The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [161]
I went to see the men bringing in the coals. I hardly know how to describe them unless I say they looked like imps of the old gentleman. They were black men, and they seemed to have only a sack on; naked legs, feet, and arms, and covered with coal dust. They brought the coals from the barge to the ship over a steep plank in rather small baskets, and they hurried to and fro and made such a dust that they were in a perfect cloud, yet they were evidently in high glee, judging by the way they skipped over the planks singing, laughing, and making as much noise as they could; if they had slipped, they would have fallen in the water. I thought it a good example of contentment.55
The scenes on the feeder routes in the Indian Ocean were even less sanitised. George Curzon wrote, as usual vividly, as usual in Orientalist tones, of the Gulf steamers:
The fore deck of a Gulf steamer presents one of the most curious spectacles that can be imagined . . . men lying, sitting, squatting, singing, chattering, cooking, eating, sleeping; and all in the midst of a piled labyrinth of quilts, and carpets, and boxes, of sailcloths and ropes, of sheep, and birds in cages, and fowls in coops, of trays, and samovars, and cooking-pots, of greasy donkey-engines and clanking chains – surely a more curious study in polyglot or polychrome could not well be conceived.56
Curzon is describing 'Asians' using a western means of transport, and this introduces the matter of what was happening to local craft as the steamers expanded. What eventuated was a pronounced dualism. We noted how it was near-impossible for locals to compete in the commanding heights of steam transport, but sailing ships for a time were able to continue on coastal routes. They carried some goods which were unloaded in the major ports onto the steamers, but they also carried low-value goods up and down the coasts and rivers. However, late in the century their role was increasingly undermined by tramp steamers, European owned and tramping from one port to another rather like the pedlars of previous eras. The characteristic dualism was well seen in the Gulf around 1900. Iraqi dates for America, Australia and East Africa were taken in steamers from Basra, while those for southern Arabia went in dhows. Indian luxury imports to the Gulf, such as textiles, arrived in steamers, but bulk goods like tiles and timber in dhows.57 In Indonesia proa or prau had, and still have, some role. In 1910 the average carrying capacity of a steamer was 3,200 cubic metres, of a native rigged proa 28 cubic metres. Steamers carried 90 per cent of total cargo, yet even so proas were still viable, feeding in to steamer routes.58 So also in East Africa, where dhows went to minor ports that steamers could not or did not visit, such as Lamu, Shihr, Mukalla. The mangrove trade to the Hadhramaut, Kuwait and Oman, a very important one, was for long carried in dhows. Alan Villiers left a vivid account of just such a voyage. Similarly, dhows brought both goods and passengers to large ports like Mombasa, where they were trans-shipped to steamers. Indeed, it could be that steamers created new routes, and markets, and that the overall expansion of trade which we noted earlier was of benefit to traditional craft as well as steamers, or at least that the crumbs left to them meant that they continued, and still continue, to have some role.
On the high seas it was huge barques carrying bulk cargoes which held out for a time, and these were owned by Europeans. The wool trade from Australia to England via the Cape or Cape Horn was done in sail to the end of the nineteenth century, but it collapsed soon after and was replaced by steam. These were not the more famous clipper ships which carried tea from China. Villiers scorned these as 'lightly loaded kite-filled clippers', while of the great