Portuguese Ayahs: Early explorers of baby-minding sort

Pioneering explorer Vasco da Gama  was, of course, famously Portuguese. (And while he became the first European to 'discover' a route to India Catarina, his wife, stayed home looked after the seven children, presumably with an ayah's help.

But I’m just beginning to discern another –  hidden –  Portuguese travel story: the extent to which Portuguese-origin women from India were a different, domesticity-centred kind of pioneering early voyagers, four or five centuries later.  

Travelling ayahs and amahs are the world’s first women of colour to be female travelers, as this blog has shown. 

Now very new research is revealing that they might have been predominantly from places developed by the Portuguese who followed in da Gama's footsteps This is especially true of women who lived in what is now called Goa and Sri Lanka.

William Wood's 1792 portrait of this Bengal ayah, Joanna de Silva, (see pic) helps the story evolve. The painting has just been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

Joanna, whose surname sounds Portuguese, looked after the children of Catherine  and Charles Russell Deare. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in  the East Indian Company. 

Both lost their lives in 1790, age 40 and 34 respectively.  Catherine died a few days before Charles was felled by a cannon shot at Sattimungalum. They are buried together in Kolkata (see pic). Charles' military career can be perused at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59595/59595-h/59595-h.htm#

The Deares had been based in Calcutta  (a place where many Portuguese descendants lived, as did da Gama himself). And Joanna appears to have gone back to England with the children, who seemingly were to be looked after by his brother Phillip. 

That was a relatively common pattern: the beloved ayah was so central in providing 'her' children with stability after a parent died, that she effectively emigrated. She took her charges 'Home'  and then looked after them in Europe, far from her own family. 

Joanna‘s voyage to England would have been on an East Indian Company sailing ship round the southern tip of Africa. In challenging conditions aboard she’d have been looking after the orphans for about six months. She was lucky to arrive. Not all ships made it. Not all ayahs, memsahibs and babies survived voyages in that time. 

You can read the fascinating story of Joanna’s portrait, which my colleague Swapna M Banerjee (pictured) has just written up: She Travelled: The Portrait of Joanna de Silva, the Indian Ayah at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  https://bit.ly/METDeSilva

Path-breaking Portuguese ayahs

Joanna was one of the path-breaking Portuguese-origin ayahs who were mobile. Many historical texts refer specifically to 'Portuguese ayahs'  or 'Singhalese amahs' as if that cultural identity mattered very much.  

The unlikely and eroticised image (right) is of Agostina, a 13-year-old Singhalese low-caste girl who worked as an ayah in a native house in Pelmadulla, Ceylon, c.1867. In that period Portuguese domestic workers were commonly seen as sexually available.

Since Joanna's time thousands of ayahs and amahs have traveled the globe. Surely the nervous newbies venturing on the undertaking were helped by knowing that they had predecessors such as Joanna. 

If you look at the passenger lists  (now available online) you will see that an astonishing number of these mobile ayahs had Portuguese-origin names, spelled in varying ways.

In fact the two best-known ayahs on the India-UK route happen to be called Perara or a variation of that name:

1.  Caroline Pereira whose 1850 Old Bailey story reveals much about the racism on voyages from India 
2.  Mrs Anthony Pareira, who was vividly featured in a hyperbolic 1922 newspaper article. See http://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2011/01/ayahs-working-on-19c-seas.html.

Tracking down every floating ayah  who had a Portuguese name is a research job for later. But as a test I looked up the passenger lists to find all the inbound and outbound ayahs called something like Pereira. I found an astonishing number: 29. In the period 1908 to 1934  were at least:

• seven voyages by Marys
• seven by Carolines
• four by Elizabeths
•  a scattering of Isabellas and Rosalines. 

29 out of 721 is statistically significant: four per cent. So what will a study of other Portuguese-named ayahs – such as da Silva  – reveal, one wonders. 

Key question

It is well-recognised now that there were a few travelling ayahs (frequent sailors) and a lot of regular ayahs who went everywhere with the employing family, as a Filipina maid might today.

