On September 29, 1828, Captain William Nairn Forbes raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the setting sun. The expansive western windows on the first floor of Calcutta’s New Mint offered a view of the Hooghly River painted in broad strokes of gold and red that one might call picturesque if not for the cacophony of a working river and the occasional whiff of aquatic rot.Footnote 1 Guided by long habit, Forbes’ eyes immediately fixed on the location where the steam-powered dredging vessel was moored. He couldn’t help but smile.
There was a lightness in his step as he navigated the dim corridors of the nearly completed Mint and emerged at the top of the quay just as the last rays of the sun slid off the Hooghly and behind the horizon. Unlike the soft-edged evenings in his boyhood memories of Aberdeenshire, Forbes found twilight in the tropics to be a no-nonsense affair.Footnote 2 By the time he had descended the steps cut into the riverbank, it was almost full dark.Footnote 3 He waved away the ever-present cloud of insects and climbed onto the vessel. Lanterns held aloft by Indian laborers illuminated the sweat-beaded foreheads and welcoming grins of the European mechanics, Messrs. Pigg and Stewart, who awaited him on deck. Finally, after twenty-nine long months, the steam-powered dredging vessel was ready for her first trials.
Forbes had hoped to put the vessel through her paces by dredging part of the silty riverbank that had so plagued him when constructing the foundation of the New Mint, but he dared not risk the new steamboat in the pull of the high tides during the final weeks of the retreating monsoon. So rather than weigh anchor, he instructed Stewart to fire up the engine. Below decks, where the close air was significantly warmer than above, the stoker shoveled more coal into the firebox, and, in short order, the boiler built up a head of steam. Then the engine rumbled to life and began its tireless labor of pushing the piston in and out of the cylinder. Forbes timed the effort with his pocket watch – thirty-eight strokes per minute, fully six strokes per minute faster than he had anticipated.Footnote 4
Pleased with its performance, Forbes asked Stewart to halt the engine so the mistris (machinists) could reattach the working beam to the piston. On its own, the high-pressure engine was faster than any other floating on the Hooghly, but it needed to prove its worth when powering both the dredging ladder and paddlewheels simultaneously.Footnote 5 At Stewart’s command, the stoker wiped his brow and once again began to feed the hungry engine. This time, the piston rocked the beam, which turned the flywheel, and the engine’s motive power traveled along the wrought iron flywheel shaft to the apparatuses. The paddlewheel began to rotate, its three lowest paddles dipping in and out of the river in succession. The chain on the dredging ladder rattled, and, like obedient ducklings, the buckets plopped into the water, one right after another. Forbes checked his pocket watch – twenty-one strokes per minute.
The next day, he wrote to the East India Company’s Board of Revenue: “I have the honor to report that with the exception of a small windlass or surging barrel the steam Engine and apparatus of the new dredging vessel have been entirely completed.”Footnote 6
There was only one problem with the steam-powered dredging vessel: it could not float on the rivers it was meant to dredge.
This paper tracks the progress and ultimate failure of the British East India Company’s (EIC’s) efforts to launch a steam-powered dredging vessel on the Nadia Rivers of the Bengal Presidency between 1826 and 1830. An incident absent from histories of early steamboats on the subcontinent’s rivers,Footnote 7 it highlights the tensions between the ambitions and limitations of the EIC’s imperial reach in early nineteenth-century Bengal. The rivers in this deltaic region both aided and impeded the fiscal, military, infrastructural, and agricultural goals of the Company. While the Ganges River and its myriad distributaries provided ample water, its volume fluctuated seasonally and often catastrophically, therefore making it unreliable and unpredictable from the Company’s perspective. These rivers thus became a target of English-style improvement, meaning an ideology and process of employing human labor and machine technology to materially alter the landscape (among other categories) to make it visually legible and economically prosperous and ultimately to inspire the intellectual and moral development of its denizens.Footnote 8
In the 1820s, the EIC sought the power of a British-made steam engine to dredge and thus improve the Nadia Rivers. The process of importing and rebuilding the dredging engine and then building the vessel to house it proved time-consuming and expensive. When the machine was not able to immediately perform the task to which it had been assigned – dredging the Nadia Rivers – a letter from the Board of Revenue to the Governor-General admitted that “we apprehend that the vessel can never be made available for the excavation of those Rivers,” in other words, that it had failed in its original purpose. “But,” the letter continued, “the machinery may, we hope, be converted to some other public purpose of equal advantage.”Footnote 9 Even this cautious optimism for the eventual fate of the machinery did not last long. The last mention of the vessel in the records of the Board of Revenue comes in December 1830, just a little over two years after its maiden launch, saying, “The Honorable the Vice President in Council regrets to observe with how little success the steam dredging machine has been employed in the course of the past year.”Footnote 10 Mention of the steam-powered dredging vessel then disappears from the index of revenue papers. The EIC’s abandonment of the steam-powered dredging engine was not simply because of an irredeemable flaw in the material technology. Just as crucial, or perhaps more so, were the imaginative limitations of the EIC bureaucrats. Their proposed courses of action in the wake of the engine’s failure demonstrate their inability to envision anything but an adversarial relationship between the tropical environment of Bengal and steam technology sent from Britain.
