Among the ranks of history’s most iconic warships – the likes of HMS Victory, the USS Missouri, and the German dreadnought Bismarck – stands proudly the immortal Nemesis. The first iron-hulled warship in the East, it was employed with devastating effect in the First Opium War (1839–1841). Its debut was a milestone in naval technology and it played a starring role in a war that was a turning point for world history.
Magnificent in design and performance, the ship had a name to match. Nemesis! It hisses off the tongue with menace and beautiful simplicity – notice the lack of the HMS prefix (though the captain and the other top officers were from the navy, the ship belonged to the East India Company). The Royal Navy had some memorably named naval punishers – HMS Revenge, HMS Spiteful, HMS Vengeance, HMS Vindictive, HMS Spanker – but these sound rather too specific and hot-blooded in their passions. Nemesis was the Greek goddess of divine retribution, specifically retribution for the crime of arrogance before the gods (hubris), and it was a fitting name for the conflict because it was Chinese hubris (admittedly in the face of Western greed and arrogance) that sparked the war and prolonged it.
The Opium Wars have been well covered elsewhere so I’ll not go into details here. Similarly, Adrian G. Marshall’s Nemesis: The First Iron Warship and her World is the story of a ship and its place in time rather than just than an account of the war.
The Nemesis was built in Liverpool in 1839, and was the first steamship to sail out to the Orient under her own power. Because finding sufficient fuel was problematic, the standard practice was for steamships to be shipped out in parts and assembled in India.
Like a Toyota Prius – but a bit more exciting – the Nemesis was a hybrid, and she made most of the journey out under sail. She arrived off Macau in November 1840, after a journey of 243 days (of which 181 were spent at sea). At more than twenty thousand miles, this was the longest voyage ever completed by a steamship.
Although the ship had started out with an all-white crew, once in Asian waters some local men were employed. The cosmopolitan nature of the crew on such an important ship was a surprise (as were their wages). Talking about refueling and taking on new hands at Singapore, Marshall writes:
… four had ‘run’, so a number of new men – notably stokers – were engaged, Indians (‘lascars’), Chinese (‘Chinamen’) and Filipinos (‘Manila-men’), all paid at the same rate as Europeans; indeed from now on her stokers were nearly always Asians. The ship was also loaded with the maximum amount of coal that she could carry, 175 tons, enough for 15 days steaming. This took 20 coolies working all night and all day, paid a dollar (25p) for the night shift and half a dollar for the day, somewhat more than an Able Seaman was paid.
The book is full of such lovely detail. Needless-to-say, the ones about onboard beverages were of particular interest to me. The sailors enjoyed generous lashings of small beer (beer of one or – at most – two percent alcohol), black-strap (cheap red wine, diluted) or “grog” (diluted rum).
On ships of the Royal Navy a gallon