The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914

By Boyd Cothran and J. Samuel Walker

It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and holds of a single vessel. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it.

Built in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured laborers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others. But the power of this story rests in the everyday ways people, nations, economies, and ideas were knitted together in this foundational era of our modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469676562

Boyd Cothran

Boyd Cothran is associate professor of history at York University.

Book preview

The Edwin Fox

The Edwin Fox

HOW AN ORDINARY SAILING SHIP CONNECTED THE WORLD IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION, 1850–1914

Boyd Cothran & Adrian Shubert

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2023 Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert

All rights reserved

Set in Bulmer and Meta Serif

by Rebecca Evans

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Bottom: Vue générale de La Havane: À vol d’oiseau by John Bachmann, ca. 1860, courtesy of HistoryMiami Museum.

Left lens: Edwin Fox postage stamp, from the private collection of Adrian Shubert. Right lens: Old World or Eastern Hemisphere, map by William Faden, 1786, courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cothran, Boyd, author. | Shubert, Adrian, 1953– author.

Title: The Edwin Fox : how an ordinary sailing ship connected the world in the age of globalization, 1850–1914 / Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023017142 | ISBN 9781469676555 (cloth; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469676562 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Edwin Fox (Ship)—History. | Globalization—History. | Sailing ships—History. | Shipping—History. | International trade—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / World | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration

Classification: LCC HF1365 .C684 2023 | DDC 337—dc23/eng/20230530

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017142

To my father

— Boyd

To the memory of my parents

— Adrian

CONTENTS

Prologue. SETTING SAIL: Calcutta, India, 1853

1. TEAK AND TRADE: London, 1856

2. COOLIES: Havana, Cuba, 1858

3. CONVICTS: Western Australia, 1858

4. FREIGHT: Bombay, India, 1860

5. EMIGRANTS: Plymouth, England, 1878

6. FROZEN LAMB: Port Chalmers, New Zealand, 1882

Epilogue. MUSEUM SHIP: Picton, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2019

