Frightful shipwreck of coolies; two hundred and sixty lives lost

(From the Friend of India, August 31, 1865)

If any other argument were wanted to prove the necessity of the Indian government giving earnest attention to the coolie emigration trade, it is to be found in the tale of horrors with which Calcutta has been occupied during the past week.

On Sunday, August 19, the American built ship, Eagle Speed, [with] Captain Brinsden [in command], left Port Canning with 497 coolies for Demerara. Of these, 300 were men, 93 women, 65 boys and girls under 10, and 39 infants; in all equal to 425 adult coolies. All the formalities attending the departure and the arrangements of an emigrant ship were duly observed. The crew was sufficiently strong as to numbers, being of the same strength as when they left England.

There were 26 sailors and officers, exclusive of cabin boys, cooks, and assistants. Captain Hoskins, the portmaster, appointed Mr Vardy, one of the three Mutlah pilots, to pilot the vessel, and he himself, with the port doctor and three other Europeans, went down the river in her. He was aware that some of the crew were sick, but did “not know whether the number was over the average;” he knew that “three or four” were drunk, including the second officer and the boatswain, and they continued drunk the next day.

The Lady Elgin [with] Capt Heath [in command], which had been sent round from Calcutta, towed the ship down to Halliday’s Island where she anchored for the night. On Monday morning, she went on down the Eastern Channel. The barometer was low and the wind from the west; and soon the sea rose so high, as the wind veered to the south that the ship feared the steamer would not be able to tow her.

At 4 in the afternoon, in sight of the Mutlah reef buoy, with the water low, the tide setting in and a fresh breeze blowing, the rope connecting the steamer and the vessel parted.

The sands were a mile off, and during the two hours spent in passing another rope, she drifted towards the sands, without setting sail, which was impossible; or letting go the anchor, which, Captain Brinsden confesses, it would have been better to have done. She struck at half-past 6 in 4¼ fathoms, and then the anchor was dropped, while the sea rolled in “very high.” After half-an-hour, she went off to the southward, but with 19 inches of water in the hold. At 9 o’clock, the machinery of the steamer became deranged, and the ship anchored at the western channel at 10.

The coolies had been at the pumps from the first, but the water increased, and at three on the morning of Tuesday, the 22nd, with darkness around and a heavy sea, the Eagle Speed signalled to the steamer that she was sinking. At 4 [o’ clock], the steamer’s boat reached the ship, and the steamer herself approached. But no attempt was made to pass ropes, though this could have been done by daylight, and she might have been at Halliday’s Island by ten o’clock.

On this point, Captain Hoskins’s evidence is clear, “Under the circumstances, it would have taken two hours to pass hawsers; they would have readily passed by daylight. Suggesting that the wind was favourable and the sails were set, the steamer could have towed the vessel to safe anchorage in four hours. She would have been at 10 am at Halliday’s Island.”

Now we come to the tale of mismanagement, inhumanity and horrible sacrifice of life. Three of the Eagle speed boats were launched, manned by the crew, and commanded by Captain Hoskins, by the pilot, at Captain Brinsden’s request, and by the second officer, the first being ill. Including the coolies, who threw themselves into the water on hencoops, the boats saved 169, and all the Europeans.

Captain Hoskins’ boat made five trips, but the others were soon smashed; one of them had, at half-past 12, brought off the captain, whom his own crew refused to help.

The steamer’s boat was also smashed after one trip. Her two large boats were never launched. Captain Hoskins said, “Had the steamer anchored ahead, and a raft been made, many more lives might have been saved,” but there was no material to make a raft of, and Captain Brinsden in vain “asked the steamer to anchor on the bow or astern, and pass lines, in order to keep up a quicker and safer communication.”

“From the first to last the crew acted badly. There was some difficulty in getting them to man the boats latterly. They were shamed into it by the passengers.”

The steamer left for Port Canning; no hint was given to the three hundred miserable wretches who were sinking to launch the ship’s cutter, which had not been used, though the one European left and five Negroes did do so; and, with thirty coolies, were afterwards found by the steamer. The ship continued to float all that night, and did not sink until 7 on Wednesday morning, justifying the opinion of Captain Hoskins, “Considering the rate at which the ship was sinking, I was sanguine that we would have succeeded in getting the greater portion of the coolies out.”

Two steamers were at once sent round from Calcutta, and the Lady Elgin returned from Port Canning.

They found three Coolie lads on the mast of the wreck, and save about 60 more who had floated to Halliday’s and Butcher’s Island, where the tigers are said to have destroyed some. The coolies assert that the last European tried to fire the ship.

Of the 497 coolies, 260 seem to have perished on that terrible Wednesday morning or afterwards in the jungle.

We have confined ourselves to facts. The Court of Enquiry held on the pilot, before a jury in whom the public have confidence, and the arrest of four of the crew with a view to trial in the Vice-Admiralty Court on a charge of setting fire to the vessel, render it necessary for us to abstain from any attempt to fix responsibility.