The environment of deltaic Bengal
The flat, wet, and unstable fluvial environment of Bengal has long performed an active role in shaping the political and economic history of the region. Water is a key player, whether flowing through streams, inundating fields, or hanging in the air as humidity. The Bengal Presidency – territory held by the EIC roughly coterminous with contemporary Bangladesh and the Indian states around the Bay of Bengal – is bisected by rivers, streams, and khals (canals). Swamps and jheels – shallow backwaters – are also a regular fixture, particularly during the monsoon inundations of June to September. Once the heat of April sets in, however, many of these watercourses have dried up fully. Though the correspondence of Company engineers divides the year into a hot season and a cold season, with the latter reserved for the bulk of surveying and large-scale construction projects, the seasons revolve more around hydrology than temperature. David Ludden notes this on a subcontinent scale, saying that while temperature does fluctuate annually, it is the rains, or lack thereof, that determine what and when crops grow.Footnote 11
Water shapes where people have settled and concentrated their political power. That the EIC established their imperial capital on a marshy stretch of the Hooghly River and not in the ancient city of Gauda or the regional capital of Murshidabad is, in part, because of the historic shifts in the bed of the Ganges. Because of the Himalayas, a young and still-growing mountain range, the Bengal Delta has a slight eastward slope. Once the Ganges emerges from the Rajmahal Hills, its currents slow, and it fans out into tangled distributaries across the delta. As it slows, the silt it had picked up from the Himalayas and agricultural plains of northern India falls to the bottom of the riverbed. Over time, this raises the bed of the river, increasing the likelihood that water will overtop its banks and spread across the alluvial soil, eventually carving out new channels. Beginning in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the southern course of the Ganges started to slip further and further eastward until it met the Brahmaputra River near Dhaka in the nineteenth century.Footnote 12
During this shift, the Ganges left behind silted, swampy channels in the west. The loss of navigable river transportation and an increase in mosquito-borne illness contributed to the abandonment of Gauda in the late sixteenth century; in the twenty-first century, the ruins of the city are not even on a river anymore. In the early eighteenth century, Murshid Quli Khan built his capital downriver in Murshidabad, near the confluence of the Ganges, Hooghly, and Bhagirathi. Early European traders in Bengal, not just the English but also the Dutch, French, Danes, and Portuguese, also established trading posts on the Hooghly near Murshidabad. These sites, such as French Chandannagar and Danish Srirampur, lost their importance in the eighteenth century as the main channel of the Ganges continued to shift eastward, which led to less water, slower currents, and more silt in the Hooghly, Bhagirathi, and other rivers in the region. Calcutta, established closer to the mouth of the Hooghly by the British in 1690, became the main port for ocean-going vessels and contributed to the rise of British political power in the region.Footnote 13
In no way did settling downstream in Calcutta ameliorate the Company’s contentious relationship with the riverine environment of Bengal, however. Part of their frustration came from the way in which they wished to utilize the rivers as an imperial transportation network, and part came from their expectations of what a river should be. When British imperialists came to the subcontinent, they carried with them a cultural construction of nature. They took the Romantic views of the Lake District and the improved landscapes of the drained and enclosed Midlands as visions of what the Indian environment could and should be under their “civilizing” rule. This transposition of nature-as-idea can clearly be seen in nostalgic Anglophone poetry written in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also manifests itself in EIC-led engineering projects designed to impose a British-inspired natural order on the Indian environment.Footnote 14 The dredging in Nadia was part of a larger effort to wrest India’s rivers into a more familiar, British shape.
Overall, the British Isles have been hydrologically lucky. British rivers were not only long-standing highways of commerce and industry but, from the canal craze of the eighteenth century, had proven themselves to be open to permanent hydraulic improvement – deepening, straightening, and leveling their banks – for increased communication. While major estuaries like the Thames and Ouse host mercurial deltas, riverine legislation drafted by Parliament demonstrated that British legislators expected their rivers to remain more or less in their established beds, and that while the levels of said rivers did fluctuate according to the season, it was a rare occurrence if one completely dried up.Footnote 15
Rivers in the Bengal Delta, however, are unlike most English rivers. In addition to changing their course – sometimes by a mile or more – from year to year, they also swell up during monsoon and shrink down to a trickle in the hot season. Not only did their material condition clash with the British cultural construction of what a river should be, but it made British methods of transportation and commerce nearly impossible throughout significant portions of the year. This fundamental clash of expectation and material reality contributed to the failure of many riverine engineering projects, large and small, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Bengal Delta.
For instance, between 1774 and 1776, Benjamin Lacam received a land grant from the EIC to build what he called New Harbor, a port on Channel Creek south of Calcutta. Two months before the harbor was due to be completed, the Company pulled their grant, citing crucial discrepancies in the reported depth of the water. Because Lacam’s “geographical measurements did not match the geological facts on the ground,” the Company believed the whole project was bound to fail.Footnote 16 In unraveling the subsequent thirty-year court case in which Lacam attempted to recoup his losses, Debjani Bhattacharyya argues that New Harbour was a failure because, to the EIC, “the land in question was not ontologically available as land.”Footnote 17 These British bureaucrats had no mental or legal framework for managing a mobile, soaking landscape and therefore halted the project because they could not understand its existence, much less imagine its success.
Ujjayan Bhattacharya surveys the myriad failures of bunds (embankments) lining the rivers of Bengal or protecting fields from unwanted inundation. Many of these failures were localized and came from human mismanagement or concurrent seasons of heavy rainfall.Footnote 18 Bhattacharya argues that over the course of the nineteenth century, British attitudes toward bunds changed. Initially, Company officials saw the bunds as a natural part of the rural landscape, a necessary protection from unwanted inundation even if they were not always effective. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, many British engineers recommended removing some, if not all, bunds in the lower delta due to their expensive upkeep and “constant bursting.” Such a recommendation was rooted in an adversarial mindset in which even the most solid and scientifically sound British engineering was no match for the porous soil, violent currents, and heavy monsoon of the tropical environment of the Bengal Delta.Footnote 19 These engineers chose to pick their battles against nature, rather than consider the possibility of non-combative options, such as inundation agriculture.Footnote 20
Rohan D’Souza uses the Nadia Rivers to illustrate how the “land-centered imagination” of EIC officials had them “endlessly trying to split the deltaic admixtures into neat separations of immiscible units of land and flows.”Footnote 21 To these officials, riverine flows were to be discreet highways of commerce and communication separate from the surrounding solid land, but the hybrid condition of the Nadia Rivers barely changed in the three decades of Company-led silt wrangling that D’Souza narrates. Between the 1820s and 1850s, the rivers remained an unpredictable mixture of water and soil, prone to snags and other sunken obstacles, and never open to year-round navigation despite the best human-led technological efforts. This was because the EIC officials never understood the rivers as part of a deltaic process, but rather saw each inundation as a discrete “aberration” of the natural state of what a river should be.Footnote 22
The failure of these specific endeavors does not mean that the British imperial government failed to establish any successful large-scale hydraulic infrastructure. Indeed, Arthur Cotton’s irrigation works are still celebrated in Andhra Pradesh, and colonial barrages and dams continue to stand on the Indus and Ganges despite intense opposition during their construction.Footnote 23 But in the unstable landscape of the Bengal Delta during a moment when steam technology had yet to definitely prove its utility, anxiety – and eventually failure – shaped the narrative.Footnote 24 In the case of the dredging engine “recently sent from Britain,” the Company initially believed this latest imported technological innovation had the power to redraw the deltaic landscape into a new and improved configuration that fit their vision of an ideal, working river. Such belief was tempered, however, by anxiety surrounding the destructive power of Indian rivers and the tropical environment more generally. Therefore, when the dredging vessel failed in its stated purpose, Company officials were all too ready to abandon their hope for a rational, integrated, and improved landscape and instead broke apart the machine and river into discrete, adversarial components.
