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four-masted barques sailing via Cape Horn he wrote, 'Among man's working creations for the carriage of his goods, they alone were supremely beautiful.'59 Eric Newby left a vivid account of the end of this era in 1938–39. He was in a four-masted barque owned by Gustav Erikson of Finland, who during the depression bought these great ships cheap, perhaps only about £4,000 each, and for a time could make a profit from them thanks in part to very small crews, and these abysmally treated. On Newby's ship, the Moshulu, the main mast was 200 feet high, and it was 5,300 tons dead weight. It is a sad sign of the transition that when the ship reached the Spencer Gulf to take on a cargo of wheat for Europe, they found that steamers had already taken all the grain available for export.60

The end of sail was lamented by men like Newby and Villiers, and earlier by Joseph Conrad. He thought that steamers constituted 'a disdainful ignoring of the sea'.61 In 1922 Villiers served on a steamer. He hated it. Apart from the fact that this was an Australian ship and so heavily unionised, which he did not appreciate, he thought the ship looked 'a clumsy lump'. The work was boring and repetitive, so that being a seaman on it was 'merely another form of labouring'.62

Villiers was quite right. The modern age had altered profoundly the role of men working on ships. This went back before the age of steam. In the late eighteenth century on British ships the regime became more organised and bureaucratic. This applied particularly to the 'native' crew, known as lascars. The Asiatic Articles passed by the British Parliament aimed to provide cheap labour on British ships but ensure that the lascars could not settle in England. The result was that lascar wages ended up as low as one-fifth of those of English seamen. They were recruited for a set number of years, rather than for the duration of a voyage. The results for the owners were excellent. The lascars could not desert. They were considered to be intrinsically preferable, as they did not drink, and it seemed obvious that, being orientals, they were much better at working in the incredibly hot engine rooms of the steamers.63 Mark Twain left a somewhat idealised depiction of them. He left Sydney on the P&O ship Oceana in December 1895 bound for Sri Lanka.

A lascar crew mans this ship – the first I have seen. White cotton petticoat and pants; barefoot; red shawl for belt; straw cap, brimless, on head, with red scarf wound around it; complexion a rich deep brown; short straight black hair; whiskers fine and silky; lustrous and intensely black. Mild, good faces; willing and obedient people; capable too; but are said to go into hopeless panics when there is danger. They are from Bombay and the coast thereabouts.64 On this and other ships there was a strict colour line determining who worked where.

Steam meant that all work on board ship, apart from engineers and deck officers, was essentially deskilled. Previously there had been craft-type relations on board, with a master, a servant, an apprentice and so on, and sometimes they were paid in kind, or by a concession allowing them to load some cargo on their own account. Now men were paid wages and subject to strict discipline. This was no longer a community with collegial labour relations; now they were hierarchical. There no longer was the freedom, and the mystique, of sailors who climbed the main mast in a storm off the Cape. So also with the rest of the maritime work force. We noted the unskilled Egyptians loading coal in Port Said, and this sort of backbreaking dirty and dangerous work was replicated all around the ocean. Men loaded coal, chipped rust off decks, shovelled coal in the bowels of the ship, and ferried cargo on and off ships manually.

This is a convenient place to present some random data on speeds at sea, before going on to the other two technological matters, the Suez Canal and ports. It will be remembered from the previous chapter than a good speed for a sailing ship was up to 200 km a day (see pages 186–7). In the nineteenth