The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [166]
Moving south, the rise of Fremantle provides a good illustration of how harbour works could make a port, and undo a competitor. Fremantle was the port of Perth, the capital of the new, in 1829, colony of western Australia. However, the port had virtually no natural harbour, and was blocked by a bar, so the mail steamers went on around to Albany from their beginning in 1852 and for 30 years thereafter. The powerful merchants and politicians of Perth found this unsatisfactory. Fremantle's first jetty, built in 1873, was 420 metres long, and ten years later this was extended to 1,150 metres. By the end of the century a fine man-made inner harbour was ready, and Albany was immediately left to sink into insignificance.
Turning Chennai into a viable port was one of the great achievements of British colonial engineering. But it took a very long time! Plans to build an artificial harbour were approved in 1872, and work began five years later in the form of two huge breakwaters. Before they were finished they were damaged by a cyclone, and this part of the project was only completed in 1895. Even then there were problems, one being that the entrance silted up at the rate of one foot a year. Worse, it soon turned out that the breakwaters had been badly designed: they had to be totally remodelled between 1906 and 1912. Then another cyclone struck in 1916, which washed away the end of the sheltering arm, the lighthouse, and 8,000 tons of rock. The engineering part of turning Chennai into a decent port was completed only in 1925.
A good port needs adequate facilities for clearing cargoes and passengers on shore, and again it took a long time to arrange this in Chennai. Around the end of the century an engineer's report complained that
Between high-water mark and the streets of the town of Madras there were to be found a few confused and unregulated railway sidings and two or three exiguous sheds. The beach was to be seen at all times littered with timber, coal, railway materials, general cargo, machinery, liquors, etc., all in dire confusion. Every packet of dutiable goods landed along the beach, unless too big to be handled, was obliged to be carried on men's heads to the Government Customs House across the street, while goods arriving over the old screwpile pier had to be pushed to the same Customs House on lorries. The entire dutiable trade of Madras had to pass in, and the empty lorries pass out, through one 10-foot Custom House gateway. The result was that it was no uncommon thing for a consignee not to get his packages under several weeks or even months. Machinery and railway packages used to be piled up in stacks, sometimes three or four deep, on the beach, and it was constantly happening that, before the cargo of one vessel could be delivered to waiting consignees, that of another had perforce, for want of sidings, to be dumped on top of it. In fact, the arrangements were about as bad as they could be.83
So on land also a complete remodelling had to be done, and this was completed between 1906 and 1912.
Colombo provides an example quite analogous to Fremantle. At first the steamers bound for Australia and Singapore called at Galle, which had a better natural harbour. Colombo handled Sri Lanka's export and import trade, in sailing ships. However, Galle soon was unable to service larger steamers, and the government decided that Colombo was to be turned into the major port in Sri Lanka. There were obvious reasons to do this: it was the capital, and it had much better access to the plantations which developed in the interior in the second half of the nineteenth century. More generally, it actually was much better located than was its rival, Mumbai, to service ships going from the Red Sea to southeast Asia, the Bay of Bengal, or Australia. By the 1880s Colombo had been provided with a basin of 203 hectares of sheltered water up to ten metres deep, which could take twenty-five of the largest steamers at the same time.