Mackinnon of Balinakill

Not long after the Campbeltown Steamer Company’s third ship, the “Duke of Cornwall”, came into service, a young
Campbeltonian took passage to a new life. His influence would be felt across The World, not least in Africa.

William Mackinnon, born on March 23, 1823 in a tenement in Argyll Street, Campbeltown, was the son of poor folks
and only after a struggle, barely out of his teens, did he manage to open a grocery shop in Campbeltown’s Main Street.
Having laid down the foundations of a good-going shop, it was therefore much to everyone’s surprise that he sold up
and headed for Glasgow.

There he took first a job clerking in a silk warehouse and then moved to clerk for a Portuguese importer where he was
turned down an offer of a partnership and instead, on his 24th birthday, in 1847, sailed for India and The Bay of
Bengal where he went to work at a sugar mill in Cossipore. Within eight years, his name became a by-word from
Madras to Rangoon.

He soon met up with Robert Mackenzie, an old family friend from Campbeltown, who, ten years older than young
William, had arrived in India in 1836 and become well-known as a merchant in Bengal. Unlike others, Mackenzie was
a ‘free merchant’ and not in the employ of the then all-powerful East India Company.

In 1840, Mackenzie became the Bengal agent for The India General Steam Navigation Company ships which operated
on the inland waters of the mighty Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers and, in December 1847, Mackenzie, just months
after Mackinnon’s arrival, suggested a partnership which was established as Mackinnon, Mackenzie & Co. with
Mackinnon at Cossipore and Mackenzie at his base in Ghazipur.

In 1849, Mackenzie’s long time friend James Macalister Hall and Mackinnon’s nephew, Peter Mackinnon, went out
from Scotland to join them.

Chartering ships out of Glasgow and Liverpool, the company carried cargoes to India, China and Australia. Cargoes
included light machinery and sewing machines from Glasgow as well as consumables.

Mackenzie was amazed by the number of Australian wool ships that sailed out empty, in ballast, or simply with
emigrants from Britain. These ships would have been more profitably employed taking out cargoes of whisky, beer,
brandy and porter for which there was a high demand and little provision of supply.

Mackenzie took it upon himself to visit the company’s Australian agents in 1852 and look at the possibilities of
developing the trade. Returning on the “Aurora” to Calcutta in May 1853, Mackenzie was drowned when the ship was
wrecked on Gabo Island, close to Cape Howe, on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. Mackinnon, aged
just 30, began to put into effect the plans which he had devised earlier with Mackenzie.

In 1854 he founded The Calcutta and Burmah Steam Navigation Company and built his first ship, the “Cape of Good
Hope”, which was accidentally run down and sunk on her maiden voyage ! Without a moment’s delay, William
ordered another “Cape of Good Hope (II)” and too the “Baltic”.

In 1855, Mackinnon, Mackenzie & Co. had successfully bid for The East India Company’s mail contract between
Rangoon and Calcutta - The East India Company were still effectively in control of Burmese affairs in these days.
Mackinnon needed funding for new ships for the service and in 1856 he returned home to Scotland. Whilst home, he
married Janet Jameson, the daughter of a Glasgow solicitor.

With the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny the following year, in 1857, Mackinnon’s were the first ships chartered to the
Government for troop carrying. He quickly realised the future advantage of designing ships’ hold spaces that could be
quickly converted to carry men and horses in time of war and equally quickly be converted back to carry cargo in
peacetime.

In later years, with the help of Denny’s yard in Dumbarton, Mackinnon would virtually monopolise the British
troopship trade, a trade that would last for nearly 100 years before the troops would take to the air.

Mackinnon’s watchword was “integrity” and hearing that his agents were trying to force up freight rates for rice
desperately needed when there was a severe famine in Orissa, Mackinnon took control himself, sacked his agents and
shipped in the rice at a heavy loss to himself until the famine was over.

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Barely forty, Mackinnon formed The British India Steam Navigation Company on October 28, 1862 with a capital of
£400,000 and nine ships and at the same time placed an order in Britain for a further six ships. Lord Palmerston
offered Mackinnon a Knighthood too around this time but the offer was declined !

The company gave the crews uniforms ( ! ) and took over the services from Calcutta to Burma and Singapore, from
Bombay to Karachi and The Persian Gulf and proposed further new services to other Eastern ports.

In 1867, nine of the ‘B. I.’ ships were employed to carry Indian troops to join up with the British forces in Abyssinia
where the Emperor, Theodore, enraged by Queen Victoria’s failure to reply personally to one of his letters, had taken
some Europeans as hostages !

The British military campaign to free the hostages was covered by a young, then unknown, American newspaper
reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, who, just a few weeks previously, had been guest of the Burns family, of shipping
renown and of Dr James ‘Paraffin’ Young at Wemyss Bay ! It was there, at Wemyss Bay, that Young told H. M.
Stanley about his friend David Livingstone, the African missionary-explorer, whom Stanley would later famously seek
out in Africa.

David Livingstone died in 1873 and his body was taken to Zanzibar and lay in Mackinnon, Mackenzie’s offices
awaiting shipment back home for burial in Westminster Abbey. His body brought back to England for burial in
Westminster, Livingstone’s two African servants, Susi and Chuma, came to Wemyss Bay to stay with ‘Paraffin’ Young
at Kelly House. They built a replica of Livingstone’s hut in the estate grounds and it lasted in fairly good condition
until the 1930’s before being swamped by undergrowth.

