Pressed: One Sailor's Year on a Frigate, 1805
Using the log, muster book and a surviving letter, Imogen reconstructs twelve months in the life of a Portsmouth labourer taken by the press gang and sent to sea before Trafalgar.
The Lascars Who Sailed the East Indiamen
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Show notes
Crews from Calcutta and Surat
Lascars, seamen recruited in Indian ports through a ghat serang, sailed East India Company ships for two centuries. They were paid a fraction of European wages, could not legally stay in Britain, and spent winters in miserable lodgings in London's East End. This episode follows them from recruitment to return.
- The ghat serang system and the money that stuck to every hand
- Shipboard life on an Indiaman as the Company recorded it
- Winters in Shadwell and the Strangers' Home
- The 1814 Lascar Act and what it changed
- Descendants: the Bengali community of East London today
With thanks to the British Library's India Office records.
Transcript
Welcome back to Dead Reckoning: Lives at Sea. I am Imogen Hale. This episode is about the sailors who crewed the ships that built the British Empire and who are missing from almost every painting of them. By 1800, Indian seamen, known as lascars, made up a large share of the crews on East India Company ships. They were recruited in Calcutta and Surat through a labour contractor called a ghat serang, paid a fraction of an English sailor's wage, and when they reached London they were not allowed to stay. Many spent the winter in lodging houses in Shadwell waiting for a ship home. We follow them from the recruiting ghat to the East End and back, through the Company's own records, and we end with their descendants, who are still in East London. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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