The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (24 page)

The lack of variety in Indian Ocean shipbuilding was far less a reflection of stolid mariner conservatism than of centuries of experimentation and refinement to solve the technological problems of using the monsoons to full advantage. The key breakthrough was the lateen sail, that gracefully curved, wing-like form that brings to Western minds all the images of Sindbad and the
Arabian Nights
. The lateen was probably first developed in the western Indian Ocean in ancient times, then diffused into the Mediterranean in the wake of seventh-century Muslim expansion. Square sails, such as those being used in northern Europe in the fourteenth century, performed efficiently when the wind was astern. But if the breeze turned too much toward the beam of the ship, the sail was taken aback, that is, it was pushed against the mast. The lateen, on the other hand, was a fore-and-aft sail. The wooden yard to which it was attached sloped downward toward the bow and thereby provided a stiff leading edge against the breeze. Consequently the sail could be set much closer to the wind without being taken back. A well-built lateen-rigged craft could sail in almost
any
direction except into the eye of the wind.

Dhow under sail off the west coast of India

Ray Smith

Daulatabad, The Deccan, Central India

Ray Smith

The Indian Ocean dhow was not, however, in total harmony with its monsoonal environment. The sewn, unreinforced hull construction, whatever the advantages of its plasticity, could not tolerate more than a modest tonnage of cargo. The size of ships was also limited by the rigging itself, since the mainsail yard was usually about as long as the vessel and extremely heavy. A large crew was required to hoist it (perhaps thirty or more on the biggest ships), and they of course displaced precious space for goods and paying passengers. Moreover the crew had to perform extremely laborious and difficult procedures to maneuver the sail and spar. When wind conditions changed, the sail was never reefed aloft. Rather the yard was hauled down, the sail removed, and a smaller or larger one hoisted in its place, a task that might have to be carried out in a heavy gale. Going about, that is, turning the ship to the opposite tack, was an even trickier operation. It was always done by wearing round (turning tail to wind), and this involved pushing the luff end of the yard up to a position vertical to the mast, swinging it from one side of the mast to the other, then letting it fall again, all the while preventing the loose, sheet end of the enormous sail from flapping wildly out of control. The heavier the weather, the harder it was to control the rigging, all the worse if the crew had to push and stumble its way through a muddle of passengers, cargo, and livestock. Many a ship was lost when it blew too close to a dangerous shore, and the crew could not bring it round in time or lost control of the sail altogether. The danger was especially great during the high season of the southwest monsoon, when only a very brave captain or a fool would dare to approach the western coast of India. The conventional method for survival in violent storms was to haul down the yard, jettison the cargo, and make vows to God.

Although Ibn Battuta logged thousands of miles at sea in the course of his adventures, the
Rihla
is a disappointing record of fourteenth-century shipbuilding and seamanship. Since he presumably had no sailing experience in early life, and his Tangerian upbringing was no doubt remote from the workaday world of the port, he was excusably indifferent to the rudiments of nautical technology. He is far better at recalling the characteristics of port
towns and the pious personages inhabiting them than the humdrum details of navigation and life at sea.
²⁵

Sailing out of Aden, he has nothing whatsoever to say about the size or design of the ship to which he committed his fate, not even a classificatory name.
²⁶
Since it was bound for the distant reaches of the East African coast, it was probably a relatively large vessel. Trading dhows of that age sometimes had cabins of a sort, presumably with roofs that served as decks. But they were probably not completely decked, obliging passengers to endure the voyage in an open hold, settling themselves as best they could amongst shifting bales of cargo.

Dhows making the run from Aden (or Omani and Persian gulf ports) to East Africa carried a wide assortment of goods, some of them destined for the interior trade and some exclusively for the Muslim coastal towns, whose inhabitants depended on manufactured imports to maintain households of reasonable civility and comfort. The staples of the upland trade were cloth (fine, colored stuffs produced mainly in India) and glass beads. The coastal population, especially the well-to-do families of merchants, scholars, and officials, consumed most of the luxury items. No genteel household would have been without its celadon porcelain from China, its “yellow-and-black” pottery from South Arabia, its silk wardrobes, glassware, books, paper, and manufactured tools. In exchange for these goods, the ships returned north with a range of raw, higher-bulk African commodities destined for dispersal throughout the greater Indian Ocean basin: ivory, gold, frankincense, myrrh, animal skins, ambergris, rice, mangrove poles, and slaves.

