Introduction

Summary

Lascars ashore and afloat

The Lark left Coringa on the eastern coast of India in late May or early June 1783. Laden with beans and pulses, she was bound for the British-controlled port of Madras. As with most ‘country ships’ engaged in intra-Asian trade, the captain was a European but the crew was composed almost exclusively of ‘lascars’ or sailors from east of the Cape of Good Hope. Captain Dean appears to have been highly unpopular with his men during the short voyage since he resorted to floggings on a regular basis. He never reached his intended destination. Officials initially speculated that he might have been taken prisoner by a French privateer but reports soon arrived that the crew had attacked Dean, thrown him into the sea, burnt his ship and then fled ashore. This was not the first time a lascar crew had seized a British merchantman in the Indian Ocean, nor would it be the last. The crews who engineered these mutinous episodes and the seafaring culture to which they belonged form the subject of this book.

The term ‘lascar’ is derived from the Persian word for ‘army or camp follower’. In the eighteenth century, the British and Portuguese used it to refer to Indians attached to artillery pieces in their empires but it later came to be attached to men hired to serve aboard ships. The term is often associated with South Asian sailors but for much of the nineteenth century it was an all-encompassing label that could cover almost any sailor from the Indian Ocean region. As Ravi Ahuja explains, it also implied certain characteristics:

The term ‘lascar’ […] carried connotations of a low, subordinated status and of inferiority to ‘white’ workers. If an ‘unskilled’ Asian labourer was not a worker but a ‘coolie’ and an Indian infantryman not a solider but a ‘sepoy’, an Indian Ocean sailor was not a seaman but merely a ‘lascar’. This discriminating label stuck to Indian seamen even after the end of colonial rule when it was ordered, without much success, not to use it in official correspondence.