The challenges of navigating to and from Calcutta
The narrative of the failure of the steam-powered dredging vessel is set in Nadia District. It lies to the north and east of Calcutta. Its western boundary is defined by the Hooghly and Bhagirathi Rivers, and the northern edge of the district touches the Ganges River. It is predominantly a flat alluvial plain intersected with a myriad of rivers, creeks, and khals. The three largest – the Bhagirathi, the Jalangi, and the Mathabhanga – are collectively known as the Nadia Rivers in EIC papers. From 1824 onwards, their direction and depth were managed by John Stuart May, the Company-appointed superintendent of Nadia Rivers.Footnote 25
The Company had a vested interest in keeping the Nadia Rivers open to navigation. The fertile and populous plains of northern India stretched out on either side of the Ganges River. Major population centers, such as Allahabad and Varanasi, and military cantonments like Kanpur sprawled along its banks. The imperial dream of “advancing civilization” relied on this river to move European people and material beyond Calcutta and into the mofussil (hinterland).Footnote 26 Specifically, the Company used the Ganges to transport troops, officers, and all their attendant baggage; convey bullion to and from the district collectorates; and carry stamps, stationery, medical supplies, and manufactured goods to European officials in the mofussil.Footnote 27
Relying on the Ganges to be the main artery between Calcutta and the mofussil was not without its problems, the most salient being that Calcutta did not, in fact, lie on the Ganges but rather the Hooghly, one of its distributaries. Boats in Calcutta wishing to reach the great river could either sail downstream on the Hooghly to the Sundarbans and then pick their way through the tidal creeks and mangrove roots of that watery forest until they reached the mouth of the Ganges or, in the right season, sail upstream to Nadia District and navigate the “tortuous course” of either the Bhagirathi, Jalangi, or Mathabhanga up to the Ganges.Footnote 28
While the Sundarbans offers year-round water routes from Calcutta to the Ganges, most British accounts of the voyage cast it as harrowing, even after setting aside the dangers of tigers, wild hogs, snakes, and crocodiles.Footnote 29 When taking the shorter upper route, boats were often damaged or destroyed. Being a tidal swamp, the ocean twice daily replenishes the water of the Sundarbans’ creeks even on the driest days of summer. The creeks themselves meander through the mud, changing size and course so often one might assume they take some sort of anthropomorphic delight in their feats of rapid transformation. One moment a stream might be so wide as to ape a lake and then bend and twist to such a narrow channel that a boat of twenty feet’s breadth scrapes both banks.Footnote 30 In the 1830s, one of the first steamboats to navigate the middle course of the Sundarbans on Chandcolly Creek chugged forward to the rhythmic slap of branches on her forecastle until she rounded a sharp point. There, the overhanging branches were so dense they ripped the jolly boat off her stern.Footnote 31 When the Governor-General took the same route a decade later with his tug and flat-bottomed barge, the jungle lining the narrow creek tore the jalousie screens off the windows.Footnote 32
Passage through these narrow creeks was also complicated by the tides. Like the majority of Bengal’s waterways, the silty bed of the Sundarbans wis strewn with uprooted trees, sunken boats, and other underwater hazards. High tide liftes boats above these hazards, but woe to the captain who found himself trapped in a narrow creek as the tide rushed out. He might throw down an anchor and wait for the water’s next rise, but the tides sweep through the channels at a speed of three or four miles per hour. This is strong enough to rip anchors out of loose sediment and send boats careening toward the Bay of Bengal. The government steamer Hoogly suffered when low tide dragged her over a weir of sharpened bamboo stakes local fishermen had sunk into the mud.Footnote 33
To avoid the dangers revealed by low tide, experienced pilots waited at the mouth of narrow creeks until the tide started to come in and only then chanced the journey. This, however, created new hazards, particularly for budgerows and other large Company boats that spanned the entire channel. Boats often met head-on and scraped their hulls against wood and soil as they gingerly inched past each other.Footnote 34 The only way to avoid all the hazards of the upper Sundarbans route was to eschew these creeks altogether and sail down to where the mangrove swamp met the Bay of Bengal. This lower passage added an additional 80 to 100 miles to the Calcutta-Allahabad route.Footnote 35 All told, traveling from Calcutta to the Ganges via the Sundarbans took at least four to seven days longer than making the same journey via the Nadia Rivers.Footnote 36 Therefore, the EIC had both a commercial and ideological interest in deepening and straightening the Nadia Rivers and thus linking Calcutta to the Ganges through a safer and faster route.
The dream of an ecological machine ensemble
The dream of swift voyages on the Nadia Rivers had begun to take shape in 1819, when the aforementioned Captain Forbes, an engineer in the Company’s military, had approached the EIC with plans for a steam-powered dredging engine and vessel.Footnote 37 He had then taken the plans with him to England and revised them at the famed Soho workshop of Boulton and Watt. When Forbes had returned to Calcutta in 1823 with machinery for Calcutta’s New Mint, he had anticipated the dredging engine would follow close behind.Footnote 38
Though it took nearly three additional years, when the disassembled engine did arrive on the Hibberts in mid-April of 1826, the Company treated its investment well. The machinery was met by James Kyd, master shipbuilder for the EIC and eponymous owner of the Kidderpore dockyard.Footnote 39 Kyd gave the captain his personal receipt for the cargo and oversaw its transfer into one of his private godowns (warehouses); unusually, very little of the machinery was damaged during transit.Footnote 40 After taking charge of the machinery, Kyd hired sikligars (polishers) to keep the parts rust-free until they could be assembled. This was no simple undertaking. The cleaning costs from May to December of 1826 amounted to Rs. 293.9.1.Footnote 41 At that rate, upwards of seven sikligars may have been permanently assigned to the task of polishing the steam-powered dredging engine and apparatus.Footnote 42
Within a month of the machinery’s arrival in Calcutta, it was unpacked and inventoried by Kyd; John Milligen Seppings, Surveyor of the Marine Department; Captain Forbes, Superintendent of Steam Engines; and any number of unrecorded Indian laborers. This work took time. Each piece had to be checked against the bill of lading and examined for defects before being turned over to the sikligars for the first of many polishes. Even with these delays, Captain Forbes submitted a report on the steam-powered dredging machinery to the EIC’s Board of Revenue on June 1, 1826, only a few weeks after the committee commenced its work. The first half of the report reviewed the circumstances of the machinery’s arrival and its storage in Kyd’s godown. It noted the minimal damage to the apparatus and assured the Board that the two missing keys and one fractured pipe could easily be recast and replaced by a local foundry, Jessop & Co.Footnote 43
The second, and much longer, half of Forbes’ report concerned the construction of the vessel that would house the steam engine and dredging apparatus. That the wood and hemp of the vessel would work in concert with the iron and steam of the engine to create an integrated machine ensemble was crucial to the overall success of the project. It was why Forbes, the Superintendent of Steam Engines, so involved himself with the minutiae of shipbuilding in his report and why Seppings, of the Marine Board, was involved in the unpacking of the engine. The design of the vessel had to be perfectly suited to the engine for the dredging machinery to do its work of improving the Nadia Rivers. And Forbes believed he had both the ideal design and shipbuilder at the ready, as they were just as important to the success of the project as the unimpeded erection of the engine.
Steam engines in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries were not discrete objects but were designed to be part of larger machine ensembles consisting of, perforce, millwork and housing but also architecture, landscapes, and even engineers. In the case of the steam-powered dredging vessel, the EIC imagined that when the machine ensemble was completed and set afloat on the Nadia Rivers, it might eventually incorporate those same rivers into an expanded ecological machine ensemble, all working for the same purpose of supporting British commerce in Bengal.
The machine ensemble, as coined by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his pathbreaking work on the penetration of the railway into the consciousness of the nineteenth century, describes both a new level of material integration and a new way of conceptualizing technological infrastructure. In the case of Schivelbusch’s railway, rather than the locomotive as a discrete object and the railway tracks as another, the machine ensemble is a system so cohesive that in the imaginations of engineers and passengers alike, the motive power of steam engines could not be separated from the tracks upon which they moved.Footnote 44
As the lines grew, the reach of the railway machine ensemble expanded to encompass complementary technical systems – embankments and cuttings, tunnels and viaducts, signals and telegraphs – and then spread the ensemble’s influence across the landscape, remaking the modern world as a place inconceivable without the railway.Footnote 45 Other works on the social history of the railway have further expanded the reach of the railway machine ensemble, rhapsodizing over its power to absorb everything it touches, reshaping it to the dictates of iron and steam.Footnote 46 The railway seeped into the cracks of popular consciousness until the nineteenth century, of necessity, became the century of the “steam engine running upon a railway,” unable to be imagined as anything but.Footnote 47
Because of the ever-increasing presence of the railway across the nineteenth-century landscape and imagination, it is easy to believe that it, as an expanded machine ensemble, had been born Minerva-like, steaming out of a railway tunnel in Jupiter’s forehead. And yet, long before the Rocket first puffed into Manchester, earlier steam engines had already been integrated into different types of machine ensembles. When incorporated into existing technical structures – moving from poled to steam-powered ferries or from waterwheels to steam-powered flywheels in factories, for instance – those industries were as irrevocably changed as ground transportation was by the railway machine ensemble. And this pre-railway machine ensemble was also more expansive than just an engine, millwork, and housing. The records of the British engineering firm Boulton and Watt demonstrate that the Company’s appeal in the overseas market was due in large part to the expanded machine ensemble they exported: engine, millwork, architecture, and engineer. This latter addition added a human element but made the entire expanded machine ensemble more vulnerable to failure because all these elements were inseparable; in missing one, the entire project would falter.Footnote 48
The expanded, and human, machine ensemble
Schivelbusch does not explicitly integrate engineers into his railway machine ensemble. Though they are present in his narrative, they observe their creations from beyond the perimeter. Despite the fact that he stretches the railway machine ensemble to incorporate international capital formation, urban planning, and the very landscapes of Europe, he maintains humanity as a separate actor on par with, but not a part of, the machine ensemble. Perhaps he did so for fear of losing some of the human inside the machine or denying the possibility of an engineer existing sans engine. In other narratives of large-scale industrial projects that changed the face of the nineteenth century, it is often the laborers who are pulled, bodily, into the machine ensemble, while the inventors and financiers remain outside of it.
This holds particularly true in the narrative of colonial frontier settings, where popular mythmaking tells us men used machines to conquer nature and build nations. Riding the euphoric wave of the Enlightenment, early nineteenth-century inventors believed that their gadgets and engines were material manifestations of the triumph of the rational mind.Footnote 49 In this improvement of nature, machines were the tools wielded by conquering humans to vanquish environmental foes.Footnote 50 European colonizers, particularly Britons of the nineteenth century, celebrated their technical prowess as proof of their right to rule their less mechanically-inclined subjects.Footnote 51 In these narratives, humans made machines, and machines marked the hierarchy of humanity, so the stories stop short of assimilating the machineries’ creators and possessors into the machine ensemble.
Laborers, on the other hand, were readily subject to assimilation in the machine ensemble, losing the possibility of a physical identity separate from the industry in which they worked. Their circadian rhythms were replaced by the signals of factory time and work-discipline. The tissues of their bodies absorbed industrial offal.Footnote 52 The lungs of textile workers filled with choking cotton, and hand-processing of spermaceti stripped whalers’ skin to a child-like smoothness. Coal miners, too, inhaled the deadly essence of their profession as their hands and minds carved out the dark rooms in which they spent their working days.Footnote 53 The legs of bargemen grew thick as they walked their coal boats on the low ceilings of the same mine tunnels.Footnote 54 The fingers of railway yardmen were misshapen or missing, reminders of the dangerous intricacy involved in manually coupling rolling stock.Footnote 55 Nineteenth-century machine ensembles could not operate without integrated human bodies, and these bodies were altered by the nature of their labor.Footnote 56
The case of the steam dredging vessel offers space for a further expansion of the human borders of the machine ensemble to incorporate not only the sikligurs skilled in polishing its specific iron components or the stokers’ intimate knowledge of the draw of its firebox, in other words, the laborers whose material bodies interact with the actual engine. It also demonstrates that those invested in the machine – the administrators and engineers – are of necessity drawn into the machine ensemble as well, until their cultural prejudices and imagined intentions for the machinery are as much a part of the ensemble as the material machine itself. This meant that the steam-powered dredging vessel was composed of iron and wood as well as the professional expertise of engineers like Watt, Boulton, and Forbes and the hopes of improving the Nadia Rivers held by the EIC’s Board of Revenue.
The workshop of Boulton and Watt was instrumental in expanding the machine ensemble to include humans. From 1769 to 1800, they held the only atmospheric steam engine patent in the world, thus giving them a ferociously guarded monopoly on both the artifacts and skills needed to operate one. Industrial espionage was rampant in England; Watt complained in 1782 that “ones [sic] thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them.”Footnote 57 In the overseas market, however, the Soho mechanics eventually were able to exert more control over their product. While foreign patents proved to be largely unenforceable as infringement claims had to be prosecuted in British courts, exporting engine parts with architectural plans and a skilled British engineer – the expanded machine ensemble – proved a much more successful mechanism for protecting Boulton and Watt’s intellectual property.Footnote 58
Though knowledge of atmospheric engines had been circulating in courts, universities, and other centers of European Enlightenment learning throughout the eighteenth century, there was a dearth of skilled mechanics able to turn description and illustration into working machinery.Footnote 59 Therefore, mechanics who had trained at Soho or another respected British manufactory were in great demand, particularly overseas. These engineers became part of the Boulton and Watt “package” that included the machine, millwork, architectural plans, and a skilled engineer to oversee the erection of the apparatuses and the training of local mechanics in their operation and upkeep.Footnote 60 In fact, when the British government drafted legislation meant to halt the flow of skilled British mechanics to foreign shores, Boulton and Watt argued that “if engine erectors were to be prohibited from leaving Britain, it would be tantamount to prohibiting the export of the… engine.”Footnote 61
In India, the practice of exporting an expanded, human machine ensemble made especially sense to British engineers and industrialists. Patent protection was a secondary concern to those who imagined the subcontinent through the lens of the “deadly tropics.” This belief that the topography and climate of the subcontinent were uniquely dangerous to British bodies was part of the cultural construction of nature that EIC employees carried with them from England.Footnote 62 Through decades of consuming letters and memoirs written by their compatriots, the British middle classes had come to believe that “the climate of India proves a severe trial to every European constitution; many fall sacrifice to its first attacks; many more linger on in a state of increasing debility and painful disease, which reduces them to a state more resembling ghosts than men.”Footnote 63 This increased morbidity and mortality could be explained by medical topography – the nineteenth-century idea that certain landscapes were prone to certain types of disease – which had gained authority in both scientific and literary circles.Footnote 64 Travelers wrote about the scorching sun, unhealthy winds, ague-ish swamps, and putrid miasmas wafting from rotting tropical vegetation. The more scientific-minded among them might also have noted which regions local people considered “healthy” or “unhealthy.”Footnote 65 Doctors outlined the steps one might take to avoid or mitigate the effects of local fevers. For instance, living in a healthy location – far away or above fetid waters – was ideal.Footnote 66 However, improving the watery landscape through, say, the application of a steam-powered dredger provided the British with a longer-lasting solution to their constructed problem of the “deadly tropics.”
