The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [160]
One important result of these developments was that less coal was needed. In the early days steamers hopped from one coaling station to another, but these stops progressively became less frequent. In 1884 a passenger described how his steamer took on coal at Port Said, and then sailed non-stop to Western Australia; though the ship sailed less well as the voyage progressed, for the coal had acted as ballast.49 The steamers could now profitably carry cargo as well as mail and people. Regular cargo voyages began in the ocean in 1866. As we will see, this did not apply to bulk cargoes for some time yet, but most other cargo was carried on the predictable and reliable steam ships. One other innovative helped here, of benefit especially to the settlement colonies of South Africa and Australasia. This was refrigeration. In 1880 the first cargo of frozen Australian mutton was landed in London in prime condition. Soon after, butter and fruit were taken too.50
The greatest advantage of the modern steamers was that they were able, to a very large extent, to conquer nature. They promised regular passages, unaffected by the monsoons which for so many millennia had acted as a strait jacket on Indian Ocean sailing. True that this took a while to achieve. In the early days of steam, in the late 1840s, P&O promised, on pain of being fined, to do the Suez to Kolkata voyage in 523 hours, and the return one in 543. However, during the monsoons of May to July 120 hours had to be added. But soon the monsoon became irrelevant. On the run to Australia, P&O ships left London every other Friday in 1913, that is with the Suez Canal being used. The voyage to Fremantle was precisely 32 days, and to Sydney 41. One could avoid the Bay of Biscay and go to Marseilles by train. The train left London at 11.00 a.m. on Thursday, got to Marseilles at exactly 7.10 a.m. on Friday, and the boat sailed at 10.00 a.m. BI ships were soon able to ignore the dreaded southwest monsoon off the west coast of India. From 1863 the line operated a routine service from Kolkata to Mumbai. Ships left both ports on the 1st and 15th of each month, and called at fourteen regular ports, and others by request, during the three-week journey.51 One much noted consequence of this routine and efficiency was the way in which it made the voyage from the metropole to India much easier. Consequently English women could join their husbands in India, go home for holidays, and send their children back to school in England. It is claimed that this reduced any chance that the English rulers of India would be indigenised in the way previous rulers from outside had been, for a return home was now easy.
Yet we must not give a picture of total efficiency, with sea passages being as routine, sterile, and boring as those on a modern cruise ship. Colin MacKenzie was on SS Merkara in 1890. Typically even for this time, the ship had some sails also. After a dreary and hot passage through the Suez Canal they took on coal at Aden, so much that in order for them to be able to go direct to Batavia some of it was piled up on the deck at first.52 His ship, and many others, carried livestock which was slaughtered as needed to meet the British propensity for large meat meals. Royal Navy ships also did this. In 1850 a 36-gun ship cruising off the African coast to catch slave ships took on twenty or thirty bullocks, sheep, pigs and so on in Zanzibar, 'which made our main deck appear more like a farm-yard than a battery' At one time they had 'as many as fifty bullocks between the guns on the main deck, besides sheep &c.'53 Even the stately P&O ships had a barnyard aspect to them, for fodder had to be carried for the animals, and passengers woke to the crowing of cocks, cackle of geese, bleating of sheep, squealing of pigs, and lowing of cows. The steamers were dirty ships, belching out smoke and cinders. If the wind was a following one, the smoke went straight up and then dropped smut and cinders on the deck: the