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1.1. Edwin Goodhugh Fox

2.1. Havana harbor

2.2. Chinese representation of the barracoons

2.3a. Chinese coolie contract, 1857

2.3b. Spanish coolie contract, 1857

2.4. Chinese representation of a coolie committing suicide

3.1. John Edward Henderson

3.2a. The Great Train Robbers, Agar

3.2b. The Great Train Robbers, Burgess

3.2c. The Great Train Robbers, Tester

3.3. Aboriginal prisoners, Rottnest Island

4.1. Ship auction at Lloyd’s

4.2. Captain Joseph Ferguson

4.3. Chart of the 1865 voyage

4.4. Full rigging and barque rigging

5.1. Sketch of the layout of an emigrant ship

5.2. Attack on a Māori Pā, 1863

5.3. Albatross skull

5.4. Quilt made during a voyage to New Zealand

5.5. The Robins family

5.6. A burial at sea

5.7. Immigrants arriving at Lyttelton

5.8a. Margaret Hocking

5.8b. John Hocking

5.9. Brinsmead and Sons piano

5.10. Tippu Tip’s ivory camp

6.1. The New Zealand Frozen Meat Trade

6.2. Corriedale sheep

6.3. Marketing frozen New Zealand lamb in the United Kingdom

6.4. The Edwin Fox and the SS Maori, Picton

6.5. The Edwin Fox, ca. 1900

6.6. Hulk of the Edwin Fox, ca. 1920s–1930s

E.1. Joseph Banks bartering with a Māori man

E.2. The Edwin Fox at Shakespeare Bay, January 1986

E.3. Edwin Fox postage stamp, first day cover

MAPS

0.1. Frontispiece

1.1. Asian monsoons

4.1. Tramping in the Bay of Bengal

5.1. Emigrant voyages to New Zealand

The Edwin Fox

PROLOGUE

Setting Sail

Calcutta, India, 1853

On the morning of December 14, 1853, William Taylor Salmon, the thirty-two-year-old master of the Edwin Fox, stood outside the formidable timber gates of the Union Docks construction yard and waited. It was just before six in the morning.¹ The first rays of dawn shone from beneath the horizon as he gazed across the Hooghly River toward the tightly packed settlement to the east. The weather was cool and dry, a welcome respite from the torrential monsoon rains that swelled the river each year. It had not been a severe season: June saw heavier than usual rains, causing flooding and damaging crops in the west. But as the rainfall subsided, life on the river assumed a more industrious pace.² Men piled into their red- and blue-painted country boats. Women washed clothes on the submerged white steps of the ghats. Young boys with slender poles coaxed their gilt-horned oxen into and out of the river, churning up the chestnut-colored waters of the slow-moving Hooghly. And through it all, a constant din of bells and drums echoed in the background—the hum of life, motion, and shipborne commerce: American schooners, Chinese junks, Arab dhows, and tiny boats with names Salmon may not have known.³

As he stood on the pier and took it all in, the young captain reflected on the cosmopolitan nature of this place, and how he would soon leave it. Earlier that morning, the harbormaster had worked the Edwin Fox free from the fore and aft moorings and towed the ship around a bend to an anchorage near the Palladian mansions lining the river at Garden Reach. All he needed now was for his pilot to show up.

Born to a family of sailors in Rochford in Essex, Captain Salmon was an experienced seaman who served as master for numerous ships until his final, fateful journey aboard the steamer Persia, lost in the Bay of Bengal to a cyclone on October 5, 1864.⁴ He knew the importance of a steady pilot to help navigate the Ganges delta. Even if the Edwin Fox made this maiden voyage with a light cargo of rice, rapeseed, linseed, safflower, horn tips, castor oil, cowhides, jute, and various other miscellany, the ship’s draft—twenty-one feet, six inches—made crossing the shallow waters and hidden sandbars of the Hooghly perilous.⁵

Salmon had done everything he could to prepare. He had checked and rechecked the boatswain’s loading job to ensure that the bulkheads were secured and that the vessel sailed on an even keel. He had walked the black-and-white taffrail and inspected the transoms. And from the quarterdeck, he had ordered his men to inspect everything from the halyards to the deadeyes. Five days earlier, the port authorities had also surveyed the Edwin Fox and declared it seaworthy, recording its description and issuing its registration certificate as Calcutta no. 12/1853.⁶

At a registered tonnage of 836, it was well below the 1860 average of 1,200 tons, and with an overall length of 157 feet and the staid, square rigging of a man-of-war, the Edwin Fox was neither fast nor particularly large.⁷ It was exceptional for being unexceptional and, in some ways, old-fashioned even before the keel was laid down. Its design derived from the apple-cheeked Blackwall frigates built on the Thames in London as replacements for the lordly and lugubrious East Indiaman.⁸ Round-bottomed and sturdy, more suited to carrying London general merchandise than for setting speed records, it had none of the prestige of the great tea and opium clippers like the Cutty Sark, which captured the public imagination at the time.⁹ Yet the Edwin Fox and workaday merchant ships like it played a far greater role in connecting the world in the late nineteenth century than their more famous relatives.¹⁰

As if on cue, the pilot appeared just before dawn with his entourage. Salmon greeted the men, and together they embarked on a skiff to board the larger vessel. With the master and pilot aboard, the Edwin Fox was a hive of activity. It had a full complement of sixty-five men and five officers. Although no crew agreements survive from this maiden voyage, the ship was likely manned almost entirely by Indian sailors known as lascars.¹¹ If so, the Edwin Fox was not alone: although British regulations had long discriminated against Indian crews (the British Navigation Act of 1651 required that all trade between England and its colonies be conducted by vessels built in Britain and sailed by a British crew), these restrictions loosened during the Napoleonic Wars, and by the 1820s lascars accounted for an estimated two-thirds of the crew members on London-bound ships out of India. Although the profusion of Indian sailors led to additional regulations intended to constrain the lascars’ role in the British shipping industry, by the time the Edwin Fox set sail in the winter of 1853, virtually all restrictions on the employment of lascars had been lifted.¹²

