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Chapter
Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine c. 1880–1945
Jonathan Hyslop
In late 1942 a young Bengali man called Syed Ali from Kalijuri in the Sylhet district decided to go to sea. In Calcutta, he found work in the engine room on the British merchant marine steamship SS McLeith, which was sailing for Cape Town (Choudhury, 1995:94). It was a dangerous time to sail the southern Indian Ocean. The Japanese navy had launched a significant submarine offensive against Allied shipping in the seas north-east of the Natal coast and German submarines were also occasionally striking off South Africa. The bodies of dead sailors were washing up on the Durban beachfront (Keane, 1995). But with war raging in nearby Burma, staying at home could not have been a very attractive option either. From the beginning of the voyage Syed Ali was bullied by the serang (boatswain or supervisor) of the stokehold, a man called Attik, from Ishkapur. In Cape Town, the ship docked for a short stay and the crew were given shore leave. To escape his persecutor, Syed Ali deliberately overstayed his leave and the ship sailed without him. The port police directed the young man to a seamen’s boarding house and he was told by an official that he should remain there. There were several other Sylhetis in the boarding house, and one of them, a serang from Dinapur, turned out to be a friend of Syed Ali’s uncle. This serang promised to find a berth for the lad when he next got a ship, and soon they sailed off together on the SS McNeill for Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Syed Ali remained on this ship for a long period, plying the route back and forth between Colombo and Cape Town. Eventually paid off at Colombo, the now experienced seaman returned to Calcutta and spent a month visiting his family. He needed to get work again and back in Calcutta was offered a job on the SS Murdoch. But his papers had a ‘black mark’ because of his desertion of his ship on his first voyage, and this was an obstacle to getting employed. He went to see two local men who had connections with the seamen’s union led by the powerful organiser Aftab Ali. These two worthies used their influence to solve the problem. The ship then went to Bombay and on to Cape Town. There, the news came that the war was over. The crew received a bonus and went out celebrating. But Syed Ali was saving his money. The ship was now going to sail for Britain and he intended to stay there. In Manchester, Syed Ali, who spoke no English, equipped with only a few pounds in his pocket and some warm clothes given by a friend, disembarked and headed for London. This was the beginning of a new life for him, for he was to settle in Britain (Choudhury, 1995:94–95).
Although there has been a vast development of the literature on the Indian Ocean in recent decades, I think it would be fair to say that its most distinguished contributors (Chaudhuri, 1985; McPherson, 1993; Pearson, 1998; Subrahmanyam, 2005) have written primarily on the age of sail, whereas the epoch of steam has been less well served. The aim of this chapter is thus to identify some of the key issues concerning Indian Ocean seafarers of the age of steam navigation. In doing so, Syed Ali’s story is a useful point of departure. His journeys stood at the end of a period of about 70 years in which the sea trade of the world had been dominated by the coal-burning steamships of the British merchant marine. Sailors of African and Asian origin had been present on British ships since the 18th century and had formed a very significant proportion of the merchant and fighting naval forces in the Napoleonic Wars. But their numbers fell very sharply thereafter until the mid-19th century. The introduction of the steamship saw a new reversal of the trend, with African and Asian sailors again becoming a central component of British marine power. This development was met with considerable resistance from British seamen, largely framed in racial terms, for they saw the new workers as a cheap labour force that would undermine their position. It also generated decades of intra-bureaucratic struggle within and between the various ministries of the British state and the viceroy’s government of India over the management of this workforce.
In the work of those who have paid central attention to the Indian Ocean steamship sailor, there is a strange imbalance. This work seems to have been focussed disproportionately on the history of seafarers in British ports and on the regulation of the lives of these sailors by the British authorities (Dixon, 1980; Visram, 1986; Tabili, 1994; Frost, 1995). Of course, there is a good and valid political reason for this – the concern of historians to examine the history of immigration and official racism in Britain, which became such a central issue in the country’s late 20th-century politics. But Syed Ali’s life reminds us that this was not the whole story. Syed Ali’s maritime experience was chiefly of the ports of the Indian Ocean – Cape Town, Colombo and Calcutta, in his case – and of the shipboard microworld. The life of the maritime cities of the Indian Ocean littoral and their lateral connections across that ocean are surely at least as important to explore as the metropolis–periphery relationship and the social world of Cardiff or South Shields, but they have had less attention. Moreover, Syed Ali’s story is not one simply of subordination to the power of the British imperial authorities, but of circumventing them – he jumped ship in Cape Town, used family connections to find a new job, got his union contacts to fix his papers and settled in Britain without asking anyone’s permission. Rather than effectively containing and policing the sailors, the colonial state leaked like an old rowing boat. For all the attempts to regulate people like Syed Ali, the port was at the limits of the power to control, rather than exemplifying irresistible governmentality. Thus, I want to propose that attention needs to shift to the world of sailors in Indian Ocean ports and on board ships, and to their active role in shaping their futures. In this, I follow the important leads given by the work of Broeze (1997) and his collaborators on coastal cities, Ewald (2000) on the crucial role of African maritime workers in the Indian Ocean, and Balachandran (2003) on the need to move away from a victimological reading of the sailor’s experience.
