The deck-passenger ship in which I was serving got a contract to board 1,500 Muslim pilgrims at the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and to take them back to Chittagong at the top of the Bay of Bengal.
It was an unusual maritime experience.
Our ship, the Sirdhana of the British India company, was just one ship out of the many that participated in one of the great annual occasions of human transportation that carried tens of thousands of pilgrims going to and coming from the holy city of Mecca. That was many years ago.
It’s different today, when most of the two million pilgrims on the hajj, as the pilgrimage is called, will be carried on hundreds of flights through the airports at Jeddah and Medina. This year the hajj lasted from August 9th to the 14th.
We were berthed in Karachi, the major port in Pakistan, when we got the news. First of all we signed on a doctor and three medical assistants and three nurses.
There was an expectation that many of the pilgrims would be in a poor physical state, after journeying to Saudi Arabia from Bengal and then enduring the heat and crowded conditions in Mecca.
Our crew from the Indian sub-continent set about arranging the lower decks where most of the impoverished pilgrims would lie in bunks or hammocks or on mats on the wooden decks.
When we set off on our voyage, the ship was empty. On the fore part of the boat deck the European officers played table tennis. The slight rolling of the ship as we ploughed along the Arabian Sea called for some special skills. Both winners and losers, all Christians and mostly British, gave vent to laughter, loud oaths and blasphemies during games. As a result, when we neared Jeddah, our captain called us all to his cabin for a meeting.
“You chaps will need to be careful with your language when our Muslim pilgrims come on board,” he said in a fatherly tone. “They regard Jesus Christ as a prophet of some significance and don’t like to hear his name disrespected.” We noted his comments and decided to watch in our language when the pilgrims boarded.
They came from one of the most impoverished regions in the world. Many had saved and scrimped for years to put together the cost of the pilgrimage. For them, a visit to the holy sites at Mecca was to be the culmination of a lifetime of religious devotion.
When our ship docked at the crowded port of Jeddah we looked down on a disturbing sight. Our pilgrims, dressed in white cotton, were being roughly corralled on the dockside by the Saudi police, in the searing heat. Some looked in poor shape, even skeletal. As a mark of the completion of the pilgrimage many men had dyed their beards with henna, a reddish/brown colour. When our gangways went down they shuffled slowly on board. Some had to be helped. It took a long time for all to make their way onto our ship.
After the gangways were hauled up our big white-painted vessel pulled away from the dockside with a long blare of the hooter and set off.
The pilgrims were led by an imam, a religious leader who had a large impressive beard and a powerful voice. Early each morning he went into the purser’s office and called the faithful to prayer over the big loudspeakers of the public address system. The promenade deck was a principal area of devotion.
A pivoted sign on the top of a wooden post pointed towards Mecca. Prayer mats were laid on the wooden deck in orderly lines in that direction and the pilgrims knelt and bent forward in unison, while the imam intoned the prayers. It was the role of the second officer to adjust the sign as the ship altered course during the voyage. He told me he had forgotten to do so on one occasion and that day the pilgrims were praying towards Mogadishu in Somaliland rather than Mecca.
Illness, much of it made worse by malnutrition, ravaged the passengers. Our medical staff did the best they could. It was considered fortunate that there were only four deaths. The bodies, wrapped in canvas and weighted with lead, were put into a chute on the poop deck aft. The imam intoned prayers and the bodies slid into the Indian Ocean.
When at last we reached Chittagong the weary pilgrims made their way down the gangways hauling their meagre baggage with them.
For all the hardships they had undergone there was an aura of dignity about them. It evoked in myself and others a respect for their beliefs and an admiration of what they had endured to fulfil them.