The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [187]
We have privileged European travellers, partly as their accounts give vivid impressions of life at sea when the ocean was a British lake, and partly as they have left so many quotable accounts behind them. Yet it will be remembered that between 1834 and 1937 around 30 million Indians left their homes to go overseas, and 24 million returned. The majority of travellers were still indigenous people, travelling as slaves and later as indentured labourers, or for trade, pleasure, or reasons of piety. We will look at the pious travellers first, but always remembering that piety and pelf were intricately connected: most pilgrims chaffered their way to the Holy Land. Similarly, there was a connection between worldly success and religious prestige.
We have written about the hajj earlier in this book (see pages 173–5). The passage to Jiddah was strongly facilitated by the introduction of steam ships, which led to a substantial rise in the number of hajjis from both India and Indonesia. In the later nineteenth century a total of at least 100,000 performed the pilgrimage each year, and some 30,000 of them came by sea. Isabel Burton was in Jiddah in 1876, and as this was a Hajj al Akbar (an especially auspicious hajj, as the time of the standing at Arafat was on a Friday) there was a larger crowd than usual: according to her 138,000. She left an extended account of what she saw. Her ship picked up 800 returning hajjis. They were packed in like sardines, and several died. They were 'Somalis, Hindis, Arabs from Bokhara, Kokand, Kashgar, Turcomans, Persians, Tashband, Russian subjects, Bengalee and etc etc.' and they all suffered greatly from lack of food combined with rough weather as the ship met the northeast monsoon.155 In 1817 Col. Johnson travelled in the Gulf on a small ship.
About thirty men and women were huddled together with their provisions, merchandise and part of the ship's cargo in the great cabin. These were Mahometans from the Carnatic travelling on a pilgrimage of Holy Tombs of Kurballa and Mecca.... The bustle and confusion of this crowded scene were augmented by a multitude of monkeys, paroquets, cats and other domestic animals.
The adventurous Mrs Elwood in the 1820s came down the Red Sea on a dhow. 'She was heavily laden with merchandise, and with Hjadjes, of which there were not fewer than 300 on board, it was deeply immersed in the water and as the deck was too crowded to admit of my walking across it, I was positively compelled to enter my cabin by a ladder suspended from the window.' Other passengers, there were 300 in total, were Nubian women and girls taken prisoner by Mahomet Ali's soldiers, who were being sent for sale in the Jiddah slave market; their price was about two dollars a head. They were naked from the waist up, and much ornamented with glass beads, but 'seemed perfectly happy.' From Yambo her dhow was accompanied by many other ships, also laden with hajjis and grain.156
The rectification efforts of Muslim divines were described in an earlier chapter (see pages 175–7). This effort continued to the present. I have chosen to focus on the role of people from the small south