Syed Ali also poses a challenge for South African historiography. As in other parts of the world, the many books by South African ship enthusiasts and company historians tell us almost nothing about sailors. But serious South African social historians have done no better. With minor exceptions, almost no work examines the lives of seafarers. Shamil Jeppie’s (2007:8–14) recent call for the study of aspects of civil society in South Africa beyond the range of conventional political narratives is thus both extremely timely and relevant to our present concerns. The maritime world of South African ports and their global shipboard and port extensions should be a significant area for research. The one part of this social world that has been examined to some extent is that of dock workers, especially in relation to the development of black trade unionism since the 1920s (Hemson, 1977; Bradford, 1987; Beinart & Bundy, 1987). Usually, however, the specifically maritime character of this world is seldom addressed. It may be worth asking new questions about the cultural impact of the maritime life within inland South Africa. For example, Isaiah Shembe, the founder of the extraordinarily successful syncretic religious movement based in Natal, was a former dock worker.10 Could his experience of the Indian Ocean world not have been a factor in the evolution of his thought? Similarly, in his great autobiography, Tell Freedom, Peter Abrahams (1970) writes of growing up in a Johannesburg slum before the Second World War with an ‘Ethiopian’ father who had had adventures in many lands; but as far as I am aware, none of the literary scholars who have written about Abrahams has investigated who this father was. Almost certainly, on the slight evidence that Abrahams gives us, he would have been a sailor from the Horn of Africa, which raises interesting questions about the connections of the ports to the South African interior.
What sort of analytical framework might help us come to terms with analysing this vanished world? A useful point of departure is provided by Tony Ballantyne’s recent work on the Sikh diaspora. Ballantyne (2006:81) focusses on
two interwoven, overlapping but occasionally independent sets of webs. The first is composed of the imperial structures largely produced to meet the needs of British merchants, missionaries, and administrators …. The second set of webs was largely constructed by Punjabis themselves, who fashioned them to meet their needs within a world that was being remade by colonialism and migration.
For Ballantyne (2006:69), the British Empire functioned as
a system of exchange and mobility where key institutions (such as the military and the police force), communications networks (steamship routes, telegraph cables, and the circulation of newspapers), and markets constituted crucial horizontal connections between colonies as well as linking individuals to the metropole.
In his terms, this is a metaphor,
a heuristic tool for conceptualising these networks and the various forms of cultural traffic they enabled within the empire … [and whereas] most imperial historiography reduces the empire to a series of metropole-periphery binaries, the web reinforces the multiple positions that any given colony, city or community might occupy (Ballantyne, 2006:69).
What I want to do here is to adapt Ballantyne’s model and to think of the world of Indian Ocean sailors as another of these global webs, intersecting with both the webs constituted by other diasporic populations and that constituted by imperial structures. Ballantyne’s approach is helpful in a number of ways. It suggests how colonially created structures may nevertheless have provided the context for seamen’s own manoeuvres in shaping their lives. Thus, it provides a basis for moving beyond a conception of the lives of the colonised as simply shaped by the impositions of colonial or capitalist power onto a subordinate society, restoring a sense of the agency of the seamen in shaping their world. Ballantyne’s angle of vision also suggests the importance of looking closely at the interactions of varying segments of the colonial and colonised populations, and how these shaped particular outcomes. The world of British sailors can also be thought of as constituting another trans-imperial web, in constant interaction with the web established by the imperial communications system and that constituted by the Afro-Asian sailors. Ballantyne rightly emphasises the lateral connections between colonies, rather than simply fixating on colonial links to Britain. As he says, such ‘horizontal’ connections have been underplayed in the historiography, because they transgress the boundaries of metropolitan-focussed imperial history or studies framed within the boundaries of individual colonies. He might have added that anti-colonial nationalist historians have largely been equally reluctant to think outside the framework of metropolis–colony linkages and of national boundaries.
In sum, then, what I am proposing is that it is helpful to think of the British Empire as a set of overlapping webs, and for our purposes three of these are crucial: the webs of the shipping companies, of British diasporic labour and of Indian Ocean seafarers. The web metaphor enables us not only to capture how existing patterns constrained and directed certain flows of activity, but also to escape simple hydraulic models of domination and resistance. I will outline some of the features of these webs and attempt to show how African, Asian and British sailors shaped their world in interaction with one another and with the constraints and opportunities presented to them by imperial organisation.
The first layer of the web that I wish to explore is that created by the British Empire’s shipping companies. The transition from sail to steam was not instantaneous. Although the first steamship to go from Britain to India around the Cape was as early as 1825, the original steam technology, with its paddle wheels and vast consumption of coal, was not a really viable basis for tackling the vast distances of the mid-Indian Ocean (Roff, 2000). It was only after ships using screw propellers and efficient engines had been fully developed that, around 1880, the sailing ship began to really give way to the steamship on a huge scale. Throughout the period from then to the Second World War, over half the tonnage of ships in the world consisted of British merchant marine vessels – the adoptively, but enthusiastically, British mariner Joseph Conrad (2004:159) recalled in later life that the ‘red duster’ flag of the United Kingdom’s merchant fleet ‘prevailed to such an extent that one always experienced a slight shock in seeing some other combination of colour blow out at peak or flagpole of any chance encounter in deep water’. This fleet was pivotal in holding together the global economy. Throughout the period, virtually all intercontinental transport of goods and passengers rested on it. Between 1850 and 1913 global per capita output rose by 90 per cent, but transnational trade grew sixteenfold (total carrying capacity grew by 279 per cent, but the greater speed of steamships meant that they could make far more voyages than a sailing ship in the same time) (Fischer & Panting, 1995).
It is also important to note that the relationship among shipping employees, capital and the British state was not one in which class and racial hierarchies were simply congruent. Small but significant pockets of Asian ship-owning capital existed under the empire. The young lawyer M. K. Gandhi was first brought to South Africa to represent the interests of the Natal-based steamship owners Dada Abdulla, part of a fairly substantial stratum of steamship owners from India that formed in this period. By 1939, 23 per cent of coastal shipping in India was locally owned (Desai, 1939:17). By the late 19th century the sultan of Zanzibar, the king of Burma, the Thai authorities and the Sultan of Oman had all bought steamships. The successful Straits Steamship Company was controlled by Singapore Chinese capital (MacKenzie, 2004:120). As such companies often employed British captains and engineers, this produced some complex reversals of imperial racial hierarchy. The Syrian-American traveller Ameen Rihani gave this rendition of the comments of the master of a ship on which he sailed, a Captain Hay, who was employed by a Parsi-owned company based in Aden:
I was Captain of a Transatlantic liner before the war, and here I am now on one of Kawasji’s tubs getting barely one-fifth of what I used to get from an English company, What’s to be done? Kawasji’s few rupees are better than idleness in Liverpool (Rihani, 1930:175).
The second web layer was that of the African, Asian and Caribbean mariners who played a major part in providing the labour that kept the steamships running. This was especially the case in the Indian Ocean, where South Asian, Arab, Somali, East African, Chinese and Malayan sailors were indispensable to the viability of the British merchant fleet. Syed Ali would, in his day, have been described by the British – and possibly by his colleagues and himself – as a ‘lascar’. Technically, a lascar was specifically a seaman from India. But the inevitable mixture of sailors of varying nationalities in all ports meant that it was often used to describe all Asian and East African seamen (although generally not West Africans and Caribbeans).
In understanding where the crews of the steamship era came from, it is important to recognise the flows between the world of the steamship and the worlds that both preceded it and existed alongside it. Bose (2006) has shown how the economy of the modern British Empire was largely dependent for its penetration into the Afro-Asian world on the retail networks of Asian traders. In the same way, it may be suggested that initially there was a great deal of reliance by British ships on the existence of a pool of Afro-Asian seafarers. Although, for reasons to be explained, increasingly seamen were recruited from inland areas, men from communities with a tradition of seafaring participated in both sectors and moved between them in pursuit of their personal objectives. As late as 1939 over a hundred ocean-going dhows were operating out of Kuwait, and only the hostility of post-war African nationalist regimes to Indian and Arab commerce and the availability of cheap motorised technology seem to have brought this centuries-old trade to a final end (Villiers, 1969). Ewald (2000) highlights the persistence of dhow-borne African slavery in the north-west Indian Ocean into the 20th century, and the flow of ex-slaves into dock labour in the ports of that region and into steamship work. By the 1870s Africans were working on steamships out of Aden and in the same period members of an African community based in Bombay were working on steamships, many of them being freed slaves left in India by British patrol ships. ‘Seedis’, as the Africans were known, became especially predominant in the stokeholds of the P&O, the largest of the British Indian Ocean shipping companies, in the late 19th century. In his classic account of his voyage as a crewman on a dhow travelling from southern Arabia in 1938 and 1939, the Australian sailor and author Alan Villiers (1969:75–77) provides a suggestive anecdote. On board was a Seyyid (a descendant of the Prophet) from Mukalla in the Hadhramaut of southern Arabia, travelling as a passenger and following his commercial interests in East Africa. The Seyyid had not only spent eight years working in the stokeholds of British ships, but had also been an automobile worker in Detroit. Villiers discovered that although the Seyyid did not speak English, he had a good command of Polish, the prevailing language in the Detroit industrial suburb of Hamtramck, where he had lived. The story suggests both how the boundaries of dhow and steamship worlds were quite porous and how a sailor might be able to move along the networks of the web from a proletarian position across the sea to end his career in his home in a position of relative economic socio-strength.
