BUILT IN INDIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 November 1942, Page 4

BUILT IN INDIA

SHIPS PAST AND PRESENT SOME NOTABLE OLD-TIMERS. WAR BRINGS ABOUT REVIVAL. It must be fifty years since I met Joseph Conrad and on the same day first heard of ships being built in India, writes Leonard Matters in the “Port of London Authority." The two facts are only remotely related, but reciting them serves to introduce what is hoped will be a subject of war interest to shipping men. With an older companion I wandered along the wharves at Port Adelaide, gazing with admiration on the tall ships. There was one beauty, the Alexandra, taking in wheat, and berthed behind her was the equally graceful Torrens, floating high on the muddy stream after unloading. A big, bearded man stood by the gangway of the Torrens. My cheeky friend, Bagster, asked if we could go on board and the big man, speaking with a detectable foreign accent, said “Yes.” As the outcome of that meeting was that Bagster signed on as “boy” for the homeward voyage of the Torrens I came to know that the big mate was Conrad, although that meant nothing to him or me at a time when the Pole was only a sailor and not a sorcerer in words. PRISON HULK SUCCESS. Hard by the Torrens in the Port Adelaide river was the prison-hulk Success—a floating chamber of horrors, if ever there was one. For an admission fee of sixpence we explored her cavernous interior. She was an exhibition ship of the old convict days. There were her iron-barred cells, occupied by pallid-faced wax figures of famous criminals and a good many others (such as notorious bushrangers) who had never been prisoners in her. For an extra penny we got a “programme” which told us that the ship was built of teak in India, and that she was then the best part of a century old. Whether built in India or not the prison-ship was certainly tough. She had been at the bottom of Sydney or Melbourne harbours for years before she was put on show, and years later still she was sailed to the United Kingdom with her grizzly exhibition. She was undoubtedly of the period when large numbers of ships of the Royal Navy and of the East India Company were built at Bombay or Calcutta, and she was bluff and bargey, of the type described by Stanley Rogers for the old “John Company” as ships whose careers ended only “when they were wrecked or became obsolete.” Rogers added that they “never wore out.” VERY ANCIENT ART. Before saying anything about the very ancient art of shipbuilding in India it is well to speak of the period when big sailing ships for the Navy and the Merchant Service came regularly from yards at Bombay and on the Hooghly. The East India Company knew all about ships. It was mercenary. The Admiralty also had a practical mind. In the old days of sail fashions did not change much. Ships that were cheap to build and would last were wanted. The Company’s records speak of a vessel, the Deria Dowlat’, built at Bhavnagar in 1750, which was sound in limb and body in 1837 after 87 years of wear and tear. The same records declare, as part of the argument for continuing to use Indianbuilt ships then, that “every ship in the Navy of Great. Britain has to be renewed every 12 years.” It is also related that a ship built in the Bombay Dockyard, the Sir Edward Hughes, had “performed” eight European voyages when it was found sound enough to begin its career in the British Navy at a time when “no Europe-built Indiaman was. capable of going more than six voyages with safety." EARLY ENTERPRISE. India had been building big wooden ships from time immemorial when the East India Company came on the scene with galleons of the Elizabethan age. The company saw that Indian teak was good, and the craftmanship equally so. It imported a master shipwright, one Warrick Pelt, 1668, and he established a yard at Surat which the company maintained up to 1735 when it was transferred to Bombay along with the Parsi foreman, Lowjee Nuserwanjee, whose family held the job of master shipwrights to the company for a century and a quarter. In that Bombay yard between 1736 and 1863 no less than 300 ships of all classes and sizes, including Line of Battle ships, were turned out. Over at Calcutta between 1801 and 1821 the Hooghly yards built 237 ships o£ a total tonnage of 105,693.

Our dead and gone shipwrights of 150 years ago will not arise to protest if I quote Colonel Walker who in 1811 upheld the policy of building Navy ships in India on grounds of economy and longevity. He agreed that English ships had to be renewed every 12 years while those of India were good for half a century. Walker drew a picture of Britain getting a whole fleet in 15 years out of Indian yards; a fleet serviceable for 50 years. He put the cost of a ship of the line at £lOO,OOO in England and in Bombay at £75,000, and on this basis, cutting out the necessity for renewals every 12 years, he argued that Britain would save £325,000 on each Indian ship when kept in service half a century. IRON, STEEL & STEAM. The argument lost all its force, of course, when iron and steel and steam came along, but it was impressive and almost unanswerable in the days of wood and sail. Many a great East Indiaman with her 32 guns, that ran rich cargoes and fought off the privateers and other ships of France, Holland and Spain in those stirring times when India seemed a prize for all competitors, was built of Indian timbers by Indian workers. Since the middle of last century shipbuilding in India has been almost dead, but just now it looks like being revived under the stress of war and the Indian nationalist urge towards industrialisation. Bombay and Calcutta still build small craft for naval purposes, and a modern yard has been opened at Vizagapatam for the construction of merchant tonnage. What of the ancient past? OLD TIME VOYAGES. Among the earliest scripts of Indian history are to be found references to ships and merchant princes who went on long voyages on the high seas. The more modern Sanskrit and Tamil literature—and that is a thousand years old —tells of the shipwrights’ craft, and there is a manuscript called the Yukti

Kalpataru which describes ship construction both for river and .ocean use. According to this record the largest ocean-going vessel was 276 feet long, 36 feet beam, and 27 feet deep. That would make her about 2,300 tons. Marco Polo speaks of Indian ships of great size carrying ten small boats slung over the side as on modern davits, and beyond a doubt 1,000-tonners were being built from as early as the first century wheras right up to the seventeenth century European ships rarely exceeded an average of 250 tons. The first convoy of the East India Company to India comprised five ships, the largest of which was 600 tons and the smallest 100 tons. Early Portuguese voyagers to India found their biggest vessel, a ship of 1,500 tons, smaller than an Indian ship, the Rehemy, which they described as ‘at this time the largest vessel in the Indian seas.”

Whether in steel India can equal the achievements of the past in wood remains to be seen. She has the steel. The yards can be provided and the craftsmen trained, but the provision of engines will be the problem—at' least during this war. Maybe the time is not so distant when 10,000-tonners will yet slide down the ways of Bombay, the Hooghly and Vizagapatam into the warm waters of Ind.