The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [178]
This is very much a later nineteenth century matter. The opening of the Canal made a huge difference, as now one did not have to trans-ship at Alexandria and travel overland to Suez, there to pick up another ship to travel down the Red Sea. The itinerary of Emma Roberts, travelling from London to India in 1838, shows that even with steam a voyage could be long and arduous. Travelling by small steamers and diligences, it took fourteen days to reach Marseilles from London. She then took a steamer to Leghorn, Malta and Alexandria, and then a small boat to Cairo. The next part of the journey was overland to Suez, which took three nights and two days. The passage on a steamer from Suez to Mocha and then Mumbai took another sixteen and a half days. In total her trip took sixty-one days,
Once the Canal was open the journey became very routine, and very fast. The P&O line was always considered to be the poshest, even if the appealing notion that POSH is an acronym for Port Out Starboard Home, these being the preferred shady sides of the ship, unfortunately has no linguistic validity. They carried the mails, had the gilt edged, official, passenger trade, and never allowed dogs on board. When Leonard Woolf went out to Colombo on the P&O liner Syria in 1904 he had to send his dog on another, less restrictive, line. Mark Twain left an agreeable account of first-class travel in 1896 as he went from Ceylon to Mauritius:
Customs in tropic seas. At 5 in the morning they pipe to wash down the decks, and at once the ladies who are sleeping there turn out and they and their beds go below. Then one after another the men come up from the bath in their pyjamas, and walk the decks an hour or two with bare legs and bare feet. Coffee and fruit are served. The ship cat and her kitten now appear and get about their toilets; next the barber comes and flays us on the breezy deck. Breakfast at 9.30, and the day begins. The people group themselves about the decks in their snowy white linen, and read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap, and so on.... If I had my way we should never get in [to a port] at all.119
The imperial aspect was very strong indeed, even when not on a British ship. Isabel Burton and her husband Richard sailed on an Italian ship, he being Consul at Trieste. Nevertheless, there were plenty of occasions for imperial activity. In the Red Sea in May 1876 they passed a lighthouse, and
They dipped flag to us, as the Captain paid us the compliment of flying the red Union Jack for the Queen's birthday. Lloyd's made us an extra good dinner for this occasion, and I brewed a claret-cup, and we drank Her Majesty's health 'three times three,' with a fervent 'God bless her!' at the end. Then followed the healths of Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress, the Captain and the officers. The old Captain was quite affected by this unusual scene, for we made the old Italian ship ring with British cheers, and he ordered champagne and drank to our Queen and to us, in a very pretty speech; we afterwards sang 'God Save the Queen' on deck, and then the Austrian national hymn.120
Indeed, so British was the whole route that some even found it disappointing. Harding, later to be an important mandarin in London, travelled out to the colonies on the Medina, a magnificent 12,400 ton steamer, in 1913. He was Secretary of the Dominions Royal Commission. There was some exotica to be sure. Port Said was 'a compound of a second rate French watering place... and a fourteenth rate Eastern town. The most attractive parts of it were the children in various stages of costume from half a nightshirt to what one is accustomed to see, and the