European Sailors, Alcohol, and Cholera in Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract

In early modern Europe, British sailors had the reputation of being rootless, often violent, promiscuous, and dipsomaniacs—an idiom for social evil (Conley 2009, 2). However, in the late eighteenth century, this image started to change as naval authorities, Christian missionaries, authors, and playwrights sought to project sailors as valiant founders of Britain’s maritime empire. Subsequently, in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, sailors were increasingly portrayed as defenders of the nation and devoted family persons. American sailors were likewise presented sympathetically in accounts such as the 1852 annual report of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, which stated that more than 70,000 sailors had pledged themselves to the temperance movement and nearly 50 Sailors’ Homes had been established in port cities (Haughton 1855, 111). At the same time, the merchant and war navies of several countries supplied sailors with premium quality coffee and tea in an attempt to discourage them from drinking liquor. Naval authorities around the world floated the idea that abstinence improved the chance of surviving the ordeals of maritime voyages (Gustafson 1884, 97). However, in stark contrast to this generous characterization of the sailor in Europe, the British Indian government expressed great anxiety about the worsening situation of European sailors in Indian port cities. Its efforts to regulate the health and behaviour of sailors drew a fault line between imperial and colonial contexts of governance.

Research for this chapter was done as part of a doctoral fellowship from the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘From Sail to Steam: Health, Medicine and the Victorian Navy’, held at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford.