Laleh Khalili: Canton Kitty

Laleh Khalili

In 2015, while I was researching a book on shipping, I travelled on the Corte Real from Malta to Jebel Ali. The other two passengers on board, sailing from Hamburg all the way to Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia, were German septuagenarian widows who preferred travelling by freighter to the ‘false sociality’ of cruise ships. They had brought good coffee, which they brewed at 10 a.m. every day in the sitting room on our floor of the housing block, as well as a suitcase full of dry Riesling, which was their aperitif at 5 p.m. every day on their deck, an hour before the appointed dinner time. They invited me to coffee once or twice but never shared the wine.

We weren’t the only women on the vessel. The captain’s contract required him to be at sea for two months at a time, but one of the perks of the job was permission to bring his wife once a year. The captain, like all the officers, was Croatian and had spent much of his career working for Jugolinija, the Yugoslav national freight company, which later became Croatia Line, sailing out of Rijeka. He was jovial and bald and loved to spin colourful yarns about life at sea. His wife turned their sterile suite at the top of the residential block into a more homely space, filling it with family photographs. She invited me and the widows to coffee a couple of times. She was friendly, quiet in English but more gregarious when speaking to the Croatian seafarers.

Towards the end of the journey, she described her life with the captain. They had married when they were very young. After the birth of their only child, a daughter, he decided to give up seafaring and became a docker in Rijeka. The bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia forced him back to sea to earn a living; he had now been a seafarer for twenty years and had another eight to go before he could retire. She was happy that she had plenty of girlfriends who were often also made temporarily single by the maritime trade. They attended parties and special occasions together when their husbands were at sea.

There was a fifth woman on board, one of four officer cadets being trained by the captain. At meals, always strictly at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., she sat at the end of the officers’ table. The captain sat at the head with his wife to his right. The Croatian chief mate and chief engineer sat on either side, the engineers to the left, the deck officers to the right. The Filipino first mate ate his meals in the crew’s mess, and his seat was always left empty. The rest of the officers cascaded down the table according to rank. The three male cadets had their own little table, as did the two widows and I. The woman cadet was businesslike and confident. She seemed to know a lot of the Croatian officers – I found out later they were friends of her boyfriend – and like them spent her spare time in the ship’s gym, lifting weights far heavier than her tiny frame would suggest.

Corte Real was a behemoth: 366 metres in length with a 51-metre beam. When laden, its draught was 16 metres deep, which meant that in shallow waters like the Persian Gulf it had to keep to the designated dredged channels. The cliché was that if you laid the Empire State Building on its side, the top floor would be just a couple of metres longer than Corte Real and its sister ships. Corte Real was built in the Daewoo shipyard in South Korea in 2010. The biggest container ships today are longer, at 400 metres, and the supertanker Seawise Giant – which was built in Japan in 1979 and scrapped in 2010 – was still longer, at 460 metres. Despite Corte Real’s size, there were only 35 people aboard, including those of us along for the ride and the four trainees. By comparison, the world’s largest cruise ships, which are roughly the same size as these freighters, can carry more than ten thousand passengers and crew.

Seafaring is a bundle of contradictions. It is highly skilled labour, yet mostly invisible. Lower ratings of seafarers are housed together, six or eight to a claustrophobic cabin, yet they are chronically lonely. They may love the adventure of going to sea, but their everyday work is tedious and backbreaking. They pride themselves on their professionalism, and can’t wait to retire. Seamen are notorious for their portside debauchery, even as most of them long for their families. They are reliable breadwinners, but are often at sea for so long they become strangers to their children. Although international labour regulations require that seafarers serve no more than eleven months at a time at sea, global events and the caprice of shipowners sometimes lead to longer confinement. Stories of seafarers abandoned aboard without wages, and even without fuel or food or water, are not rare. During the Covid pandemic, some seafarers were forced to remain on their ships for almost two years.

The lower ratings aboard the two freighters on which I have travelled were mostly Filipino (though there were two Indian able seamen on Corte Real and two Chinese oilers on Calisto the following year). Most were in their twenties or early thirties; the bosuns were experienced middle-aged family men. In 2021, the Philippines provided nearly 10 per cent of all officers and 13 per cent of all crew, more than any other country (followed by Russia, Indonesia, China and India). The Filipino chefs on both journeys had worked in swanky hotels in Dubai or on cruise ships, but they preferred working on a freighter. The messmen, ranked lowest in the strict maritime hierarchy, were young Filipino men, perhaps in their late teens. On one of the journeys, the messman politely offered himself to me, which I equally politely declined.

Last year, the International Labour Organisation and the International Maritime Organisation agreed to a voluntary global minimum wage for seafarers of $690 per month. On Corte Real and Calisto, the Asian crew earned around $1000 per month and served at sea for nine months at a time. The officers earned many times that. National laws still determine wage structures and living conditions, which is why three-quarters of the world’s fleet fly flags of convenience, allowing them to follow the laws of countries with lax employment and environmental regulations.

