The Voyage to Demerara

(As I write about my great-grandfather’s journey to British Guiana during the national tragedy of the MV Barima, I note the irony that he set sail from the docks near the Guyana Depot location where Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers [GRSE] is presently headquartered and which, in 2023, built the MV Ma Lisha ferry that was supposed to replace the MV Barima to transport Guyanese between Georgetown and Region One.)
As the Allanshaw reached the open waters of the lower Hooghly, Rambishoon and his fellow immigrants were divided into groups and placed in charge of one of the immigrants who would be their guard (“chowkidar”) and then taken below to the second deck. He and the other single men, several of whom he had travelled with on the train to Howrah Junction, were assigned spaces in the fore of the deck; the married couples with their children were strategically placed between them and the single women at the back. He would sleep on his blanket on the two feet of space that was assigned to him. The ceiling was just five feet six inches, so he was fortunate to be only five feet two inches. The few men who were taller had to crouch when moving around.
From the ship’s records in Guyana, we learn that there were 627 indentured labourers who left India on the Allanshaw in 1888: 385 men, 153 women, 12 boys, four girls, and 73 “infants” (39 males and 34 females under 12 years); one woman died, three men returned to India, and there were three paying passengers. The Allanshaw was a 1589-tonne, three-masted, full-rigged iron sailing ship with a length of 263 ft, a beam of 40 ft, and a draught of 23.0 ft.
She was launched on 29 August 1874, so she was fairly new and supposed to comply with the latest regulations for transporting “coolies”. Yet on an 1883 trip to Australia with “Government immigrants”, it carried 393 “worthy poor” compared to its 1888 trip with 627 coolies. There was absolutely no privacy for anyone. But the separation of the single women and men was rather ironic because, as illustrated in the infamous 1885 trip of the same Allanshaw, when a sixteen-year-old girl, Maharani, was raped by a sailor and subsequently died. This was a recurrent feature of the crossing.
As in the depot, in a gesture to caste sensibilities, meals were prepared (here in the galley/kitchen) as far as practicable by Brahmins but were served on deck to everyone seated together. The meals were very basic peasant fare with rice, flour/chappatis, and dal as staples along with vegetables (pumpkins, yams, and potatoes) cooked in oil or ghee with the spices (turmeric, onions, garlic, chillies, coriander seeds, and mustard seeds) that would define “Indian cooking” in the Girmitiya diaspora. Chura (parched rice), gram/satoo (ground parched channa), and biscuits were dry foods served during rough weather. Six sheep or goats per 100 men were also taken aboard for a fortnightly mutton treat. Small portions of preserved milk were provided to lactating mothers and babies. Overall, the food had improved much since the early days of indentureship, and the main challenge to the immigrants was the confined space and the tossing and turning of the ship on the rough seas.
The earlier high mortality had also been reduced through better food and the services of a ship’s surgeon who was provided with the basic pharmaceuticals of the 19th century. One Indian concoction became “Vicks VapoRub”. The doctor would have been assisted with any births by immigrant midwives (Chamain). Depression was endemic among the Indians as they continued their journey into the unknown. This was assuaged somewhat by those in their midst who were returning to British Guiana after returning to India and were unable to readjust to their old “home”.
Rambishoon landed after 81 days on the “Kala Pani” (the Black Waters) in Georgetown on November 18th, 1888, and disembarked on the 20th and was marched north up Water Street to the Immigration Depot at Barrack Street, Kingston, near the mouth of the Demerara River and next to the lighthouse he had espied when the ship approached land.
While he might have been a boy from the countryside, his exposure to Patna and Calcutta made even Stabroek Market, the new Victoria Law Courts, and City Hall under construction suffer by comparison. In 1888, Water Street still had tramways. It would be the first and last time he saw Georgetown.