Читать книгу The Last of the Lascars - Mohammed Siddique Seddon - Страница 15

FROM ADEN TO ‘TIGER BAY’, ‘BARBARY COAST’ AND ‘LITTLE ARABIA’

SAMUEL CHEW INFORMS us that the first recorded Englishman to travel in Yemen was John Jourdain, a ‘factor’ or, representative, of the British East India Company who, ‘leaving his ship The Ascension, at Aden, penetrated into the interior as far as Sana [sic].’¹ While Jourdain crossed through the mountain highlands to the ancient city of Sana’a, the remainder of the crew of The Ascension, under the command of Alexander Sharpleigh, passed through Bāb al-Mandab and entered the Red Sea to become the first recorded English vessel in that part of the world. Jourdain then rejoined the ship at the port of Mocha from where it continued to India. This expedition took place in the spring of 1609.² At the time Jourdain and his shipmates landed at Aden, its population was estimated to be around 60,000, consisting mostly merchants, traders and sailors. There is no further recorded contact until 1829, when the East India Company considered utilizing Aden as a coaling station to refuel the ever-increasing numbers of steam-powered merchant vessels sailing between British and Indian ports. In 1835, Captain Haines of the British East India Company opportunistically wrote:

Aden … might be the grand emporium for the export of coffee, gums, etc., as well as a channel through which the produce of India and England might be thrown into the rich provinces of Yemen and the Hadhramaut … the trade would also be open to the African coast, the distance being so trifling; from thence, gums, coffee, hides, frankincense, myrrh, would be thrown into the Aden market and the trader thereby be enabled not only to return with the produce of the Yemen, but what of might return him [sic] a good profit from the African coast.³

A BRITISH COLONY AT ADEN

By 1839, Aden was virtually reduced to a fishing village with a reported population of no more than 600 people. Captain Haines’ report to the Bombay government optimistically described Aden’s admirable strategic position, its fine harbours and natural defenses, as a ‘must have’ acquisition for the East India Company, which he concluded was poorly managed by the ruling Laḥijī Sultanate. The earliest relations between Britain and the Laḥijī Sultanate were based on a series of treaties and negotiated agreements that began in 1802 when a treaty of commerce was signed. This agreement eventually led to the British exerting their power and influence over the port and surrounding areas through the eventual imposition of the British Protectorate of Aden in 1839.

Initially, British efforts to realize Aden as a colonial entrepôt for tripartite trade between Asia, Arabia and Africa were slow and ineffective and the expected trade between British merchants and the interior coffee trade districts of the Yemen did not materialize immediately. Fortunately, trade with the northerly coast of East Africa prospered, largely due to the security for merchant ships in the region as a result of the establishment of Haines’ garrison at Aden. Eventually, a growing trade between Indian and Arab merchants with Somali tribesmen was stimulated by the great annual fair held at Berbera in Somalia. In 1840, it was recorded that 300 native East African vessels and 21,000 camels were engaged in the great fair trade. However, as Berbera was abandoned during the annual monsoon season between April and October, the inland tribes moved to the African coast to prepare their huts for the expected trading vessels from Yemen, Muscat, Ras al-Khaimah, Bahrain, Porebunder and Bombay. The burgeoning British settlement at Aden soon capitalized on this trade by allowing Indian traders to build their storehouses in the port, unlike the nomads of Somalia who would not permit permanent and secure buildings at Berbera. This proved fortuitous for Aden which had, until this time, progressed little beyond being more than an offshoot of the Berbera trading centre up until the end of 1848. When Somali merchants gradually began to journey across the Gulf of Aden to conduct their business in the port, largely due to their own storage restrictions at Berbera, by 1878, the economic situation of Aden was radically changed.