Improving the tropics through British-built steam engines proved to be a laborious task for the Company for several reasons. First was the dearth of engineers or training programs on the subcontinent coupled with the EIC’s prejudice against training and employing skilled Indian laborers. Britons in India looked at Boulton and Watt’s long-standing practice of sending an engineer along with his engine and thus believed that if competent mechanical engineers could not be found in France or Prussia, they certainly would not be hiding in the jungles of Bengal – never mind that one of the earliest steam engines to be built entirely in India was by Goluk Chunder, a Bengali blacksmith who accurately reproduced a steam-powered printing press imported to Srirampur in the 1820s.Footnote 67
The consequences of this lack of skilled engineers in India can be illustrated by Boulton and Watt’s signature expanded machine ensemble export: a mint. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, M. Boulton Mint Co., working in conjunction with the Soho manufactory, had designed the Royal Mint in London and national mints for Russia, Denmark, and Brazil. Boulton’s design blended the machinery with the production process so that bullion would seamlessly flow through the various rooms and engines and emerge out the other end as coinage. The system was fully integrated, and no part could function without its fellows. Boulton’s design reached its apex of productivity at Calcutta’s New Mint. A decade after the equipment first arrived in 1823, the steam engines, coining presses, rolling mills, and pouring machinery worked in such concert that 300,000 coins might be struck in a single seven-hour working day.Footnote 68
This machine ensemble extended beyond the mechanical apparatuses to the building in which the New Mint was housed. From the beginning, the Bengal Mint Committee directed that “the character of the building should in every respect correspond with that of the machinery.”Footnote 69 To that end, the EIC imported 80,000 British-made bricks to construct the twenty-six-and-a-half-foot foundations that elevated the mint above the reclaimed alluvion on which it was built. More bricks were laid beneath the mint machinery than in the Doric façade above it, indicating that the Mint Committee’s instructions to seamlessly integrate architecture and engineering were taken seriously by the building’s architect, Captain Forbes.Footnote 70
Along with Forbes, Boulton and Watt sent out ten additional British mechanics to work on the intricate business of installing the mint machinery. Six came from Soho itself, and the rest from other British machinery contractors. Due to the nature and variety of work needed to properly construct the entire mint machine ensemble, Forbes estimated it would take these ten men five years to see the work to completion.Footnote 71 As it was, the New Mint opened six years after Forbes laid the cornerstone in March of 1824.Footnote 72
Beyond the overall dearth of British engineers, another reason the Company struggled to realize its plans of improving the tropics through the application of an expanded steam-powered machine ensemble was the fragility of the human component of that ensemble. With the knowledge to build and repair the engines monopolized by a few British men, when those men fell ill or died, there was no easy way to continue their work. Of the ten engineers sent with the mint machinery in 1823, four were dead by the end of 1825, and shortly thereafter another was declared unfit for work “through continuous intoxication.” Unsurprisingly, the high mortality rate made it difficult for Boulton and Watt to recruit skilled replacements in Britain, despite offering wages two to three times higher than mechanics could command at home. Frustrated, they eventually suggested sending out men with some, but not all, the requisite mechanical skills, assuring the EIC that these recruits could fill in their knowledge gaps with on-the-job training – assuming they lived long enough to do so.Footnote 73 Despite this, the EIC did not accept training Indians as engineers as a practical solution until the late 1840s when they established the College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee to support the construction of the Ganges Canal. Thus, this chronic shortage of skilled engineers would also delay the construction of the steam engine dredging vessel in the 1820s.
The ecological machine ensemble
As aforementioned, the purpose of the steam-power dredging engine was to straighten and deepen the Nadia Rivers, meaning to improve it, using the terminology of the day. As an expanded machine ensemble, the engine was joined with the paddlewheel, dredging apparatus, custom-built vessel, and the bureaucrats, engineers, and laborers who were all inextricably bound up in this technological venture. One of the ways the EIC tied itself to this project was through the continued assertion of the British and imported qualities of the engine, qualities with which they personally identified. For instance, in an early letter to the Board of Revenue on the subject, Forbes continually stressed that the plans for the engine had been “recently sent to [him] from Soho” and were therefore of the highest quality, being attached to Boulton and Watt as Forbes also was.Footnote 74 Such a rhetorical emphasis on the Britishness of the engine also linked it to the hoped-for improvement of the Bengal Delta. While improvement did not have a single, set definition in the early nineteenth century, the concept had been three hundred years in the making in Anglophone culture. It evoked rhetoric and action focused on a more comfortable, prosperous, and moral future.Footnote 75 An improved landscape contained specific elements, elements that also made it distinctly British: well-tended agricultural fields with clearly delineated boundaries and purposes, as well as humans, animals, and machinery dotting the landscape as evidence of the owner’s wealth and willingness to reinvest that wealth back into the soil.Footnote 76
This is where the idea of the ecological machine ensemble comes into play. The main purpose of the steam-engine dredging vessel was to open up one or more of the Nadia Rivers so they could support commercial shipping further into the hot season. By deepening and regularizing the river through mechanized dredging, it would become a predictable, orderly cog in the improved machinery of empire rather than remaining an agential subject in its own right. Much historiography of the past three decades concerning rivers and human political power adopts a similar hybridized, rather than oppositional, approach to this relationship.Footnote 77 Whether in urban or rural landscapes or along international borders, rivers and human societies coexist as separate entities in uneasy but often generative relationships.Footnote 78 The ecological machine ensemble, mirroring British imperial aspirations, does not allow for an independent river. Unlike Richard White’s Organic Machine, which starts with a river that maintains natural qualities even when subject to human intervention, the ecological machine ensemble focuses on the steam engine as a vanguard for the eventual conquest and assimilation of the “deadly tropics” into an improved imperial landscape.Footnote 79 But just as the machine ensemble that had stretched to incorporate engineers was fragile, the ecological machine ensemble was all the more so. At the first indication that the steam-powered dredging vessel would fail at its appointed task of dredging the Nadia Rivers, the EIC would abandon its goal and break apart the ecological machine ensemble, not into a more loosely hybridized entity, but rather into incompatible and oppositional pieces.
