Air travel woes: A time to reminisce about the lost romance of sea voyages

As COVID-19 continues to keep international flyers from taking to the skies, it is a good time to reminisce about the world of international travel before jets compressed time and made distance immaterial.

While th earliest ships mostly carried cargo, in 1818 the Black Ball Line in New York became the first shipping company to offer regularly scheduled services for passengers from the United States to England. It took another decade for steamships to be introduced and thus began regular transatlantic trips for passengers.

Indians too were active travellers by this time as men like Dwarakanath Tagore, Rammohan Roy and Michael Madhusudan Dutt set sail in quest of knowledge and learning. Conditions on board these ships varied. The Mahatma always travelled cattle class. Given his simple needs, goat’s milk and some nuts, that was enough to keep him in good humour. Many of his famous quips emerged from the decks of ships such as the SS Rajputana which he boarded on August 29, 1931 to attend the 2nd Round Table Conference in London.

Obviously the princes and other landed gentry who accompanied him snuck into the upper decks where service was excellent and a whole host of goodies awaited the traveller. Even when Swami Vivekananda began his famous journey to Chicago from Bombay on May 31, 1893, he travelled first-class thanks to the Raja of Khetri, who presented him with a ticket on the SS 'Peninsular' of the Peninsular and Orient Company.

Contrary to the impression the unfortunate Titanic’s sad end seems to have spread, sea travel by the early years of the 20th century wasn’t a particularly hazardous way of getting around the world. It was altogether a lot more joyful and fun than being cramped on board a 16-hour non-stop flight.

The long voyages inspired passengers to read on board and there are many paintings of an elegant lady in a sun hat curled up on a deck chair, reading a book she’s brought along while nursing a daiquiri. While the sea has inspired classics of literature like The Old Man and the Sea and Moby Dick, authors such as EM Foster added to the merriment by disguising themselves during voyages. Mark Twain, who in 1867, was a passenger on the first cruise originating in America, documented his adventures of the six month trip in his delightful book Innocents Abroad. Gandhi too used his time to write extensively. In fact, according to Nalini Natarajan’s book Atlantic Gandhi - The Mahatma Overseas, one of his most important political treatises, Hind Swaraj was written in 1909 while he was sailing across the Atlantic on the SS Kildonan Castle between London and South Africa.

Long and tedious voyages

Till the middle of the 19th century, travel from Bombay, Calcutta or Madras to London or Southampton in the United Kingdom was long and tedious. The two routes before the Suez Canal opened in 1869 included one via the Cape of Good Hope and the other through Alexandria in Egypt.

The voyages took anywhere between four and six months depending on the weather and the speed of the ship with the ease of the journeys guided by wind currents, pirates at sea and the monsoon. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced the journey time to two months and also made the journeys more frequent for British officers, traders of all kinds as well as rich men in pursuit of adventures.

One Maharaja Jagatjit Singh used the services of a newly-started travel agency by Thomas Cook to travel to Europe in 1893 and even wrote a travelogue based on his trip. An even more significant account of a voyage in 1885 comes from the book A Bengali Lady in England by Krishnabhabini Das, translated by Somdatta Mandal: “Later, I fell asleep and it was my first night on the ship. I woke up at six in the morning when a steward came knocking with tea and biscuits for us and my husband went up and received it. After having tea, I went up to the ship’s deck. With the sea all around us, no cities were visible. It was blue everywhere. There wasn’t even a bird in the sky and gazing at the sea, one could only see the countless waves crashing one after another.”

The writing is simple and the descriptions basic, but there is a lyrical quality to it which invokes the romance of sailing in ways that flying can never hope to recreate.

Sundeep Khanna is a senior journalist. The views are personal.