From this period onwards the majority of African trade between Arabia and Asia was financed, supplied and controlled from Aden, drastically changing the fortunes of the port and the control and influence of the British in the region. American vessels had continued to use Mocha, loading 2.5 million pounds of coffee as early as 1805, and in the process obtaining very favourable terms from the Sharīf.⁴ Yemen coffee exports still increased based in the northern ports of Mocha and Hodeidah despite Haines’ attempts to entice the trade to Aden from as early as 1839. However, his increased efforts were continuously thwarted by the wily regional ruler Sharīf Hussain. But, as disputes between the Sharīf and the Zaydī Imām of Yemen began to intensify, the balance of mercantile power began to swing in favour of the British and their entrepôt at Aden. When the Zaydī Imām attacked the Red Sea coastal area in 1844, leading to the final capture of Mocha, by 1848 all business in the port was halted. As a result, within 18 months, all caravans at Ḥujariyah and Sana’a were bringing their loads of coffee to Aden. Yet, despite this development, American vessels avoided trading with the port, dissuaded by unfavourable custom rates and uncertainty over the availability of goods. In 1853, the East India Company declared Aden a ‘free port’, thus solving the problem and ensuring that from then on export shippers of all nations in the lower Red Sea directed their vessels to Aden.

By the time Haines departured as the first British Resident of Aden for the EIC in 1854, a sizeable Arab and Indian trading community was consolidating its grip on the markets of North East Africa, Red Sea ports and the Yemen. In the same year, contracts for export coffee from the port were recorded at $184,000. However, as Aden grew the neighbouring ports of Mocha, Shuqrah and Bīr Aḥmad were seriously affected as increasing trade with American, French and German ships made Aden the primary focus of their trading activities. In his term of office as the East India Company’s Resident at Aden, Captain Haines worked endlessly to develop and expand the port’s commercial potential. In 1847, he recommended the construction of a second customs post at the port’s main pass in order to register the trade from there and a pier was completed at Ma˓allā in 1855, which allowed merchants to establish the main customs post there by 1864.⁵ The rapid growth in the port’s activities ensured that Arab, Indian and Persian traders in cotton goods, coffee, gums, spices and cloves, situated at the port of Zanzibar, quickly relocated their businesses at Aden. Although the port returns for 1855–6 reveal that the bulk of the port’s trade was with India, particularly Bombay, 30% was with the United States. By 1856–7, France had surprisingly overtaken both India and the US in trading at the port, but it was predominantly British ships, providing the mail steamer service, that dominated Aden’s traffic (29,000 tons/year between 1852–5 compared with 80,000 tons/year of non-British vessels).⁶ Suprisingly, it was not until 1857, when Captain Luke Thomas began commercial operations in Aden, that a British trader was finally established at the port.⁷

British mail ships, largely P&O vessels after the termination of the government mail service, were given priority at the harbour and were provided with buoy berths. Until 1857, all other vessels were required to lie at anchor in the inner harbour and, where British mail ships had port company pilots, other merchants had to employ the services of Red Sea pilots until the establishment of the Aden Pilot Service in 1848. Steamships required an incredible amount of coal, all of which was shipped to the port by a fleet of colliers from the British ports of Cardiff, Newcastle, Liverpool and Hull – ports that were soon to see the settlement of Yemeni merchant seamen in the dockland areas. The draft limitations in Aden’s Western Bay meant that the colliers were required to discharge their loads in the outer harbour to draft 17 feet before unloading the remaining coal in the inner harbour.

At the dockside, the labour required to handle all cargoes was mobilized and organized through the system of a muqaddam. The muqaddam acted as a ‘foreman’ or, ‘leader’ of small, freelance labour gangs for anyone wishing to employ them. The chief duties of the muqaddam was to recruit and employ local men individually, keep the labour gang together, fill the places of those who fell sick and provide sufficient men to meet the needs of the port employers. Serangs (Bosons) and tindals (Boson’s mates)⁸ supervised the actual work, with the serang accepting or refusing the services of the muqaddam as they saw fit. This degree of partiality was open to a system of small bribery, known locally as ‘al-ḥaqq al-qahwah’ (literally, ‘the right of coffee’), which meant that for a small ‘service charge’, usually set at a nominal fee – the price of a cup of coffee – an individual could buy his place on to a muqaddam’s gang, or a muqaddam could ensure work for his gang by greasing the palm of a serang or tindal. Ansari refers to the role of the muwassiṭ or muqaddam as:

