The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (100 page)

The canal was first and foremost a steamship thoroughfare and it might have failed were it not for the
development of the high-pressure compound marine engine by the
Liverpool shipowner and engineer
Alfred Holt, founder of the Ocean Steam Ship Company, better known as the
Blue Funnel Line. Holt’s shipping career began when he inaugurated steam service from Liverpool to the West Indies, and to
Brazil and the river Plate, and a monthly service between
Jamaica and New York. In 1863, he and his brother decided that there was too much competition in the Atlantic trades and launched a steamer service to China. Holt claimed that the switch was prompted by a colleague’s remark that
“ ‘Steamers may occupy the Mediterranean, may tentatively go to Brazil and the River Plate, but China is at least safe for sailing vessels.’ I suppose the fiend made me say, ‘Is it?’ ” In the 1850s,
John Elder had developed a high-pressure, compound engine that
reduced coal consumption by more than half, and in 1866 Holt fitted three Blue Funnel ships with compound engines for service to the Orient. Thanks to their dramatically greater efficiency, these could steam eighty-five hundred miles nonstop before taking on coal at Mauritius and continuing onward to
Penang,
Singapore, and China.
^e
The opening of the
Suez Canal made uninterrupted passages of eight thousand miles unnecessary, but
without the efficiencies realized by the compound engine it is thought that no steamship could have afforded to reach India, much less China, even via Suez.

The gains realized by Elder’s compound engine were eclipsed in the 1880s by the invention of the triple-expansion engine, which uses steam at high, intermediate, and low pressure, and is about a third more efficient than a compound engine. More efficient still was the steam turbine, perfected for use in ships by
Charles A. Parsons, who built a six-horsepower steam turbine in 1884 and quickly realized that it would be well suited to driving ships. One problem to overcome was the phenomenon of cavitation, the result of a vacuum forming around a propeller screw turning at high speed. When Parsons finally hit on the correct configuration of screws and shafts, in trials his 31.5-meter
Turbinia
attained speeds of thirty-four knots.

Parsons labored in relative obscurity until the international naval review
held to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in June 1897.
Turbinia
romped through the anchored fleet with breathtaking agility and easily outran her pursuers in a dramatic demonstration of the new technology. Shortly thereafter he founded the
Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company, the prospectus of which clearly enunciated the benefits of his engine: “
Increased speed, increased carrying power of vessel, increased economy in steam consumption, reduced initial cost, reduced weight of machinery, reduced cost of attendance on machinery, diminished cost of upkeep of machinery, largely reduced vibration, and reduced size and weight of screw propeller and shafting.” The
Admiralty ordered turbine engines for a torpedo-boat destroyer in 1899 and a light cruiser in 1903, but the technology received its greatest boost in 1905 when First Lord of the Admiralty John A. “Jackie” Fisher decided to install them in
HMS
Dreadnought
. Commercial interests were somewhat slower to embrace the new technology, but in the same year Cunard chose turbines for the
Mauretania
and
Lusitania,
whose seventy-thousand-horsepower engines were three times more powerful than those of the
Dreadnought
.

Just as the compound engine helped ensure the success of the Suez Canal, the submarine
telegraph contributed significantly to the expansion of merchant shipping in the age of the steamship. The overland telegraph had achieved commercial practicality by the end of the 1830s, and within twenty years insulated
submarine cables had been laid across the
Irish Sea and the
English Channel. In 1866, the
Great Eastern
ran a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland. The third of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s innovative ships, the iron-
hulled
Great Eastern
measured more than 211 meters long and nearly nineteen thousand gross tons, and no vessel of greater length or tonnage would be built for forty years. Propelled by paddle wheels and a single screw, with five funnels and six masts, the
Great Eastern
never entered the Australia trade for which she was originally intended. Proving too big for economical transatlantic service, the ship went on to lay five transatlantic cables, as well as one between Suez,
Aden (which Britain occupied as a coaling station in 1839), and
Bombay. Just as telegraph lines on land tended to follow railway lines, submarine cables followed shipping lines, and by the 1870s Bombay was connected to Australia and there were direct links from continental Europe to the United States and Brazil. Transpacific lines were not laid until the early twentieth century, from the United States to the
Philippines via
Hawaii and from Canada to
New Zealand and Australia.

The telegraph contributed to the growth of British ports, but the real winners were the burgeoning industries of continental Europe, whose buyers, no longer reliant on ships to convey their wishes, could now order raw materials directly from their overseas suppliers. British ships captured an increasingly
large share of the trade even to continental ports, and in 1870 the
British merchant marine comprised 43 percent of the world’s total tonnage (as indicated in ship registers); thirty years later this figure was 51 percent. Overall, the annual
value of international trade grew an estimated 30 percent in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, to about £400 million. By 1870, it was worth £2 billion, and by the eve of World War I it had reached £6 billion—a twentyfold increase in just over a century. Part of this growth was related directly to the overseas migration of millions of Europeans, among others, and the increasingly strong ties between the resulting expatriate communities and their homelands.

