern Swahili coast. Their treatment here seems to have been much less oppressive than on the European plantations, being nearer to clientage than to the horrors of a slave life cultivating sugar. Pfeiffer commented on this difference in Madagascar in 1857, where she claimed that to be owned by a native was much preferable to being owned by a European:
The position of slaves is here, as among all half-civilised nations, much better than that of their fellow-bondmen among Europeans and Creoles [by which she means Europeans born in the Indian Ocean area]. They have but little work to do, are fed about as well as their masters, and are seldom punished, though the laws do not at all protect them.100
Not all slaves came from Africa: on Mauritius in 1806 ten per cent were of Indian origin. Nor did they all work on plantations for Europeans. Many worked on the docks, in construction, as sailors and as pearl divers in the Gulf.
The nature of this trade changed once the
British had abolished slavery and took steps to stop others trading in human beings. The French planters in response pretended that their slaves were really bonded labour, not property. Abolition was a difficult task to accomplish. One British officer told Captain Sulivan, who commanded a ship off the East African coast and inspected every ship he came across, that 'If we go on condemning these vessels for having only a few slaves on board, we shall be having our supplies cut off again from the interior.' All too often a suspicious dhow would be chased, only for it to beach itself and crew and passengers escape inland. Independent Zanzibar was a particular problem, constituting a gap in the system of patrols that the British tried to enforce. It was only in 1873 that the sultan was persuaded, or rather required, to stop exporting slaves from his island, while it was only after Zanzibar came under British protection that domestic slavery was ended in 1897.
It is useful to distinguish three sorts of colonies around the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, with rather different people travelling across the ocean to reach them. First are the settler colonies, where white people displaced indigenous inhabitants: South Africa and Australia are the obvious examples. Second are plantation economies, with a mostly imported population, of which Mauritius is the type study. Finally, there are mixed areas, where Europeans ruled indigenous people and also introduced a host of migrant Indians and Chinese: Burma, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Singapore all fit here.101
Once slavery was abolished a new form of labour was required. This was the indentured labour system, whereby poor people were recruited for a set number of years to work for low wages, after which they were free to work for themselves. This was hardly a new system, as it had operated across the Atlantic to the British North American colonies in the seventeenth century. The difference was the scale, and the fact that most of the indentured labourers were Indian; there was a racial as opposed to class element involved. The broad context is of a steep rise in the movement of people around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A large part of this was Atlantic, with a huge influx of free labour to North America. In the Indian Ocean the movement was not of free people. Chinese indentured labour moved to southeast Asia, and Indians to the islands, to South Africa, Burma, Malaya, and far afield to Fiji, Guyana and Trinidad.102
The majority were Indians. Once slavery was abolished in South Africa, labour was still needed, and the local Zulus were not interested. Between 1860–68, and 1874–1911 around 176,000 Indians were imported.103 In several parts of the tropical world plantations were booming, first sugar, and then coffee, tea, and later rubber. The system began in Mauritius in 1834, which island in total received 450,000 Indian labourers. The system was soon extended to other places beyond the ocean. Between 1834 and 1937 thirty million left their homes to go overseas, and 24 million returned. These workers certainly made more money than they would if they had stayed in India, but conditions of work were often brutal, and those who through illness could not work lost pay. However, if they survived the first few years they often could save and send money back home to their families in India. Indians were preferred, as free African labour was seen at the time as more or less useless: too stupid, lazy and unreliable. Indians, on the contrary, were perceived as docile, industrious, and respectful, or so it was thought at first. When they began to assert themselves the European planter stereotype changed: they now were greedy, weak and dirty, and Chinese were preferred instead.104
To call this a new system of slavery is perhaps to paint too black a picture. It is true that conditions on the plantations could be very harsh, but on the other hand skilled labour could do very well. One way to provide a context is to note that the death rate among Indians on the voyages from India to Mauritius was much higher than that of free white labour going to the settlement colonies of the Americas or Australia, but much lower than on the slave voyages across the Atlantic.105 Unlike slaves, there was a good chance of returning home, as the figures above show. In the case of Burma, a third of the Indian population moved in and out each year. Some 450,000 Indians came to Mauritius between 1834 and 1910, and 157,000 returned home.
Another variant in the category of more or less coerced movement of peoples was the use of Indian troops and police all around and beyond the ocean. They played a crucial role in extending, and maintaining, the British empire. Sikhs were used as police around most of the shores of the ocean. Gurkha mercenaries similarly served from Hong Kong to East Africa. The Indian army took a very large part – even 50 per cent – of the Indian colonial budget. Indians were paid about one-third of what British troops got, and served in Egypt in 1882, the Sudan in 1885, China in 1900, and several times in Burma and East Africa. Indian involvement in World War I was massive: a total of Indian combatants and non-combatants of 44,000 in East Africa, 589,000 in Mesopotamia, 116,000 in Egypt, and 50,000 in Aden and the Gulf.106
An important consequence of the movement of so many people was an increased mobility of disease. In most areas this was not a matter of the virgin soil epidemics which devastated native populations in the Americas and the Pacific, which in turn facilitated European conquest. Most of the ocean, some islands excepted, was part of a common Eurasian disease pool, so that frequently some immunity had been built up. Indeed, if anything it was the newly arrived Europeans who were most threatened by 'Indian Ocean' diseases. However, a vastly increased mobility, along with the development of poverty and slums in the port cities, did lead to much greater outbreaks of common diseases even if they were not new to the areas. Leprosy was a problem in the eighteenth century in the Cape, and may have arrived with the Malay servants and slaves that the Dutch introduced. As communications improved diseases could spread more quickly, no longer so hindered by the vast extent of the ocean which previously had acted to restrict the spread of 'crowd' diseases like cholera, smallpox and plague. A new and very virulent type of epidemic cholera spread out from Bengal several times during the nineteenth century. The first devastating episode was in 1817–22. Its spread was helped by movements of people: hajjis, troops, migrant labour. Cholera reached Java in 1821 and killed 125,000 people, while on the other end of the ocean, in East Africa, there was a particularly serious outbreak in 1865. The hajj was a great transmitter of this disease, and mortality at Mecca itself was often fearsome. In 1865, out of a total of 90,000 pilgrims, 15,000 died. In the 1880s rinderpest was introduced into Ethiopia, probably again from India, and in the next decade spread, with devastating effects, down the East African coast.107
It is now time to set sail again, and look at the actual experience of people travelling over the ocean in the great western steamships. For now I will discuss only westerners; local travel by indigenous people will come later. There are a plethora of quotable accounts. My task was to use enough of them to give this section a whiff of ozone, to inspissate or leaven my dry descriptive prose with a more immediate maritime experience, yet to avoid overwhelming this chapter with undigested anecdotes and accounts of sea travel.
We can start with an account of a voyage from Kolkata to Europe in 1799. Our traveller took a barge from Kolkata for three days to get to the ship, but was disappointed when he went on board:
We found the ship in the greatest disorder; the crew principally composed of indolent and inexperienced Bengal Lascars, and the cabins small, dark and stinking, especially that allotted to me, the very recollection of which makes me melancholy. The fact was that as Captain Richardson [his patron] and myself were the last who took our passage, all the good apartments had been previously secured by our fellow passengers.... In the next cabin to mine, on one side was a Mr. Grand, a very passionate and delicate gentleman; and on the other side were three children, one of whom, a girl three years old, was very bad tempered, and cried night and day; in short, the inconveniences and distresses which I suffered on board this ship were a great drawback from the pleasures I afterwards experienced in my travels.
There followed a delay of two weeks while the captain spent time in Kolka
ta, and then the dangerous passage down to the sea. 'During our passage down we had several narrow escapes. Our vessel drew thirteen feet and a half of water; and we passed over several sands on which there were not six inches more water than we drew. Had the ship touched the ground, as the tide was running out, we should have stuck there, and probably have been lost.' They reached the open sea only one month after our author had left Kolkata, and already water and provisions were running low. When they reached the equator those who had not crossed it before were ducked, but 'When it came to my turn, by the mediation of one of the officers, and a present of some bottles of brandy, I was excused this disagreeable ceremony.'
Not a happy traveller, our author found four problems with his ship:
The first is that to which every ship is liable; viz. the want of good bread, butter, milk, fruit, and vegetables; to which are to be added, stinking water, and washing the mouth with salt water . . . and the difficulty of getting to and from the quarter-gallery, with the danger of being wet, or drowned, while there. To these I should add, the state of suspense and agitation to which a person is constantly exposed, the confinement in one place, and the sickness caused by the motion of the ship.
The second class arose from want of wealth; viz. a small and dark cabin, and the consequent deprivation of air and light; the neglect of servants; the want of a ship cot, on account of the deficiency of room; and the tyranny or rudeness of my neighbours, who ever studied there own conveniences at my expense.
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