not usually belong to unions and were regarded, rather patronizingly, as docile, inferior, lacking in masculinity, self-reliance and initiative, although this image changed significantly by the early twentieth century. As a result of imposed racial stereotypes, largely framed by an inflated sense of colonial superiority, it was deemed that lascars, although quite competent sailors, could only make excellent seamen when led by European officers.32 The false notion that, because of their tropical origins, lascars could withstand the heat of the engine rooms better than their white European counterparts meant that they were given the worst jobs on board ship: the engine stokers or so-called ‘donkeymen’. This racial misnomer has also been highlighted by Grahame Davies who notes from the writing of Captain Jac Alun Jones, a former Welsh seaman and poet, who wrote:
When Welsh coal exporting was in its glory, and every ship was burning coal to drive the engines, most of the firemen were Arabs, as they were famous as men who were able to withstand the great heat of the stokehold.33
This peculiar climatic discrimination also meant that lascars were deemed unable to work in colder climes and were, therefore, limited to sail in latitudes between 60 degrees north and 50 degrees south. Such racist imaginary meant that lascars were firmly placed at the bottom of the maritime labour hierarchy, a means of keeping their labour rates much lower than those of European sailors.34
As more and more ships docked in British ports, so the numbers of stranded lascars increased. The question of numbers arises in terms of trying to assess how many lascars were present in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Visram says that, by the 1850s, of the 10–12,000 lascars and Chinese seamen employed for service in British trade, at least 50% were brought to the UK every year and of these, 60% were Asiatic lascars.35 This figure was dramatically increased with the opening of the Suez Canal, the introduction of faster steam-powered liners and the establishment of the Britishcontrolled port at Aden. According to Salter’s statistics (the source of which is not known) by the 1890s:
an average of 500 Asiatics [Asians and Arabs] come to the docks every week, and more than 10,000 Asiatics and Africans – including East Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Persians, Malays and Africans of various races – visit London in the course of a year.’36
Whatever the actual figures, Salter’s contemporaneous account gives us some idea of the huge numbers of Oriental sailors visiting Britain’s ports in the nineteenth century, suggesting that their presence in the docklands was both highly visible and formidable. The Asiatic Mission, founded by Salter, was established with the intention of giving rest to:
the bodies of the travellers who have reached us from the distant East, or inner Africa, strangers in a strange land, where their customs and language are so little understood, such a home is greatly needed.37
The evangelical missionary further asserts that ‘England annually attracts to her shores from all nations those who come either as visitors to enjoy our civilization, or as adventurers to exhibit the manners and habits of heathendom for our amusement and information.’38 Visram has observed that ‘Christian missionaries and evangelicals saw lascars as a moral challenge. Like the ayahs (oriental nannies), they presented an opportunity for proselytizing.’39
As British imperial expansionism reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, the increasing numbers of colonized others became a familiar presence throughout the country’s rapidly developing industrial docklands and cities. However, we are told by Salter that, ‘the prejudice against bringing foreign labour under any circumstances into the east of London was very great.’40 Perhaps proving that even then, as now, migration to Britain by significant numbers of visible ethnic and religious others was fraught with political and cultural tensions. The majority of the mission’s clientele were Muslims and Salter rather disparagingly comments, ‘those who visit the Rest [Home] are mostly Mahommedans [sic], varying from the bigoted Afghan and Arab to the semi-fetish worship of Africa.’41 The Asiatic Rest was located ‘opposite the walls and near the gates of the East India Docks’, and a plaque in both Persian and Bengali was mounted on the front door of the mission.42 Inside copies of the Qur’ān in Arabic and the Bible, translated in various languages, were available to visitors. The walls of the mission were decorated with hand drawings of both Makkah and Madīnah, donated by various sailors who had visited the holy sites, along with Biblical verses translated into numerous oriental languages. One in Arabic ‘tells the wanderer from the Nile, “Whoever believeth in the Lord Jesus shall be saved”.’43 Salter established the Asiatic Strangers Home, under the auspices of the London Christian Mission in 1856 specifically to provide welfare and proselytize among the destitute lascars. Although the Emancipation Act of 1833 had effectively abolished slavery across the British colonies, plantation owners and British merchants introduced a form of indentured labour that simply provided a ‘legal’ means of enslaving by signing up colonial subjects to a lifelong employment service to British coffee, tea, sugar and cotton plantations across the colonies. Other less permanent forms of employment allowed the recruitment of ayahs and lascars to suit the particular needs of those hiring. Subsequently, many ayahs and lascars, employed at the ports of Bombay and Aden, were immediately dismissed once they had reached the shores of Britain.
This unscrupulous form of employment left thousands of ‘Orientals’ stranded across British ports with no guarantee of returning to their homeland. Lascars simply had to try to buy their way onto the crew of a ship using the same muqqadam system that they had used initially to gain employment in their country of origin. A lack of funds to pay ‘al-ḥaqq al-qahwah’ or opportunity for employment on the right ship meant that lascars often took to begging on the streets of British port cities. Salter makes reference to the many ‘Asiatics’ and Arabs begging in east London around 1856 and recounts the number of unfortunate ‘Oriental lascars’ buried in pauper’s graves in London cemeteries. The favoured locations for congregated lascars in London appear to have been Westminster, Whitechapel and Shadwell, and Salter comments, ‘Westminster has always had its contingent of Asiatic mendicants, with the usual undergrowth of half-caste children.’44 Salter also informs us that the presence of the lascars was neither confined to the imperial capital ‘nor were those resorts restricted to London: similar ones were to be found in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.’45 Amongst the lascar beggars and street entertainers that Salter encountered was a lascar, who he met in both London and Manchester, suggesting that lascars often adopted a vagrant existence to ensure their income. ‘Monkey Abraham’, Salter tells us:
was another [lascar] who issued daily from the ‘Black Hole’. He earned his title from the queer attitudes he could assume. His head was some distance in advance of his body; his elbows kept crookedly afar from each other, while his boney knees sought closest acquaintance. His dress and cap were bedizened with spangles, and he wore a necklace, in four rows, of beads and strange seashells.46
As an evangelical Christian missionary Salter was extremely critical of what he described as ‘telescopic philanthropy’, the process of sending Christian missionaries to all corners of the empire without addressing the reality of thousands of destitute colonial ‘heathens’ roaming the streets of British cities.47
2.3 – The old British Port Authority building at Steamer Point, Aden, now a museum and known by Yemeni sailors as Dār al-Sayyūn (‘Place of Travel’), taken in December 2004.
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