So you're on a 1900s Steamship...

Life aboard an ocean liner.

Writing a novel set in 1906 London, I was faced with having my characters get around. First they had to come from India to London somehow, and then get to classes in Holborn from Highgate, or hide from the police in the East End. Then they had to take ferries to Paris, and somehow find their way to Marseilles. How were they getting from place to place? And how easily? How cheaply? How much time did each trip take? What were they eating on international ships?

The trunk of a well-traveled woman with labels indicating all the destinations she’s been to

First, a novel update

My novel, India House, is in its fourth draft now, and I gotta say, this draft has been a breeze so far. All the story elements are in place, and I am just making each chapter readable and connected with the chapters before and after it. It involves some rewriting, but it’s at the chapter level. All the big plot changes and structural changes are done, and now editing feels like editing.

Though, this is the draft where I’m becoming that which I swore never to be - adding historical inaccuracies! My previous drafts were heavily focused on accuracy, and I’d taken great pains to research everything and create an immersive atmosphere. I researched characters, events, historical context, and anything else that allowed me to write characters based on real people whose descendants wouldn’t find them unreasonable. But in this draft, I put readability and fun first. I find myself cutting out minor characters and giving their lines to characters who have a bigger role to help with their character development. This means some characters are where they weren’t in reality, doing things they didn’t in draft 1. And I’m cutting out events that don’t contribute to the main narrative, so lots of cool historical events are no longer included. I’m glad I wrote out the whole accurate narrative, though, because this way, the cuts and inaccuracies are for things that take away from the main narrative.

How dare you, Lila, you might say, but it’s all for YOU, so you can immerse yourself among Indian revolutionaries in Edwardian London and enjoy the ride. At least, that’s the hope.

I found this great book titled Edwardian England: A Guide To Everyday Life, 1900-1914 which has been quite useful in figuring out the day-to-day for my characters, though there are a lot of specifics I end up looking for elsewhere on the internet.

So let’s get to it. How would someone get from Bombay to London?

The SS Persia

So we know Savarkar traveled to Marseilles, France on the SS Persia from Bombay, with a stop at Aden, which was then still part of Bombay Presidency.

Turns out, the SS Persia is kind of a famous vessel. In WW1 it got sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Crete. Some well-known passengers who went down with the ship included the model on whom the Rolls Royce bonnet mascot was based, and Frank Morris Coleman, the co-owner of Bennett, Coleman and Co, which prints the Times Of India. But more importantly, a large quantity of gold and jewels belonging to the Maharaja of Kapurthala was aboard the ship, though the Maharaja himself had disembarked at Marseilles. So there’s jewels out there you can hunt for on your next trip to Crete.

You can even look at artifacts from the ship at this maritime museum in Hampshire in southern England. They managed to locate the wreck in 2003 and forced open the strong room of the ship, hoping to find the lost gold. Unfortunately, it was empty.

I remember reading in RK Narayan’s autobiography about going to England involving “a P&O voyage of three weeks”. Turns out, the P&O stands for Peninsular And Oriental Steam Navigation Company. They ran a lot of the international passenger ships. They are still around as of today!

The SS Persia on its final voyage seems to have had a lot of Goans working as stewards. Many Indians also worked as sailors, titled ‘lascars’. They have a very storied history. One of our main characters, Madanlal Dhingra, worked as a lascar on a ship, and the racism he faced turned him against the British forever.

On its three-week journey back to Bombay, the SS Persia seems to have had a crew of about 300 and around 200-odd passengers. That feels like an odd ratio, but the crew was probably getting paid garbage and the passengers paid a lot. It cost £20-30 for a ticket, by some accounts.

An interesting aspect I found was that the SS Persia and similar ships seemed to also dock in England, but all the Indians in the accounts I read tended to get off at Marseilles, take a train to Paris, hang around there some, and then cross the channel to England.

Which made me wonder, what did they do with luggage?

Baggage!

It seems like there were two kinds of trunks - a steamer trunk, called a ‘packer’, and a cabin trunk, which was hand-baggage. Not all steamships allowed a lot of baggage, a lot of cheap transatlantic ships only allowed what the passenger could themselves carry. One company, which seems like the Southwest of shipping companies, allowed passengers ‘up to ten square feet of luggage’. Which sounds insane honestly!

You’d hand over all your luggage to the steward. Your hand baggage would be unpacked by the steward in your cabin. The steamer trunk, which you would have marked ‘Not Wanted’, would be placed in the hold, and affixed with a label, much like today, while the cabin trunk would have your clothes and other items for daily use on the ship. The steamer trunks were supposed to be sturdy, because they had to withstand rough handling and dropping. Plus, both kinds of trunks had to be made of the right material because the sea air and humidity could make the best glue and stitching come undone with enough time, and you didn’t want handles popping off or latches coming undone.

Louis Vuitton made trunks for ship travel, and they are beautiful and practical:

Louis Vuitton Cabin Trunk

When you disembarked from the ship, the baggage handlers would put out the baggage from the hold onto some common area for you to pick up. And, like today, you needed to have colorful ribbons or stickers to distinguish your bag from the dozens of others like it.

