small axe 70 • March 2023 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-10461770 © Small Axe, Inc.
Life Unadministered: Colonial
Care and the Indian Coolie
Najnin Islam
“This pamphlet or tract . . . is intended to discriminate a false and corrupt opinion—viz, the
opinion that coolie emigrants sufer so dreadfully on the passage from Calcutta to the West
Indies, that in spite of all care and attention, at least one third of them die in the passage,
and that consequently, the practice of sending coolies from India to the West Indies causes
a cruel, an outrageous, and an unavoidable loss of human life.”
The “pamphlet or tract” under discussion in this 1859 article in the Colonial Standard and
Jamaica Despatch is a sixteen-page extract from a journal kept by Captain Edolphus Swinton
on board the British ship Salsette.
1
In March 1858 the Salsette sailed from Calcutta to Trinidad
with 324 Indian indentured laborers. It was one of numerous ships that traversed the waters of
the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the wake of the British emancipation of enslaved Africans,
transporting Indian indentured servants to Caribbean sugar plantations. During the Salsette’s
four-month-long voyage, 124 emigrants lost their lives, leading the British colonial government
to conduct an investigation into the high mortality, especially in the absence of an epidemic
on the ship. Captain Swinton died on the return voyage, when the ship foundered of the
coast of New York. Following this, Jane Swinton, the captain’s wife, who had been present
on the Trinidad-bound journey of the Salsette, collaborated with the abolitionist James Carlile
1 Otto Wenkstern, Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch (Kingston), 8 September 1859. Several exchanges between
Wenkstern and L. Chamerovzow, the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, were part of a long article
(headline unknown) in the 8 September issue.
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