This painting depicts the ‘Mersey’, an iron-hulled sailing ship built by Charles Connell and Company of Glasgow and launched on 18 May 1894 for the Nourse Line. The ship was primarily used to transport Indian indentured labourers – so-called ‘coolies’ – to the British colonies. The Mersey’s destinations included Suriname, Trinidad and Fiji.

The ‘coolie’ system had its origins in the abolition of slavery. After an act of parliament formally abolished slavery in most British colonies in 1833, sugar plantation owners formed powerful lobbies to push policies that safeguarded the profits of their trade. No longer able to rely on enslaved labourers, they explored alternative ways of securing cheap manpower. After some short-lived and unsuccessful attempts to employ emancipated slaves and European labourers on low wages, the planters began importing indentured workers from India. Despite some newspapers condemning this practice as a revival of the slave trade, it quickly gained parliamentary approval, giving rise to a centralised and organised system of contractual migration, which sustained the sugar trade for many decades and created Indian diaspora communities across the globe. The trade in indentured Indian labour continued throughout the nineteenth century. By the time this system was abolished in 1920, an estimated 1.3 million Indian labourers had migrated to British, French, Danish and Dutch colonies across the world. Although less well-known than the earlier transatlantic slave trade, the history of indentured Indian labour highlights the close links between labour, migration and colonialism.

In the early decades of the ‘coolie’ system, ships were chartered each year as required, sometimes in India but more often in London. However, from the early 1870s, it became increasingly common for shipping firms to enter into multi-year contracts with colonial authorities. These contracts gave firms exclusive rights to supply labour to particular colonies. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Nourse Line was one of the biggest firms in the ‘coolie’ trade. Wooden sailing ships were initially used to transport ‘coolies’ until the Nourse Line began using iron-hulled ships in the 1860s. Other shipping firms soon followed suit. Steamships eventually took over from sailing vessels in the early twentieth century.

The Mersey’s involvement in the ‘coolie’ trade ceased in 1908, when it was sold to the White Star Line. Employed as a training vessel for White Star Line cadets, the Mersey made six voyages to Australia, becoming the first sailing ship to be equipped with a radio in 1910. The Mersey was sold to Norwegian owners in 1915 and changed hands several more times, being briefly renamed ‘Transatlantic’ and ‘Dvergso’. It was eventually scrapped in 1923.