As I researched I keep wondering about all the many Pereras among the very mobile ayahs:

~  ls this coincidence?  Surely not.

~ was there a dynasty of travelling Pereras  who had cornered the market?  A bit of a 'Dial-an-intrepid-ayah' service or a network known to shipping agents?

I've now realised that the answer is bigger than that. 

Portuguese-descended ayahs tended to be Roman Catholics. This meant they had a more relaxed attitude to travel and to religious prohibitions about food than did some Hindu and Muslim ayahs. They wouldn't lose caste if they voyaged.

It's likely that memsahibs in search of travelling ayahs selected those who'd be the most flexible supports. And maybe, too, RC ayahs would market themselves as  especially able to cope with ocean vicissitudes and on ships without galleys catering for particular dietary rules. 

In addition, the Portuguese were known as trustworthy couriers of European travelers from the 1600s. This meant that ayahs were part of a culture group  characterised as ideal working escorts. 

Caroline Periera of Devon/Ceylon

And an ayah’s work could take her to all sorts of iconic places. 

In 1932 one of the Caroline Pereiras was sailing with Ceylon tea planter William Waddon-Martyn’s family. With Mrs Sheila and the two-year old twins, Caroline seems to have been briefly lodging in Dorland, Yelverton, while the crumbling, ancestral home, Tonacombe Manor in Devon was rented out.  

She was 47 and a British subject, planning to settle back in Ceylon after they left the Marnix van Sint Aldegonde  (pictured),  at Colombo.

Caroline would maybe have known the haunted medieval house, which was where author H Rider Haggard wrote some of Westward Ho! 

What's ahead?

Watch this space for the latest news of the extent to which Portuguese-origin ayahs dominated the domestic-couriering business. How many more ayah de Silvas might there have been?  

These women’s’ voyages didn’t pave the ways for empire building – as Vasco da Gama’s had. 

But they certainly did unusual exploring, as non-white women. Their fortitude deserves recognition. 

Chinese women working with UK ships in 20C

British maritime labour history is largely a history of white and BAME men, and possibly 1 per cent white women. 
Women of other backgrounds, including Chinese, Yemeni, and African women are almost entirely absent. This is a brief introduction to Chinese women's relationship with sea mobility and British seafaring.

Adam Williams, his Chinese amah, and mother Anne at one of Hong Kong's many bays, 1956.
Chinese women accessed the sea and mobility because of their work. 
Image courtesy of https://www.adam-williams.net/2013/05/17/adams-five-generations-of-a-china-family/

Attitudes

Q. Why the absence of Chinese, South Asian, Afro-Caribbean and African-origin women working on ships? 
A. The answer is that shipping companies deliberately excluded such women, despite their potential for being very cheap labour indeed, as both female and non-white. It's not that such women didn't want to go to sea.

Despite extensive research in shipping company and National Union of Seamen archives I have not found any  records of such women. Nor have I found discussions about excluding/including them. Reluctantly, I have to conclude that in the UK in 20C there were no BAME seafaring women. it seems extraordinary. 

I've had a lot of conversations with seafarers. From that I understand that the two main reason for this racialised and gendered exclusion are likely to have been on these grounds: 

1. PASSENGER ATTITUDES. Bedroom stewardess was the main job open to women until the 1970s. Companies probably believed that BAME women wouldn't have been acceptable to white lady passengers in the intense intimacy of a cabin. 

Yet such an objection doesn't seem quite plausible. White European women living in countries such as Singapore, Shanghai, Malaya, and Hong Kong readily employed Chinese servants, especially amahs (children's nurses, even wet nurses) in their homes. 

So it may be that actually the reason for the exclusion is about  the need for stewarding staff - as warders -  to subtly wield authority, to be a female-oriented part of the hegemonic and gendered control of passenger-inmates. 

Bedroom stewardesses and stewardesses had to, to some extent, regulate the passengers in their patch - for example ensuring they didn't request too much room service, and that they attended lifeboat drills.