Although southern African historians are well aware of the pre-colonial trade route connections with the east coast dhow trade in the region, it tends to be assumed that by the late 19th century this was no longer a factor. While the dhow trade never seems to have extended to the coast of present-day South Africa, it did reach the southern limit of Mozambique in the late 19th century. When the Durban mariner Alex Anderson (1925:18) sailed to the Mozambique coast in 1869, he found ‘large Arab dhows’ in port, which still made voyages directly across the Indian Ocean to India. Anderson (1925:20–21) also found dates, palm wine and Indian prints on sale, commodities likely to have been transported by dhows.
It is possible to identify a number of major ‘nodes’ where Indian Ocean seafarers were recruited to British steamships. Firstly, there were seafarers who primarily worked out of the three great subcontinental ports of Calcutta, Bombay and Karachi, although originating from a very wide range of localities on the Indian subcontinent (and beyond it). Secondly, Aden and, to a much lesser extent, Mogadishu were the centres for Arabian and Somali sailors and for sailors from the Swahili coast of East Africa. Finally, Malay and Chinese sailors came through Singapore. Indian sailors were supposed to sign distinct ‘articles’ (employment contracts) when they were recruited in India that differed from those under which sailors were taken on in Aden or Singapore, but regional demarcation was not so strict in practice. British officials were often too ignorant to assess the origins of sailors in foreign ports; for example, many Indian seamen signed on as ‘Malay’ in Singapore to take advantage of better pay or more flexible service conditions.
Accurate statistics on the size of this workforce are hard to pin down. An often-cited statistic is that in 1914 ‘lascars’ constituted 17.5 per cent of all sailors on British-registered ships, something over 50,000 men (Dixon, 1980:265). In 1935 the number of Indian seamen was put at 59,000, the fourth-highest number for any country compared to Britain, which had just under 153,000 seamen (Desai, 1939). However, east of Suez the proportion was undoubtedly much higher than this, and one has to be sceptical about how accurate the figures are in such a complex realm. Dinkar Desai, a lawyer and writer involved with the trade unions in Bombay, pointed out in 1939 that, given the fluctuating nature of employment in the maritime industries, the actual number of people who were sporadically employed in maritime industries was much greater. He convincingly suggested that there were 140,000 seamen in Calcutta, 70,000 in Bombay and 25,000 in Karachi (Desai, 1939:18–20). (I have not found plausible figures for sailors in other parts of Asia or in Africa.)
Labour on steamships was divided into three ‘departments’: the engine room, the deck and the saloon. The engine room housed the great furnaces that produced the energy to power the ship. The main types of labourers here were the ‘trimmers’ who brought the coal forward from the bunkers in which it was kept, and the firemen who shovelled the fuel into the furnaces and ensured that they burned at the right temperatures. The engine room was an industrial hell. Trimmers and firemen were in constant danger of being burned by the furnaces; crushed by sliding coal; choked by dust, smoke and fumes; or overcome by heat exhaustion. Deckhands were chiefly occupied with the maintenance problems posed by a metal ship at sea – they were constantly scraping, cleaning and painting. They also had to perform much of the work of loading and unloading cargo. The saloon crew, very small on a merchantman, but huge on a liner, worked as waiters, cooks, cabin cleaning staff and the like. As in other colonial enterprises, labour recruitment was highly ethnicised, with a ‘common sense’ developing among employers as to which groups were ‘good’ at which jobs and local social networks being tapped for recruitment. Thus, in ships sailing out of India, typically the saloon staff were from Goa and Calcutta and from among Christians of the Madras presidency, and the firemen and trimmers were Punjabis, Sylhetis or people of other East Bengal districts, as well as some Pathans, Kashmiris and members of the ‘Seedi’ communities. Deckhands comprised a large proportion of Muslims from the Malabar coast, and Hindus from the Surat and adjoining districts (Hood, 1903; Desai, 1939; Colaco, 1955). It seems that people from inland communities in India often kept a foothold in agriculture in their home villages and worked as migrant labourers in a pattern not very different from that in southern Africa.