The turnaround time for container ships at modern ports can be under a day, and seafarers are often so busy with portside tasks that they remain aboard. When ships are in port for longer, seafarers go to town for rest and recreation. Marsaxlokk in Malta is a favourite, since Valletta and its many pleasures is a mere half-hour drive away. The morning I boarded Corte Real in Malta, most of the crew and officers were visibly hungover. They liked Beirut and the ports in Turkey, they told me, but at the time I was travelling both were out of bounds because of political tensions. Before our arrival in Jeddah, the captain ordered that everyone turn in their booze, music and porn for safekeeping, in case port inspectors came aboard.

That we had a woman seafarer aboard was highly unusual. A 2024 survey by the IMO indicated that only 1 per cent of the nearly two million seafarers plying the waves are women, and most of them work on cruise ships or passenger ferries. When passenger ships were grounded during Covid, some women seafarers moved into the freight sector, but harsh contract conditions led many to leave seafaring altogether. A survey of 1128 women seafarers published in 2022 found that gender-based discrimination (60 per cent), intimidation by male colleagues (66 per cent) and physical and sexual harassment (25 per cent) were the main problems at sea. Male seafarers from the Global South also reported bullying and harassment by white officers who saw them as effeminate, submissive or soft.

Ships have long been masculine spaces, despite the presence of women. A 14th-century chronicle mentions the young women, nuns and widows kidnapped by John Arundel’s men and taken to sea during the Hundred Years’ War, sixty of whom were thrown overboard when the ships hit bad weather, the long-standing belief being that women brought bad luck at sea. Records show that a few Spanish women – maidservants, merchants and convicts – crossed the Atlantic on Columbus’s voyages. From the 1530s onwards, thousands of women travelled to the Americas and to the Indian Ocean. Women missionaries, religious nonconformists, artisans and servants migrated from Europe to settle the New World. Convict ships took around 25,000 women to Australia. Approximately four million African women – a third of all enslaved Africans – were forcibly transported to the Americas between the 16th and the 19th century; their names were almost never recorded.

The notorious 18th-century pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny were preceded in the 16th century by Sayyida al Hurra – privateer queen of Tetuan and ally of the feared Ottoman admiral Heyreddin Barbarossa – and followed in the 19th century by Zheng Yi Sao, whose four hundred pirate junks raided European ships in the South China Sea. Pirates transgressed the law of the sea, the sovereignty of imperial metropoles, the rules of property and precepts of bourgeois decency – and women pirates doubly so.

In the age of sail, the British state’s attitude towards women on ships shifted from leaving them to the discretion of the ship’s master to regulating them extensively. Intrepid sea-going women dressed as men and uncloaked themselves only after they had already established their authority as seafarers and fighters. Some were discovered during flogging. In Female Tars (1996), Suzanne Stark describes many such women, including the Black seafarer ‘William Brown’ – her real name isn’t known – who served in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Brown was captain of the foretop on HMS Queen Charlotte, a role, as Stark writes, only given to a sailor who was ‘agile and unafraid of heights; he had to be experienced in working the sails, both from the deck and aloft. He also needed to have gained the respect of his fellow seamen, who must follow his lead without hesitation.’

Even where women weren’t forbidden from serving on or captaining ships, male seafarers were rarely eager to obey their authority. Mary Patten, the protagonist of Tilar Mazzeo’s The Sea Captain’s Wife, went to sea in 1856 aboard Neptune’s Car, a 64-metre-long clipper known for its speed. She was 19 years old and pregnant. When her husband, Joshua Patten, fell ill with tubercular meningitis in the South Atlantic, she stepped in to captain the vessel through Cape Horn’s treacherous icebergs, all the way to San Francisco, a journey of 56 days. Patten had learned to read nautical charts and measure winds and currents on previous voyages. She quelled a mutiny and cared for her bedbound husband before bringing the ship to port. Joshua died soon after they disembarked. Mary, who had survived malaria and typhoid fever, died of tuberculosis five years later.

Mazzeo has put together her story from news reports, census records and secondary sources. Although Patten was fêted in the press, she found herself short of money after Joshua’s death. In the passages Mazzeo cites, Patten is often patronised – even infantilised. Commentators recognised her courage and resourcefulness in bringing Neptune’s Car safely into harbour, but there is a whiff of disapproval at her overstepping the bounds of propriety as a woman. The comments about her pregnancy, and the fact that she hid it from the sailors, show how unnerved observers were at this breach of custom.

According to the Women’s International Shipping and Trading Association, the first woman to captain a mechanised ocean-going merchant vessel was Anna Ivanovna Shchetinina, who enrolled in the Vladivostok Marine School in 1925 and became a captain ten years later at the age of 27. Outside the Warsaw Bloc, maritime academies opened to women only in the 1970s. Since then, a tiny number of women have attained the training and experience necessary to become certified as a master mariner who can carry unlimited gross tonnage on any ocean (the first woman to become captain of a cruise ship was Karin Stahre-Janson in 2007).