Serangs and ghat serangs – labour agents, moneylenders and lodging house-keepers rolled into one (and therefore very powerful men) – were already established in Calcutta and Bombay … Yemeni and Somali maritime employment was organised and controlled in a similar way: muqadams (similar to serangs) were charged with supplying labour from their own tribes and negotiating contracts to the best advantage of the shipping companies and themselves. ⁹

The muqaddam system was used by Haines from the earliest days of the British presence in Aden, specifically in the construction of the fortifications and the garrison erected around the port. Labourers not only found their way to Aden from the tribal highlands of Yemen, but they came from as far as Egypt and Iran. The overwhelming majority of labourers, however, were from Mocha or the hill-farming communities of northern Yemen. As a result of labour migration, Aden soon became a cosmopolitan community comprising of Arab, Indian, Somali and Persian workers and traders. It was through this very particular and effective employment process that Aden quickly developed a competitive edge over all the other coal bunkering stations and colonial ports. During the 1840s and 1850s, it was estimated that a third of Aden’s population were hill farmers from the northern hinterlands, who would return to their mountain villages to sow their crops and then harvest them from June to October every year. This annual migration left the port with a serious shortage of labourers. Another third came from Mocha as the changing fortunes of the once-famous coffee port was slowly reduced to little more than a fishing village when the coffee merchants and traders relocated to Aden.

2.1 – A picture postcard view of British Colonial Aden, circa 1960.

In the early years of British control of Aden, migrant labourers usually settled in poor makeshift wooden huts along the dockside. However, by 1856, the EIC’s Assistant Resident at Aden introduced a policy of tearing down the temporary huts at the same time that he was clearing the water tanks at al-Tawāhī. Hut occupiers were offered plots on which to build stone houses which meant that by 1867 there were 1840 permanent houses for a population of 17,564.¹⁰ A survey conducted at Ma˓allā in 1881 revealed that 15% of Aden’s population was homeless, 60% were semi-settled in ‘kutcha’ houses, which suggests these were homes of Indian settlers, and the rest occupied stone houses. By 1870, the population of around 22,000 was dominated by migrant port workers who frequented the coffee houses in search of work, to take their recreation, eat food and, in many cases, collect their wages from the muqaddam, who was also often the coffee house owner. The size of Aden’s population remained fairly constant until after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Thereafter, steamers gradually began to replace the square-rigger ships, which made longer voyages around the Cape to China and India. More steamers inevitably meant more coal at Aden whose status was further boosted as an important refuelling and trading port when the triple-expansion engines for steamers were introduced in the 1880s accelerating the numbers of vessels passing through the port. Yet, as the port became increasingly busy, the facilities and harbour conditions at the docks had hardly improved. It was only after a parliamentary debate in 1885 and the subsequent formation of the Aden Port Trust in 1889 that the British government and the mercantile community at Aden arranged for a major dredging and reconstruction of the docklands, which enabled the mooring of the biggest ships of the day to berth at the port. The end result of the muqaddam system of employment and migration flow meant that many Yemeni lascar crews were discharged in Europe, and did not return to Aden; instead, a number of pioneer Muslim settlements around the ports of Marseilles, Amsterdam, Cardiff, South Shields, Liverpool and London emerged by the late nineteenth century.