How did the ‘lascars’ understand their own political identitities? There is a strong tendency for labour historians to look for signs of insurgency, but this is not equally useful at all historical junctures. Certainly, by the end of the 1930s sailors were caught up in the anti-colonial sentiment sweeping the world. But this should not be projected back in time. The initial appeal of African and Asian workers for shipowners was that they were not highly mobilised. Moreover, there are indications that at least some sailors had a certain faith in imperial justice, which made their anger when it failed all the more bitter. Consider the following case. In February 1927 two seamen from Bombay, Abdul Gani and Patrick Fitzgerald, the former of Punjabi origins and the latter the son of an Indian mother and a Liverpudlian father, wrote impassioned letters from Antwerp complaining that they had been illegally excluded from entering Britain at London as crew on the SS Australind. Their letters suggest a profound sense of moral outrage at the challenge to their identity as British. Gani pointed out that he served out of British ports in the Great War and had all his discharges.11 Fitzgerald was mortified:
I cannot see why they would not let me land as I am a British Subject born in Calcutta on 20 September 1902 and my father is an European and had served in the British navy during the war who also is in Liverpool … and who is a member of the Buffalo Lodge …. Sir, I think it will be hard for me to stay here and find a job as we are dark people, and I am a respectable man and never been destitute … where(as) in England I could get a ship and find employment soon.12
The two men were allowed to come temporarily to Britain, but their appeal speaks of a more than instrumental relationship to British identity. Lascars were very active agents in the world, but not at all times actively anti-colonial agents.
Finally, there was the social web of the British seafarers’ labour diaspora, in which I would include the maritime workers of Australasia. In the 19th century British sailors lived truly appalling lives. Between 1830 and 1900 one out of every five British mariners died at sea – perhaps a quarter of them from drowning and the rest from the effects of disease, exposure or malnutrition. Ships were often loaded to unsafe levels. The possibility of being fully compensated by insurance for their losses tended to make owners indifferent to the dangers involved. Yet under the 1870 Merchant Shipping Act, sailors could be imprisoned if they refused to go to sea because they thought their vessel was unseaworthy. Most sailors did not live to the age of 45 (Jones, 2006:12–23). In port, the situation in which sailors were paid in advance laid them open to swindling by ‘crimps’ – unscrupulous boardinghouse keepers (Jones, 2006:121).
Before the 1880s British marine officers exercised very effective control over their labour force. W. Caius Crutchley, who went to sea as an apprentice in 1863, experienced ‘the power of the master mariner’ as an ‘absolute despotism’ that was, however, fully accepted by the crew: ‘There was seldom any attempt made to obtain redress for ill treatment at sea’ (Crutchley, 1912:16). Crutchley’s book, like many other accounts of British shipping of the mid-to-late 19th century, is full of references to captains and mates who used their fists on sailors, beat ships’ boys with ropes’ ends and locked up disciplinary offenders in irons, on bread-and-water diets. In the 1870s Crutchley (1912:158), now a first mate, made use of these methods himself, recalling that in Cape Town ‘on sailing day it was no uncommon thing to be obliged to go uptown in a hansom cab, find your men half drunk, and then sit on them in the cab until you could get them safely on board and in irons until they were sober’. The social relations of this world were, however, seldom challenged by British sailors.
I now want to examine how these interacting webs generated a certain kind of racialised politics in the maritime world, which lasted throughout our period. I would argue that British labour had a strong initiating role in this phenomenon. I do not think that to make such an argument implies a naturalisation of racism. British sailors were indeed confronted by an economic threat, for there is no doubt that many employers did want to replace them with the cheap labour of people of colour. But the combination of an awareness of this with strong unions that were almost exclusively white and the prevalence of a virulent racial discourse in this period did produce politics that was undeniably racist in response. Labour historians who want to deny the racism central to British trade unionism in at least the era before the First World War come uncomfortably close to the argument of the Australian publicist Keith Windschuttle (2004), who claims to his own satisfaction that the White Australia policy was not racist, because the trade unionists who supported it were motivated by economic considerations.
In the 1880s there was evidence of a new unwillingness by British seamen to accept their conditions. This needs to be placed in the context of broader changes in British politics and society. The admission of the upper stratum of the male working class to the franchise in 1867 and its further broadening in 1884, the elaboration by Gladstone of a combative radical liberal ideology, the firming of the position of craft unionism and the rise of agrarian radicalism in Scotland and Ireland all militated towards a situation where questioning the legitimacy of established forms of authority became more possible for subordinate social groups. The 1880s saw J. Havelock Wilson found the organisation later known as the National Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union (NSFU), the first effective national trade union in its sector. Although Wilson’s extreme patriotism and his penchant in his later life for cozy arrangements with management have made him something of a butt of mockery for labour historians, he was in his day an extremely effective leader. In 1888–89 the famous shift to the New Unionism occurred in Britain, when previously unorganised categories of supposedly unskilled workers – the dock workers and sailors to the fore among them – engaged in landmark strike actions. The next year saw the success of Samuel Plimsoll’s long-running parliamentary campaign for the regulation of the loading of ships, and in 1891 Wilson got into parliament, where he was able to promote his union’s policies. Over the next two decades the political context became more and more characterised by forms of working class self-assertion, with the consolidation of the trade union movement, the Labour Party’s breakthrough to significant parliamentary representation in 1906 and the massive syndicalist-led strikes of 1911–12, in which sailors and dock workers played major parts (Wilson, 1925).