It may be that shipping lines thought elite white passengers wouldn't accept such regulatory pressure from 'lower' status BAME women.

Also there were not enough Chinese or Indian female passengers to justify employers taking on women servants of the same nationality to look after them during the voyage. Cash-strapped shipping companies only do what they have to do, and employ specific staff only when it pays to do so. 

(This 'appropriateness' type of justification was later used in 1970s legal battles for equality. The concept of 'Genuine Occupational Qualification' was articulated, famously in a case where a gentlemen's tailoring firm remained men-only on the grounds that women should not measure male customers for trousers.) 

  

2.  UNION. The seafarers' union is likely to have opposed BAME women, on the grounds that white men, white women and BAME men - in that order - were more entitled to any available jobs. 

Presences

The main non-British women I have found working on ships have been:

 A. Europeans. Portuguese matrons or auxiliary nurses for migrants, pre WW2. They were employed by the shipping lines, usually Royal Mail and Blue Funnel, whose ships took some passengers of Portuguese background to Brazil. a former Portuguese colony. 

Crew agreements (registers of personnel aboard each voyage) show some of these women workers have British surnames. This suggests that local shipping agents in Portugal - say Lisbon - would have sought bilingual women, probably Portuguese women who were the wives and daughters of British men living there. 

Children were an increasing presence on ships after WW2. Their nannies, including ayahs and amahs, attended as part of their working day. Image from Tim Roberts' story, http://www.archhistory.co.uk/taca/memsmisc.html

B. Ayahs. 阿媽. Children's nurses - especially from India, Ceylon and non-mainland China. They were employed by the traveller's family, not by the shipping line. They therefore travelled as passengers although they worked all the voyage long. This included the usual nursing, dressing, playing with their charges, plus attending at children's sittings for meals on ship, such as the tea party pictured above.

There are records of Indian ayahs aboard, but few of Chinese or Japanese amahs. 

(For a brief summary of amahs' role on land see 'A Lifetime of Labour: Cantonese Amahs In Singapore', 

http://www.nlb.gov.sg/biblioasia/2017/10/02/a-lifetime-of-labour-cantonese-amahs-in-singapore/

C. Gash Jennies, in port. These Chinese women in British colonies worked briefly on British ships in ports such as Hong Kong. 

Affectionate, if patronising, bonds existed between officers and well-organised teams of women who routinely serviced moored ships, doing women's work. 

The most famous 'Jenny', who died aged 92 in 2009, led  a gang who: 
took ''over the domestic economy and husbandry of each vessel. They washed and ironed, cleaned ship, chipped rust and painted, attended as buoy jumpers, and, dressed in their best, waited with grace and charm upon guests at cocktail parties.

Captains and first lieutenants would find fresh flowers in their cabins and newspapers delivered daily ...[jenny earned] by selling soft drinks to the ships' companies and scavenging every item of scrap and gash which could be found on board.' 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military.../naval.../Jenny.html

Could have been in...

1. Galleys and laundries. It never happened. But it wouldn't have been too abnormal for Chinese women living in the UK,  to be employed in jobs that didn't involve passenger contact, such as laundry and galley work. 

It would have been especially 'natural' for employers to take on those women who were part of British culture because of their family connections with British seamen, as in the Portuguese example above. 

(By the early 20th century Hong Kong-origin Cantonese men were routinely employed in the laundries of some shipping lines.)  And British women to do such work were so hard to get that in the 1930s shipping companies took on criminalised young women from penal institutions. 

One reason for women not being taken on for such backstage work may have been cultural resistance from the community. Chinese people in the UK possibly did not think it desirable for Chinese women work away from home for months on ships. Their shipboard position would have been lowly, and perhaps morally compromised.  

Amah holding Linga in HongKong, c 1919.
Image via https://gwulo.com/atom/28110

2. Ship's nurseries. From the 1930s major passenger ships had nurseries, staffed by one nursery stewardess. 

From the 1950s a hierarchy emerged, as was traditional in grand houses: a high-status 'children's nurse' supervised the nursery stewardess, who had a more maid-like status, for example cleaning up spills. 