The greatest episode in human
migration took place between 1815 and 1930, when 56 million Europeans emigrated overseas. The countries with the highest emigration were Great Britain (11.4 million),
Italy (9.9 million), Ireland (7.3 million),
Austria-Hungary (5 million), Germany (4.8 million), and Spain (4.4 million). English-speaking countries received the lion’s share—32.6 million went to the United States, 5 million to
Canada, and 3.4 million to Australia. Less well known is the story of
immigration to South America. Brazil took in 4.4 million Europeans and 6.5 million sailed for
Argentina, where it was said that “
Mexicans descend from the Aztecs,
Peruvians from the
Incas, and Argentines from the ships.”
Cuba’s population also exploded in the nineteenth century, leaping from 150,000 in 1763 to 1.3 million in 1860. The main sources of this growth were slaves, Chinese laborers, loyalists fleeing independence movements elsewhere in the Spanish Americas, and Spaniards. In addition to Europeans, who were by and large voluntary emigrants, about a million East Indian
coolies were shipped to the Caribbean,
South Africa,
Fiji, and elsewhere in the
British Empire; a quarter million Chinese reached Cuba and Peru; and the
Japanese government helped arrange the transportation of about
165,000 laborers to Brazil, which was home to the second largest population of overseas Japanese after Manchuria.

Despite minor improvements, such as limiting the number of people that could be carried per registered ton, shipboard conditions for most passengers on most routes worsened through the first half of the nineteenth century, and reached their nadir during the mass exodus from Ireland during the
Great Hunger. In the 1840s, about
1.3 million Irish emigrated to the United States, most in what were grimly dubbed “coffin ships.” In 1846 alone,
more than 20 percent of all passengers died before reaching North America. A New York
doctor who visited the sailing ship
Ceylon
the next year testified to a Senate committee on the conditions he found:

The rate of illness aboard British ships was more than three times that on American or German ones. Following American precedent, British legislation of 1849 set minimum
space requirements at 14 to 30 square feet (1.3 to 2.8 square meters) per passenger depending on the height of the deck, those on the orlop (lowest) deck being entitled to more space. Passenger berths could be no smaller than six feet by eighteen inches, and there could be no more than two tiers of bunks per deck. The practice of requiring passengers to supply their food for a six-week voyage began to change in 1830 when the city of
Bremen legislated that ships provide passengers with cooked food. The British law of 1849 required that passengers be provided with three quarts of water daily as well as a weekly allowance of “
2½ [pounds] of bread or biscuit (not inferior to navy biscuit), 1 lb. wheaten flour, 5 lbs. oatmeal, 2 lbs. rice, 2 ozs. tea, ½ lb. sugar, ½ lb. molasses.” By 1872 death rates fell to less than twelve per thousand aboard sailing ships, and to only one in a thousand on steamers, and these
figures were halved again in the next five years. At this point, when virtually all transatlantic passengers traveled via steamship, all ship fares included food, although many passengers were still required to provide their own
utensils and bedding.

Keeping order among passengers was a major problem aboard immigrant ships. Testifying before a legislative inquiry in New South Wales about whether the failure to segregate passengers by sex was “
very injurious to the moral condition of the emigrants,” the second mate of a German ship reported: “There were about forty girls on board, some of them not more than from ten to twelve years old, and I am sure, and can lay an oath upon it, that I know for certain that every one left the ship as a prostitute.… All the sailors, every one, had their girls in the forecastle.” The most common approach to prevent such extremes of perversion was to separate passengers according to familial status—families in one part of the ship, single people in another—and by sex. Men and women aboard British ships on the three-month passage to
Australia were segregated as early as 1834, but no similar restriction applied on the North Atlantic until 1852.

Such reforms as were undertaken tended to benefit European emigrants, but others were less fortunate. When the
slave trade was abolished new opportunities for exploited labor opened in the
coolie trade, the shipment of unskilled Indian and Chinese laborers, which lasted until after World War I. Britain was initially the leading carrier of
coolies, but was superseded by
France and Spain, while the United States was fourth. Technically indentured servants, coolies were slaves in all but name, kidnapped or duped into leaving China, and, like the indentured English before them, often worked to death by their masters. (Fifty percent of the coolies in
Cuba did not survive their term of indenture.) Conditions endured by coolies were even worse than those encountered by impoverished European immigrants. The mortality rate was about 12 percent, but individual ships could lose 40 to 50 percent, and the trade was repeatedly compared with that in slaves, most eloquently by
Frederick Douglass, a former slave himself, who described it as

Mutinies aboard coolie ships were not uncommon, especially if the coolies believed they were bound for the guano-covered
Chincha Islands off
Peru. Battened belowdecks, mutineers often resorted to setting fires and, when allowed on deck, attacking the crew. In the case of the
Dolores Ugarte,
it was reported that after an ineffectual attempt to douse a mutineers’ fire the captain abandoned ship. One hatch was opened but no more than sixty people survived.

Such callous behavior aligned perfectly with Alexander Falconbridge’s observation that “a delight in giving torture to a fellow creature is the natural tendency” of the slave trade. This also helps explain the indifference and depravity evident in contemporary testimony about the passenger trades of the nineteenth century. The contempt shown by crews for the people in their charge, whether aboard the
Arctic
or the
Ceylon,
can be attributed to the fact that no one cared very much for sailors. In 1854, an American newspaper estimated that in the course of eighteen months, losses occurred at the rate
of “
one vessel lost every eleven hours; one stranded every forty-four hours; one abandoned every seventy-five hours, and one sailing and never afterwards heard from, every ten days.” Between 1830 and 1900, 20 percent of British mariners perished at sea, and under a law passed in 1870, sailors who signed on for a voyage and then sought to break their contract for fear the ship was unseaworthy
could be jailed for three months, as more than sixteen hundred were in the next two years. Even after the peak of the desperate, famine-fueled migration to North America, an estimated one in six sailing ships in the passenger trades sank en route, and in 1873–74 more than four hundred ships and five hundred lives were lost just on the coast of the United Kingdom.