The failure of the steam-powered dredging vessel
This process of breaking apart the hoped-for ecological machine ensemble began when Forbes wrote to the Board of Revenue in October of 1829 that he had “the honor to report that with the exception of a small windlass or surging barrel, the steam engine and apparatus of the new dredging vessel have been completed” and also mentioned in an almost offhand manner that “the draught of the vessel (considerably beyond builder calculations) is 6 feet forward and 4 feet 3 inches aft.”Footnote 80 The depth of the Nadia Rivers – the Bhagirathi, Jalangi, and Mathabanga – were seasonally variable and could shrink to eighteen inches or less in the hot, dry months before the monsoon rains set in.Footnote 81 Simply put, a boat with a draft of six feet could not float on a river with a depth of eighteen inches. Despite the desires of the EIC, the steam-powered dredging vessel could not dredge the Nadia Rivers. When the Board of Revenue forwarded Forbes’ report to the Governor-General in Council, they baldly stated, “As the draught of water [of] this vessel has… considerably exceeded the builder’s calculations… we apprehend that the vessel can never be made available for the excavation of those rivers under Mr. May’s Superintendence.”Footnote 82
Over the cold season of 1828–1829, the EIC considered alternative employment for the dredger and searched for the root cause of its failure. By the end of February 1829, all those who had been involved in the original construction and design of the vessel – the Marine Board; John M. Seppings, Surveyor of the Marine Department; Mr. Stenbrow, foreman of the Howrah Dock Company; Captain Forbes, the supervising engineer; and John S. May, Superintendent of the Nadia Rivers – had offered their opinions on the current state and future prospects of the steam-powered dredging vessel. Certainly, these men considered their job security when crafting their reports to the G-overnor-General, and all their responses indulge in a measure of self-serving finger-pointing. More saliently, their explanations for the failure of the vessel demonstrate an imaginative terrain in which steam-powered technology had had the potential to reconfigure the landscape of the “deadly tropics” and subsume it into an ecological machine ensemble. However, whether their explanations focused on the vessel, engine, or rivers as the key point of failure, they arrived at a similar conclusion: that the failure of the steam-powered dredging vessel was all but prescribed because British technology was ill-suited to the Bengali environment and, therefore, could not adequately do the work of improving it. This oppositional mindset and an unwillingness to imagine a complementary relationship between steam technology and the river contributed as much to the failure of the project as the deep-drafted boat itself.
This idea that some projects would naturally fail while others would naturally succeed owing to their innate worth was a popular one in the nineteenth-century British Empire. Samuel Smiles, the hagiographic biographer of engineers such as Boulton, Watt, Stephenson, and Telford, acknowledged that the men he had put up on a pedestal experienced failure but conceptualized those failures as necessary lessons on the path to success. He wrote, “We learn wisdom from failure more than from success: we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.”Footnote 83 This interpretation presupposes a world ordered by scientific truths, one in which truth and success are synonymous and will thus eventually prevail, regardless of previous failures.
Such an interpretation of failure is comforting and certainly possesses staying power, but it also relies on a “conviction that what were formerly regarded as ‘failed’ technologies were necessarily ‘wrong paths’ that deviated from the teleological rationality of technical progress.”Footnote 84 Instead, contemporary explorations of failure within science and technology studies focus on the contexts and contingencies of the failure. In his study on air engines, Ben Marsden proposes that our definitions of success and failure are highly nuanced and have changed over time. With this, he observes that our criteria for what constitutes a success or failure are based on the perspective of the person doing the evaluation. And finally, he argues that failure is contingent on when the narrative ends.Footnote 85 Forbes and his crew built a steam-powered dredging vessel with more horsepower than any other engine floating on the Ganges at the time. This could be a success if one chose to stop the narrative there and not measure the draft of the boat against the depth of the rivers it was meant to dredge.
Because the interpretation of failure is contingent on its context, studying the epistolary postmortem surrounding the failure of the steam-powered dredging vessel demonstrates the complex tensions between British ideas of technology and the tropics that influenced EIC policy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Though the imagined power of steam to wrest the world into ecological machine ensembles grew as the century progressed, it was not yet a totalizing force of modernization and improvement, particularly when operating in the “deadly tropics.” As each writer gestures to a different material point of failure, their reasoning reveals how they imagine the dynamics between technology and the tropical environment. John Seppings’ focus on the flawed vessel design critiques the idea that British technology could be relocated wholesale into a tropical environment and still function as intended. William Forbes has such confidence in the transformative power of the steam engine he claims it could dredge anything, even a dry riverbed. John May pushes the steam-powered dredger to the background, arguing that the Nadia Rivers are so powerful that, at best, human-built technology could but nudge the rivers and hope for their compliance.
A problem of vessel design
The reports of Seppings, Stenbrow, and the Marine Board focus on the vessel and its “Plan sent out from Europe.” Their consensus is that the calculations of the “original drawing of the vessel received from England” were fundamentally flawed. Not only were they “incorrect as regards the disposition of the Machinery,” but they were “not sufficiently explicit as to the materials and Fastenings to enable the Builder to prepare Estimates.” Stenbrow believes that Boulton and Watt’s original design was so erroneous that had he built “according to the Europe Plan the Boat would have been wholly immersed in water from the weight of the machinery.” Footnote 86
Seppings had modified this design by increasing the boat’s breadth, decreasing its depth, and using a light-frame diagonal truss.Footnote 87 He had anticipated that his changes would decrease the draft to four feet. When Seppings’ alterations resulted in a boat with a six-foot draft, he explaines that he had based his new estimate on “Messrs. Boulton and Watt’s calculations,” saying he had considered the engineers’ “well known celebrity… sufficient guarantee for the correctness” of those calculations.Footnote 88
As in the letters surrounding the arrival of the steam engine and dredging apparatus in 1826, the trope of the imported, British engine figured prominently in the EIC’s discussion of the failure of the dredging vessel in 1829. Between Seppings’ and the Marine Board’s reports, the plan’s links to Europe or Boulton and Watt are referenced ten distinct times, a much higher density than in earlier correspondence. As demonstrated above, both reports intimate that the Britishness of the plan was its main reason for failure, pairing the “European” modifier with faults in the design and construction processes.
Seppings’ main excuse for the deep draft of the dredging vessel is that he had mistakenly trusted the reputation of Boulton and Watt and therefore merely modified their design rather than drafting a new one himself. He feels he should have known better, not only because most European boats required adjustments before plying Bengal’s shallow rivers, but also because even the “cleverest engineers in Europe” were still struggling to build steamboats whose final drafts did not exceed their initial calculations.Footnote 89 Seppings seems content to acknowledge that while the deep draft of the dredging vessel was indeed a problem, it was also a problem in Europe and therefore a universal engineering problem. Consequently, he reasoned, the error was not exclusively his fault.Footnote 90
Once finished describing what he perceives were the material points of failure for the steam-powered dredging vessel, neither he nor the Marine Board recommend the boat be sent up to the Nadia Rivers, as it could not traverse those waterways during the season in which dredging was needed. Instead, the Marine Board is quick to wash their hands of the project and look for other ways to recoup the cost of the vessel’s construction. They recognize the utility of steam-powered dredging over animal- or human-powered dredging efforts and recommend the vessel prove its worth on some of the other rivers that they believe impeded British commerce. They suggest “the Dredging vessel might be employed advantageously in… clearing away the accumulation of mud from before the several Public Jetties” near Calcutta or be set to work on the sprawling James and Mary Shoal that grew from the confluence of the Hooghly and Damodar Rivers.Footnote 91
Steam triumphant
Forbes was flabbergasted when he heard that the Board of Revenue believed “the vessel can never be made available for the excavation of those rivers under Mr. May’s Superintendence.”Footnote 92 In his February report, he acknowledges that the boat’s six-foot draft was considerably deeper than planned and that the depth of the Nadia Rivers was often far less than six feet. He does not, however, consider this to be an insurmountable obstacle. In fact, his incredulity at the Board’s attitude pours off the page when he notes, “Had it [the Nadia Rivers] afforded evidence of their having at all Seasons been sufficient water to have floated a vessel of 6 feet draught it would indisputably have proved that the Dredging Machinery had been constructed in vain.”Footnote 93 In other words, the shallowness of the rivers was precisely the reason why the dredger was needed and should not become the excuse for its abandonment. Only with the application of steam power could the Nadia Rivers be made deep enough for the steam-powered dredging vessel to float on them.
This was not the first time that Forbes had attempted to reshape Bengal’s rivers using powerful technology. In April 1819, right before he left for Britain and the Soho Foundry, he petitioned the Military Department for materials to break up a shoal near Fittighur on the Hooghly River. The project was ambitious. He constructed a pile driver and used it to bore holes into the shoal. This pile driver was thirty feet in length and constructed of pieces of sturdy sal wood six inches by six inches square. It was hauled to the shoal and dropped upright from the side of a boat large enough that it needed to be rowed by seven people. Then a wooden ram, three feet by sixteen inches by fourteen inches, was winched up and dropped down until the pile was bored into the sand of the shoal. Each pile was a wooden box ten feet tall.Footnote 94 At the bottom of the pile was a mine. A twenty-foot leaden tube containing a fuse and powder went into the pile and ignited the mine. The ensuing explosion destroyed the wooden pile but also, presumably, broke up a section of the tightly packed soil of the shoal and sent the sediment further downstream, hopefully to the Bay of Bengal, where it would not be an impediment to navigation. Forbes’ requisition, which was approved by the government, was for one hundred such piles.Footnote 95 He used a massive amount of military technology to literally blow up the riverbed in order to reshape it to his idea of what a river should be.
When compared to his earlier efforts, Forbes’ continued support for the use of a steam-powered dredger on the Nadia Rivers seems almost tame. While the method for which he advocates in 1829 reflected his professional experience in engineering beyond his military appointment, he nevertheless continues to argue for the ability of British technology to improve the Nadia Rivers with the same force as a caisson full of explosives. To prove his point, Forbes uses the same arguments for the soundness of the design that he had throughout the project: namely, that it was a product of the minds of Soho and, as such, was inherently well-done. He claims that the “ablest Engineers in England” had taken into consideration the particulars of the Bengali environment when they had designed the machine and vessel, and therefore any suggestion to alter or abandon them were motivated by nothing more than rank ignorance.Footnote 96 Again and again, Forbes links Boulton, Watt, and Rennie with the steam engine and dredging apparatus. When enumerating the positive qualities of the vessel, he presses the Governor-General to “remember… the names of the Engineers who gave the opinion quoted.”Footnote 97 The engineers were an inextricable part of the machine ensemble, responsible for its authority and ultimate success. The more Forbes protests the Board’s suggestion to repurpose the vessel or dismantle the machinery, the more he refers to the steam engine and dredging apparatus as an indivisible machine ensemble. Even the undesirably deep draft becomes an intrinsic part of its design. In order to do its job properly, “the Dredging apparatus must be of a certain height,” Forbes proclaims, “inevitably requiring a large and weighty mass of framing.”Footnote 98 He urges the Governor-General to trust the Soho machine ensemble and allow it to prove its mettle in Nadia.
When Forbes writes of the relationship between the deep-drafted vessel and the rivers, he no longer imagines that the latter will be able to be incorporated into an ecological machine ensemble through the mechanism of improvement. Rather, he couches the Nadia Rivers as obstacles the steam-powered vessel needs to overcome to prove her worth. According to him, her design was already prepared to vanquish all but the most perfidious of hazards: “After careful consideration of the circumstances affecting the Bengal Rivers generally and those [of the Nadia Rivers] alluded to in particular,” Boulton, Watt, and Rennie opted to place the dredging ladder at the head of the vessel, rather than off one side or through a well in the middle, as was common practice in Britain.Footnote 99 With this design, Forbes imagines the vessel will approach shoals from deep upstream channels and employ a dredge-as-you-go method, excavating a channel into which she could then float.
The colored elevation of the vessel sent from Soho demonstrates this principle. What the drawing calls the “Calcutta Dredging Machine” is a boxy affair. The boiler, pistons, and flywheel are located in the center of the vessel with local flywheel shafts extending aft to the paddlewheel and fore to the bucket chain of the dredging apparatus. The fully colored rendering of the apparatus extends at approximately a forty-five-degree angle over the bow, though a pencil sketch of the same apparatus at a much steeper angle intimates that it might be repositioned depending on the needs of the riverbed. In this elevation, the vessel has a draft of approximately four feet and floats an optimistic two feet above the level riverbed. The silt slated for dredging is obligingly piled up at the edge of the paper in a neat mound.Footnote 100
This rendering of the steam-powered dredging vessel supports Forbes’ argument that the presence of the river itself was no longer necessary for the triumph of steam technology. Forbes is so confident of the genius of the forward location of the dredging ladder that he claims that “even were they [the rivers] dry she is adapted for working a passage (slowly) through them.”Footnote 101 Though he imagines the dredging vessel did not need the rivers to succeed, Forbes does acknowledge that “the power of the Engine… directly opposed to the Million Horse Power of these Rivers [would] be of little avail.” He creates an adversarial relationship between nature and technology in which neither component needed the other, rather than work for an ecological machine ensemble in which all components worked to improve the landscape. While he bestows upon the steam dredging vessel great powers to reshape the environment, he draws back from the ultimate claim that it possessed the strength to force the Nadia Rivers to do something they would not otherwise do. Regardless, to Forbes, the failure of the project comes from the Board’s unwillingness to deploy it in the Nadia Rivers, rather than from a problem in the vessel’s design or draft.
