The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [156]
and also high-value shorter distances. They were advantaged by their access to modern navigation techniques, and also by the way the greatest traders, the EIC and the private European traders, used only European-type ships owned by Europeans. All this was writ large once steam came in.
We have noticed several times that European ships had certain advantages over local craft. In the sixteenth century they were sturdier, held together with nails so that they could survive Atlantic storms. This also meant they could carry cannon. Increasingly local shippers preferred to use European ships, partly as they were technologically superior, partly as they were less vulnerable to pirates. The improvements in navigation also helped, as did experiments from the 1760s with copper sheathing over the hulls, which countered the effects of tropical parasites. But it was the use of steam power to drive the ships which was the really important, qualitative, innovation.
Steam engines were the driving force behind the process of industrialisation in England. First used to pump water, and then to drive machinery, in the early part of the nineteenth century they were used to provide locomotion, first on land and then at sea. Steam assisted ships developed early in the century, though regular steamer passages across the Atlantic began only in 1838.33 The very first steamboat in India was a small pleasure craft built for the Nawab of Oudh in 1819, and indeed the first regular use of steamers in India was on the Ganga river. In 1821–22 the British built two steam tugs to tow ships to Kolkata, and they used primitive gunboats, steam driven shallow draft vessels, in the first Burma War of 1824–26. From 1828 iron clad steam vessels were used on the Ganga to tow strings of accommodation boats, and barges with freight. They provided an early illustration of the superiority of steam, for they towed their barges the 780 miles from Kolkata to Allahabad in three weeks, instead of the three months taken by country boats.34 Yet there were problems also. They were very expensive to run, and had difficulty getting up to Allahabad, let alone any further, due to variable shoals in the river. In 1837 the stately Lord Auckland was Governor General. He and his sisters were towed up the Ganga with a vast entourage in a string of 'flats', or large barges. However, there were constant problems with the shallow water, so that the steamer kept running aground even though this was October when the river should have been quite high.35 Steamers on rivers were of no use in the south, where there are no rivers navigable for any distance, and on the other great river of the north, the Indus, there were other problems. Essentially there was a technological trap, in that steamers powerful enough to cope with the strong currents were too heavy to get over the shoals in the river. The advent of railways soon made these river steamers redundant. Nevertheless, they did illustrate a wider facet, which is steam as western dominance writ large. A British passenger on a Ganga steamer in a novel of 1852 said that there was an 'inconceivable separation... between us few English, silently making a servant of the Ganges with our steam-engine and paddle-boats, and those Asiatics with shouts and screams worshipping the same river.'36
On the high seas the first steamer to be seen in Mumbai arrived in 1820, in Kolkata in 1823, and in Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya in 1825. The first steam-assisted ship to reach India from England seems to have been a small paddle steamer which arrived in Kolkata from Falmouth in 1825 after a passage of 113 days. Next year the new Governor General, Lord Bentinck, arrived in a steam boat. A steam boat was used in the first opium war in 1840, and in the same year the famous P&O Company was reorganised and two years later started regular sailings linking Suez, Aden, Ceylon, Chennai and Kolkata. In 1852 this company took over from the EIC the Suez–Mumbai route, one which became its most famous and most profitable. In this same year a regular service to far