If British shipping interests out of India were reluctant to employ local sailors, they showed no such compunction when it came to employing Bengali craftsmen and material. In fact, Calcutta’s shipbuilding industry flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century. This boom resulted partly from the lower costs of building and repairing ships in the East—British-built vessels cost up to twice as much—and partly from the superior quality of the craftsmanship and material used.¹³

The Edwin Fox was well built and fashioned to last. It was made of teak, considered among the finest timber in the world for shipbuilding, and morung sal, or saul (Shorea robusta), a hearty wood native to north and central India.¹⁴ Insurance companies such as Lloyd’s of London gave discounted rates to ships made of teak. Many shipwrights preferred it over even the hardest English oak because of its natural resistance to Teredo navalis, the dreaded naval shipworm whose rapacious appetite could destroy a ship’s hull in a matter of months, especially in warmer equatorial waters.¹⁵ Built from Burmese teak by Bengali craftsmen and manned predominately by lascars, the Edwin Fox was shaped, carved, rigged, and sailed by Indian hands. It was truly a daughter of the East.

Fully loaded and cleared for departure, the Edwin Fox began its journey down the Hooghly, past Manikhali Point and Moyapur Bar around the James and Mary Shoals through Diamond Harbour to the Saugor Roads, where the river opens wide into the Bay of Bengal—a voyage of nearly 120 miles from the Union Docks in Calcutta. From the quarterdeck, Captain Salmon ordered his men to bring the ship about, calling on them to haul tight on the mizzen to take full advantage of the gentle breezes typical of that time of year. It was December 24, Christmas Eve, and the Edwin Fox was sailing for London via the Cape of Good Hope.

Over the next fifty years, the Edwin Fox—a small, unadorned slowpoke in the heyday of the age of sail and a weary workhorse in the age of steam—had an extraordinary career. On its arrival in London, it was chartered by the British government as a troop carrier during the Crimean War. It then returned to Asia to carry diverse cargoes within East and Southeast Asia, between Asia and Great Britain, between the United States and Europe, and even between Norway and Australia. The Edwin Fox carried indentured laborers (coolies)¹⁶ from China to Cuba to start their indenture periods and returned Indian coolies after completing their terms of service in Mauritius. It transported convicts from Great Britain and throughout the empire to what is now the state of Western Australia. And beginning in 1873, it took British settlers to Aotearoa New Zealand as part of a massive scheme devised by Julius Vogel, the colonial premier, to transform the colony into a progressive British paradise.¹⁷ Mark Twain would later describe it as a junior England.¹⁸ In 1885, after it was past its best-by date as a sailing ship, the Edwin Fox was converted into a floating refrigeration unit for the emerging trade in frozen lamb between the Colony of New Zealand and Great Britain. Finally, in 1905, the ship was gutted and turned into a coal hulk before being all but abandoned for nearly a century, awaiting its final destiny as a monument of sorts to its era.

Working throughout the crucial decades that the historian Jürgen Osterhammel has called the inner focal point of the nineteenth century, the Edwin Fox was truly a vessel of globalization.¹⁹ The years between 1850 and 1914 witnessed staggering and unprecedented change on a global scale.²⁰ The rapid expansion and intensification of trade around the world, the spread of industrialization, and the integration of settler colonies into imperial markets were hallmarks of the era. International trade grew from 6 percent of global GPD in the early nineteenth century to 14 percent by 1914. The outbreak of World War I brought this first wave of globalization to an end and initiated a period of thirty years when it went into reverse. Two world wars, financial crises, and isolationism brought trade down to 5 percent of global GPD. The end of World War II brought forth a new era of globalization under the economic hegemony of the United States, but international trade wouldn’t return to the levels seen during the inner focal point of the nineteenth century until 1989. And despite astonishing technological developments, the globalization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries remained heavily dependent on ships, just as it had during the first, pivotal era of globalization of which the Edwin Fox was a part.²¹ Yet while the newly globally interconnected planet of the late nineteenth century created wealth on a scale never before seen, that wealth was not evenly shared. Just as this global reordering entailed Western imperialism’s great thrust into nearly every corner of the earth, resulting in the unprecedented migrations of people (both free and forced) and massive environmental change, it also ushered in the large-scale and systematic dispossession of Indigenous peoples and their replacement with settler populations. Vessels of globalization such as the Edwin Fox contributed to those devastating developments too.

