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This is such an important book that it is surprising it has not been
reviewed in Britain. The distinguished author has turned conventional
thinking about engineering in British India on its head, by revealing the
debacle of steam-powered boats on one of India' s greatest rivers.
Three companies were set up in the 19th centuty: The Bombay Flotilla;
the short-lived Oriental Inland Steam Navigation Company and the
lndus Steam Flotilla. 'The search for a viable vessel - a steamboat
suited to the "hazards of navigation" on the lndus and its tributaries -
went on for forty years. But no-one found a solution: it was like the
quest for the grail.' There were three essential criteria, unfortunately
all mutually exclusive. The ideal steamer had to have a very shallow
draught, not more than 18 inches or it would run aground on the
shifting sandbanks. It needed a powerful engine to drag barges
upstream, against the current and it had to have effective steering.
But if the ship-builder increased the engine's power the additional
weight meant the boat would sit deeper in the water and if the boat was
built with a wide flat bottom to accommodate the engine, then it
became harder to steer. The problem was never really solved. What
seemed perfectly feasible on the Clyde at Glasgow was clearly not
going to work on the Indus. Steamboats brought out at huge expense
from Britain had to be literally rebuilt when they reached India and
their working life was very limited. Then there was the problem of
fuel. Wood was freely available, but was not as effective as coal, and
good quality coal was hard to find. Hopes were frequently raised when
coal seams were found, only to be dashed when the seams petered out.
So the boats had to make frequent stops to take on board great stacks of
felled trees, whose weight slowed them down, and led to deforestation.
With all these problems one might wonder why the steamboat
companies persisted for so long, from 1839 to 1878, to be precise. A
lot of it had to do with the unshakeable Victorian belief that technology
was the way forward, not just in Britain, but throughout much of the
Empire too. Railways were the obvious example, speeding up the
import and export of goods and moving soldiers quickly across country
where they were needed. The electric telegraph which at first ran
parallel to the rail tracks was another - information between cities
could now be transmitted in hours rather than days. But the Indus was
where British ingenuity failed. The river was treacherous, changing
course without warning, full of shoals and sandbanks that themselves
moved, so that charts were useless. Every journey was different from
the one before. And the boats were terribly slow. Lieutenant
Christopher recorded a painful journey when it took seven days to
cover fourteen miles. It had been hoped that river transport would
enable soldiers to be quickly moved to trouble spots on the north-west
frontier but this proved not to be the case. The Planet, for example,
taking men to the first Afghan War kept running aground and when the
soldiers went into the river to haul and pull the boat off, the current was
so strong they lost their balance. With immense detail Dewey examines
every aspect of steam travel - the high fares which meant only the rich
could sail, the cost of fuel, the risk of being attacked from the banks by
warring tribes, the personalities of the captains and their crew, the
unsatisfactory bridges over the river, the ill-fated ferries and much else.
He contrasts all this with the small country boats that used the river,
'complex and fragile' as they were, but viable and cheap. A masterful
book.
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