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The passengers used to dine not later than 2 P.M. And such was the authority of the captain that when he retired from the table after either dinner or supper, the passengers and officers must also retire. The captain was to pay due attention to the comfortable accommodation and liberal treatment of the passengers, “at the same time setting them an example of sobriety and decorum, as he values the pleasure of the Court.” Any improper conduct of the ship’s officers towards the passengers or to each other was to be reported quietly to the captain, and the decision left with the latter. But if anyone thought himself aggrieved thereby, he could appeal to the Governor and Council of the first of the Company’s settlements at which the ship should arrive, or, if homeward bound, to the Court of Directors.

And the following brief, common-sense paragraph summed up the whole situation:—

“The diversity of characters and dispositions which must meet on ship-board makes some restraint upon all necessary; and any one offending against good manners, or known usages and customs, will, on representation to the Court, be severely noticed.”

We can well believe that those military officers or civil servants of the Company who came on board homeward bound, after spending years in India without benefit to their livers and tempers, if to their pecuniary advantage, and were as ill-accustomed to the conditions of ship life as they were bereft of an adaptable spirit, needed all the tact and patience of the commander and ship’s officers to prevent matters being even more uncomfortable than they were. Those who had spent their lives wielding authority in India, and both honestly and otherwise making fortunes, were not the kind of mortals most easy to live with in the confined area of a ship not much over 1200 tons. However, every passenger who came on board was given a printed copy of the regulations, which had been formed for the good of all, and they were told very pertinently to observe them strictly, and the captains had to see that they did as they were told.

Certainly up to the second decade of the nineteenth century, the ships themselves also were in great need of supervision, as to their construction, though there were not many capable critics then in existence. All the Company’s ships were of course built of wood, but iron was already being extensively used for the knees. The idea was excellent, but in practice inferior material was actually employed and not the best British iron. And the same defect was noticeable with regard to anchors and mooring chains. Of those various losses which occurred to the East Indiaman ships about the year 1809, it was thought by some that the cause was traceable to these weak iron knees which had been put into the vessels. A certain Mr J. Braithwaite wrote a letter to the East India Company in December of 1809, in which he stated that he had been employed to recover the property of the Abergavenny, which had been lost off Weymouth; and he found, on breaking up the wreck, that many of the iron knees were broken, owing to having been made of such poor, inferior material. This, he noticed, snapped quite easily, and he was convinced that ships fitted with such knees would, on encountering gales of wind, be lost owing to the knees giving way. The East Indiaman Asia was thought to have perished owing to that reason.

But there was also another reason why the ships of this period were unsatisfactory. They were built not under cover but outside, exposed to all the weather. But, in addition, there was a bad practice at that time which unquestionably caused a great deal of serious injury to the ship. When the ship was approaching completion, and before the sheathing had been put on, the sides and floor were deluged with water, the intention being to see if there were any shake in the plank, or butt or trenail holes, or if any of the seams had been left uncaulked. If the water poured through anywhere this would indicate that there was need for caulking before the ship was set afloat.

This was all very well in theory, but in practice it was very bad indeed, for the water thus admitted settled down into the innermost recesses, and the result was that the cargoes were always more or less affected injuriously by the damp. Similarly, it injured the ship herself, and dry-rot eventually shortened the vessel’s life. Damp, badly ventilated, these old East Indiamen were frequently the source of much anxiety to their managing owners or “ships’ husbands,” as they were usually called. Then there was another defect. The influence of the Middle Ages was not yet departed from shipbuilding: consequently trenails were still used. This meant that the ship was riddled with holes for the insertion of these wooden pegs. Speaking of an East Indiaman of this time, a contemporary says that thus “she appears like a cullender,” and “there is hardly a space of six inches in small ships that is not bored through” by a trenail of one and a half inches in diameter, being only six inches apart from the next trenail. Thus, of course, the timbers were weakened, and at a later date when the ship needed to be re-bored with holes for more trenails on the renewal of decayed planking, there were so many holes in the timbers that the ship was very considerably weakened thereby.

The method of the French in building ships had formerly been to use iron fastenings, but the plank grew nail sick, and the iron having corroded became very weak. Indian-built ships, however, were constructed in such a way that there were no numerous series of holes bored, and thus the hulls remained strong and stout. The planking was secured to the timbers by spikes and bolts of iron, yet—owing to the oleaginous sap of the teak from which they were built—the iron did not corrode as it did in the case of oak-built ships. So about the year 1810 the introduction of metal nails and bolts was advocated in connection with the building of ships.