The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [171]
the seabears were killed while they were warming themselves in the sun on the rocks along the shore and the wide bay. Because only the skins had value for them, they left the skinned bodies lying rotting on the ground in such masses that it was difficult not to stand on these bodies as one went ashore. Each step there revealed a highly revolting sight and everywhere there was a foul stench of rotting flesh [which] poisoned the air.
In 1820 an American ship found two men who had been left behind in a 'cave which was a wretched hovel to be sure, built in the cavity of the rock, with a kind of shrub matted together for a front, and a couple of square holes left in it to let the lights in. The... bed, which was two sealskins, was a pigstye and everything else there in one room. The whole was a picture of human misery.' So efficient was this industry that by about 1810 the seal population had been exterminated, as also the original flora and fauna, which fell victim to fires and the introduction of new species like pigs, which soon went feral, and deer, goats and rabbits. The pigs also plundered seabird nests and ate the eggs and the young birds. In sum, the islands once 'were green, now they are brown, desolate and despoiled.'99
These sealers, and whalers also, travelled long distances from their homes in America and Europe to the hunting grounds, then back to Guangzhou to sell the catch, and then home again, where they hoped to use their profits to buy a farm and give up the sea. Who else travelled over our ocean? The general point is that in previous times people travelled by sea to be sure, but not that many, and most of them came from, and visited, only littoral areas. Now there were many more people travelling. Some of them came from inland, such as bonded labourers, and some came from right outside, that is Europeans bound for the settlement colonies in the southern ocean: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Our travellers include pilgrims, religious exemplars, troops, bonded labourers, westerners travelling within their empires or back home to the metropole, and slaves. We will discuss slaves first.
There was always a considerable internal slave trade within Africa, but we will focus on long-distance trade by sea. This trade had existed for many centuries. The greatest flow was from Africa to the Middle East. Among the early Europeans the Dutch were the main traders, bringing in quite large numbers from Africa and India to work as domestics and on plantations in Indonesia, and from Madagascar for the Cape. The Portuguese were also involved, but to a lesser extent. However, the trade grew exponentially once plantations had been established by Europeans on the islands of the ocean. We lack authoritative estimates of the numbers involved, but certainly some hundreds of thousands were sent to the European islands, and many more to Brazil and Cuba. French planters in the Mascarenes brought in slaves from Madagascar, and then from the East African coast. Later the Seychelles also required slave labour. Mauritius and the Seychelles became British in 1814, but the slave trade continued until the British abolished it in 1834. Even after this there was an extensive illegal trade, especially to the French island of Bourbon. Meanwhile there were two other main streams: from Portuguese Mozambique to Brazil, and from Zanzibar to the Middle East and the northern Swahili coast. Their treatment here seems to have been much less oppressive than on the European plantations,