Beginnings
The IFC was formed in 1865, primarily to ferry troops up and down the Irrawaddy River and delta. Soon, the company was carrying passengers, rice, government stores, and mail from Rangoon to Prome and, in 1868, to Bhamo. Click here to see a photograph of Beeloo, a mail steamer of the IFC.
The ferry became indispensable to the oil fields up river at Yenangyaung and Chauk for carrying supplies and heavy equipment. Partly because the railway to Mandalay followed the path of the Sittaung River rather than the Irrawaddy River, the company stayed relevant and useful well into the twentieth century, even after independence from Britain.
The ships, which were paddle steamers, were built in Scotland, before being dismantled and transported to Burma for reassembly. When the Japanese invaded Burma in World War II, Manager of the IFC's Burma fleet, John Morton, ordered the scuttling of all 600 ships in his fleet. This supreme act of denial prevented the Japanese from having a usable, local fleet for transport up the Irrawaddy River. In 1948 the company was reconstituted as the Government Inland Water Transport Board.
Read more about this topic: Irrawaddy Flotilla Company
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)