The Indian Sea Voyage between India and the Caribbean during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Headnote

Abstract

The Indian sea voyages, which followed on the heels of the African slave trade, transported roughly 725,000 Indians to and from the Caribbean from 1838 to 1955. However, this essay focuses mainly on the voyages during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Death rates on the sea voyage ranged from 2 to 30 per cent on the ships that crossed the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The outward-bound passengers experienced more deaths and disease than the inward-bound ones. Returning ex-indentured Indians from the Caribbean appeared much healthier and happier than arriving indentured Indians from India to the Caribbean. These aspects of the Indian indenture experience have received scant academic attention in the Caribbean. This article analyses the circumstances, organization, diseases, deaths and other aspects of the sea voyage during the period under review.

Introduction

The sea voyage from India to the Caribbean and back to India has received comparatively lesser attention than other themes in CaribbeanIndian historiography. The imbalance in attention is understandable since the "in-between" Indian indentured experience was not as visible as recruitment in, and emigration from, India, and the plantation work routine in the Caribbean. For a majority of Indians, the sea voyage was a psychologically lonely and brutalizing experience on high seas, which was recorded mainly by the European personnel on board the ships. Few Indians, especially during the first four decades, ever wrote accounts of their sea-voyage experience. Therefore, we have to rely on the limited accounts and testimonials of indentured Indians and the European personnel to understand the sea voyage. This explains why there is a limited body of literature on the Indian sea voyage. Apart from Verene Shepherd's Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean, Ron Ramdin's The Other Middle Passage: Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Trinidad 1858, and Brinsley Samaroo's "Chinese and Indian 'Coolie' Voyages to the Caribbean", and few others,1 the literature on the Indian sea-voyage experience is very scarce. As a consequence, there are many unanswered questions. What names and meanings were assigned and attached to the outward- and inward-bound voyages? Was the outward-bound voyage frightful, while the inwardbound one was a much more pleasant experience (since ex-indentured Indians were returning home)? Did the inward-bound voyage...