YEMENI BAḤRIYYAH AND LASCARS

As a country at the heart of the industrial revolution and the subsequent manufacturing boom, Britain became a place of migration for many foreign emigrants and settlers. In the beginning, the Muslim presence was transient and temporary, largely facilitated by British imperial expansionism and commercial enterprise. But the empire slowly drew Muslims to its industrial centres by a number of means: firstly as oriental sailors, or lascars, and wealthy Arab merchants, then later as a large post-colonial labour force. The establishment of the Yemeni Muslim community in Britain is intrinsically linked to the historical legacy of British colonialism and imperialism, because Aden was ruled through imperial India until it was granted colony status in 1937. When Aden originally became a British Protectorate in 1839, the empire secured a vital strategic fuelling station for its merchant steam vessels sailing to and from British India and the Far East. Yemeni migration to Britain began with the formation of early nineteenth-century lascar settlements in Cardiff, Liverpool, London and South Shields. Humayun Ansari has asserted that ‘the vital link in Yemeni emigration to Britain was the port of Aden.’¹¹ However, the burgeoning industrial docklands of imperial Britain were far removed from the remote highland village settlements from where most of the Yemeni lascars originated. The British colony at Aden was included in the Bombay presidency until 1932 when its control was then transferred to the central Indian colonial Government at Delhi, and the Resident at Aden subsequently became a Chief Commissioner. By 1937, Aden was finally separated administratively from India and it became a Crown colony.¹² This relatively late shift in the colonial politics of recognizing and ruling the Aden Protectorate as a separate entity from colonial India is perhaps largely responsible for the perceived ‘invisibility’ or, lack of any distinct recognition of an early to mid-nineteenth century Yemeni presence in Britain.

As colonized subjects associated administratively with British imperial India, the cultural and ethnic distinctiveness of Yemeni lascars was probably viewed as an insignificant detail in the larger scheme of colonial lascar employment within the booming maritime industry of imperial Britain. Hence, most of the contemporaneous accounts of lascar presence in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain are largely absent of any specific cultural and ethnic details regarding the particular racial origins of Oriental lascars. Instead, general depictions and monolithic representations, as ‘Indians’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Africans’ and ‘South Sea Islanders’ are usually given. Occasionally, terms such as, ‘Egyptian’, ‘Malay’, ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Soudanese’ [sic] were employed, but how accurate these descriptive terms actually were is questionable. Fred Halliday has argued that the fluidity of identities in the reception and placing of Yemenis in the British colonial context accounts for one further striking characteristic of the Yemenis, namely their ‘invisibility’.¹³ He argues that the obvious reason for this was simply that there were not that many of them compared with South Asian Muslim settlers in Britain. He particularly notes that ‘most of the time there was some larger identity into which they could easily be assimilated. In most cases there was an element of validity in this inclusion – lascars, Muslims, Arabs being cases in point.’¹⁴ Richard Lawless’ work also confirms a degree of identity confusion with regards to the Yemeni settlers in South Shields, noting that ‘in the opinion of the people living in the district [East Holborn, South Shields] half of the Arabs were in fact Turks’¹⁵ and that ‘[t]he Chief Constable of South Shields admitted in 1917 that he did not know the difference between a Turk and an Arab!’.¹⁶

2.2 – The seamen’s registration certificate of Ali Mohamed (b.1902) issued from Cardiff and dated 1929.

Like other sailors from the east India regions of Bengal and Bihar and those Far Eastern sailors from Malacca and Sumatra, the Yemenis of Aden and Ta˓izz sought employment on merchant ships sailing to Britain. Humayun Ansari states that lascars were employed to overcome the maritime labour shortage created as a result of British seamen being inducted into the navy for war service against the French from the 1760s onwards and to address the reality that significant numbers of British seamen were ‘deserting’ at Indian ports.¹⁷ Ansari also attests to the horrific treatment of lascars at the hands of ship masters that ‘despite the better wages there is evidence that many of these Indian Muslim sailors were brutally treated on ships, which compelled many to try to escape such harrowing ordeals.’¹⁸ Apart from London, many Yemeni lascars settled in Cardiff and South Shields, with smaller communities in Liverpool, Hull and later Manchester. He notes that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century a significant proportion of the lascars in Cardiff originated from Yemen and Somalia with the vast majority (95%) concentrated in the dock area and a small number in the city centre and other working-class districts. By 1911, it was estimated that the lascar population of Cardiff numbered around 700.¹⁹ In Glasgow, a Sailor’s Home was established in 1857 to cater for the ever-growing number of lascars settling in the city. A report by the Sailor’s Home stated that by 1903 nearly one-third (approximately 5500) of the annual number of nightly borders were lascars:

Among these Lascars were Yemenis and Somalis who, from as early as the 1850s, were recruited on steamers as firemen and stokers. In the East End of London, apart from Indian Lascar communities, Yemeni and Somali seamen together with Ottoman Turks represented some of the earliest Muslim communities in Britain.²⁰

Ansari, like Paul Dresch, claims that many Yemenis were drawn to working on ships after a series of droughts and famines occurred across the villages of the northern highlands of Yemen during the latter half of the nineteenth century.²¹ In the process, foreign remittances helped to support dependent families and for long periods prop up the ailing Yemeni economy. According to Joseph Salter’s record, the arrival of large numbers of lascars was becoming a common occurrence in the nineteenth century and by the 1890s with around 500 lascars arriving at London’s docks alone.²² Peter Fryer informs us that Asian and Arab lascars were present among the destitute Black populations of London as early as the 1780s. Salter was an Anglican priest and evangelical missionary who devoted the larger part of his life as a cleric prosyletizing among mostly Muslim, with some Hindu and fewer Buddhist, lascars coming to British port cities through imperial and entrepreneurial vessels. The cleric’s efforts produced two detailed contemporaneous published memoirs of his missionary efforts with the lascars. Salter’s detailed account of his missionary work amongst the poor and destitute lascars of the nineteenth century provides us with a fascinating and startling account of colonial lascars in British docklands. The result is a unique pair of descriptive and ethnographic documents on the plight of Oriental lascars living in horrendously deprived conditions at the height of imperial Victorian Britain. His work also confirms the ill-treatment of the lascars and he comments that, ‘In the 1850s Indian seamen, during their stay in Britain, were still enduring appalling conditions.’²³ The lascars were usually herded into lodging houses, often between six to eight to a room, without bedding, chairs or tables. Lascars who fell ill would find themselves suffering in a hospital or a workhouse without any means of communicating their ailments due to language problems. Between 1856 and 1857, eight lascars died of cold and hunger on the streets of London and a coroner reported that he had dealt with over 40 similar cases in the past few years.²⁴ Rozina Visram also attests that lascars were present in significant numbers by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, stating that:

Although no direct evidence of Lascars in the [East India Company barrack] premises for the period 1795–1814 is available, the fact that a bill was rushed through Parliament without debate in November 1813, to compel the Company to provide for lascars, suggests the Company’s own arrangements had failed. ²⁵

LASCAR DESTITUTION AND CHRISTIAN MISSION

Missionaries became hypersensitive to the treatment that the colonial subjects were facing in the heart of the imperial metropolis and so Christian philanthropists established competing missions aimed specifically at aiding and proselytizing the stranded lascars. The Reverend Henry Venn, Secretary of the Church Mission Society, opened a ‘Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders in West Dock Road, Limehouse, catering for some 150 lascars. At the same time, the Reverend Joseph Salter was establishing his missionary works among the destitute lascars of Britain’s burgeoning industrial cities. The overwhelming majority of black people in Britain by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were lascars. Abandoned by steamers or attracted by the prospect of casual work, lascars had begun to settle around the docks at Cardiff by the early 1870s when Welsh coal was beginning to be exported rapidly around the globe as essential fuel for commercial steamers.²⁶ By 1881, a sailor’s rest was established in the city to cater for the increasing presence of lascars working out of Cardiff, Newport and Barry. Fryer describes the plight of the lascars thus:

Having spent the small sums they had been paid-off with, having pawned any spare clothes or other belongings, destitute seamen tramped from port to port, desperate for work. Their quest was endless and almost hopeless. Help form compatriots and parish hand-outs kept them from starving, but they often went hungry.²⁷