The period between 1870 and World War I was also the great era of imperial expansion. Driven by a combination of economic motives, international rivalries, and beliefs about racial superiority, a number of European countries, as well as the United States and Japan, carved up much of the globe. Africa was the primary target. In 1875, less than 10 percent of the continent was part of a European empire; twenty years later, less than 10 percent was free of imperial rule. The British Empire was by far the biggest winner, adding more than 4 million square miles and 66 million people, but France, Germany, and Belgium also claimed huge new territories and populations. In this context, there was inevitably an intimate connection between globalization and empire, above all for the British Empire. Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson even posit the existence of a British world economy [that] was among the first and most powerful sponsors of globalization as we recognize it today.²² Maritime connections were the fundamental sinews of the British Empire. This assemblage of colonial holdings, ports and zones of influence was, as historian Tony Ballantyne describes it, a maritime order … dependent on the movement of vessels, large and small, over short trips and world-spanning voyages.²³ The Edwin Fox was one of those vessels, although its voyages transcended even the expansive British imperial world.

Historians have grappled with how to approach these epochal processes. Some have written massive, sweeping syntheses of nineteenth-century globalization, such as Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World and Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World.²⁴ Others have studied single commodities such as cotton, rice, and even guano, or authored microhistories focused on single individuals.²⁵ But despite their ubiquity and their centrality to the long-distance movement of goods and people well into the twentieth century, workaday merchant ships such as the Edwin Fox have essentially evaded global historians’ sonar. As Martin Dusinberre and Roland Wenzlhuemer put it in their introduction to a recent special issue of the Journal of Global History, Despite their centrality to the literature of ‘global’ or ‘world’ history, ships as historical arenas in their own right have often remained beyond the global historian’s gaze, featuring merely as ‘other spaces’ in our work.²⁶

That is not to say that global historians have completely ignored the careers of ships and the stories they have to tell us. Historians have written books about individual ships, although they are all very different from this one. Most have dealt with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the slave trade being a favorite topic. Most have focused on one or two voyages.²⁷ Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History does something different again. Rather than an actual vessel, it explores the slave ship as a category, and in doing so, tells the human story of the Middle Passage over three centuries. Cian T. McMahon does something similar for the ships of that carried Irish migrants during the Great Famine in his The Coffin Ship.²⁸ But as voluminous as this literature may be, none of it has used the career of a single vessel to tell the story of nineteenth-century globalization writ large.²⁹ Maya Jasanoff writes in her study of Joseph Conrad’s global life that he watched the emergence of the globally inter-related world of today … from the deck of a ship.³⁰ We wrote this book because we believe one can observe that same transformational process even more fully from the decks of the Edwin Fox.

This book offers a view of how the world changed in the late nineteenth century from the deck of a single ship. It is less a day-by-day, year-by-year study of the ship’s workings than a journey alongside and within this remarkable vessel as it sailed to almost every corner of the world in its more than thirty-year career. Along the way, we will discover the rich stories and unexpected connections, and learn about the diverse cast of characters the Edwin Fox encountered throughout its exceedingly long and varied career.

To tell this story, we had to journey to the ends of the earth ourselves and deploy an array of research approaches. At times, finding traces of the ship was like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Fortunately, there were a surprising number of needles and we benefited from exceptionally good metal detectors. For half a decade, we mined every surviving account of the ship’s many voyages. We used every extant ship log, ship chart, and crew agreement. To fill in the gaps, we spent weeks tracking down every reference to the ship in Lloyd’s List and the shipping news for hundreds of digitized newspapers. In the end, we reviewed more than 300 ports of call and at-sea sightings of the ship. With this information, we compiled the most extensive database of the ship’s daily locations to date and reconstructed, using mapping software such as ArcGIS, a visualization of the ship’s voyages on a daily basis across its more than thirty-year career. We also conducted research on three continents and made extensive use of the comprehensive collections of digitized newspapers in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United Kingdom to find local reports, court proceedings, and accounts of sailors and passengers associated with the Edwin Fox. We also found naval reports and the logs of surgeons, schoolteachers, and letters and reminiscences from passengers, officers, and crewmen. We also mined family histories, local legends, and even the ship itself.