The power of the Nadia Rivers
John S. May, Superintendent of the Nadia Rivers, reaches the same conclusions as Captain Forbes: the dredging vessel should be employed on the Mathabhanga, Jalangi, and Bhagirathi, and these rivers cannot be incorporated into the steam-powered ecological machine ensemble. May, however, does not focus on the inviolable power of the British-made dredger but rather grounds his explanation in the character of the Nadia Rivers.
Shoals in these rivers could be broken up by humans in many different ways, ranging from dozens of stomping feet to the mechanized labor of stationary steam-powered dredgers.Footnote 102 Some were, of course, more efficient than others in keeping the channels clear for navigation, but all would do in a pinch. This is why May is able to confidently state at the beginning of his letter that “Dredging Machinery of sufficient power, and constructed on a principle suited to the circumstances of the Rivers of this Country might be employed to great advantage in freeing their beds from incidental obstructions, or partial accumulations of sand.”Footnote 103 Like the others, he believes that British-built technology had to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of the Bengali environment in order to be successful. He also agrees with Forbes that placing the dredging ladder at the fore of the vessel is likely to ensure its success.
It is in the definition of success that May’s and Forbes’ reports bifurcate. Forbes imagines a technological modernity in which steam engines might subdue nature to the point where nature is no longer relevant. John May, on the other hand, speaks of success in a cyclical and seasonal manner. At the time of his report on the dredging vessel he had been superintending the Nadia Rivers for over eight years.Footnote 104 Each year after the rains abated, he would ride and sail across the district, identifying the shoals that he believed needed dredging and the channels that needed training before the waters began to recede. He would contract with zamindars and other local landholders to organize dozens, if not hundreds, of laborers to raise logs and sunken boats; sink bandals (weirs) along the edge of the channels; cut down trees leaning over the banks; and cart tons of alluvial soil away from the rivers.
John May measured his success in inches and days. In December of 1825, for instance, he warned the Board of Revenue that “the Ganges is daily falling at a rate of 1 inch per day,”Footnote 105 that the Bhagirathi was already closed to commercial traffic, and that it was unlikely that he could keep the Jalangi or Mathabhanga open for more than a month.Footnote 106 In June of 1826, he was pleased to report to the Board that the Bhagirathi River was rising “at the rate of 2 Inches per diem” and would therefore “certainly be navigable by the 20th of this Month for boats drawing 3 feet of water.”Footnote 107 Despite his efforts and those of his work crews, the biggest determinant of whether or not the Nadia Rivers were deep enough to accommodate boats of 250-300 maunds weight was the seasonal nature of the rivers themselves.Footnote 108
The variable nature of the rivers is why May emphasizes in this missive, as in nearly all his reports, that it is “quite beyond the power of art to control” the navigation of the Nadia Rivers.Footnote 109 Furthermore, even when he was able to effect an improvement to the navigation of a river, “the changes of one season in the course of the Ganges afford no data whatever to determine what the next shall produce and hence that however favourable present appearances may be no reliance can be placed upon their permanency.”Footnote 110 May explains that the combination of the sandy soil of the riverbeds and the “tremendous current” of water that flows over them rendered any human attempt to confine the rivers to a fixed course impossible. It did not matter how much knowledge one had about the course and nature of the rivers or how much time, effort, and technology one expended in the previous cold season; nothing could check the awesome power of the monsoon.
John May’s realism – or fatalism – regarding the behavior of the rivers under his superintendence is why his report on the steam dredger focuses on the character of the rivers rather than the character of the machine. He imagines that the dredger, even with its draft, might be applied to great effect because the riverbeds had a “light and flaky nature” so that “a very large portion of it is consequently held in suspension by the water.”Footnote 111 Because of the nature of the soil, the agitating action of the dredger would draw more soil up into the current, which would then carry it beyond the Nadia Rivers and out into the Bay of Bengal. He casts the dredger as the helpmeet of the mighty rivers, a small intervention that might coax them to alter their courses to the benefit of the mortals living along their banks.
Despite this vision, May does not imagine the seamless integration of engine and environment necessary to the EIC’s imagination of the improved Nadia Rivers. The rivers stood apart from and above any human-directed efforts. May indicates the subordinate role of the dredging vessel by describing it as just one of several other methods for clearing channels that he has witnessed. They were just as effective, if not as efficient, as steam-powered dredging. That any of them produced their desired effect was due entirely, however, to the character of the rivers. Well-acquainted with the power of the rivers, he could not imagine any human-built endeavor their equal, even a steam engine. When he urges the Board to send the steam-powered dredger to Nadia, it is to complement the tools he already used to guide the rivers into courses beneficial for navigation. The machine ensemble could not be expanded to encompass the rivers because it was not powerful enough to draw them in.
Conclusion
All of these reports – the Marine Board’s and Seppings’, Forbes’, and May’s – speak of the fundamental incompatibility between the steam-powered dredging vessel and the Bengali rivers on which she had been designed to work. The shipbuilders take up the familiar refrain that British technology, like British bodies, was vulnerable in the tropics. They blame the European plan and its insufficient adaptation to Bengal for the boat’s deep draft. Forbes stands by the steam engine under his supervision and imbues it with such earth-changing powers that he erases the rivers from the operation of dredging. May, on the other hand, limits the efficacy of the engine to what the rivers would allow. None of these options allow for the expansion of the steam-powered machine ensemble into the environment or an integrated and improved landscape.
The failure of the dredging vessel resulted from material problems in the vessel design and the weight of the engine. But the EIC did not undertake expensive modifications or experiment with putting the engine on a new vessel because the failure of the project was also determined by the Company’s imagination. While the British-built steam engine held the promise of an improved future, the tropical environment in which it was to operate still incited anxiety among the EIC, and thus they imagined the two forces at odds and, particularly as the engine and apparatus needed continual and expensive repairs, the Nadia Rivers the eventual victor. A single posthumous reference serves as a fitting epitaph for the abandoned steam-powered dredging vessel: “In 1828–1829 a steam dredger received from England was sent to work on this river, but the machinery did not answer well, and the draught of the boat, six feet, rendered her very ill adapted for the river.”Footnote 112
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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