The Marseille-Nagasaki Route

Soon after the opening of Japan’s ports to foreign trade in 1859, P&O, Pacific Mail and other foreign shipping companies started regular services from Hong Kong and Shanghai to the ports of Japan. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the number of foreign merchantmen and warships visiting Japan increased dramatically, making Nagasaki their first port-of-call and drawing the city into the network of maritime transportation stretching to the ends of the Earth.

By the late nineteenth century, Nagasaki was reaping the benefits, not only of commercial shipping, but also of a new trend in international travel: tourism. The ports of East Asia, once hidden behind a curtain of mystery and danger, were now easily accessible to foreign travelers following in the footsteps of Pierre Loti and other writers who had stirred the collective consciousness with tales of adventure and discovery in exotic lands outre-mer.

One of the regular services was operated by the French company Compagnie Des Messageries Maritimes. Founded in Marseille in 1851, the company started as a government-supported organization but went private in 1871, going on to become France’s major carrier of passengers, cargo and mail over a vast web of shipping lines extending from the Mediterranean Sea to Africa, India and East Asia. 

In 1876, the Compagnie Des Messageries Maritimes appointed a Norwegian merchant named H.M. Fleischer to serve as their agent in Nagasaki. Fleischer opened an office in the Western-style building at No. 3 Umegasaki in the Nagasaki Foreign Settlement. In addition to the French shipping company, Fleischer served as agent for the Bell Telephone Co. and conducted one of Japan’s first telephone experiments in Nagasaki in May 1878.

After Fleischer’s death in 1882, the Nagasaki agency transferred to Holme, Ringer & Co. run by prominent British merchant Frederick Ringer. From that year onward, Holme, Ringer & Co. handled all the related business, everything from the sale of steamship tickets and arrangements for the loading of cargo, to laundry, tourist information and the supply of coal, food and fresh water. Compagnie Des Messageries Maritimes announcements appeared regularly on the pages of Nagasaki newspapers, and the distinctive company flag, with the letters MM on a white background and red corners, became a familiar sight in Nagasaki Harbor.

Advertisement from The Nagasaki Press

The voyage from Marseille to Yokohama took about six weeks. The steamships crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Port Said (the Egyptian city at the northern end of the Suez Canal), traveled south to Djibouti in French Somaliland and traversed the Arabian Sea to Colombo, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). The voyage continued across the Indian Ocean to Singapore, then north to Saigon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), the eastern hub of the Compagnie Des Messageries Maritimes and the major port in French Indochina. The final stopovers were Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe and the terminus at Yokohama. 

Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes routes 

from Marseille to the ports of Japan

In response to the popularity of the Marseille-Yokohama line and all the romantic connotations it garnered, the Compagnie Des Messageries Maritimes published a series of postcards depicting scenes from the various ports-of-call. The artist engaged to paint the illustrations was Charles Millot, a French naval officer who, aside from the Croix de Guerre and other decorations for outstanding military service, had won recognition for his prodigious artistic talent and the human touch of his watercolors depicting life in the navy. After retiring from active service in 1919, Millot had taken up the position of Official Painter of the French Navy, using the pseudonym Henri Gervese.

Entitled Croquis d’Escale or “Sketches of a Stopover,” Gervese’s postcards brim with the same warmth of his earlier work, portraying comical but realistic scenes from the exotic ports-of-call on the Marseille-Yokohama line. The motifs include a camel ride in Egypt, a native merchant selling trinkets on the deck of a steamship in Colombo, a Sikh policeman directing traffic in Singapore, a dragon dance in Saigon, Chinese women wearing fashionable clothing in Shanghai and sumo wrestlers in Yokohama, all conveyed with Gervese’s distinctive colors, fluid lines and attention to detail. One of the two postcards entitled “Nagasaki” shows a humorous episode in the vestibule of a Japanese restaurant, the other a crowded theater with old-fashioned box seats. The vivid content and authentic dress of the Japanese characters suggests that Gervese based the illustrations on personal experiences from his travels as a naval officer. The only stopover on the Marseille-Yokohama line not given a postcard was Kobe. The following are a few examples of Gervese's illustrations in the Croquis d’Escale series, the last two depicting scenes in Nagasaki.

The war between Japan and China in the 1930s caused a sharp drop in the number of foreign passenger ships visiting Nagasaki, including the venerable steamships of the Compagnie Des Messageries Maritimes, and after World War II airplanes replaced steamships as the principal means of international travel. Regular ocean services are now mostly a thing of the past, but Henri Gervese’s illustrations continue to evoke the romance of leisurely travel at sea and the excitement of cultural discovery in faraway lands.