Our approach of using the voyages of a single merchant vessel to tell the story of globalization in the late nineteenth century—and what it meant for ordinary men and women around the world—makes that history tangible on a human scale, in a way that captures the messiness, complexities, and associations that might otherwise remain invisible. It also makes the tale of the Edwin Fox one for modern times. We wrote this book during the COVID-19 pandemic, itself a part of the globalization of our own time. The pandemic disrupted the lives of billions of people around the globe. The international scale of the pandemic—from its onset to its lasting effects and implications—revealed in no uncertain terms the grave, even catastrophic downsides of globalization. The story of this humble vessel, the people and things it carried, and the places it visited reveals the complex and contradictory inner workings of human history’s first important period of globalization. Approaching nineteenth-century globalization through the many voyages of Edwin Fox removes it from the realm of the mythical or arcane. It highlights the local and human agency at work. And perhaps most important, it creates opportunities to explore the myriad complexities and the intimate and unexpected interconnections that really were the stuff of globalization.

Our story begins with the world in which the Edwin Fox was built. A time of extraordinary change on a global scale, the mid-nineteenth century saw the emerging dynamics of global free trade and global migrations that would characterize the rest of the century. It was also a period in which global free trade went hand in hand with expanding imperialism and the widespread dispossession of Indigenous peoples. In chapter 1, we tell how the Edwin Fox was built and follow its maiden voyage to London, where it was quickly sold and drafted into service as a troop transport for the British navy in the Crimean War. After its term of service ended, we follow the ship on two distinctive voyages in the late 1850s that we call its Voyages of Unfreedom. Chapter 2 examines the world of nineteenth-century coolitude, recounting a voyage in which the Edwin Fox carried indentured laborers from China to Cuba. Chapter 3 considers the intersection of convict colonialism and settler colonialism as it explores the voyage in which the ship transported convicts from the United Kingdom and throughout the empire to Western Australia. Chapter 4 widens the focus to show how throughout the 1860s the Edwin Fox carried every imaginable cargo around the world even as global shipping changed dramatically with the emergence of steamships and new business and infrastructure projects. In 1870s, the Edwin Fox reinvented itself once again, this time as an immigrant ship. Chapter 5 examines these voyages and the ways globalization drove processes of settler colonialism. Part of Julius Vogel’s assisted migration scheme, the Edwin Fox throughout the 1870s and early 1880s took settlers from the United Kingdom to the Colony of New Zealand as part of a massive settler colonial project. In the process, it participated indirectly in the wide-ranging dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the transformation of Aotearoa into the Colony of New Zealand. In 1885, after the Edwin Fox was well past its prime as a sailing ship, its owners sought to squeeze out one last bit of profit by selling it to a company that converted the ship into a floating freezer unit for the emerging trade in frozen lamb between the Colony of New Zealand and Great Britain. In this final act of service, the Edwin Fox helped connect the world through the food people ate while never leaving its snug harbor on the South Island of New Zealand.