Ship’s officers and owners had a palpable sense that their power over British sailors had been undermined. In the early 1890s, during his last years at sea, Captain Crutchley (1912:320) felt that the ‘after-effects of the strikes’ had generated a ‘dangerous spirit of insubordination’. Thomas Wilson Sewell, the respected chief engineer of the SS Majestic, noted during the same period the ‘falling off in good men’ in the crews that could be found for steamships (New York Times, 14 April 1890 cited in Fox, 2004:323). By the beginning of the 20th century captains were commonly portraying British sailors as completely unmanageable. In 1903 an experienced officer, Captain W. H. Hood, published a book entitled The Blight of Insubordination, deploring the current behaviour of British seamen. In his rambling, but quite well-documented text, Hood (1903:39), raging against the seamen, wrote that ‘in a merchant ship commonly enough voyages start with a crew who are at once both insubordinate and mutinous’. For Hood the rot had been encouraged by the weakening of the skipper’s authority through recent reforms of marine law, soft-hearted magistrates and undisciplined trade unionism. Many other officers felt similarly. In August 1904 Robert S. Riley wrote in the Marine Engineer that on leaving port, the ship’s engineer was not surprised to find his men ‘half drunk and altogether unruly’ (cited in Fox, 2004:324). The Nautical Magazine noted in May 1909 that although few engineers would acknowledge this, they were afraid of violence from their men (Fox, 2004:124). Labour relations were further complicated by political tensions between predominantly Scottish Protestant engineer officers and stokers who were often Irish Catholics (Fox, 2004:324).
The crisis in authority relations within the British maritime world produced a new interest among captains and shipowners in the possibility of employing the labour of African and Asian sailors, who were seen as a cheap and tractable substitute for demanding and uncooperative British sailors. Ultimately, it was the difference in access to political participation between British sailors and colonised subjects that made this possible. The unenfranchised lascars did not have the access to political resources that the newly empowered British and Australian seamen were acquiring. This provided the basis for massive wage differentials. As late as 1939, for example, a British fireman received £10, 2 shillings and 6 pence a month, whereas a fireman from Bombay received £2, 2 shillings and 6 pence, and a fireman from Calcutta £1, 14 shillings and 6 pence (Desai, 1939:93). In addition, employers could simply crowd more workers into the same space: the relevant British legislation until nearly the end of our period provided for 120 cubic feet of accommodation for each British sailor, as opposed to 72 cubic feet for each lascar (Desai, 1939:97). Employers could also more easily get away with skimping on the feeding of lascars, with the result that these sailors experienced serious malnutrition problems.
The introduction of a new workforce coincided with and was made easier by the triumph of steam over sail on the oceans of the world, a development that was, in a sense, the industrialisation of the sea. The work of a seaman on a sailing ship can be thought of as artisanal: to climb the masts and set the sails required agility, expertise and the initiative to meet unexpected problems. For all its dangers and hardships, it was a way of life in which sailors could, and did, take pride. For instance, Herman Melville, in his autobiographical novel based on his first ocean voyage in 1839, wrote of the ‘delight’ he took in furling the sails in a ‘hard blow’, of the feeling of ‘mastering the rebellious canvas’ and of the ‘estimation’ in which a ship’s company held the knowledge of a truly experienced sailor who was ‘an artist in the rigging’ (Melville, 1986:173–75, 182). On the other hand, the work of the steamship had a grimmer character; the craft of the sailor largely disappeared. What this meant was that the skills that sailing-ship men took years to learn were replaced with skills that could be acquired fairly quickly and had relatively little specific connection with seamanship (Fox, 2004). This undermined the esprit de corps that was the hallmark of sailing-ship life; it was noted that men on steamships, unlike their predecessors, did not sing at their work (Fox, 2004:318). It also made them easier to replace with new workers.
Ship’s officers and other marine experts who were opposed to the introduction of Asian and African sailors elaborated a discourse as to why it was crucial to prevent the replacement of British sailors by Asians on British ships. Prominent among their claims were that Asian and African sailors were poorly skilled and that they could not cope in a crisis at sea. Such issues were thrashed out in a public political controversy in Britain in 1896 at the hearings of a parliamentary committee looking into the manning of British ships. In their evidence to the committee, a number of captains, as well as company nautical experts, gave evidence for the abilities of the ‘lascars’. Captain Almond, inspector of the P&O line, for example, testified that his company employed lascars because they were as efficient as European crews and more so as firemen in hot latitudes, and that ‘under no circumstances of wind or weather’ had he known lascar crews to fail him (Hood, 1903:7). The committee went on to accept the worth of the lascar as a sailor.
