The 1852 Centaur Shipwreck: Law, politics and society in the Persian Gulf

Abstract

The 1852 Centaur Shipwreck:Law, politics and society in the Persian Gulf Seema Alavi The Incident In 1852 Centaur—a 550-ton British merchant ship under the command of Captain William Taylor Salmon—set sail from Calcutta on a voyage to Bushire and Basrah in the Persian Gulf. Its owner was Haji Baba Tazim—a British Indian subject. She had an insured cargo of rice, sugar and 1,645 chests of indigo valued at about 12 lakh Indian rupees. She wrecked in dense fog 25 miles south of Rāʾs al-Ḥadd, located at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman where it enters the Persian Gulf above and meets the Indian Ocean below.1 The site of the wreck was 120 miles from Muscat and well within the territorial jurisdiction of its Sultan Sayyed Sa'id.2 Arabs mainly from the Banī Bū ʿAlī tribe looted her cargo. A passing sheikh of the Jeneba tribe, that was also involved in the plunder, offered his boat to carry the crew for 100 Maria Theresa dollars (hereafter, $MT) to the safety of Muscat.3 The Muscat sultan on the advice of A. Hamerton, the British consul, initiated an investigation to get to the bottom of the shipwreck.4 But his team was unable to reach the site because of bad weather and returned to Muscat. The damaged and plundered Centaur was set on fire by the tribes, making investigation impossible. The Context Observers noted that the looted Bengal indigo comprised the entire annual stock that was consumed in the Persian Gulf. This may well have been the case as Indigo—the vivid blue pigment produced from plants belonging to the genus Indigofera—, indigenous to many tropical and subtropical parts of the world including India, was of high value in the region. In the Persian Gulf societies it was used to dye cloth, and also as a pigment for body paint by tribes of the Arabian Peninsula at weddings and festivities. It also had medicinal value. Temporally and spatially the Centaur shipwreck can be located in a specific moment in Omani history when its political sovereignty was contested by Britain, which was determined to control the Western Indian Ocean. By the mid-nineteenth century Oman's economy was booming. The reduction in the European slave trade due to the anti-slavery campaign of Britain diverted slave labor and capital to the hands of Arabs, who invested it in Omani clove and date plantations.5 This increased Britain's resolve to interfere and have an upper hand in the ocean. The internal tensions within the Sultanate offered the perfect canvas for British intervention and competition: royal family feuds, ambitions of Omani political and religious leaders, the Arab tribes and the Wahabi incursions. The Argument It is in the backdrop of these imperial rivalries that the claims for the recovery and reparation of indigo assumes special significance. Historians have written the history of commodities, like indigo, that moved across the Indian Ocean as integral to the story of colonialism and capitalism.6 Recent histories offer a more textured view of imperialism by putting the spotlight on the Indian Ocean as a transregional space of exchange where itinerant communities created legal regimes that sustained their commercial and social exchanges with political implications.7 Other works explain the working of different forms of "customary law" at sea to explain incidents of piracy, and the role of the loot and plunder that followed shipwrecks in building the political economy of tribes.8 This essay enriches these legal histories of the ocean by detailing the microhistory of law as reflected in the unfolding of the Centaur story. The many different experiences of individuals impacted by the same mishap but located in different geographical, social and political contexts offers a thick connectedness of things on scales both small and large.9 The movement of the looted indigo and the fight for its recovery and reparation made the Persian Gulf the main site of social interaction for three sets of people: the merchants, ship-owners and underwriters; the sultans, the Arab sheikhs and the tribes; and the British political agents and legal experts. It became a critical social space of...