Читать книгу Blenden Hall - John Gilbert Lockhart - Страница 5
ОглавлениеA PASSAGE TO INDIA
In these days those of us who have never made a voyage to the East are at least familiar by hearsay with its circumstances. You board your P. & O. at Tilbury or, snatching a few extra days on land or shirking the discomforts of the Bay of Biscay, you join her at Marseilles. You may strike it rough in the Gulf of Lyons; you may find it unpleasantly warm in the Red Sea; you may catch the tail-end of the monsoon in the Indian Ocean. But, fair weather or foul, you look to berth in Bombay harbour some twenty-one days out from Tilbury, or some fourteen days out from Marseilles. During those days you are comfortably housed and handsomely fed; and if your luck is so far out that you have a following wind down the Red Sea, you can sit under an electric fan and sip an iced drink by day and sleep out under the stars by night. There are plenty of books and deck sports and amusements, and fellow-passengers enough for you to pick and choose your company. In short, such a voyage to India is merely an agreeable interlude.
Consider, by contrast, the passage you would have made one hundred to one hundred and fifty years ago in an East Indiaman.
To begin with, it was a dangerous business. The percentage of casualties in the Company’s fleet from wind and waves and enemy action would appal the twentieth-century broker at Lloyd’s. In 1809 the insurance rates were seven guineas per cent. for ship and seven pounds per cent. for cargo of a regular East Indiaman, and nine guineas and nine pounds respectively for what were known as “extra” ships, privately owned but chartered by the Company. Nor were these rates exorbitant. In 1808 and 1809 alone no fewer than ten homeward bound Indiamen were lost by fire or storm, among them such large ships as the Britannia (1,200 tons) and the True Briton (1,198 tons). Some of the most famous and tragic disasters at sea in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were those of the Company’s ships. There was the Grosvenor (1782), which went ashore on the east coast of Africa with a king’s ransom in her holds; exactly fourteen of her passengers and crew survived the march south to the Dutch settlements. There was the Halsewell (1786), driven by storm against the iron coast near St. Alban’s Head; all the women and most of the men in her perished, some of the more active alone succeeding in scaling the overhanging cliff. There was the Kent (1825), which caught fire on a wild night in the Bay of Biscay and burned almost to the water; so that it was a question whether she would blow up before she foundered, or founder before the flames reached her magazine. These were examples of well-found ships, with skilful and experienced commanders, which nevertheless went to utter disaster.
A voyage to India, therefore, was in all circumstances a dangerous adventure. Even if the weather was fair there was the risk of enemy action. During the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century we were, as often as not, at war—generally with the French, and sometimes with the Spaniards, the Dutch and the Americans. The India trade offered the fattest of rewards to the enterprising frigate or privateer, and the Indiamen, even when sailing in convoy, were constantly exposed to attack. When we were at peace, there were the pirates, particularly off the west coast of Africa and the coasts of Arabia, Persia, and India. It was for these reasons that the Indiamen were run man-o’-war fashion. They were manned far beyond the number needed to work the ship; they carried guns which they used on occasion to good purpose; their officers wore a special uniform and ranked socially only a little below the King’s officers (and financially far above them).
One of the most stirring events in the Company’s history was the engagement in the Straits of Malacca between an unescorted convoy of Indiamen, under the command of Captain Dance, and a French squadron consisting of a line-of-battle ship, two frigates, and a brig. Now the duty of a merchant captain was not to try to damage the enemy, but to bring his owner’s ship and cargo intact into port. Dance, however, saw at once that by running many of his ships would get clear away, but a few of them would inevitably be captured. So he turned and bore down on the French and gave them such a pounding that after a few hours of it they made off in confusion; thus displaying the unusual spectacle of a squadron of warships routed by a fleet of merchantmen. The engagements, of course, did not always end so happily. In 1805 the Warren Hastings, a fine Indiaman of 1,200 tons, fought a single-handed duel with a French frigate of forty guns, compelling her to haul off several times and keeping up the engagement for four hours before succumbing to superior numbers and metal.
Such incidents make stirring reading to-day, but for the peace-loving merchant or passenger were scarcely an agreeable substitute for the deck sports of the modern liner. In time of war the casualties from privateers were heavy; and in time of peace the Indiaman sometimes met a match in a fighting pirate. The Company’s practice of sending all despatches out East in triplicate indicates the official view of the chances of the voyage.
We have seen that the passage was dangerous. It was also very long. The Indiamen were not clippers; their records cannot compare with those of the splendid ships which in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies of the last century raced home from China with their freights of tea.[1] The Indiaman was built not for speed but for strength and cargo capacity. According to Mr. Keble Chatterton,[2] four beams to the length was the rule, compared with five or six beams to the length in the famous clippers, and nine or ten in the larger Atlantic liners of to-day. It followed that the Indiamen were steady but slow. A passage even to Bombay was a matter not of weeks but of months. Mr. Chatterton gives the time-table of a ship which left the Thames on September 20th, 1746, reached China on July 8th, 1747, started for home on January 12th, 1748, and arrived off Scotland on July 9th, 1748. In 1821 a passage of nineteen months, out and home, was not considered unsatisfactory.