A major theme in the controversies of the era was the sailor’s relation to alcohol. The Liverpool Courier of 2 July 1902, for example, carried a letter describing a scene in a South African port where three ships lay alongside one another, with a British, Chinese and Indian crew, respectively. Two-thirds of the British crew ended up in jail, while the other two ships sailed on time. The plausibility of such tales is hard to deny. Of course, British sailors had drunk from time immemorial, but the combination of drink and political radicalism and the possibility of drawing labour from cultures in which drinking was prohibited or disapproved of were likely to sway employers’ approaches to hiring. The next ten years saw a series of parliamentary enquiries and initiatives on maritime questions.
J. Havelock Wilson and his union consistently stood for policies of racial exclusion. This was sometimes explicit, as when Wilson’s enforcer, Edward Tupper, led a race riot against the Chinese community in Cardiff in 1911, of which he later openly boasted in his autobiography (Tupper, 1938:13–48). More subtly, Wilson was able to deploy formal rhetorics of equality and good management for inegalitarian purposes. He campaigned for the space allocated to lascars and British seamen, and the money spent on their feeding by employers to be equalised – laudable measures on the surface. But Wilson’s call was clearly based on the assumption that if employers’ savings in hiring sailors from the colonies were reduced, they would give preference in hiring to British employees. Similarly, he advocated a language test for sailors, supposedly to ensure that, for safety reasons, they could understand their officers, but in fact with a view to finding another mechanism to exclude African and Asian sailors from the labour market.13 In reality, officers and sailors generally communicated quite effectively in a range of creole languages, especially an Urdu-based tongue known as Lascari-Bat. Manuals in this language were widely available from the 1890s onward (‘Malem Sahib’, 1892; Valenti, 1896; Harrison, 1905) and were extensively utilised by officers in the P&O and other lines (Valenti, 1896:2).
The 1919 race riots in British ports seem to have been precipitated largely by socio-economic tensions between African and Asian workers who had entered the maritime labour market and settled during the war, and returning white servicemen. While the NSFU cannot be charged with instigating them (as it could in the case of the 1911 events), it certainly did not do much to restrain its members from instigating racial attacks either (Jenkinson, 1987). In 1921 the NSFU demanded the repatriation of Arab sailors from British ports. In the following year the NSFU won the introduction of the PC5 card system under which a sailor had to get union approval for employment, which adversely affected Asian and African sailors, because local NSFU branches varied in their willingness to grant membership. When in 1925 the Home Office issued the Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, an actually illegal fiat requiring African and Asian seamen to register with the police, the NSFU supported this measure (Hirson & Vivian, 1992:41).
Australasia tends to be somewhat absent from all the existing accounts of Indian Ocean labour. But the action of the labour movement there in closing the maritime labour market to Asian and African seamen had important long-term implications for the spatial politics of the Indian Ocean. Australia was a major destination for British shipping, representing perhaps a tenth of all British seaborne trade at the end of the 19th century. Although the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 drastically shortened the trip between Britain and Asia, it did not reduce the distance of the journey between Britain and Australia to anything like the same proportion – and Suez had its negative side in the form of high fees and congestion. The result was that a very large proportion of British trade and passenger traffic to the Antipodes continued to use the Cape route, sustaining Cape Town and Durban as significant ports. In addition, because of the inadequacy of inland communications in Australia, coastal shipping came to constitute a massive and strategically crucial sector in the Australian economy (Blainey, 2001). In the mid-19th century a substantial number of Chinese sailors were employed in this sector. But in 1878 the recently formed Federated Seamen’s Union of Australasia struck against the employment of these men by the Australasian Steam Navigation Company and won, thus starting to establish a principle of racial exclusion in the local shipping industry (Broeze, 1998:204–5). In 1888 local mass movements in Melbourne and Sydney based in the labour organisations prevented the landing of ships carrying Chinese immigrants or manned with Chinese crews (Rolls, 1992:454– 508), a key moment in the development of the White Australia policy that became such a crucial institution of the new pan-Australian state in the first half of the 20th century. The unions not only succeeded in totally pushing Asian sailors out of the local maritime labour market, but also continued to agitate with partial success for the exclusion of Asians from intercontinental ships calling at Australian ports. And this was true even in the radical left of the labour movement. In his definitive history of Australian communism, Stuart McIntyre (1998) shows that the party, which became quite dominant in Australian sailors’ and wharfmen’s unions, while formally opposing the idea of White Australia, in practice viewed and treated Asian labour as a threat to the existing unions.