It would not have been odd if Chinese women did this work on ship. In fact they were never employed in this capacity on UK ships. There was no transition from land-based amah to professional travelling amah, as there was with Indian ayahs.

Male counterparts

The UK history of Chinese men working on ships is as yet barely known, although this is now being addressed by some Heritage Lottery Funded projects. And perhaps men's history, in this case, is anyway not very helpful to understanding Chinese women's maritime history. It was so different.  
Any researcher wanting to go further in exploring men might try these sources, for starters:

A. 1915 crew agreements on line show brief details of Chinese seafaring men in WW1: https://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk/ 

To search you look up the seafarer by surname. So, for example, when I inserted the common name 'Ching' I found a firemen, carpenter, and steward. See https://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk/crew-member?crew_member_search%5BlastName%5D=ching&page=5

B. One of the recent digitally-available interviews with/about Chinese seafaring men includes this: Yew Chang (1919-2012). Pictured. From Hong Kong, he was a merchant seafarer from c1938 to the early 1950s. Initially in the engine room then a cook, he worked for the Netherlands company Shell, later Royal Dutch Shell group. Many Chinese seafarers in the UK worked for Blue Funnel.

In war BAME men were among those seafarers who were held in camps abroad. In WW2. Yew Chang was 'detained' in Calcutta for two years, and 'sent to repair damaged aircraft'.  
The British Chinese Heritage Centre has made available two interviews with him:  http://www.britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk/interviews/seafaring/item/mr-yew-chang and http://www.britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk/interviews/seafaring/item/mr-yew-chang-2.

C.You could try searching the records of the London School of  Nautical Cookery, currently held in the National Maritime Museum Archive, London, at SAH/63.They may include Chinese men, because cooking was one of the jobs Chinese men did on ships, especailly when Chinese food became more popular in the UK. https://collections.rmg.co.uk/archive/objects/469748.html

I recently looked through to find references to women of any ethnicity. The few female applicants were usually told there was no point in training, as no shipping company would take on women cooks.

NOTE

I am grateful to Sha Zhou for inspiring this blog entry. Sha is at King's College, London, and looking for the history of amahs on ships as part of her Ph.D work on The Life Experience of Chinese Female Migrants in Britain after 1945.

Ayahs working on 19C seas

Just out: my article: ‘Ayahs who travelled: Indian nannies voyaging to Britain in the nineteenth century’, Black and Asian Studies Association Newsletter, January, pp.5-8.

What interests me is the race as well as gender were key issues in the mobility of these women. They were the nearest Britain got to employing non-white women seafarers. Ayahs can't really be seen as counterparts of Lascars because they were employed by individual passengers, not by shipping lines.

One ayah sailing as late as 1922 was Mrs Antony Pareira. An article describes her:
‘scanty greying locks … once … lustrous... and black as crow’s tail, [with] ear-rings of quaint native workmanship… smiling and complacent, gentle and maternal, soft-spoken and plainly self-reliant, with small dark eyes alight with keen intelligence…a mother at sixteen ...

'a past mistress in the peccadilloes of the high seas: an adept at doctoring in stubborn mal de mer; and as much inured to the customs and routine of a trim liner as any gold-laced skipper who ever paced a bridge or used a sextant.’

Perhaps the saddest case – and one that indicates that the stress of travelling and the tensions about power between ayahs and memsahibs - is that of the Abbot’s un-named ayah. She was travelling from Ceylon to Plymouth on the steamship Violette, in June 1885.

When Mr Abbot went to get a cup of tea 'the woman seized the eldest child, a beautiful, fair-headed girl, six years old, and thrust her through one of the ports, and then jumped out herself.

Both fell into the sea, and although the steamer was stopped, nothing could be seen of the child … great consternation and regret … the children being great favourites on board.’

This BASA article is part of a much bigger work I am doing on ayahs who sailed.