The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [164]
The indirect advantages to the British were less easy to quantify, but were massive. The canal facilitated trade, made possible faster communications with the heart of the empire, India, and rapid movement of troops from the metropole to the colonies. The reciprocal nature of the enterprise is perhaps best seen in the way Indian troops were used in 1882 to help the British take-over of Egypt, and in 1885 in the Sudan. Other consequences were legion. The canal assisted in the demise of sail between Europe and the Indian Ocean, and the Cape route became less profitable. Steam and canal were linked, while sailing ships could not use this narrow water way. Cape Town became isolated and less important in the imperial system, while east and southeast Africa were now drawn more closely in. The Red Sea route, which had been eclipsed by the Cape route since the sixteenth century, revived: steam ships calling at Jiddah rose from 38 in 1864 to 205 in 1875.74 Islands in the Indian Ocean – Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius – once used as way stations for shipping using the Cape route, were now less important.
There was a symbiotic connection between the three elements we have delineated. Steam ships became bigger and bigger, and this was made possible by, and also required, the progressive deepening and widening of the canal. Similarly, bigger ships needed better ports, or on the other hand better ports made possible bigger ships. An engineer in 1910 vividly described this as a race:
A race between engineers: such might describe the condition of affairs in the maritime world of today in regard to two of the most important branches of civil engineering. On the one hand, we have the ship designers turning out larger and larger vessels; on the other is the harbour engineer, striving vainly to provide a sufficient depth of water in which to float these large steamships. It is a tremendous struggle. The former has set the pace, and the latter finds it hot, so much so that he is hard put to it to keep on his rival's heels.75
We have had occasion to notice how difficult were many of the ports around the ocean before the nineteenth century. The Coromandel coast was notoriously dangerous; Kolkata and Jakarta, both vital centres, were located on treacherous estuaries. An American visitor described Jakarta in the 1830s:
The mode of landing in Batavia is not common. The water in the roads is so shallow that ships lie about three miles from the shore. . . . There are two booms, formed of wooden piles, extended seaward, for a mile, in a straight line from the shore, having a canal between them; at the entrance of which, the sea breaks over a sand bar, with such violence at times during the north-west monsoon that boats are frequently upset and the passengers are subjected to a narrow risk of becoming food for sharks and alligators, even if they escape drowning.76
To get ashore in Chennai was, as we have noted already, a real obstacle course. In June 1765 Mrs Kindersley wrote despondently that 'I am detained here by the tremendous surf, which for these two days has been mountains high: and it is extraordinary, that on this coast, even with very little wind, the surf is often so high that no boat dares venture through it; indeed it is always high enough to be frightful.'77
Kolkata, being far up the delta of the Hughli, had no surf, but it had other perils. Mrs Kindersley, once she was