The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [182]
A week later 'the time have gone so fast I fell like asking for my money.' At stops along the way she got out and about with no hint of racism or condecension: 'Think what a turist miss not to do such things.'
On a French ship she enthused 'Its good to be with the French again and get a change of Food. most of the Passangers are French. an English Lady an her young Lady Daughter sit by me at table they have lived down here 5 years but know nothing about India.' Then after Colombo
Yesterday I had to use my coat it being our first rough sea and while most of them was nurseing their sea sickness I to keep it off scrub my Cabin floor washed the mirrows port hole and the seat that run across the wall. The Boy had let it go for two days. I found his brush and soap and felt fine altho the boat was jumping up and down at each end. I am the first woman on deck each morning I enjoy seeing the Sun come up out of the Sea I was pleased it was rough yesterday it was the first time we had roost chicken plain lettuce salad and icecream.
Later, in the Red Sea, 'It is ever so home like on this Steamer everybody do just as they wish. the French, Germans and Itilians are so much nicer to travel with than the English and yet the English are lovely in their country.'133
Juanita Harrison seems to have brought her sunny, optimistic and tolerant nature with her, and preserved it through a remarkable nine years of travel around the ocean. For others however the voyage was a liminal time. Victor Turner brought this term forward in his analysis of people travelling on pilgrimage, but it has subsequently been used to apply to all types of travel. His key notion was that in the liminal stage of a journey, that is on the actual journey as compared with setting out or arrival, there develops a strong feeling of communitas amongst the travellers. This occurs 'when the subject is in spatial separation from the familiar and habitual... [it stresses] generic rather than particularistic relationships... it is any condition outside or on the peripheries of everyday life, and a time in which the rules recognized as legitimate by the political and intellectual elites at a given time' are less operable.134
This notion has some utility, but must be used with considerable hesitancy. For example, the governor's daughter used the steward for sex, but clearly felt no sense of communitas with him. More generally, we noted the rigid divisions aboard most ships, so that if anything 'the rules recognized as legitimate' were reinforced. On the ships carrying settlers to the new colonies, officers read out detailed instructions before the ship sailed, and there was rigorous checking for stowaways and disease. E.M. Forster, bound for India in 1912, took a pith helmet, a deck chair, plenty of visiting cards, a cummerbund for night train travel, chlorodyne, quinine, and avoided celluloid underclothing for his time in India. Off the coast of Arabia he recorded that the other first-class passengers had all gone over to dressing, but he was still in morning dress as he could not find his evening tie. All this hardly sounds very liminal, and nor were his relations with his fellow passengers any different from what they would have been on land. 'They think us very queer on board, but are not uncivil & term us 'the professors.' The women are pretty rotten, & vile on the native question; their husbands better.' Equally predictable and routine, Forster became very friendly with a young officer who, according to the editor of the letters, was 'a dedicated homosexual.'135
How then were people different when they travelled by sea? For some it was a long rest, a welcome break from routine, as Mark Twain noted with great approval:
there is no mail to read and answer; no newspapers to excite you; no telegrams to fret you or fright you – the world is far, far away; it has ceased to exist for you – seemed a fading dream, along in the first days; has dissolved to an unreality now; it is gone from your mind