“For nearly twenty years this system of working the company’s traffic continued in operation, but it sufficed for carrying on a trade which, for the value of the merchandise in proportion to its bulk, has, it may safely be said, never been equalled. It attained sometimes the annual value of forty millions sterling.”[73]
[73] P. & O. Handbook, 1905 edition.
The East India Company’s service between Suez and Bombay was as bad as that formerly maintained with Calcutta, owing to indifferent management and unsuitable steamers, and as it cost about 30s. per mile, whereas the P. & O. maintained its services to India and China for 17s. per mile, there was a renewal of the agitation for the service to be taken out of the control of the East India Company and entrusted to a concern which could work it better and more economically. Parliament in 1851 supported the agitation, but the East India Company would not give way until the fates were too strong for it; one lot of Bombay mails went to the bottom in a native sailing vessel in which they had been placed at Aden, as the company had no steamer ready for them at Suez. At the request of the Government, the P. & O. Company agreed to take over this service for a subvention of £24,000 per annum, as against the £105,000, or thereabouts, which the old arrangement had cost.
The P. & O. Company opened its Australian service in 1852 as a branch line, but this connection proved so beneficial to the company and the Australian Colonies alike, that in course of time it was made a main-line service, to the mutual advantage of the company and the Colonies. So many of the company’s steamers were employed in the Crimean War and during the Indian Mutiny for the Army, that the Australian portion of the service was dropped for some time.
H.M. Troopship “Himalaya” in Plymouth Sound. (The “Royal George,” 120 Guns, in background.)
In 1852 the company added eleven vessels to its fleet, including the celebrated Himalaya, then the largest steam-ship afloat and the fastest ocean-going vessel, with the possible exception of a few on the North Atlantic. Eleven of the company’s steamers were chartered to the Government as transports during the Crimean War, and one of them, the Colombo, was nicknamed Santa Claus when she arrived at Sebastopol one Christmas Eve with presents and sorely needed stores and provisions for the troops.
The East India Company in 1855 asked for tenders for the Calcutta and Burmah mails, and an agreement was entered into with Messrs. McKinnon and Co. of Glasgow, but the steamers they employed were unsuitable and small and the enterprise was a failure. Two steamers, the Baltic and Cape of Good Hope, were sent out for the work, and fortunately for the owners were acquired soon afterwards as transports during the Indian Mutiny.
This undertaking was known as the Calcutta and Burmah Steam Navigation Company, and was at that time purely local in its operations. Its steamer the Cape of Good Hope was lost in a collision in the Hoogly, and another steamer of the line was wrecked while on her way out to India on her first voyage while off the coast of Ireland.
However, the company changed its name in 1862 to the British India Steam Navigation Company, Ltd., and notwithstanding its inauspicious start under its old name, it has grown apace and is now one of the principal lines trading between England and the Eastern Hemisphere.