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. 

Pioneering Indian ayahs afloat ( South Asian Heritage Month 2021)

Ayahs (nannies) were the biggest group of South Asian women business travellers in the 19C and early 20C during the Raj.

They sailed to and from Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon and Colombo, looking after colonial children being taken ‘Home’ by Anglo-Indian parents on furloughs or to British boarding schools.

2021 is the hundredth anniversary of the peak year for ayahs arriving in Britain.

Among the 50 ayahs arriving in 1921 was a woman only known as ‘Ayah Hollick.’(It was normal to refer to servants only by the name of their employers).

Ayah Holllick was sailing from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to London on the Bibby Line’s  SS Lancashire. During the three-week voyage she was looking after Mrs Louisa and Mr FC Hollick, their boy of nine and a baby girl, Anthea.

Ayahs gained status from their employers. So this ayah is likely to have enjoyed the Mr Hollick's referred prestige. He was a tea merchant working for the illustrious Dodwell & Co, direct rivals to those mighty merchants of the Far East, Jardine, Matheson & Co.

On arriving, the whole family went to Matlock Manor Hotel, a boarding house in south London’s Herne Hill. Possibly the ayah shared a room with the children.

We don’t know what the ayah made of England, nor how long the Hollicks stayed. Indeed, if the family’s sojourn was a long one, the ayah may have gone back earlier. 

It's possible that she stayed at the Ayah's Home in Hackney at some point: rates were cheap, the companionship heartening, and prospects for finding a job through networks were good.

Did she work for the Hollicks in Colombo when they returned, and while the children were growing up? Certainly some families had a fast turnover in ayahs. Other ayahs remained devotedly for generations. Some settled as British Asians.   

 After the 1921 trip?

Ayahs were usually proud of ‘their’ children and followed their career from afar, after moving on to work for other ex-pat employers However Ayah Hollick may well have felt ashamed of, or defensive about, what ‘her’ little girl grew up to do.

Age 18, Anthea Hollick not only angered the Buddhist world in Ceylon. She repeatedly made world-wide headlines in 1938-39 as the ‘Buddha Girl’ because of a faux-pas. 

Whether the ayah was in England devouring the Daily Herald, or in the East reading the Ceylon Daily News she'd have been shocked at Anthea's behaviour, especially if the ayah herself was a Buddhist.

On holiday with her fiancé George Lamont Watt in at Anuradhapura at Easter 1938 the "blue-eyed blonde" had seized a photo opportunity. She'd posed in the lap of the seven-foot-high Buddha (pictured). It looked as if she was in the deity’s arms.

When George’s film was put in for processing someone at the film lab spotted the calumny and reported it. Protest meetings ensued. Buddhist organisations then demanded an official apology. 

It was given, and published. Even the Attorney General was involved. 

The couple were fined 1s 6d (7.5p), which would have been worth about £5 in today’s money. The derisory amount suggests the level of local cultural respect. 

Buddhist journals that summer referred to the "barbarous act of sacrilege." Maha Bodhi & the United Buddhist World demanded "how long are these acts of desecration and apologies to continue? 

"In Anuradhapura notices calling visitors’ attention to the penalty for tampering with or defiling sacred relics are prominently displayed in addition to the existence of sit watchers to look after the sacred places and objects.

“Can it then be imagined that these persons acted in good faith? Or, did they ignore all official notice boards and the prevailing customs of the majority of the people of this Island?”

She was so infamous that when she arrived in Britain on the Orient Line’s Ormonde in July 1938, to buy her trousseau, the headlines were ‘Buddha girl arrives.’ 

Reporters came on board at Southampton, while the ship was en route to Tilbury. Anthea was not contrite despite the shaming publicity. See her photo at https://tinyurl.com/anthea-hollick

The Straits Times picked up Anthea's syndicated comments: "We have lost none of our friends in Combo as a result of the incident – and we have not come home [to England] because of any ill feeling in Colombo."

What’s more, she found a cobra in her cabin trunk on the voyage. 

Had some affronted Buddhist really wanted her to die from a snake bite? Or was it just a story? Maybe so, as there were no subsequent reports about dangerous reptiles, as you’d expect.

She brought her trousseau, and sailed home. But people were still talking about Anthea’s photo in August 1938. 

“The whole matter is closed now,” she said. “We made a mistake. There was not the slightest intention of insulting anyone’s religion, and we have paid for it. We have been through the mill and in Ceylon now everyone is satisfied. That being the case, I am totally disinterested in the whole affair and I don’t care a hoot what people in England think about it.”

The following January, 1939, she and George married in Colombo. Did her old ayah go to the wedding? 

And if so, what were the thoughts about respect that she could not afford to express?  We know only that ayahs had precarious careers. They needed to avoid blacklisting in the ex-pat community.

Ayahs' later voyages

There’s no evidence as to whether Ayah Hollick ever came back to the UK. She certainly didn’t return as ‘Ayah Hollick’. None of the family’s post-1921 voyages included an ayah.

But some ayahs kept making repeat voyage working for different families. Records show 984 ayahs arrived in England between 1890 and 1960.

There were never as many as the 50 in 1921. The nearest to that peak was 26 in 1925. No voyages by ayahs were listed after the mid-1950s

However, Indian ayahs still work for European, and Indian, families. Now, when required to travel, they fly.

If Anthea Hollick had children she may well have employed an ayah too. My sleuthing skills haven’t extended this far. If she brought them home to see her mother in Epsom they are likely to have travelled by plane.

When we celebrate South Asian Heritage Month we also acknowledge this remarkable group of possibly a thousand pioneering women. They had unusual privileges, but at a cost: precariousness and obedience.

Ayahs crossed the sea partly out of a desire for adventure and partly because the voyage went with the job. They left behind their own children, in order to tend the Antheas of that colonial world.