Two of the lesser known trades carried out by sailing ships in the second half of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries were in coolie ships and oil sailers. The coolie trade commenced in the 1850s after the suppression of the obnoxious slave trade. It involved the relatively humane transport of indentured labourers from, mostly, India and China to Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji, Cuba, Malaysia, Peru and other places.
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