Despite the emergence of significant trade unionism among the seamen of the major Indian ports in the interwar years and a major infusion of social radicalism into British seamen’s politics in the 1920s, there was little sense of any major change in the racial politics of the Indian Ocean workforce in the interwar period. In 1925 there was an international strike of British seamen against an attempt by shipowners to impose a wage cut. Havelock Wilson, still at the helm of the NSFU, opposed the action, which was driven by the communist-led National Minority Movement and a breakaway union led by the radical Labour Party politician Manny Shinwell. This dramatic strike gave rise to major demonstrations in the port cities of South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, and paralysed the imperial transport network (Hirson & Vivian, 1992). In Australia, the strike coincided with a vicious struggle between the local labour movement and Prime Minister S. M. Bruce, who was attempting to deport two seamen’s union leaders and change the legislative framework for the maritime industries. But for all its radicalism, the strike did not move outside the framework of racial protectionism. In fact, because of the exclusion of Indian seamen from the British unions, those same unions immediately had to cast lascars in the role of strike-breakers. In Durban, the local labour activist H. H. Kemp, who had been elected leader of the local strike committee, told an approving rally that he favoured the expulsion of all ‘Asiatics’ from South Africa and that if, as was then rumoured, lascars were brought from Bombay, he would join the white citizens of Durban in throwing them into the sea (Hirson & Vivian, 1992:49). The political tensions provoked by the story of lascar recruitment for the South African ports were considerable, with both the Natal Indian Congress and the Times of India warning that such a move would be inflammatory, and Prime Minister Hertzog issuing a statement implying that such lascars would be deported should they arrive (Hirson & Vivian, 1992:49–50). In Australia, the local unions framed their conflict with Bruce in terms of their suspicions that he was conspiring with British shipping interests to reintroduce Asian labour into the Australian industry. Bruce was indeed a recently appointed director of the P&O and strongly anti-labour, but in the end there was no change to Australian racial policy in respect of shipping. The seamen’s strike eventually broke. When it did, ships started moving again with crews drawn from white scabs, exhausted strikers – and lascars. The experience simply reinforced the racialisation of the politics of British seaborne trade unionism.
Trade unionism among seafarers in India began to gather momentum at the end of the First World War. But after an initial flare-up of conflict in 1920, the Indian-based union movement was rather quiet and ineffective in the interwar years. It suffered from high levels of fragmentation – separate unions clustering around each port – and factionalism – separate groupings being run by socialists, communists and different Indian National Congress groupings. In addition, sailors were under the thumb of the gat-serangs – recruiters who operated patronage networks that milked sailors for bribes in return for jobs. This system was one of the major grievances of unions and it dampened organisational possibilities by drawing sailors into patronage relationships that were inimical to the logic of unionism. Ethnic factors also played a part in limiting the appeal of the unions, with, for example, Goans tending to dominate the leadership of the Seamen’s Union of Bombay, one of the better-organised groupings. For much of the interwar period this did not eventuate in major mobilisation, but by the end of the 1930s a new militancy started to emerge. In 1938 the Seamen’s Union of Bombay launched a quite substantial strike protesting current hiring practices; this led to significant confrontations with the authorities in Bombay (Colaco, 1955). Within a week of the outbreak of war in 1939 strike action for higher wages on a massive scale spread among Indian seamen across the British Empire. The strikes apparently started in South Africa and then moved to Britain and elsewhere. British officials suspected communist involvement and, indeed, given the communist line at that juncture of opposing the British war effort, this may well have been a factor. However, it seems that the major impetus was that the sailors resented risking their lives for a pittance and were emboldened by the shaky political condition of the Raj. The strategic threat posed by such a strike in wartime galvanised the British cabinet to come down heavily on the shipowners. Wages more than doubled over the next few years and reforms of working conditions were undertaken (Balachandran, 2003:121–23).
Syed Ali’s maritime world no longer exists. The Second World War marked the end of his era, for the massive losses of merchant ships in the war and the building of huge numbers of new ships to meet the crisis saw steam finally give way to oil burners, with their smaller crews. While we are still invisibly reliant on the ocean transport of goods for much of what we consume, that transport system has been working in a very different way since the container ship revolution of the 1960s. And, of course, air became the major means of transport for passengers and high-value goods. Syed Ali was at sea in the last years of the British steamship empire.
For a South African historian, what must be striking about the politics of the steam empire is that it bears remarkable similarities to the history of the gold-mining industry in South Africa and thus perhaps casts a new light on the vexed question of the ‘exceptionalism’ of South Africa. In both cases, the introduction of a new technology in the late 19th century generated a demand for cheap unskilled labour. In both cases, employers turned to colonised subjects for this labour. In both cases, white enfranchised labour saw this situation as a threat to their established position and used their access to political power to resist it. However, this chapter also suggests a major difference. To a much greater extent than in the rigidly policed mining industry, the multivalent web of transoceanic connections made it possible for workers to slip around or through the grids employers and officials set up to contain them. ‘Lascars’ like Syed Ali were often able to move and find their own way along the webs that stretched across the oceans.
