The last voyage of the Arabella: life and death aboard a British country ship

Abstract

The brig Arabella was seized by South-East Asian sailors off the western coast of Sumatra in September 1813. A wage dispute motivated one section of the crew to kill the captain, scuttle the vessel and then row for the shore. Subsequent attempts by British officials to apprehend them were frustrated by local politics. The Arabella was a ‘country ship’, or privately owned merchant vessel that traded between Asian ports. Such vessels occupy an important place in the history of Indian Ocean maritime labour yet the experiences of their lascar crews have received very little scholarly attention. This article provides the first in-depth study of a lascar mutiny aboard a British sailing ship. It traces the mutineers from their quarrel with the captain to their deaths in the custody of the East India Company. The incident followed an almost identical pattern to many other uprisings involving lascars that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also presents some highly distinctive features, making it a useful subject for a case study. The mutinous lascars formed relationships with the enslaved members of the ship's company, including a ‘slave sailor’ and the captain's concubine. They also engineered a second shipboard uprising while being transported to Calcutta for trial. The official investigation provides a rare portrait of the social relations aboard a British country ship trading to South-East Asia in the early nineteenth century. It reveals the deep divisions that could exist between members of a mixed Indian Ocean crew, highlighting the problems inherent in dealing with the applied category of ‘lascar’. The investigation also generated over a hundred pages of depositions in which lascars demonstrated their understanding of local politics, described their working lives aboard a sailing vessel, complained about abusive treatment and repeated jokes their shipmates had told about the dead captain. A critical reading of these documents thus offers one of the very few means of recovering lascar voices from the archives.