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By Root 792 0

century ships in the Great Southern Ocean, scooting along before the westerlies, could achieve over 500 km a day.65 Tim Severin's replica dhow usually made about 140 km a day. The huge barques carrying bulk cargoes from Australia to Europe went very fast in the Great Southern Ocean and elsewhere, partly to save costs and partly as they were racing each other to get to Europe first. One of them in the southern Indian Ocean covered, very dangerously, 126 miles (225 km) in eight hours, the equivalent then of 675 km in a day.66 Villiers wrote that one could expect to do about 470 km a day between the Cape and Australia, about the same speed as the great VOC ships in the seventeenth century. Modern specialist yachts do much better. In late 2001 one of the boats in the Volvo Round the World race in the southern ocean set a record by covering 640 nautical miles (1150 km) in one day of very heavy sailing. This is an average of 26.6 knots. The fastest sailing vessel on record was a trifoiler which in 1993 reached 46.5 knots over a 5,000 metre course.

These however are exceptional speeds. Further north, in the monsoon zone, times were slower, but still much faster than those claimed by Braudel for the Mediterranean. Generally speaking, with a good wind a ship could make 150 km a day. Yet without a favourable wind things could be very slow. In 1822 Fanny Parks's ship, near the equator, made only 17 nautical miles, 31 km, in a whole day.67 Passages on inland waterways could be slower still. Emily Eden's 'flat', that is a large barge towed by a steamer, averaged only 36 km a day and was constantly bumping on the banks and going aground.

As a rule of thumb, late nineteenth century cargo steamers averaged 10 or 11 knots, the mail steamers up to 18, with 15 knots, that is 15 nautical miles an hour, resulting in a distance over a day of 650 km.68 Particular circumstances could alter this drastically. Isabel Burton travelled on an Austrian Lloyd ship which went only 8 knots, the reason being, so she darkly noted, that 'the captains have a premium on coal'. Ships in the Suez Canal also had to go slower. Burton passed through in 1876, when it was just opened. Ships could travel only in daylight, and the top speed was less then 6 knots.69 Gavin Young had an interesting voyage on a local craft from Colombo to the Maldives in 1979. The launch he was on made only 6 knots, and was wildly overloaded with a cargo of lavatory seats and bowls, chairs and tables. The crew, as is still commonly done on small craft in the Indian Ocean, had a sail and used it when the wind was favourable.70

The triumph of steam, if this be not too grand a term, was strongly facilitated by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As Isabel Burton put it, 'it is the last link riveted in the great belt of trade, and the road for our ships is completely defensible.'71 In combination with steam the results were dramatic and rapid. Both the numbers of ships which transited, and their sizes, grew exponentially. The average size of ships transiting was 1,510 tons in 1880, but 5,600 tons in 1938. Total transits were 486 ships in 1870, in 1880 it was 2,026, in 1890 it was nearly 3,389, in 1900 it was nearly 3,441, in 1910 it was 4,533, in 1920 it was 4,009, and in 1930 it was 5,761. A year after the opening shipping through the Canal was 436,000 tons, in 1875 it was 2 million, in 1895 it was 8.4 million, and in 1913 it was 20 million. The tyranny of distance was greatly reduced. London to Basra via the Cape was 11,440 nautical miles, via Port Said 6,700. To Mumbai was respectively 10,780, and 6,370, to Kolkata 11,810 and 8,020, and to Fremantle 10,960 and 9,640. Put in other terms, the savings in terms of distances to be travelled were: London to Mumbai 42 per cent, to Kolkata 32.6 per cent, Fremantle 14.3 per cent, Kuwait 42.5 per cent, Singapore 27.8 per cent.72

The main user was always Britain, and as Burton noted it was a vital link in the imperial system. The British occupied Egypt in 1882 in order to ensure British control of the canal. To the late 1880s nearly 80 per