Captain Hoskins, who seems to have done his duty better at least than any other white man, in his evidence ascribed this horrible disaster to “the force of circumstances.”

The court and the jury will doubtless make it clear why, when in two hours the steamer might have again taken her in tow, after she was reported to be sinking; and in four more might have deposited her freight in safety on shore; she steamed off with 169 and abandoned the rest to their horrible fate. Or why, before steaming off, she made no attempt to use the three boats, each trip of which would have saved fifty lives.

Even the tigers of Butcher’s Island would have been preferable to the slow and silent approach of a fate equal to a thousand deaths, as the shrieking victims were swept off the wreck till with its clinging burden it at last disappeared, leaving only the top of the mast, three boys, and “lots of clothing”, to tell of inhumanity and incompetence – such as are fortunately rare in the annals of British seamen.

Background

We can begin to appreciate the pivotal role of the Police Force – which is today the most visible and ubiquitous symbol of the state – when we consider that this institution typically, has the sole authority to use force against the citizens of a country.

The Indians that were brought to Guyana starting in 1838 have a history that is almost coterminous with that of the GPF, which was founded in 1839. Both events were in response to the abolition of slavery in 1834, and just a decade after the launching of the London Police Force. The British Police was unarmed, up to the present, and their emphasis was to protect British citizenry. In their definition of the duty of the police “to maintain law and order”, their imperative was to uphold the law.

The British view of the role of the police in its colonies however, was the opposite of the above stance. Here, their prime concern was to maintain order to protect British interests, and they organized the police force appropriately.

They followed innovations in the Royal Irish Constabulary – to ensure the imposition of order against the predominantly Catholic population. It was very centralized, heavily armed and ‘ethnicized’. That is, it consisted mostly of those the British could trust – Irish Protestants and English officers; the focus of the Irish police was to maintain order, i. e. to protect the security of the state.

The GPF was explicitly organised in Irish tradition. The GPF therefore had always been heavily militarised, but as the protests by Indians on the sugar plantations intensified, in 1889 the force was reorganised and its structure and training methods made more explicitly military. This was in the era of the greatest numbers of Indian immigration.

In 1891, with the departure of the West India Regiment, the entire police force was armed and became a semi military outfit.

Divide and Rule: Exclusion of Indians from the GPF

It is noteworthy that the motto, “To Serve and Protect” was not adopted until more than a hundred years after the formation of the GPF. The British were certainly not moved to serve and protect the newly-freed slaves. The early police recruits were primarily from Barbados to ensure that any orders from the whites to use force on the newly freed slaves might not be disobeyed, out of sympathy for “kith and kin”. The GPF was organized with a highly centralized command structure to deal with anticipated uprisings from the local Africans. The British had honed its “divide and rule” policy to a ‘T’. When the ex-slaves proved compliant to the new order, and indentured labourers were brought in to replace them on the plantations, the latter were determined to be posing a threat, purportedly because of the implements (cutlasses) in their possession. By the 1870s, Governor Kortright noted that there were more than 60,000 Indians on the plantations – with cutlasses in their hands – and this presented a clear and present danger of an uprising. Armed police were recommended for the rural areas.

Of course, it was an implicit acknowledgement that the abysmal conditions and atrocious pay would provoke the Indians to rebel. The police force was expanded, especially in the rural areas, to counter the Indian “threat”. The estimates for the GPF reflect the inexorable build up: 1850 – $ 19,000, 1868 – $ 33,500, 1879 – $ 80,000. In 1881, the governor repeated the official apprehension.

The interests of the planters, as they defined their security needs, were made coincident with the security needs of the country. The converse, of course, also held: the Indians on the plantations represented a threat to the nation.

The local Africans were soon recruited into the GPF to deal with the new “threat”, and set into motion a historical discrimination against Indian recruitment that continues to the present.

It suited British policy of playing off one ethnic group against others, to have a segregated force. There was never a problem with Indians unsuitable, per se, for serving in the police or any other militarized forces.

The British army and police in India at no time had more than 5 per cent British members – they were all staffed by Indians.

The British were old hands at the art of discrimination and they used various stratagems to exclude Indians from the GPF. In Guyana, “minimum physical requirements” was one of their prime tools. The physical requirements for males were as follows: Height: 5’ 8″, Weight: 135 lbs., Chest: 34″. During the nineteenth century, the average height of the Indian male was about 5’ 3″ and so in one swipe, most Indians were excluded.

The age requirement was 18-25 years, and the applicant was required to be unmarried.

Up to the middle of the 20th century, however, Indian cultural practices ensured that most males were married by that age.

Food, which was geared for the tastes and diet of the Africans, was another barrier to Indians, who had religious proscriptions against certain foods.

Breakfast was typically tea and bread, while lunch and dinner leaned heavily on ground provisions, (plantains, yams, eddoes – fried and in soups) beef, pork, salt fish. Muslims of course, did not eat pork while Hindus ate neither beef nor pork.

