This page was created by Peter Thilly.
Sailors and Lascars
The laborers and sailors who crewed the ships owned by Jardine-Matheson, both the clippers plying between China and India, and the coastal receiving ships, were called "lascars." Above we see Captain MacKay of the Jardine ship The Fairy complaining that the rival firm Dent & Company's ship The Lord Amherst (Captained by Thomas Rees) had hired "every Lascar in the place [i.e. Macao]."I am exceedingly ashamed to say that I am still here. I hope however to get away tomorrow with a gang of Manila men for I can get no others. Every Lascar in the place has been shipped for the Lord Amherst and she is still short. JM B2 18, Reel 31, 123, Captain MacKay at Macao to William Jardine in Canton, November 4, 1835.
The term was not an ethnic identifier, per se, although many Europeans understood it as such. A better and more accurate description of these people can be read in the below quotes from the novel Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (a delightful book that does an incredible job of bringing these opium ships to life). Below the quotes is a map detailing a collection of the potential origins of lascar sailors for a Jardine-Matheson ship during these years.
On learning who lascar sailors were, and were they came from:
"This was Zachary's first experience of this species of sailor. He had thought that lascars were a tribe or nation, like the Cherokee or Sioux: he discovered now that they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. They came in groups of ten or fifteen, each with a leader who spoke on their behalf." (Sea of Poppies, p13)
On the challenges of a newly-arrived American learning to sail on a lascar-crewed ship in the 1830s:
"Having been put in charge of the ship's stores, Zachary had to familiarize himself with a new set of provisions, bearing no resemblance to the accustomed hardtack and brined beef; he had to learn to say 'resum' instead of 'rations', and he had to wrap his tongue around words like 'dal', 'masala' and 'achar.' He had to get used to 'malum' instead of mate, 'serang' for bosun, 'tindal' for bosun's mate, and 'seacunny' for helmsman; he had to memorize a new shipboard vocabulary, which sounded a bit like English and yet not: the rigging became the 'ringeen', 'avast!' was 'bas!', and the cry of the middle-morning watch went from 'all's well' to 'alzbel'. The deck now became the 'tootuk' while the masts were 'dols'; a command became a 'hookum' and instead of starboard and larboard, fore and aft, he had to say 'jamna' and 'dawa', 'agil' and 'peechil'." (Sea of Poppies, p15)