The opening of The Suez Canal on November 17, 1869 brought more opportunities for Mackinnon and, against fierce
competition from ‘P. & O.’, he won the U.K. to India troopship contract - A monthly mail service to Aden too was
begun in 1872.

Mackinnon, no office-bound shipping magnate, now quickly set off down the almost completely unexplored and
undeveloped coast of East Africa to size up trading opportunities. Here were riches as great as any in India and again it
was Britain, thanks to Mackinnon, that was first in the field.

By 1873 his ships were plying regularly between Zanzibar and Aden and linking into his British India Company ships
for the long haul to and from Britain and India. There were both fast and slow mail services, the slow mail making
‘umbrella stops’ off the least important coastal settlements where a lone company clerk sat out , under an umbrella on
the beach, scanning the horizon for the smoke rising from the funnel of the approaching steamer.

Exploiting native peoples was utterly alien to Mackinnon and such were his ideas of empire that, in 1878, the Sultan
Bargash of Zanzibar, immensely satisfied with the benefits brought to his lands by Mackinnon’s ships and deeply
impressed with the integrity and capacity of their owner, made the little Scot as remarkable an offer as has ever been
suggested by a ruling Prince to a foreigner.

The Sultan’s offer amounted to “a concession for 70 years of the customs and administrations of the dominions of
Zanzibar, including all rights of sovereignty”. This meant complete trading rights along 1,150 miles of coastline, together
with all the country inland as far as The Congo Free State - some 590,000 square miles of virgin territory.

Mackinnon quickly reported the agreement to The Foreign Office in London. Whitehall was unimpressed.
Undismayed by the attitude of London’s petty civil servants, Mackinnon resolved to hold a watching brief on Britain’s
behalf for the Germans, under Carl Peters, were infiltrating everywhere in East Africa and signing secret and
meaningless treaties with the local tribal chiefs regardless of the fact that these chiefs were all subordinate to Sultan
Bargash in Zanzibar - and, in turn, to Mackinnon who kept on hammering at The British Government !

At last, in 1885, The Foreign Office realised they had been caught napping. But, the Kaiser had by then granted
German nationals a charter which brought into being German East Africa and Tanganyika. Fortunately for Britain,
the friendship between Mackinnon and Sultan Bargash was indeed strong and, in 1888, the Sultan offered Mackinnon
a second concession !

This time, taking nothing for granted, Mackinnon formed The Imperial British East Africa Trading Company to
which Queen Victoria granted an immediate Royal Charter on September 3 that year, 1888.

The published aims of the company were characteristic of Mackinnon. They included the abolition of slavery, equal
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treatment for men of all nations, complete religious liberty and proper administration of justice, regardless of class or
creed.

Again, success followed success. Vast surveys were undertaken, roads and railways fanned out in all directions,
trading and missionary posts set up and Mobassa transformed from a collection of mud-huts into a great and thriving
seaport.

Another relative of Mackinnon’s, his nephew Duncan Macneill, had also joined the fold and by 1885, as Macneill &
Co., was operating his Calcutta-based fleet of river steamers in Mackinnon’s ‘B. I.’ colours.

In 1889, Mackinnon was created a Baronet and by the following year his influence had penetrated to Uganda and his
companies influenced all manner of affairs from Mombassa to the Albert Edward Nyanza and north to the banks of
the White Nile. A few months before his death in 1893, Mackinnon invited The Crown to step in and take over all his
administrations in East Africa.

Like so many far-seeing men, Mackinnon realised the vital role which the Church has to play in empire. Mackinnon
founded The East African Scottish Mission which became The Church of Scotland Kenya Mission and now has tens of
thousands of communicants.

At his own wish, Mackinnon was buried in the little churchyard at Clachan, in Kintyre, where, in 1867, he had
bought and then, twenty years later, re-built Balinakill House. The extension to the house, what remains today as a
hotel, was built of specially quarried stone which, shipped in to West Loch Tarbert, was hauled up from the shore on a
horse-drawn railway system, the old house itself was demolished in the 1960’s.

When Mackinnon died, at the youngish age of 70 in June 1893, it was written that “His record is one of which any
man could be proud. His victories were those of peace and they have indeed been great and beneficient. His name was
known and his influence felt in almost every part of The World.”

Mackinnon’s estate was valued at the then enormous sum of £750,000. He left no heirs and James Macalister Hall took
over the company till the following year when he handed over to Duncan Mackinnon, another of William Mackinnon’s
nephews. Eventually, in 1914 and with the outbreak of World War I, the company amalgamated with ‘P. & O.’ and
herein lies a mystery.

There is indeed a mystery about Mackinnon’s estate for, to this very day, 8 of Mackinnon’s British India Company’s
shares remain unaccounted for - ‘it could be you’ - and they would undoubtedly be worth a real fortune !

Despite the company’s amalgamation with ‘P. & O.’, the ‘B. I.’ ships continued to be painted in ‘B. I.’ company
colours. In the company’s final years, the parent ‘P. & O.’ swallowing everything up into ‘groups in 1971, the best
remembered ships “Dunera”, “Devonia” and finally, till 1986, the “Uganda” all served as educational ‘school-cruise’
ships taking secondary school pupils from Britain to the Baltic and Mediterranean.

Even though the “Uganda” was the last of Mackinnon’s British India Company ships, the name of Mackinnon,
Mackenzie & Company lingers on in Bombay and now, Indian owned, its ships still sail with Mackinnon’s old British
India colours, the funnels painted black with two white bands divided by two heavy black lines.