The Colonial Office would often repatriate unemployed lascars, usually as a result of the intervention of the church missions. However, although an act of Parliament was passed in 1814 decreeing that no ship with a lascar crew was permitted to leave shore without a bond for their support until they were returned home, in practice very little changed on the ground.²⁸ In 1820, legislation had tried to limit the number of lascars present on British ships but the measures were short-lived as the growing demand for cheap labour in the maritime industry increased. An Act of Parliament in 1849 revised all existing restrictions and quotas, identifying all Oriental lascars (Asians, Arabs, Africans and Malays) as ‘British’ for the purposes of shipping. This relaxation of the law allowed ship owners to exploit an endless supply of cheap labour.²⁹ By employing lascars, ship owners were able to keep their wage bills to a minimum by effectively hiring three lascars for the price of two European sailors.³⁰ Further, lascars were known for their sobriety and were seen as ‘more manageable and amenable’ in comparison with European sailors. Sydney Collins has also noted that Yemeni lascars were particularly valued for their loyalty as hard working crew members, ‘They are reputed to be most obedient to their superiors, to cooperate as a work team, and to be willing to deputize for and indisposed workmate.’ He also recorded further that due to their loyalty, ‘Father and sons are often employed on the same boat. Thus for a period the son came under direct paternal supervision.’³¹ Lascars did not usually belong to unions and were regarded, rather patronizingly, as docile, inferior, lacking in masculinity, self-reliance and initiative, although this image changed significantly by the early twentieth century. As a result of imposed racial stereotypes, largely framed by an inflated sense of colonial superiority, it was deemed that lascars, although quite competent sailors, could only make excellent seamen when led by European officers.³² The false notion that, because of their tropical origins, lascars could withstand the heat of the engine rooms better than their white European counterparts meant that they were given the worst jobs on board ship: the engine stokers or so-called ‘donkeymen’. This racial misnomer has also been highlighted by Grahame Davies who notes from the writing of Captain Jac Alun Jones, a former Welsh seaman and poet, who wrote:

When Welsh coal exporting was in its glory, and every ship was burning coal to drive the engines, most of the firemen were Arabs, as they were famous as men who were able to withstand the great heat of the stokehold.³³

This peculiar climatic discrimination also meant that lascars were deemed unable to work in colder climes and were, therefore, limited to sail in latitudes between 60 degrees north and 50 degrees south. Such racist imaginary meant that lascars were firmly placed at the bottom of the maritime labour hierarchy, a means of keeping their labour rates much lower than those of European sailors.³⁴

As more and more ships docked in British ports, so the numbers of stranded lascars increased. The question of numbers arises in terms of trying to assess how many lascars were present in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Visram says that, by the 1850s, of the 10–12,000 lascars and Chinese seamen employed for service in British trade, at least 50% were brought to the UK every year and of these, 60% were Asiatic lascars.³⁵ This figure was dramatically increased with the opening of the Suez Canal, the introduction of faster steam-powered liners and the establishment of the Britishcontrolled port at Aden. According to Salter’s statistics (the source of which is not known) by the 1890s:

an average of 500 Asiatics [Asians and Arabs] come to the docks every week, and more than 10,000 Asiatics and Africans – including East Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Persians, Malays and Africans of various races – visit London in the course of a year.’³⁶

Whatever the actual figures, Salter’s contemporaneous account gives us some idea of the huge numbers of Oriental sailors visiting Britain’s ports in the nineteenth century, suggesting that their presence in the docklands was both highly visible and formidable. The Asiatic Mission, founded by Salter, was established with the intention of giving rest to:

the bodies of the travellers who have reached us from the distant East, or inner Africa, strangers in a strange land, where their customs and language are so little understood, such a home is greatly needed.³⁷

The evangelical missionary further asserts that ‘England annually attracts to her shores from all nations those who come either as visitors to enjoy our civilization, or as adventurers to exhibit the manners and habits of heathendom for our amusement and information.’³⁸ Visram has observed that ‘Christian missionaries and evangelicals saw lascars as a moral challenge. Like the ayahs (oriental nannies), they presented an opportunity for proselytizing.’³⁹