As we explore the many worlds of the Edwin Fox, we will encounter several important themes. As today, globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century had a technological component. Steamships and telegraphs were its signatures. But this process was not driven entirely by technology. Even as steamships were becoming more prominent and the opening of the Suez Canal further reduced the travel time between Europe and Asia, sailing ships—including an old-fashioned one such as the Edwin Fox—continued to play an important role.³¹ Nor was globalization exclusively driven by imperial economic and political elites, though they were important too. The Edwin Fox carried convicts to Western Australia and settlers to the British Colony of New Zealand because settlers and colonial authorities wanted them there. It carried coolies to Cuba to meet planters’ demands for labor, even though this caused complications for imperial authorities in Madrid. In other words, the periphery drove globalization as much as the metropolitan core. Above all, though, globalization involved people, from wealthy shipowners like Duncan Dunbar and Cuban planters like Julián de Zulueta to settlers like thirty-two-year-old single mother and tailoress Elizabeth Broadhurst, women’s suffrage campaigner Margaret Hocking, and Dr. Frederick Everard Hunt; from coolies like Angtau Mauricio and lascars like Mosio Ali to convicts like William Messenger and William Graham. Globalization had diverse and unpredictable human outcomes for the people who traveled on the Edwin Fox, for those who lived where it visited, and even for those far removed from its ports of call. Like today, globalization generated tremendous wealth and ushered in periods of unprecedented prosperity, but only for some; its costs and consequences were borne disproportionately and its rewards distributed unevenly. For every story of wealth and success created by processes of globalization, there were at least as many stories of hardship, displacement, and exploitation. As today, there were winners, big and small, and there were very real losers. In other words, the Edwin Fox’s extraordinary career is the story of globalization writ small. And this, too, makes it a story for our times.

CHAPTER ONE

Teak and Trade

London, 1856

On the morning of September 25, 1856, Edwin Goodhugh Fox was making his way from his home at St. Helen’s Place in the City of London to the offices of J. Elliott Fox Jr., solicitor (no relation), a walk of about ten minutes along London Wall. A merchant, land speculator, surveyor, and auctioneer, Edwin Fox was a man on the rise. He had been born in London on November 14, 1820.¹ His father, Ebenezer Fox (1793–1863) was born in Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, but by 1812 he was living in London and working as an artists’ colorman, selling art supplies such as gilding materials, paints in cakes, powders and bladders, varnishes, primed cloths, panels and millboards, as well as preparing canvasses. This would be his trade for the rest of his life.² His mother, Mary Ann Goodhugh, (1797–1866) was a Londoner born and bred. She and Ebenezer had married in 1815 in St. George’s Church on Hanover Street in the tony London district of Mayfair; the great composer George Frideric Handel had had a pew there. At his death, Ebenezer left effects under £450.³ Mary Ann took over her husband’s business after his death and ran it until her own death three years later.⁴ But on this fine Thursday morning, Edwin Fox was on his way to the solicitor’s office to prove the last will and testament of Thomas Reeves, a master shipwright from Calcutta, who had died in Alexandria, Egypt, in June.

Fox had been shocked to learn of the shipbuilder’s death. Only a year and a half earlier—on February 2, 1855—he had agreed to serve as executor of Reeves’s estate and as guardian for his children. But beyond that, we know nothing of their relationship. The two men were twelve years apart in age, grew up in different parts of London, attended different schools, and seem to have had no discernible business dealings. Reeves had spent much of his adult life in India, whereas Fox appears never to have traveled there. The only tantalizing bits of evidence we have of their possible relationship is that in 1842 Thomas Reeves named his last son Edwin.⁵ And, of course, in 1853, Reeves named one of the ships built in his shipyard in Calcutta the Edwin Fox. Other than that, just what united the men is a mystery.

FIGURE 1.1. The Edwin Fox was named in honor of Edwin Goodhugh Fox, a London merchant, land speculator, surveyor, and auctioneer who would go on to found the well-known estate agency of Edwin Fox and Bousfield. Although the precise nature of Edwin Fox’s relationship with Thomas Reeves is not known, he served as executor of Reeves’s estate and looked after his surviving family when Reeves died in 1856. Shown here in the uniform of the Honourable Artillery Company, Edwin Goodhugh Fox stands just to the left of the man seated on the crate. (Credit: Illustrated London News, September 28, 1861, 22. © Illustrated London News Ltd / Mary Evans.)

We know more about how Reeves died. He caught a chest cold while visiting the small port town of Suez, a minor oasis in the desert that would soon change the world forever. Situated on the northern end of the Gulf of Suez in Egypt, the settlement had begun to grow rapidly in recent years with the establishment of a regular overland mail route connecting the European continent to India, Southeast Asia, and beyond. A telegraph line stretched across the small town. Regular overland caravans and camel pack trains serviced the area and connected Suez to Cairo and Alexandria.

