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037 Sailortown
Erfgoedstuk
Bladmuziek
Sailortown,
Titel:
Sailortown
Naam uitgever:
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. - E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
Jaar van uitgave:
1997
Omschrijving:
Liedtekst en Liedtekst verklaring
Aantal pagina's:
360
Taal:
Engels
Plaats van uitgave:
London & Newe York
Auteur:
Stan Hugill
ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN SAILORTOWNS
trouble were common. Dutchmen, in these days, ran many of these sailor drinking dens and brothels. Cholera was rife in Calcutta in the eighties, but apparently it
didn't worry the seaman; perhaps his drinking of the local firewater kept him immune. As far as Bentinck Street and the eastern end of Chowringhee Road sailor drinking dives were many. This area also held many brothels frequented by the seafaring community, the inmates of which were mainly native Nautch girls or Maghis. Ballasteer Road was another brothel area with white and half-caste harlots, as well as Japanese girls, all catering for the sailors' needs. By the turn of the century the number of brothel quarters in Calcutta patronized solely by soldiers and sailors were over a dozen, while native ones, solely for natives, ran into the twenties. The best known bordels catering for sailors were those of the Moonshi Ganch, close to the Kidderpore Dock, where French, English, Japanese, and Indian girls charged as low as four to six annas for a 'short time', those of the Dookaria Baghan in Kariah Road, New Market, and of Back Circular Road, where the harlots were mainly French or Frenchified; and those of the famous Randi Bazaar, where both the Western and the Eastern styles of'love' could be indulged. The native prostitutes, or Khanki, hcnna'd their hands and kohl'd
their eyes, and were mostly Nautch dancers as well as whores. The lowest types, as found in Kidderpore, were called by the sailors Chowlahs. The Maghis, too, were both whores and dancing-girls, and the sailormen very often preferred these Indian types to their own kind, the former being far more seductive and mysterious, and the watching of the belly-dancing before going to the divan was, to the sailor, a kind of aphrodisiac not found in Western bordels. Close to the Dookaria Baghan in New Market Street was a brothel run by Black Harry and Pringee Katherine, who employed Maghis for the benefit of sailors. According to J. H. Williams it was also a sailors' boarding-house. Crimps thrived at various times in Calcutta, but it was never a
regular home of the Shanghai game, and, although occasionally brothels, the boarding-houses were usually of the ordinary lodging- house kind. Williams, however, declares the crimps, at one time, did become powerful enough to take over the Sailors' Home here; he reckoned that all the officials were mixed up in the game. With the aid of Father Hopkins of the Priory, a sailor padre of the i88os to 1890s, known all over the Seven Seas, Williams fought them and the hypocritical sky-pilot system, until they were all kicked out, and a complete overhaul of the management of the Sailors' Home insti- tuted. Father Hopkins, it is said, while playing the organ in Calcutta Cathedral, overheard the conversation of two homesick British brass- bounders. Their rather woeful tête-a-tête made him decide to work for the welfare of seamen thenceforward. He would go aboard the Y
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Organisatie: Shanty Nederland
laatste wijziging 18-09-2022
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