As British imperial expansionism reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, the increasing numbers of colonized others became a familiar presence throughout the country’s rapidly developing industrial docklands and cities. However, we are told by Salter that, ‘the prejudice against bringing foreign labour under any circumstances into the east of London was very great.’⁴⁰ Perhaps proving that even then, as now, migration to Britain by significant numbers of visible ethnic and religious others was fraught with political and cultural tensions. The majority of the mission’s clientele were Muslims and Salter rather disparagingly comments, ‘those who visit the Rest [Home] are mostly Mahommedans [sic], varying from the bigoted Afghan and Arab to the semi-fetish worship of Africa.’⁴¹ The Asiatic Rest was located ‘opposite the walls and near the gates of the East India Docks’, and a plaque in both Persian and Bengali was mounted on the front door of the mission.⁴² Inside copies of the Qur’ān in Arabic and the Bible, translated in various languages, were available to visitors. The walls of the mission were decorated with hand drawings of both Makkah and Madīnah, donated by various sailors who had visited the holy sites, along with Biblical verses translated into numerous oriental languages. One in Arabic ‘tells the wanderer from the Nile, “Whoever believeth in the Lord Jesus shall be saved”.’⁴³ Salter established the Asiatic Strangers Home, under the auspices of the London Christian Mission in 1856 specifically to provide welfare and proselytize among the destitute lascars. Although the Emancipation Act of 1833 had effectively abolished slavery across the British colonies, plantation owners and British merchants introduced a form of indentured labour that simply provided a ‘legal’ means of enslaving by signing up colonial subjects to a lifelong employment service to British coffee, tea, sugar and cotton plantations across the colonies. Other less permanent forms of employment allowed the recruitment of ayahs and lascars to suit the particular needs of those hiring. Subsequently, many ayahs and lascars, employed at the ports of Bombay and Aden, were immediately dismissed once they had reached the shores of Britain.

This unscrupulous form of employment left thousands of ‘Orientals’ stranded across British ports with no guarantee of returning to their homeland. Lascars simply had to try to buy their way onto the crew of a ship using the same muqqadam system that they had used initially to gain employment in their country of origin. A lack of funds to pay ‘al-ḥaqq al-qahwah’ or opportunity for employment on the right ship meant that lascars often took to begging on the streets of British port cities. Salter makes reference to the many ‘Asiatics’ and Arabs begging in east London around 1856 and recounts the number of unfortunate ‘Oriental lascars’ buried in pauper’s graves in London cemeteries. The favoured locations for congregated lascars in London appear to have been Westminster, Whitechapel and Shadwell, and Salter comments, ‘Westminster has always had its contingent of Asiatic mendicants, with the usual undergrowth of half-caste children.’⁴⁴ Salter also informs us that the presence of the lascars was neither confined to the imperial capital ‘nor were those resorts restricted to London: similar ones were to be found in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.’⁴⁵ Amongst the lascar beggars and street entertainers that Salter encountered was a lascar, who he met in both London and Manchester, suggesting that lascars often adopted a vagrant existence to ensure their income. ‘Monkey Abraham’, Salter tells us:

was another [lascar] who issued daily from the ‘Black Hole’. He earned his title from the queer attitudes he could assume. His head was some distance in advance of his body; his elbows kept crookedly afar from each other, while his boney knees sought closest acquaintance. His dress and cap were bedizened with spangles, and he wore a necklace, in four rows, of beads and strange seashells.⁴⁶

As an evangelical Christian missionary Salter was extremely critical of what he described as ‘telescopic philanthropy’, the process of sending Christian missionaries to all corners of the empire without addressing the reality of thousands of destitute colonial ‘heathens’ roaming the streets of British cities.⁴⁷

2.3 – The old British Port Authority building at Steamer Point, Aden, now a museum and known by Yemeni sailors as Dār al-Sayyūn (‘Place of Travel’), taken in December 2004.