The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [151]
We have written many times of connections across and beyond the ocean. These now intensified. We will follow the distinction made by Horden and Purcell in their study of the Mediterranean, and distinguish between connections in the ocean and connections of the ocean. It will be remembered that they found 'a distinction between history in the Mediterranean – contingently so, not Mediterranean-wide, perhaps better seen as part of the larger history of either Christendom or Islam – and history of the Mediterranean – for the understanding of which a firm sense of place and a search for Mediterranean-wide comparisons are both vital.'15
What then of wider connections, going beyond the ocean, a history in the ocean? Indian railway sleepers were sometimes built using Baltic fir, which was creosoted in Britain, then shipped to India. From the 1830s cargoes of ice came to Mumbai from north America. On either side of 1800 whales and seals were hunted in the southern stretches of our ocean by European and American ships, and the products taken far outside the ocean. Seal furs were mostly sold in Guangzhou. Cowry shells from the Seychelles were used to buy slaves in West Africa, and even after the end of the slave trade they were used to about the mid nineteenth century as currency in the Bay of Bengal, and far afield in Timbuktu, Benin, and up and down the Niger river. In 1925 there was a large strike by seamen in Britain after ship owners, led by the reactionary Lord Inchape of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company (P&O), cut their wages. The strike was vigorously supported by unionists in Australia, who provided strike pay for their English colleagues. Once the strike was over Lord Inchape decided to teach the unionists in Fremantle a lesson: for a while his ships boycotted western Australia and sailed direct to Melbourne.16
The history of the ocean, that is connections within it, are many and variegated: again a few examples will set the scene. Opium was cultivated in Bihar, in eastern India. Its role in the China trade in the nineteenth century is well known, but an earlier extensive trade to Java has been less studied. The VOC monopolised this trade. In the 1670s they made less than 5,000 Spanish dollars from its sale, but in the 1720s they made 83,000 and nearly 2,000,000 in 1800.17 Another drug, tobacco, continued to be traded around and in the ocean, with the Philippines becoming a major production area during the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century Kuwait imported all its water, and other necessities also travelled long distances across the ocean. As land was taken over for cash crops in Mauritius and Zanzibar, food had to be imported. Indian indentured labour in the former required imported rice, dhal and ghee from India, as did the free Indian population in the latter. Mozambique Island, just as in the past, imported food from along the Swahili coast, and even from India. Aden was taken by the British in 1839 and became an important hub in the imperial system. Livestock came from the Somali coast, grains from India, rice from Kolkata, and dates from the Gulf. Even leeches were traded far and wide. These were necessary for blood letting or phlebotomy, a very common medical specific in some European areas, especially France in the nineteenth century, and also in the Indian ayurvedic system. The main producer was the small French remnant in Pondicherry, and there was an extensive trade from there to Mauritius: their availability was widely advertised by pharmacies in Port Louis. One had them available by the thousand. In 1845 Fanny Parks was on her way back to England on the Essex. The ship's doctor had brought on board 10,000 leeches from Kolkata, as he knew there was a shortage at the Cape, and he could sell them for no less than half a crown a piece. He carried them in large earthen pots full of soft mud: alas, the pots broke in a storm