ASIATIC COURAGE.
THE escape of the El Dorado' last week in the Bay of Biscay has revived a controversy which has been raging more or less for a century, which excited Captain Marryat forty years ago, and which seems as far from settlement as ever, and that is the quality of Asiatic sailors. In a very early period of their history, the East India Company found that their captains could obtain the services of certain Asiatics in the ports they touched at, at very cheap rates. The men, who called them- selves Lascars, belonged to almost all Asiatic races, ex- cept the Chinese—your Chinaman wants full wages, and when he goes to sea is always a carpenter, or sail-maker, or skilled operative of some kind—Philippine Islanders, Malays, Mughs (from the old Burmese coast), ,Sindees, Cutchees, Arabs, Somalees, and even, though rarely, Pathans from the Hills, and pure blacks from Nubia; but they were all strong, all amenable to discipline, and all very pleasant to captains, because they required so very little accommodation. Any covered place was better than their own buts, and if there were none available, they slept about as they could. They all obeyed their own elected officers or gang- masters, and they all, as long as their wages were paid, did their work steadily and perseveringly, mutinying quite as rarely as Europeans. The captains liked them, they persisted in employing them, and gradually the lascars came to form a large proportion of every crew,—a proportion which of late years, and in non-fighting services, has steadily increased. There was, however, always one doubt about the lascars. Captains, unless extremely familiar with them and personally popular with them, distrusted their nerve in battle—that is Captain Marryat's grievance—and believed that whenever tried at once by danger and cold, they would absolutely refuse to do their duty. We do not remember the incident on which the belief rested, but it was nearly universal among the very experienced and competent seamen who made up the old Company's Naval Service—a curiously separate and estimable class—and was embodied in a story almost certainly fifty years old, for we heard it ourselves as an old legend of the Service thirty-one years ago. One of the Company's captains was running down the Channel in bitter weather, when a gale came on, and the ship being in extreme danger, all the lascars suddenly sat down. They struck nobody, insulted nobody, and made no rush for liquor ; but there they sat, with that passive, inoffen- sive, and unendurably irritating obstinacy which none but Asiatics and Red Indians can display. The captain, after vain efforts to rouse the men with exhortations, orders, and ropes'-endings, delivered through subordinates, at last went down to them himself, and said, in Hindostanee, "You must pull the ropes, my men, for if not, in ten minutes you will all be in hell 1" " Utcha, " (" Tres hien "), was the humble reply, " utcha, Sahib; so much the better. We shall be warm there." The very desire of life had gone out of them, and move they would not and did, not, and the work which saved. the vessel was done by some recruits on board. Apart from the epigrammatic expression, that is precisely what happened on board the El Dorado' on Thursday week,—at least, according to all the passengers' accounts, for the captain says the lascars did work down below. The gale was tre- mendous, the cold terrible, the fires in the engine-room put out by the water, and the ship seemed going to pieces, when the lascars refused to work any longer, and retired be- low, accepting death rather than exert themselves further on the deck. They wore not, apparently, worn out. They were not required to do anything extraordinary or heroic, to go aloft, or perform the work of a forlorn hope in any way, but simply to work the pumps, or that failing, to pass along buckets
for many hours. They refused, however, and as there were no means of compelling them, and no use in resorting to the means, if there had been—for if they had been shot by threes at a time, they would not, in that mood, have worked—the passengers, most of them military officers or missionaries, turned to, and in the most creditable way aid the work themselves, saved the ship,—and then, of course, growled at the Company and the lascars.