As the voyage was slow, it was both tedious and uncomfortable. The ships themselves, though ugly in line and clumsy in proportions, were among the finest afloat. No expense was spared in either building or equipment. The cost of fitting them out has been estimated at as much as fifty per cent. higher than that of equivalent vessels of private shipowners.[3] But they were, by modern standards, very small, the bigger Indiamen of the regular fleet having a chartered tonnage of about twelve hundred tons. Here was small comfort for anyone, least of all for the bad sailor, to whom a voyage East must have been a long martyrdom.
The food, moreover, though excellent in quality, was unappetising and probably monotonous. Fresh meat and vegetables would be shipped before leaving the Thames, and supplies would be replenished at St. Helena and the Cape, but for the greater part of the voyage the passengers fared on salt meat. Livestock, it is true, was carried, but in quantities necessarily so limited that it could only be consumed on special occasions. (When the Kent was burning, one of the passengers, who visited the cuddy, found it tenanted by a solitary pig which had broken out of its stye and was ranging about over the Brussels carpet.) A cow was always taken, and the calf which accompanied her was turned into veal when the voyage was half over. Plenty of lime juice was carried as a substitute for fresh vegetables, and the stocks of beer, wine and spirits were such as to astonish a more abstemious age. But there was, of course, no ice or tinned food, the supply of fresh water was jealously restricted, and in the tropics the fastidious must have found the heavy fare most unpalatable.
A worse trial than the food was the company. Conceive a society as close as that of a boarding-house in Bloomsbury; imagine its inmates cooped up together for weeks on end, with no escape and no respite from each other; meeting every day in the cuddy for meals; tripping over each other on deck; becoming disgustingly familiar with each other’s tricks and little weaknesses. However big a bore or bounder a man might be, from Gravesend to Bombay you must suffer him for all hours of the day. However fiercely you might have quarrelled, you must compose yourself to meet your enemy, not now and then, but most of the time. Conceive, too, that any Indiaman would carry its complement of Anglo-Indians, and what ticklish fellow-passengers these old ‘Qui His,’ with uncertain tempers and autocratic ways, must have made. Can we wonder if, in such circumstances, an Indiaman sometimes reached Bombay with almost as many feuds as there were passengers? Presently we shall see how our friends in the Blenden Hall supported this ordeal.
The Blenden Hall is described by our author as an East Indiaman; Lieutenant Pepper calls her a ‘free trader’[4]; the Bombay Despatches, with greater accuracy, term her a ‘private ship.’[5] At one time the Company did not build its own ships, but engaged them, under the most rigorous conditions, from private owners on a tonnage rate. Eventually, to check the profiteering of these owners, the Company built a fleet of its own, to which alone the term of East Indiaman is strictly applicable. It continued, however, to charter on the old arrangement what were known as ‘extra ships.’ Competition was very keen to supply these ‘extra ships,’ the privilege being often hereditary in the sense that when one ship had made her quota of voyages she would be taken off the roll and another would be built, as they termed it, ‘on her bottom’ to replace her. Not only was the service well paid, but it afforded the captain and officers opportunities, both lawful and unlawful, of private trading in the Company’s well-guarded preserves; so that a prudent captain might very well acquire a small fortune after making three or four successful voyages to the East. According to Mr. W. B. Whall,[6] a commander often made as much as £10,000 in a voyage, and after a man had made four successful voyages he was expected to retire and give others a chance.
The Blenden Hall, then, was one of these ‘extra ships,’ and Captain Greig her lucky owner. It is a pity that Alexander gives us no description of her. The Bombay Despatches are almost as uncommunicative. They tell us nothing of the ship and very little about her cargo, except that she was carrying a quantity of military stores, 160 tons of iron at a freight of £1 19s., and about fifteen tons of woollens at a freight of £2 9s. per ton.[7] The Register of Shipping for 1821 and 1822 gives ‘Blenden Hall, Captain A. Greig, built at Southampton in 1811.’ She is described as a ship of 450 tons, and the owners appear as ‘Greig & Co.’ The rest we must pick up, as best we may, from casual references in Alexander’s narrative of her voyage.
After this digression, dull but necessary, let us return to the Falcon Hotel at Gravesend, where we left the future passengers of the Blenden Hall dining sumptuously against the day when they would have neither the inclination nor the opportunity to do themselves well.
| [1] | The famous clipper Ariel left Gravesend on October 14th, 1866, reached Hong-Kong on January 6th, 1867, and was back in the Thames on September 23rd of that year. |
| [2] | The Old East Indiamen. |
| [3] | W. S. Lindsay: History of Merchant Shipping. |
| [4] | The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. XIV, 1822. |
| [5] | Bombay Dispatches, August 22nd, 1821. |
| [6] | Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. I, No. 1. |
| [7] | Bombay Dispatches, March 16th, 1821. |
