The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [195]
A recent example was a fleet of eleven prahus found off Ashmore Reef in north-western Australia in 1968. They were collecting trepang, clams, various other fish, and trochus shells. Based in Madura, they had sailed around east Java peddling bits and pieces. After leaving Ashmore Reef, hopefully with a full cargo of dried fish, they intended to go to Makassar via Timor, and sell the whole cargo in exchange for coconuts and copra to sell in Surabays, after which they hoped to get back home to Madura. The whole voyage usually would take five lunar months. This sort of pattern goes back some centuries at least, certainly long before white colonisation in Australia.10
Beneath the imposing imperial edifice there were also westerners who travelled and did the best they could. Somerset Maugham travelled widely in the 1920s, and always had something acute, or mordant, or supercilious, to say about his fellow passengers. On a trip from Bangkok he 'soon discovered that I was thrown amid the oddest collection of persons I had ever encountered. There were two French traders and a Belgian colonel, an Italian tenor, the American proprietor of a circus with his wife, and a retired French official with his.' The circus man was another pedlar. He had spent twenty years travelling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama – Aden, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Rangoon, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Saigon, Hue, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shanghai. Soon after, on his way from Haiphong, he met another American, this one a Jew (some gratuitous anti-Semitic remarks follow) who travelled in hosiery and had gone from Jakarta to Yokohama for twenty years.11
We have looked at a variety of people travelling on, or living near, the ocean; we have spent a lot of time describing life aboard the great liners. However, there was and still is another layer below the commanding heights of the P&O, and we can now turn to this level. We are dealing with tramp steamers, and local ferry boats. There is a marked ebb and flow of the ownership of these lower level craft. To World War II the larger ones, the tramp steamers let us say, were nearly all owned by people from outside the ocean, but after independence this changed. Yet even today much of the traffic in the ocean is generated by foreign registered ships. Taking account of the merchant fleets of all the countries around the ocean (and thus excluding China and Japan) there has been some renaissance since 1945. In 1939 these countries had about 185,000 GRT out of a world total of 58,000. By 1957 it was 879,000 out of 110,000, by 1971 it was 5,324 out of 247,000, and by 1982 it was 27,000 out of 424,000.12 The conclusion is presumably that from a lamentable base of total subordination, the region has made some progress, but much remains to be done.
Frank Broeze was the great authority on Indian shipping in the modern period. He shows how India between the two world wars was able to make some progress, as the British slowly relaxed some of their control and allowed at least a little competition. The Scindia line was founded in Mumbai in 1919, and given some access to coastal trade. Equally important, the company began to train, in India, its own engineers, rather than relying on British expertise. Yet even so the important Government of India Act of 1935 specifically forbade any discrimination by India against British shipping. Even by 1939 there still had been no agreement to allow Scindia to have half of India's coastal trade, let alone any to Europe or Japan. At the outbreak of World War II India had 132,000 GRT of shipping, less than 0.2 per cent of the world's total, and 120,000 of this was owned by Scindia. At this time traditional craft probably totalled roughly the same tonnage.13 Some progress has been made since then. By 1983 India had shipping of 6.24 million GRT; on the other hand the country was, compared with Japan or Singapore, very late to enter the container age.
We can survey Indian Ocean shipping in the twentieth century by going down in size, starting then with substantial passenger and