The Malabar’s in ‘arbour with the Jumner at ‘er tail,An’ the time-expired’s waitin’ of ‘is orders for to sail.Ho! the weary waitin’ when on Khyber ‘ills we lay,But the time-expired’s waitin’ of ‘is orders ‘ome to-day.They’ll turn us out at Portsmouth wharf in cold an’ wet an’ rain,All wearin’ Injian cotton kit, but we will not complain;They’ll kill us of pneumonia for that’s their little wayBut damn the chills and fever, men, we’re goin’ ‘ome to-day!Rudyard Kipling, Troopin’ (Our Army in the East)In the collections of the National Army Museum (London) is an evocative painting by Charles Parsons Knight of ‘The Last Indian Troopship’, namely HMS Malabar, a name that yet resonates with many Bermudians, being associated for almost a century with the Dockyard at Ireland Island, now a premier heritage destination.Sailing downwind under a full moon and several dimensions of scudding clouds, Malabar looks ungainly, being as it was one of the composite ships of the day, partly powered by steam yet retaining major vestiges of the great Age of Sail with two masts square-rigged.The moonlight plays upon the blackened sea, while in the distance a fully rigged clipper ship sails by. The windows of the stern cabins of Malabar, another vestige of older times, are lit with the pale glow of candlelight.Whether the moon is rising or setting, it is hard to say, but by the time the painting was executed in 1881, the setting of the sun on such a trooper and the empire it served was fast approaching, as steam and then oil replaced wind and great sails as the propellant force of the world of international shipping. The defeat and death of the last trooper would not occur, however, for almost another four decades.That Malabar was the fifth of seven such named vessels of the Royal Navy, the last two being the ‘stone frigates’, or building headquarters of the Bermuda Dockyard, one now derelict and the other the grandly restored Commissioner’s House at the National Museum.All of the five real ships were associated with the sub-continent of India and took their name from the Malabar Coast, being a region along the southern half of the country’s west coast, fronted by the Arabian Sea.The first Malabar was a former East Indiaman, Royal Charlotte, but on its conversion to a warship in 1794 lasted only two years, foundering under tow out of the West Indies in 1796. Malabar the second was built at Calcutta as the Cuvera in 1798 and upon purchase in 1804 became a fourth rate of 56 guns. Renamed HMS Coromandel in 1815, the ship served on convict runs to New South Wales, eventually arriving at Bermuda in 1827 as a convict hulk, but carrying a load of building timber, some of which was discovered in the floor structure of the Dockyard Parsonage in 1982. The vessel was broken up at Bermuda in 1853.The third Malabar was a small sloop of 20 guns in the Indian service in the first decade of the 19th century; little else is known of that vessel. The fourth ship of the name was a third rate of 74 guns built at the Bombay Dockyard and launched in 1818. In later years, it saw duty as a coal hulk at Portsmouth but with its teak construction was still afloat when sold out of service in 1905, by then renamed HMS Myrtle. For a brief period in 1838, Malabar IV was at Bermuda and thus in the company of Coromandel, ex-Malabar II.While the movement of troops by sea has been a feature of warfare since the time of Julius Caesar, the ships used were usually chartered from private companies. In the case of the supply of men to the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire, namely India (then including all of that country, plus what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh), that system proved inadequate, so in the mid-1860s five ships were especially built for the Portsmouth-Bombay run, being the Crocodile, Euphrates, Jumna, Malabar and Serapis.These Indian troopers were constructed to similar designs to allow for passage through the Suez Canal, which would open a few years later in 1869, but for several years after its launch in 1866 HMS Malabar ran only between the north end of the Gulf of Suez and its India terminus at Bombay, now Mumbai. Though carrying but a few guns, the ships were designed to look like warships of old, with many gunports that were but windows for the soldier’s cabins.Between the two main masts stood the funnel for the boilers of its steam engine, while a mizzen mast stood about a stern castle, with several decks of windows, not unlike the ships of Trafalgar; a “ram bow” on all the ships carried the Star of India emblem.In 1894, the sister ships were taken out of service and Malabar followed two years later, being sent in 1897 to Bermuda as a receiving ship, a duty it performed after 1901 and into the Great War renamed as HMS Terror.In 1918, the Bermuda merchants, Messrs. Pearman Watlington & Co. purchased Malabar/Terror and we find our old tourism friend, late of New York, A.E. Outerbridge attempting to act as a broker in the forward sale of the vessel to the United States Shipping Commissioner. At 73, he explains that he is “back in harness again” as his son, Frank, had enlisted “in the Engineers Corps, and for some time has been in France”.Outerbridge noted that ‘the ship has been frequently in dry dock at Bermuda, and recently had the plates bored, and found to be in fine condition, with ⅝-inch iron at the thinnest place on the water-line. He suggests that the vessel could be refitted by the Commission as a “steamer for transatlantic trade”, as part of the US Merchant Marine fleet.The Honourable John A. Donald, Commissioner at Washington, DC, was unmoved, as was his chequebook, and the Bermudian adventurers had to settle for the scrap value of the vessel. HMS Malabar was brought to the docks at Hamilton to await a tow to an ignominious death at a breaker’s yard on the East Coast, which execution was unceremoniously accomplished some time in 1920.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to director[AT]bmm.bm or 704-5480.