They even had many “How to pack your trunk” guides!

But what would you do with the bags? Did you have to lug them on the train with you? Where would you place them when you went sightseeing?

I looked everywhere for the answer and didn’t find one until I found the autobiography of TSS Rajan, one of the inmates of India House. It was in Tamil, so it took me some effort to read. Turned out, the Thomas Cook Company was active even back then, and they would take your baggage when you disembarked and ship it to your address if you asked and paid a modest fee. This left you able to traipse around Europe with just your cabin trunk and no worries about your heavy baggage.

So… what’s the deal with Ship Food?

I couldn’t find the menus of ships that were going to or coming from India to Europe somehow. But, by several accounts, there was no vegetarian food on the menu. Savarkar found himself forced to eat herring, while another inmate of India House, MP Tirumalachari, maintained a fast for 21 days while traveling to England.

But I found a restaurant in Bombay catering to sailors in 1935, and the menu seems devoid of any meal that a vegetarian would eat.

Let’s look at the menu of the most famous Edwardian ship, though - the Titanic!

This seems like plenty of vegetarian options to me, but no freaking way any young man would be able to live off of rice soup and cabin biscuits and potatoes.

Ship food was actually supposed to be exciting, as people got to eat vegetables from around the world they had never had before. Shipping companies also made sure to have good quality food for their passengers, because it was the one thing that really mattered to the passengers. There were special menus for special occasions as well.

Sea-sickness, though, put all the hearty food to naught. There was and is no cure for seasickness, and people tried all kinds of things to ease it - pinches of sodium bicarbonate, charcoal with every meal, cotton in the ears, sniffing ammonia. Or, drinking a lot of warm water, exercising a lot, chewing beef.

Companies were not far behind in touting cures - It was recommended to drink Vichy water, which seems like some kind of mineral spring water. And, surprisingly, Triscuits marketed themselves as what you eat when you’re seasick. The Shredded Wheat Company advertised Triscuits as “the perfect Toast, the ‘traveler’s delight’, a satisfying, sustaining food, whether on land or sea!”.

Passing Time At Sea

Steamers had very good libraries, and you could check out books to read. The decks had shuffleboard and ring-toss games you could join.

People played cards a lot. Whist was very popular, as we see in Around The World In 80 Days. Ships had warnings against professional gamblers and card-sharps, though, who could cost you a lot of money.

Transatlantic ships had concerts, which were the highlight of the trip. German ships for some reason didn’t have these, and instead had a ‘Captain’s Dinner’ which had the first-class saloon decorated lavishly.

Random other facts of ship life

• You didn’t need passports or visas. Except if you were visiting Russia. And if you were Jewish, you could be disallowed from entering Russia. Why?!

• A ship journey was supposed to be such a big deal that you were advised to show up and visit the ship a day in advance, so you could familiarize yourself with the ship and the cabin, and talk to the steward in charge of your cabin and tip him nice before the crowds thronged the next day, so he made sure to take care of you on the journey.

• Steamer-chairs, which I assume are deck-chairs, cost $1, and when you went early to meet your steward, you could get him to place your chair at a choice spot on deck.

• Your friends were encouraged to send you telegrams on the ship, and send ahead baskets of fruit and other goodies which would be waiting for you when you got on the ship.

• Essential ship attire for a woman included one tailor made suit, one pair of thick silk or woolen tights, four sets of combination undergarments, shirtwaists, a sweater, a woolen wrapper for going to the bath, a dressy bodice for dinner, a pair of shoes with rubber soles or heels, and three pairs of pajamas.

• A man required a black coat for dinner, with the necessary shirts for evening attire, an old suit, woolen underclothing, a generous supply of handkerchiefs and socks, several pairs of pajamas, a bathrobe and slippers, and the requisite ties and collars.

• You could have your car shipped abroad! It cost $30-75 just to pack, and $200-300 to ship. You could have pay with American Express (How? Wasn’t this before credit cards? What was Amex doing then?) England had no duty on cars, but France charged you $12 for bringing a car in, and would stick a conspicuous sticker on your car. When you were shipping it back, they’d take off the sticker and refund you. This was a lot of money, but renting a car could cost you $500 a day, so it was well worth it.

• Why did they need cars? Because wealthy Americans wanted to socialize with British elites, and a car was great to make it to parties in various country houses. The money was well worth it to be able to rub shoulders with royalty.

• Ships themselves were where people from across the world met and bonded and made important business and friendship connections. There is the famous story of Swami Vivekananda meeting JRD Tata on a ship, and convincing him to set up a science institute, which led to Tata establishing IISc.

Ship life is one of those remnants of the past we are glad to be rid of. No one wants to spend a lot of time traveling unless that is precisely the point - all this up here survives in cruises. P&O now runs various cruise ship lines. It is interesting to learn how they did so much to ease the tedium of a sailing journey, with fancy food, games, books, stewards waiting on you, and all. We have some of that with even budget air travel now, but the tedium of travel remains the same even if it is only a fraction of the time it used to take, and we much prefer to have it be quicker than comfortable.