The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [183]
Voyages had different meanings for different people; much depended on the purpose of the voyage, and the previous life experience of the traveller. In 1822 Fanny Parks ended up on a ship carrying troops, but fortunately they were from a regiment where many of her relatives had served, so she had a fine time flirting with the young officers. Yet she also noted perceptively that 'Perhaps no friendships are stronger than those formed on board ship, where the tempers and dispositions are so much set forth in their true colours.'137 For those travelling out to serve for the first time in India, it was 'a very necessary period of quarantine between two quite different spheres of existence.' The voyage also played a role in socialising new chums, as they were given, or had forced upon them, advice from the old hands. Leonard Woolf wrote poignantly, though fifty years after the event, about his setting out for Ceylon. He called his departure his 'second birth'. He wrote how 'The umbilical cord by which I had been attached to my family, to St Paul's, to Cambridge and Trinity was cut when, leaning over the ship's taffrail, I watched through the dirty, dripping murk and fog of the river my mother and sister waving good-bye and felt the ship begin slowly to move down the Thames to the sea.' He took with him ninety large, beautifully printed volumes of Voltaire, the 1784 edition. After some initial doubts, he found that he could get on quite well with his fellow passengers; indeed 'the world and society of the boat are a microcosm of the macrocosm in which he will be condemned to spend the remainder of his life.' When he got to Colombo he found that 'There was something extraordinarily real, and at the same time unreal in the sights and sounds and smells.' If you stay at home everything has a 'subdued, flat, accepted reality' but if you travel 'one feels as if one were acting in a play or living in a dream.' All this said, Woolf spent only seven years in Ceylon. He then went on leave and stayed with his family in the house they had lived in for thirty years in Putney. He got back together with his old Cambridge friends, fell in love with Virginia Stephen, and reverted to his life before he left, apparently unaffected by his seven years in a very different environment.138
For many passengers the voyage was simply very boring and routine. There is a depressing similarity about the accounts of voyages through the Mediterranean, the Canal, and via the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Basically all accounts show a strong inward gaze, describing the conditions on board, boredom, meals and mealtimes, entertainment, accidents and death. The outward gaze concerns the weather and boats being passed, flying fish (very often mentioned), while the Ocean is merely the medium on which one travels – 'nothing but water' – or rough sea, a hazard one has to cross (as quickly as possible).
Many passengers hoped that the passage through the Canal, a major engineering feat and in an area redolent with history, would be quite fascinating.
What thoughts come crowding to the mind when the Red Sea is mentioned. Sailing down the Canal we crossed the track of Joseph and Mary when they were fleeing into Egypt with Jesus, now sailing thro' the Red Sea we pass over the spot where the Pharoah was overwhelmed and all his host with him. The sailors were at it with their yarns about finding chariot wheels hung on the anchor. One of them upset the thing a little by saying the Rubber tyre was