These physical factors, which were supposedly facially neutral and not changed until 1968, and the food, were not modified until after 2000. Their effect was to produce a disparate impact on Indians, and ensured early on that they learnt the lesson that the police force was not a place where Indians were welcome. In 1965, the International Commission of Jurists was to note the adverse impact of Indian recruitment caused by these factors: Indians turned to other avenues for employment.

As late as 1884, of the 624 non-commissioned officers and police ranks in the GPF, only 13 non-commissioned officers and 161 constables were local Africans, as opposed to 49 non-commissioned officers and 246 constables, who were Barbadians. For the record, at that time, forty-nine constables (8 per cent) were from India. It was not a question of literacy in English since many Barbadians, local Africans and even whites, who were admitted, were illiterate.

During the 19th century, in only one year (1885) Indians were recruited in significant numbers – 58 of 157. The record showed that they performed credibly.

Inspector- General Cox, who addressed the batch, found it necessary to instruct, “If you see Coolies, your own race, breaking the law you must arrest them the same you would black people.” Indians were obviously not trusted by officialdom.

The planters continued their historical opposition to Indians in the Guyana Police Force into modern times. In 1939, the Sugar Producers’ Association (SPA) demanded a military man to command the force: “With their thousands of labourers of an alien race, of little or no education and a special aptitude for conspiracy, the estates’ need for police protection is a pressing one at this time”. Eighteen years after the last indenture contract expired, Indians were still an “alien race”, which, of course, made them easier to mow down.

The sugar interests held sway, and on the eve of Independence in 1965, not much changed in recruitment patterns, even though the Indian population had burgeoned to more than 50 per cent. Indians comprised 20.7 per cent of the GPF, compared with 71.9 per cent Africans. And this was after the PPP government of 1957 – 1964 had deliberately increased the number of Indians recruited. They had accepted 239 Indians versus 432 Africans from 5,877 versus 9,081 applications respectively.

The British had insisted as part of the conditions for granting independence to Guyana under the PNC was for the latter to rectify the imbalance in the armed forces, including the GPF. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), invited by the PNC in 1965 to investigate the ethnic imbalances in the state sector, concluded that the police force should reflect to a greater degree, the composition of the population. They recommended that 75 per cent of recruits and cadets for the next five years be Indian until the goal was reached.

The PNC accepted the recommendations of the commission and claimed that the very next year, 76 of 102 police recruits were Indians.

A government publication claimed that by 1968, the new policies of the government saw, “the proportion of Africans declining from 73.1 per cent in 1964 to 61 percent in 1968, while the East Indian representation grew from 21.4 to 34 per cent in this period.” This is quite unlikely since the “minimum physical measurements” was only discontinued in 1968.

Post Independence Conditions

Additionally, Prof. K. Danns, who published his doctoral thesis on the Guyanese armed forces, (“Domination and Power in Guyana”) claimed that the PNC ceased to make statistics available after 1966, but that data collected by him showed that the government did not implement the ICJ’s recommendations, and actually decreased the number and percentage of Indians accepted.

He showed that between 1970 and 1977, while the size of the force was being doubled, 92.2 per cent of recruits were Africans with only 7.84 per cent being Indians. Their numbers dropped to less than ten per cent of the GPF. After more than a hundred years of being excluded from the GPF as a matter of official policy, Indians themselves had internalized the myth that they were ‘not fit’ to be policemen. Some of the few that bucked the tide were peripheralised.

Indians who were accepted after the 1970s were placed in the Special Branch, (plain clothes) and posted to Indian villages to spy on their fellow Indians. This policy created further distrust of the police force amongst Indians.

During the long twenty-eight years of PNC rule, Indians in the GPF were seen as PNC tools since the requirement for such a job was a PNC party card. Many Indian police were given dead-end postings and treated with disdain by African subordinates who had connections with the PNC. All of these negativities simply reinforced the historically conditioned experience of the Indian that the GPF was not an institution that welcomed him.

After the free and fair elections of 1992, the PPP did not embark on any overt rectification of the historically enforced imbalances in the GPF. As mentioned however, the authorities took into consideration religious sensibilities as far as food was considered.

Subsequently, constitutional changes were introduced in 2000, and one clause called for a Commission to enquire into, among other things “the composition” of the entire disciplined forces, which include the GPF. The Disciplined Forces Commission conducted hearings in 2003 and submitted its 164 recommendations to Parliament in 2004. Seventy one recommendations concerned the Guyana Police Force.

The Commission recommended, with regard to manpower, that the police force should aim at achieving greater ethnic diversity without employing a quota system. To achieve this, ethnically diverse recruitment teams should be employed as openly and extensively as possible.

The recommendations were finally approved six years later by a Select Parliamentary Committee in 2010 but no actions have been overtly taken to date to implement its recommendations. Two new police training centres had been opened in the meantime in Berbice and Essequibo however.