Chinese Seamen in London and St Helena in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

From the sixteenth century onwards, for the purposes of trade, merchants and sailors from various European nations departed for the Indian Ocean, eventually sailing to every region of Asia. Until the nineteenth century, ocean-going voyages were full of dangers. Scurvy, pirates and severe weather, amongst other perils, greatly increased the mortality of ship crews on their voyage, and under these conditions it became essential to get a supply of local seamen for the ship’s return voyage. As a result, when European ships arrived in China for trade, there was often demand for local seamen to complete the return journey.

Yu Po-ching (游 博 撤) is now a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Support was obtained for the research presented in this article from the ‘Young Visiting Scholar of Taiwan’ programme (no. 2013TWIZB004), in the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing). The author thanks this programme for its support. This chapter is a translation, with some adjustments and corrections according to the editors’ suggestions, based on a previous paper; see Yu, ‘The Chinese’.