HOW THE SAILING SHIP LOST OUT TO THE IRON STEAMER

By ARVIND BANAVALIKER

                           DID YOU KNOW  that the US national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, was actually written on an India-built ship? It was composed by Francis Scott Key when he was briefly imprisoned on the HMS Minden in Baltimore Harbour by the British during the 1812 War.

                            The 74-gun Minden was built by the Wadia shipyards in Mumbai and launched in 1810. Founded around 1736 by Lowjee Nusserwanji Wadia, this shipyard built some of the finest wooden sailing ships in the world including schooners, sloops, pilot vessel brigs, frigates, gunboats and steamers. Lowjee Wadia had moved to Mumbai from Surat. He was awarded the title of “master builder” by the British, a title which passed on to many of his successors who were equally skilled in the trade. However, after a glorious innings of 150 years, the shipyard finally closed down in 1884. What had gone wrong and how had this come about? The answer is that wood and sail had given way to iron and steam and India itself had something to do with it.

                           The British community in India saw in steam a way of quickening the voyage between England and India and pressed for its adoption for ocean travel. They had seen how the “Diana”, a 132 ton iron vessel, built at the Kidderpore dockyards had performed during the Anglo-Burma War of 1824. She had “towed sailing ships into position, transported troops, reconnoitered advance positions and bombarded Burmese fortifications.” It was clear that “the muscles and sinews of men could not hold out against the perseverance of the boiling kettle.” (Headrich, The Tools of Imperialism). Commercial interests in India were involved. Internal transport in India itself was costly and charges for both passengers and freight needed to be reduced. There were also war considerations. The gunboat, powered by steam, had carried British power right into the interior of Asia, Africa and China.                   

                         Nevertheless, the transition from wood to iron ships was not easy. It was said that the sea “would shake the rivets out of the iron of which she was composed” and “that the heat of the tropical sun would bake her unhappy crew as if they were in an oven.” The Admiralty itself would not agree to any ship “if built of iron or any material offering so ineffectual a resistance to the striking of shot.” However, in the end, iron and steam did prevail over wood and sail.

                       Let’s call these “building materials”. But it wasn’t just a question of superior building materials. While we in India blithely continued work on wood and sail, iron had begun to be produced in large quantities in Britain (production increased thirty-fold between 1806 and 1873) and the steam engine had begun to be pressed into service in different fields as a result of inventions/improvements by Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen and

James Watt. Additionally, “…there was synergy between steel and steam technologies. Steam improved the quantity and quality of steel. Higher quality steel allowed for more precise machining as well as higher stress tolerances of pistons and cylinders leading in turn to yet more efficient steam power.”.

(Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty)

                         So modern science and technology changed the “building materials”, changed the final product, increased quantity in production, improved quality, changed the production system (earlier based on craftsmanship and human skills but now increasingly linked to the machine) – and expanded the mind! These events undoubtedly influenced the thinking of the British government and one of the consequences was to be the stolid continuance of the occupation of India.

                                      (The above article is a slightly edited version by the author of an earlier article by him appearing in a Mumbai magazine).