What broke down with the Lascars P Englishmen, of course, say their courage, but that theory is not quite so certain as it looks, and the question is of great intellectual and even political interest. That an Asiatic's courage differs from a European's is quite certain, and if we could. only discover how and why, a great many puzzling and. dangerous problems would be in a fair way of solution. The problem is put before us on land every year—this year, for example, in Afghanistan in a very emphatic way—and it may be worth while to examine it under the very special conditions of sea-life. Is not quiet sitting down in momentary expectation of death rather an .odd way of ex- hibiting abject cowardice p The lascars who did, it, are by the necessity of the case, the specially adventurous members of races which fight very well ; they are inured not only to hardship, but to this particular form of hardship, from early boyhood ; and though quiet in port, they have not in port the reputation of cowardice, but of men rather specially trustworthy. A naval officer in a row would. as soon have Lascare as Sepoys behind him, Clive chose them for artillerymen ; and ship:captains do not complain that, individually, they shrink from danger ; while the class do very dangerous subaqueous work, diving and the like, very bravely and well. As pirates they have repeatedly fought with astonishing resolution, and. they have occasionally behaved splendidly in the Company's ships. That they lack something which Europeans possess, as all Asiatics do, is true, but we are not quite sure it is not reasonableness rather than courage. They certainly fear death, as the lascars of the El Dorado' showed, least of the two races. We should be much more inclined to believe that the want was intellectual, and pro- duced by the same bias of thought which makes true fatalism so frequent in Asia and so rare in Europe, than that there was a direct failure of courage. It is scarcely fair to try lascars by such a scene as that of Wednesday week, for there are physical conditions which destroy nerve, and with Asiatics cold is the strongest of them. No one can read any exhaustive account of the flight from Cabal in 1842 with- out seeing that, but for the cold, the Sepoys might have avoided massacre, and probably would have avoided it, by in- cessant attacks, for which their faculties were too benumbed. Even on the El Dorado,' however, the moment hope reappeared, the engine fires being relighted, the lascars recovered them- selves, their cheer—which has brought on them such a shower of scorn from Englishmen, who are rather braced than cowed. by cold—having probably been one not of gratulation at escape, as is suggested, but of sincere admiration. Was not the cause of failure that readiness to despair, that inability to calculate, and that carelessness of death which Asiatics all exhibit, arid which is not uncommon among Neapolitans, Greeks, and Portuguese P The courage exhibited by Northern races in desperate circumstances is a good deal stimulated by dislike of death, and a good deal kept up by a power of thinking accurately, of seeing that there is a chance remaining if certain things can be done, which, accordingly, if they are possible, are done. English sailors, once convinced that hope is over, have been known to strike work at the pumps, just as these lascars did ; while all naval history is full of rushes at the spirit-room, and of efforts, often success- ful, made by officers to resist them. We suspect if the lascar or other healthy Asiatic could. be made to think, or imbued with any motive which should make him turn his fearlessness of death to account, be would prove quite as brave as the ordinary European, in any situation where cold did not overcome his natural energies, just as dysentery, or sea-sickness, or excessive fatigue will overcome them in the European.
It may be said that such a discussion is useless, as a mental failure may make men as worthless as a physical fear ; but in the first place, we have to employ these lascars, whether we like it or not. Shipowners will never give up such a useful reserve of power unless compelled by law, and a law prohibiting her Majesty's dark subjects from exercising the vocation of a sailor i!;, while we hold. India, not a very probable event. There are limits to injustice even in Asia, not to mention the position
of any party with the whole shipping interest of the king- dom leagued. against it in a right cause. If the lascars are naturally cowards, no arrangements will make them brave ; but if they are not, a very little training or example may make all the difference, as witness this letter from an unfriendly witness, in Wednesday's Times :—
"Some two years ago I had the misfortune to be wrecked in the
Cashmere,' a vessel belonging to the same owners as the El Dorado.' In our ease the steamer was comparatively small,—about 1,000 tons. The total number of Europeans on her books did not exceed ten. Of these, but four—the captain and three officers—were sailors, the re- mainder being engineers, clerk, and steward, and our effective strength was reduced by the loss of the second officer, who was drowned to- gether with six of the saloon passengers, early in the night. The native crew, demoralised from the moment the vessel struck, was so unnerved as to be quite incapable of working the lifeboat through the heavy surf that was running at the time, though a smaller boat, in- sufficiently manned by a volunteer crew of five Europeans, managed to make several successful trips ashore, thereby rescuing the balk of the passengers. Their example established confidence among the lascars, who eventually brought their boat ashore without difficulty."
In this case, the lascars did not fear the duty required of them, but held it impossible, and when its possibility had been demonstrated, performed it at once. In the next place, an intellectual difficulty is much more easily removed than a physical one, and good sailors can be made of decently brave men, who could not be made out of cowards ; and in the third place, Englishmen can never waste time in an effort to under- stand the nature of Asiatics, and more especially the differences between their mental condition and their own. The great English work is to govern Asiatics, and Englishmen will never do it either easily or successfully unless they thoroughly under- stand them, which is certainly not the case yet. There may be motives as yet unascertained which would appeal most power- fully to lascars like those in the El Dorado.'
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