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By Root 774 0

beans boiled pork and soup for dinner after dinner the nap as usual we had a birth on board but it died soon after birth same as usual for tea after tea had a concert in our cabin and the doctor took the chair minnie sang do they miss me at home the people down the other end had a prayer meeting.' So also William Heeley in 1890: 'There is nothing particular to record, only it is getting monotonous with not seeing anything but water for so long – 8 or 9 days. We shall be at Colombo either tomorrow or Wednesday, so that will be a nice break.' And after Colombo, 'Nothing has been seen yet since we left Colombo, not even a passing ship, that is, I have not seen anything, nor heard of anybody who had. It begins to get jading seeing nothing but water, water all around.' And yet again, six days out from Aden, 'We have not sighted a sail or steamer the last 24 hours. Already the Voyage is beginning to get tedious & no wonder considering the little excitement that prevails on board, of course I find the time drags fearfully, not having anything to do. Speed on my bark, land us safely at our destination.' Later again, 'Of course one knows that Sunday is very monotonous on board.' And next day, 'I am pretty well tired of reading already & only now & again do I get a game of chess or cards, yet that will soon be spent up everybody seems to long for the end of the Voyage.'146

There were other hazards also: steam did not make travel completely safe and comfortable. We have pointed to the effects of heat, but even the sturdiest steamer could still be threatened by storms. The Pathan, an iron hulled twin-screw steamer of 1,790 tonnes, 103.7 metres long, hit the full southwest monsoon as it entered the Indian Ocean in July.

As soon as we passed Cape Guardafui, the ship began to roll most fearfully. George immediately turned a ghastly white and sank into an armchair, and several of the girls lay down on mattresses spread along the poop and prepared for the worst. The lower deck was soon cleared as the waves were washing over it. The spray was coming in torrents over the captain's bridge and the funnel was soon perfectly white with salt. The waves looked like moving mountains and this great ship... was tossed like an insignificant toy from side to side.147

When Harding's ship left Colombo he wrote ruefully that

I always pictured the neighbourhood of the Equator as a calm region with the bluest of skies and the hottest of heats. Instead we have been beating along all day under a cloudy sky with occasional torrents of rain – to the accompaniment of a strong wind and the consequential rolling and pitching. Beside all that it has been most horribly damp and everyone has been either sea sick or limp in the extreme. I belong to the latter band.148

Whatever the hazards and discomforts, the arrival in the East, especially if it was the first time for a traveller, was always something special and memorable. Conrad got this well. He was on a small boat.

We drag at the oars with aching arms, and suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night – the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.

So also the people:

And then I saw the men of the East – they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and sombre, living