Reeves and his wife had arrived a few days earlier, having traveled in style aboard the SS Bengal. They had booked first-class passage from Calcutta to Madras, departing on June 25, 1856, for Bombay and thence to Suez. The Bengal was built the same year as the Edwin Fox. But unlike its counterpart, the Bengal was the talk of the industry. Built for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company by Todd McGregor and Company at Partick on the Clyde River in Glasgow, Scotland, for a reported £70,000, this luxurious passenger and cargo vessel was, briefly, the world’s largest steamer. With two masts, a steam-powered whistle to alert other ships to its presence, and a brass speaking tube connecting the bridge to its massive boiler in the engine room in the bowels of the ship, the 2,100-ton Bengal stretched the length of a modern-day American football field and combined luxury with the leading technology of the time. The Reeveses were bound ultimately for England to start life anew after many years in India, but first they were going to stop at Malta for an extended period on business.⁶

Construction on the Suez Canal would begin in three years, but preparations were already underway when the couple arrived. In 1854, Viscount Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, a French diplomat and engineer, had received permission from Sa’id Pasha, the khedive of Egypt and Sudan, to build a canal open to vessels of all nations without discrimination, in peace and war.⁷ The canal took ten years and the lives of thousands of conscripted Egyptian laborers to complete, but its impact on global trade is hard to exaggerate. When it officially opened in 1869, it dramatically reduced travel time between Europe and Asia; it has been a symbol of global interconnectedness ever since.⁸

But as important as the Suez Canal would become, other forces were reshaping the world in the 1850s. Indeed, the Edwin Fox was built during a time of extraordinary change on a global scale. The East India Company, which had long held a monopoly over trade with British India, had given way to the emerging dynamics of global free trade and global migrations that would characterize the second half of the nineteenth century. But trade was not the only force driving globalization. The increasingly colonial nature of relationships between European and other powers and Indigenous societies in the mid-1800s also drove the world closer together even as imperial struggles for control of the eastern Mediterranean—including the area that would eventually become the Suez Canal—brought them into conflict. Truly a vessel of globalization, the Edwin Fox sailed for the first time into a world already undergoing dramatic change on an unprecedented scale.

Unfortunately, Thomas Reeves saw none of this come to pass. The cold he caught in Suez worsened and he was taken to a hospital in Alexandria, where he soon died. His body was transported first to Malta and then to London for burial. As promised, Edwin Goodhugh Fox served as executor of Reeves’s estate and looked after his surviving family. He would also go on to found the well-known estate agency of Edwin Fox and Bousfield, be admitted to the Honourable Artillery Company and the Freemasons’ United Grand Lodge of England, and serve as an officer or board member of a number of civic and philanthropic organizations, including as chairman of Grand Junction Waterworks Company, which supplied clean water to much of London. Like his friend Thomas Reeves, Edwin Fox died of a chest cold, on March 30, 1891, at his Heatham House estate in Twickenham.⁹ But the ship that bore his name would outlive him, and it would sail far beyond the worlds of these two men. Neither could have imagined its globe-spanning—and globe-connecting—career.

Designed specifically for long-distance trade between England, the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, India, and China, the Edwin Fox was an old-fashioned ship launched into a rapidly changing world. Its fate and fortunes were linked in unexpected ways to those of the East India Company, one of the most profitable and pitiless business ventures in global history. Founded in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, the company’s royal charter created the world’s first limited liability corporation, with a trading monopoly over East Asia. What began as a joint stock company with a handful of security guards soon expanded to become a conquering army with a merchant house attached. For more than a century, the East India Company used violence, ruthless politics, and monopolistic commerce to subjugate and control the once-great Mughal Empire. It established company towns, so-called factories or principal towns, at Bombay (present-day Mumbai), Madras (present-day Chennai), and Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), and used its formidable military and economic might to vanquish or contain its French, Dutch, and Portuguese rivals on the subcontinent.¹⁰ From 1757, when company forces under Robert Clive defeated the Mughal nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the Battle of Plassey, until 1858, when the British Crown assumed direct control of India following the Rebellion of 1857, the East India Company effectively ruled the colony, leading the statesman and philosopher Edmond Burke