Star Spangled Banner India
When President Barack Obama and his wife Michele visited Mumbai in 2010, they stayed in a hotel that is not far from one of Mumbai’s most historical shipping dockyards, the Duncan Dock.
Built in 1810 and named after the then Governor of Mumbai Jonathan Duncan, it is at Duncan Dock that the first ship commissioned from India by the British Royal Navy, the teakwood vessel the HMS Minden was built. More significantly, it is aboard this Indian made ship that the song which eventually became the American national anthem was composed. The builder was a Parsi named Jamshedji Bomanji Wadia whose family went on to create a business empire in India. The HMS Minden was launched in 1810 at Duncan Dock.
During the war of 1812, Francis Scott Key, an author and lawyer from Baltimore, was a prisoner aboard the HMS Minden when the British navy attacked American forces at Fort McHenry in the Battle of Baltimore. At daybreak, Key caught a glimpse of the American flag flying above the Fort and was inspired into writing the poem ‘In Defense of Fort McHenry’. The first stanza of this poem became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and was recognized for official use by the U.S. Navy in 1889 and by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. It was made the national anthem by a congressional resolution on March 3, 1931 (46 Stat. 1508, codified at 36 U.S.C. § 301), which was signed by President Herbert Hoover.
The Wadias became renowned ship builders and constructed hundreds of ships over 150 years. Indian shipbuilders’ fine workmanship made Bombay an excellent place to commission ships. The Bombay Courier newspaper noted, ‘…the Minden, for beauty of construction and strength of frame, may stand in competition with any man-o-war that has come out of the most celebrated dockyards of Great Britain’. The descendants of the Wadia family today own large Indian companies such as Bombay Dyeing (garments), Britannia (food items), and Go Air (aviation). They also run the Miss India beauty pageant.
