History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce, Volume 4 (of 4)

by W. S. Lindsay

Number of ships lost.

As might have been anticipated, the British India Steam Navigation Company met with various losses, in the development of so extensive a range of services; but, though the wreck of their Burmah on the Madras coast, the loss of the Bussorah on her voyage to India, the stranding of the Coringa in the harbour of Muskát, and the foundering of the Persia on her voyage from Rangoon to Calcutta, during one of these fearful cyclones which, periodically, sweep the Indian Ocean, crippled for a time the resources and retarded the operations of the company, they did not quell the spirit or even damp the energies of Mr. Mackinnon and his co-directors, who thus, at last, achieved that success which industry and perseverance, in the right direction, must ever command.

Effect of the opening of the Suez Canal on the trade of this company.

The opening of the Suez Canal, in 1869, gave renewed vigour to the company. While producing an entire revolution in the shipping trade of India, it afforded facilities for its economical conduct, hitherto unknown. Of these the directors at once took advantage, and their steamer India, requiring new boilers, was the first vessel to arrive in London with a cargo of Indian produce, through the new maritime highway, which the genius and energy of Lesseps had constructed across the barren isthmus of the land of the Pharaohs.

In 1873, the company entered into still more extended arrangements with the Government of India, by doubling some of its existing lines, and, in 1872, the directors arranged with the Home Government to organize a mail service every four weeks, between Aden and Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa, so that the distance annually traversed under its contracts, now exceeds 1,100,000 miles.

In tracing the different lines used by the vessels of this company, it is interesting, as I have just mentioned, to note that their courses, especially those along the Arabian shore of the Red Sea, the eastern coast of Africa, the coasts of Hadramaut and Persia as far as Bussorah, and by way of Beluchistan and the western shores of India as far as Ceylon, are, as nearly as possible, the same as those which, from the scanty records of the past, I have endeavoured to trace on a map, so as to show the ancient routes of commerce pursued by native vessels long before the Christian era.[388]

Netherlands Steam Navigation Company, 1866.

Its fleet, and how employed.

In 1863, the Dutch East India Government offered a liberal subsidy for the conveyance of their mails in the East, but, as one of the conditions of the contract required the steamers so engaged to be under the Dutch flag, the requisite capital would not have been raised had not the shareholders of the British India Steam Navigation Company, individually, supplied the greater portion of it for this new undertaking. In 1866, the Netherlands India Steam Navigation Company commenced operations, having for its directors many of the members of the board of the English Company, but, in all other respects, distinct. These two companies, however, work together in perfect harmony, and now carry on between them a large portion of the maritime commerce of the East. The Netherlands Company owns twenty-three steamers of an aggregate of 20,000 tons, interchanging their traffic at Singapore, with the vessels of the British India Company, and extending their operations from that place and Batavia to the principal ports in the Dutch East Indies, and, again, thence, through Torres Straits to Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, thus affording another line of steam communication to our Australian colonies, along the whole of the shores of which regular steam communication is now maintained.

But perhaps the most extraordinary, and certainly not the least interesting, inland route for steamers (the Ganges and the Indus not excepted), is the navigation of the River Irrawaddy through Burmah to the confines of China, a route greatly developed of recent years. It was, as I have stated, on this river, that the second steamer, the Diana, belonging to the East India Company, made her first voyage, and, from that time until 1865, the Government of India maintained, with more or less regularity, communication by their own steamers between Calcutta, Rangoon, and Upper Burmah, as far as Mandalay, a city said to contain at one time half a million of inhabitants, and situated on the banks of the Irrawaddy, about 500 miles from the sea.