Whatever the strictures on sexuality at sea, ports have always been a different matter. The commerce passing through Antwerp and Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries attracted traders from Europe and beyond, and with them gambling, drinking, prostitution and every kind of revelry. Port Royal in Jamaica was famous in the 17th century for its debauchery, a result of both its profitability as a trading centre and its ungovernability. Bristol and Liverpool became the focus of moral panic as the British Empire expanded. Claude McKay’s account of Marseille in the interwar period captures some of these attractions and dangers:

Port of seamen’s dreams and their nightmares. Port of the bums’ delight, the enchanted breakwater. Port of innumerable ships, blowing out, booming in, riding the docks, blessing the town with sweaty activity and giving sustenance to worker and boss, peddler and prostitute, pimp and panhandler.

All this made ports a favourite target of missionaries determined to improve the resident and visiting population. Reverend Joseph Salter wrote two books – Asiatics in England (1873) and The East in the West (1895) – about his experience of evangelising to the lascars (Asian and African sailors) in Whitechapel, Wapping and Shadwell. Salter was convinced that ‘between these waifs from the banks of the Indus and Ganges, and the reputable white man brought up on the banks of the Thames, there is a great gulf fixed, and this gulf is crossed by very few.’ But his own account of life in sailor towns belied the claim. Salter was particularly affronted by the white women who took up with the lascars and ‘whose language and habits [they] acquired’. He singled out ‘Chinese Emma’, ‘Canton Kitty’, ‘Calcutta Louisa’ and especially ‘Lascar Sally’ – women who ran boarding houses and partnered with foreign seafarers.

Nadine Attewell’s Archives of Intimacy considers racial mixing in three port cities – London, Liverpool and Hong Kong – in the first half of the 20th century. Attewell uses archival records, memoirs and photographs to trace the way Chinese workers moved ‘along imperial circuits, but not always in accordance with imperial dictates or desires’. In London’s Limehouse and Liverpool’s Pitt Street the community was composed of seafarers and veterans of the Chinese Labour Corps, a force of 96,000 non-combatants employed by the British during the First World War as logistics and construction workers on European battlefields, many of whom continued to work until 1920, exhuming bodies and munitions. In Hong Kong, Chinese workers from the interior mixed with workers and migrants from other parts of the empire. The neighbourhoods Attewell sketches teem with life and complex, mostly convivial, social relations. The racial categories imposed by the authorities weren’t always a barrier to relations based on desire, friendship or solidarity. Her book is attentive to work and sex but also to the role played by shared food cultures, linguistic variety and ‘systems of mutual aid … developed in response to precarity, exploitation, inequity and inadequate, even dangerous, living conditions’.

Attewell gives a full account of the way these communities were treated in the interwar years. The number of Chinese men in East London dropped dramatically from 1400 in 1919 to 300 only two years later, as the homes and businesses of Chinese and other immigrants were set alight by race rioters, whose violence was fanned by sensationalist newspapers. One police constable reported to his superiors that the migrant community ‘regard themselves as British subjects [and] claim equal treatment with whites and contend that they fought for the British Empire during the war and manned their food ships during the submarine campaign’. Meanwhile, as the historian Marika Sherwood wrote in an essay on lascars in Britain, the National Union of Seamen excluded non-white seafarers from the improved wages and conditions the union had won through collective bargaining. In 1919, the National Maritime Board set four distinct wage rates: ‘Chinese, Asiatics and Coloured ratings’ were all to be paid less than white seamen. Sherwood also records the Labour Party chairman John Clynes calling for the deportation not only of ‘coloured alien seamen’ but even of ‘coloured British subjects’.

Attewell describes the anxiety among the white male population that Chinese migrant men were taking the ‘good jobs, suitable housing and white sexual partners needed for successful performance of white British masculinity’. Racism also played out in Hong Kong, where colonial subjects of mixed racial descent were barred from buying homes in the exclusive neighbourhood of Victoria Peak. Everywhere the British flag flew, interracial intimacy was cause for opprobrium, so much so that many white women who married Chinese men ‘insisted that they did not much socialise with Chinese men other than their husbands … and that they rigorously excluded from their social circles any woman they suspected of “com[ing] after the Chinamen”.’

On ships and in ports, a fluid and mobile population defied regimes of respectability. They were at once all too visible – to missionaries, reformers and the police – and invisible as collectives. They were patronised, improved, ground down, burned out and still left traces of themselves in the archives, the cities and buildings, news reports, photographs, records of the law and the state. In Imperial Intimacies (2019), Hazel Carby asks: ‘Is it possible to produce a reckoning of movement between and among places, spaces and peoples, the scattering that results in racialised encounters and the violent transactions that produce racialised subjects?’ As memories of such encounters and transactions are stirred up by images of migrant houses burning in Belfast and Glasgow, such a reckoning seems a long way off.

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