The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Author:Amitav Ghosh [Ghosh, Amitav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386057433
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-07-12T04:30:00+00:00

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The first steam-powered vessel to operate in India was a dredger on the Hooghly River. The vessel’s engine is said to have been sent from Birmingham to Calcutta in 1817 or 1818, little more than a decade after Robert Fulton made history by launching the first commercial steamboat on the Hudson River in 1807.

The first marine steam engines to see commercial service in India were purchased by a group of Calcutta businessmen from a British trader in Canton in 1823. The two engines were mounted on a locally built vessel, which was launched upon the Hooghly under the name Diana. Although the Diana attracted much attention, the venture was a commercial failure. But the import of steam engines continued at a steady pace: the records of one of Britain’s most important manufacturers of steam engines show that India was the company’s second-largest market after the Netherlands.

Around this time, several steam engines were also built in Calcutta. The skills for the making and maintenance of these machines were abundantly available in and around the city. A historian of Indian steamships notes, ‘the Ganges valley villages were teeming with men whose skills in their own traditional technology were roughly similar to those needed to keep a steam flotilla in service’. This anticipated an important but little-noticed aspect of the age of steam: it was India that provided much of the manpower for the boiler rooms of the world’s steam-powered merchant fleets.

Already in the early 1820s, businessmen in India, foreign and local, had become keenly interested in the possibility of a regular steamer service between England and India. Since no coal-fuelled vessel had yet made that journey, a conglomerate of wealthy men—a group that included the Nawab of Awadh—announced a prize of 10,000 pounds sterling for the first steamship to complete the voyage in less than seventy days. The challenge was taken up by a group of investors in England and a side-wheeled steamship called Enterprise (a name that recurs often among early steamships) was built at Deptford at a cost of 43,000 pounds sterling.

The Enterprise left Falmouth on 16 August 1825, and arrived in Calcutta on 7 December, after a voyage of 114 days. Even though the steamer had not met the specified time limit, the committee decided to award the owners a substantial sum of money in recognition of the historic nature of the journey.

The arrival of the Enterprise caused great excitement in Calcutta. In my novel Flood of Fire, a character recalls the moment many years later, in Canton:

I well remembered the day, fourteen years ago, when a steamer called Enterprize had steamed up to Calcutta . . . this was the first steamer ever to be seen in the Indian Ocean and she had won a prize . . . for her feat. Being young at that time I had expected that Enterprize would be a huge, towering vessel: I was astonished to find that she was a small, ungainly-looking craft. But when the Enterprize began to move my

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