The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [197]
The end of passenger ships has also occurred on coastal routes. The preferred way to get to Goa from Mumbai used to be a ferry which spent a leisurely day chugging down India's west coast for a picturesque dawn arrival at the estuary of the Mandovi. Gavin Young did this trip in 1979. Nearing Goa he wrote about
Bingo in the second-class dining room. The second officer calls out the numbers to a packed and sweating audience bent over slips of squared and numbered paper. 'Grandmother's age – eight zero . . . Republic Day – twenty-six... Punjab Day – number five . . . a round dozen – number twelve. . . Hockey sticks – seventy-seven.' Sikhs played cards on the perfectly scrubbed deck; Indian families made little picnics. Hippies peeled oranges, slept or studied pornographic pictures in sex magazines. Four miles away the green coastline moved by. On time, Captain Kadir brought the ship into Goa in a blue morning mist, passing through a fleet of trawlers with light roofs. 'We're going right inside,' he said, like a surgeon announcing his next probe. An old fort, a white church, land becoming reddish and lumpy, a line of broken water under a cliff.
He was told that the route was no longer profitable.17 True enough, the steamers stopped, to be replaced by a jet cat, which also failed. It was felt not to be picturesque enough, and one had a bumpy ride usually out of sight of land. Those on the aisle seats had packets of vomit from those sitting alongside them passed across to be collected by stewards. Goa can now be reached only by plane or train.
We can trace the career of what may be a typical humble cargo ship, thanks to some devoted amateur research. The ship in question operated for years off the Western Australian coast. It was of 2,425 tonnes, built in Sunderland, and in 1892 started life named the SS Darius. After years in the Indian horse trade from Australia, it was bought by the Western Australian government in 1912 and given an Aboriginal name, the Kwinana. From this time it shunted back and forth up and down the coast, taking general cargo to northern ports, and bringing back live cattle from the Kimberley region. Sometimes it went as far as New Zealand, South Africa and China, with cargoes of hardwood and sandalwood. In the eight years to December 1920 it had made an impressive total of ninety-six voyages from Fremantle. Then it caught fire, was declared of no further use, and was subsequently used for explosives training. Such a humble and undramatic career must typify the bulk of trade and shipping around the shores of the ocean.18
Steam, as we have commented already, was not and still is not totally dominant. Sailing ships still have some role. In 1979 Gavin Young sailed from Colombo to Tuticorin on a schooner, a 'great heavy-timbered three-master' of 220 tons. There was no engine, and indeed they were becalmed for a time.19 Arriving in Tuticorin Young found a fleet of about forty-seven seagoing thonis, some up to 500 tons, and no engines. They took salt and fertilisers to the west coast, coming back in ballast. From April to August they took imported wheat, fertilisers and rice up the east coast to Chennai and Kolkata, and they also went to Colombo. The high cost of diesel meant they were still viable. So also in Saurashtra, where there has developed a booming business making 400 tonne wooden ocean-going vessels.20
The main survivors are the famous dhows, whose partial demise has attracted endless attention from romantic westerners. Alan Villiers in 1939 wrote a somewhat premature requiem:
In the great days of the Arab navigators, Arab dhows covered the eastern seas; now it was half a century since one had rounded the southern tip of Ceylon. Ancient methods, the old instruments,