This vessel drew 17 feet 6 inches forward and 17 feet 4 inches aft when she left Gravesend, and after bringing up in nine fathoms off Margate rode to forty-eight fathoms of cable until she received the Company’s dispatches which she was taking out to the East. As she proceeded down Channel she was handicapped by light easterly breezes and calms, so that although she passed Beachy Head on 28th July, it was not till 2 P.M. of the following day that she was off Brighton, where she dropped her pilot. Six hours later she had passed the Owers Lightship (off Selsey Bill), and so after leaving the Wight made her way past Portland Bill and out into the Bay of Biscay. We need not follow her throughout her passage, but on Sunday, 6th October 1833, she was caught in very bad weather, as the following extracts show:—
“3 A.M. Hard squalls attended with most tremendous gales. In fore and mizen topsails. Reef’d fore sail and close reefed main topsail.
“5 A.M. Heavy sea running, ship labouring much. Hove to under close reefed ... topsail, reefed foresail ... staysail and fore-topmast staysail. Housed fore and mizzen topgallantmasts.
“Noon. Hard gales and a tremendous sea running. Ship labouring much.”
Two days later there is this entry:
“During the late severe gale I find from the heavy labouring of the ship many seams in the upper and lower decks much opened and the caulking worked out, and from the great quantity of water ship’d over all and the ship requiring constant pumping during the above period, I apprehend considerable damage is done to the cargo.”
However, she got safely across the ocean to China, and brought up on 28th January 1834 at her port with small bower anchor in seven fathoms, giving her thirty-five fathoms of cable to ride to. As the ship approaches her port we see interesting little details entered in the log, such as these: “Bent larboard bower cable and unstowed the anchor”; then a little later on, “bent starboard chain”; and again, “bent the sheet cable.” On the 13th of March she weighed anchor, proceeded south, crossed the Indian Ocean, as so many of the Company’s ships had done for over two centuries, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and dropped anchor off St Helena on 19th June 1834, eventually arriving in Halifax harbour on 18th August 1834, where she proceeded to Mr Cunard’s wharf—Mr Cunard was the East India Company’s agent, as we have mentioned—and thus brought her voyage to an end. By 3rd September the whole of her cargo was taken out of her.
But already, long before the East India Company had decided to sell their fleet, the death-knell of the steamship had been sounded in the Orient, though actually the decease was to be preceded by a wonderful rally in the famous China clippers. In the year 1822 a public meeting had been called together in London to discuss the practicability of running steamships to the East, and as a result a steam navigation company was formed. Lieutenant (afterwards Captain) J. Johnson was sent out to Calcutta to see what could be done in this respect, and the outcome was that a steamship called the Enterprize was built at Deptford and proceeded to India under the command of this Captain Johnson. She was of only 470 tons and 120 nominal horse-power. She started on 16th August 1825, and after a voyage of 113 days reached Calcutta, though ten of these days were spent in taking on board fuel. Her average speed was only a little under nine knots: but here was a precedent. She had come all the way under steam, and some day soon this speed would be improved upon. Already in that same year the Falcon, of 176 tons, had also voyaged round the Cape to Calcutta. But this vessel was an auxiliary steamship, using partly steam and partly sails; so the Enterprize was really the first Anglo-Indian steamship. It was not till the year 1842 that the P. & O. Company started sending their steamers to India via the Cape of Good Hope. This was another nail in the coffin of the sailing ships which had been trading to the East for so long a time. The name of the first ship was the Hindostan. She was a three-master with a long bowsprit, setting yards on her foremast for foresail, topsail and top-gallant sails, while her main and mizen were fore-and-aft-rigged: and before long other steamers followed her.
But before the Government built its transports specially for trooping the modern sailing Indiamen—that is to say, the successors of the East India Company’s ships—carried all the military to the East. Even when, in the days before the opening of the Suez Canal, the P. & O. were the only steamships voyaging to India, most of the passengers still travelled to the Orient in the East Indiamen, with the exception of the wealthy and the principal officials. Therefore, though the East India Company was dead as a commercial concern, those private firms who had bought up the Company’s ships or built new ones were doing a good business both in freights and passengers.
Before the Suez Canal was opened there were three ways of reaching India. You could go by a sailing East Indiaman round the Cape of Good Hope or in a P. & O. steamship by the same route, or you could go by P. & O. steamship to Alexandria, then overland by camels, and then by boat on the Mahmoudieh Canal to the Nile, whence passengers proceeded to Cairo by steamer. From there they went across the desert to Suez. Three thousand camels had to be employed for transporting a single steamer’s loading, and every package had to be subjected to no fewer than three separate transfers. The opening of the Suez Canal, therefore, in the year 1870, made all the difference in the world, and by the end of the next year scarcely any passengers went round the Cape in sailing ships, but journeyed to the East in steamships via the canal. Troops were also taken through the latter, and so the old and the new East Indiaman sailing ships passed out of existence.