Sheik Sulleyman Adam: A Lascar’s Descent into ‘Madness’

Here, PhD student Hasaam Latif traces the experiences of Lascar* seamen, working far from home under difficult conditions

*Lascars were sailors recruited predominantly in Southern and South-East Asia to work on British ships

 

 

In October 1910, a Lascar sailor named Sulleyman Adam stood at the centre of an appeal to the Home Office, pleading for his life after being sentenced to death in Glasgow for killing his superior officer during a violent altercation aboard ship. The plea portrayed not a hardened criminal but a frightened young sailor caught in circumstances of confusion, coercion, and despair.^[1]

Adam’s story is one of thousands that expose the psychological toll faced by Lascars. They lived and worked under the most punishing of conditions. Lascars confined to the engine room, spaces of extreme heat, darkness, and overcrowding, were often likened to prisoners, their physical and social confinement contributing to a growing number of suicides.^[2] The problem had become so severe that in 1908 it reached Parliament, where officials examined claims that fifty-eight Lascar firemen and trimmers had taken their own lives the previous year.[3] For many, the sea was not a route to opportunity but a passage into alienation and mental illness.

Adam’s case reveals this all too clearly. Unable to speak English fluently, he struggled to explain himself during his trial. He was sentenced to hang, but after urgent appeals, including one emphasising the “rigours of our climate,” his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.[4] Yet mercy offered little comfort. In the years that followed, Adam’s mental health deteriorated rapidly. Reports from Glasgow and later from Perth Prison described him as increasingly despondent and suicidal. “He has sometimes threatened to end his life,” one report noted, “and in a depressed mood, he might quite possibly attempt to do so.”[5]

 

 

The sources paint a portrait of a man unravelled by displacement. Cut off from those who shared his language or customs, Adam was utterly alone. Prison doctors noted his confusion and despair, linking his fits of depression to “homesickness,” a term that only begins to capture the psychological collapse caused by cultural isolation and the brutal cold of Scotland.[6] His repeated pleas to be returned to India, to the warmth and familiarity of home, were acts of both faith and desperation.

Eventually, the authorities relented. Adam was transferred to India, first to a special prison and later to the Lunatic Asylum at Ratnagiri.^[7]  There, his condition was recorded in minute detail by medical officers. At times he appeared rational, at others violent, incoherent, or hallucinatory.^[8]

Adam’s long descent into mental illness, from the decks of a ship to the wards of an asylum, is not merely an individual tragedy. It speaks to the ways empire shaped minds as well as bodies, binding men from the colonies into systems that offered little understanding or care for their mental suffering. By bringing these histories to light, this research also challenges us to rethink how we understand mental health among colonial sailors, tracing its roots to systems of exploitation, displacement, and neglect.

 

 

 

Hasaam Latif is a PhD student at Durham University. His  research explores the lives of Lascars in Britain and the British Empire, tracing how their experiences of displacement, labour, and mental illness reveal an often forgotten history of colonial seafaring and its human costs. Outside of his studies, you might find Hasaam on a walk, at the gym, or tucked away in a coffee shop, latte in hand.

 

 

Sources

[1] National Records Scotland (NRS), HH16/117, Letter from Mersey Mission to Secretary of State, 19 October 1910.
[2] Ravi Ahuja, “Capital at Sea, Shaitan Below Decks?” History of the Present 2, no. 1 (2012): 7, 78–85, https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0078.
[3] Hansard, “Suicides of Lascars,” House of Commons Debate, vol. 198, 17 December 1908, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1908-12-17/debates/432f2217-7e02-4e70-b4b8-91ce3dfceea6/SuicidesOfLascars.
[4] NRS HH16/117, Letter about Reprieved Lascar, 4 November 1910
[5] NRS HH16/117, Letter from H.B. Simpson, 3 July 1911
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] NRS, HH16/117, Notes of the Medical Officer and the Facts Observed by the Visitors of the Asylum, 16 January 1922.