[Illustration: THE “ALFRED,” EAST INDIAMAN, 1,400 TONS.
(By courtesy of Messrs. T. H. Parker Brothers)]
The passengers used to dine not later than 2 P.M. And such was the authority of the captain that when he retired from the table after either dinner or supper, the passengers and officers must also retire. The captain was to pay due attention to the comfortable accommodation and liberal treatment of the passengers, “at the same time setting them an example of sobriety and decorum, as he values the pleasure of the Court.” Any improper conduct of the ship’s officers towards the passengers or to each other was to be reported quietly to the captain, and the decision left with the latter. But if anyone thought himself aggrieved thereby, he could appeal to the Governor and Council of the first of the Company’s settlements at which the ship should arrive, or, if homeward bound, to the Court of Directors.
And the following brief, common-sense paragraph summed up the whole situation:—
“The diversity of characters and dispositions which must meet on ship-board makes some restraint upon all necessary; and any one offending against good manners, or known usages and customs, will, on representation to the Court, be severely noticed.”
We can well believe that those military officers or civil servants of the Company who came on board homeward bound, after spending years in India without benefit to their livers and tempers, if to their pecuniary advantage, and were as ill-accustomed to the conditions of ship life as they were bereft of an adaptable spirit, needed all the tact and patience of the commander and ship’s officers to prevent matters being even more uncomfortable than they were. Those who had spent their lives wielding authority in India, and both honestly and otherwise making fortunes, were not the kind of mortals most easy to live with in the confined area of a ship not much over 1200 tons. However, every passenger who came on board was given a printed copy of the regulations, which had been formed for the good of all, and they were told very pertinently to observe them strictly, and the captains had to see that they did as they were told.
Certainly up to the second decade of the nineteenth century, the ships themselves also were in great need of supervision, as to their construction, though there were not many capable critics then in existence. All the Company’s ships were of course built of wood, but iron was already being extensively used for the knees. The idea was excellent, but in practice inferior material was actually employed and not the best British iron. And the same defect was noticeable with regard to anchors and mooring chains. Of those various losses which occurred to the East Indiaman ships about the year 1809, it was thought by some that the cause was traceable to these weak iron knees which had been put into the vessels. A certain Mr J. Braithwaite wrote a letter to the East India Company in December of 1809, in which he stated that he had been employed to recover the property of the _Abergavenny_, which had been lost off Weymouth; and he found, on breaking up the wreck, that many of the iron knees were broken, owing to having been made of such poor, inferior material. This, he noticed, snapped quite easily, and he was convinced that ships fitted with such knees would, on encountering gales of wind, be lost owing to the knees giving way. The East Indiaman _Asia_ was thought to have perished owing to that reason.