Embarking from Aden, Ibn Battuta’s ship made a southwesterly course for the port of Zeila on the African shore of the gulf. Zeila was a busy town, the main outlet for inland trade extending to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, but the ship anchored there for only one night. Ibn Battuta made a quick foray into the bazaar, but his nostrils were assaulted by the unhappy combination of fresh fish and the blood of slaughtered camels. Pronouncing Zeila “the dirtiest, most diasgreeable, and most stinking town in the world,” he and his sailing companions beat a fast retreat to the ship.

The following day the vessel made an eastward course out of the gulf. In the winter monsoon season this could be accomplished
only by making long tacks, beating to windward until they cleared Ras Asir. Once past the headland, they swung round to the southwest, hoisted the largest mainsail aboard, and ran before the monsoon.
²⁷
Ibn Battuta reckoned a voyage of 15 days from Zeila to the next port-of-call, Mogadishu. The captain almost certainly coasted the whole way. His passengers would never have been out of sight of the great sand dunes heaped along the desolate Somali shore.

Until around the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit, Mogadishu was the busiest and richest port of the coast. It was in easy sailing range of the Persian Gulf, even easier than from the Yemen. The winter monsoon had carried the first Muslim settlers there, probably from the Gulf, in the tenth century or even earlier. Within two hundred years the town was booming, owing partly to its landward connections with the Horn and Ethiopia and partly to the transit trade in ivory and gold shipped there from the smaller towns further south.

Like any of the other emporiums of the western ocean, Mogadishu had plenty of employment for the commercial brokers (called
dallals
in South Arabia) who provided the crucial mediation between the arriving sea merchants and the local wholesalers. Their speciality was knowledge of market conditions and working familiarity with both the civilities of the local culture and the relevant languages. In this case Arabic and Persian were the
linguae francae
of the ocean traders. Somali, as well as Swahili, the Bantu tongue that may have just been coming into use along the coast at this time, were the languages of the townsmen and hinterlanders.
²⁸
When Ibn Battuta’s ship anchored in Mogadishu harbor, boatloads of young men came out to meet it, each carrying a covered platter of food to present to one of the merchants on board. When the dish was offered, the merchant fell under an obligation to go with the man to his home and accept his services as broker. The Mogadishi then placed the visitor under his “protection,” sold his goods for him, collected payment, and helped him find a cargo for the outbound passage — all this at a healthy commission deducted from the profits. Sea merchants already familiar with the town, however, had their own standing business connections and went off to lodge where they pleased.
²⁹

When the ship’s company informed the greeting party that Ibn Battuta was not a merchant but a
faqih
, word was passed to the chief
qadi
, who came down to the beach with some of his students
and took the visitor in charge. The party then went immediately to the palace of Mogadishu, as was the custom, to present the learned guest to the ruler, who went by the title of Shaykh. Upon arriving there, the Moroccan recalls,

one of the serving-boys came out and saluted the
qadi
, who said to him, “Take word to the intendant’s office and inform the Shaykh that this man has come from the land of al-Hijaz.” So he took the message, then returned bringing a plate on which were some leaves of betel and areca nuts. He gave me ten leaves along with a few of the nuts, the same to the
qadi
, and what was left on the plate to my companions and the
qadi
’s students. He brought also a jug of rose-water of Damascus, which he poured over me and over the
qadi
.

The Shaykh, moreover, commanded that the visitors be entertained in a residence for students of religion. Retiring there and ensconcing themselves on the carpets, the party addressed themselves to a meal of local fare, compliments of the palace: a stew of chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables poured over rice cooked in ghee; unripe bananas in fresh milk; and a dish comprised of sour milk, green ginger, mangoes, and pickled lemons and chilies. The citizens of Mogadishu, Ibn Battuta observed, did justice to such meals as these: “A single person . . . eats as much as a whole company of us would eat, as a matter of habit, and they are corpulent and fat in the extreme.”

Dining with these portly notables over the course of the next three days, the young scholar would likely have found them all speaking Arabic. Neither Mogadishu, however, nor any other towns of the coast could be described as alien enclaves of Arabs or Persians, ethnically isolated from the mainland populations. On the contrary, these were African towns, inhabited largely by people of African descent, whether Somali or Bantu-speaking stock. The spread of Islamic culture southward along the coast was not synonymous with the peopling of the region by colonists from the Irano-Semitic heartland. The rulers, scholars, officials, and big merchants, as well as the port workers, farmers, craftsmen, and slaves, were dark-skinned people speaking African tongues in everyday life.

Human migration, however, accompanied trade as one of the enduring consequences of the harnessing of the monsoons. It was
seaborne settlers from Arabia and the Persian Gulf who introduced Islam into the little ports and fishing villages along the coast, and it was the continuing trickle of newcomers who, along with the visiting merchants, assured and reinforced the Islamic-mindedness of coastal society. For Arabs and Persians of the arid northern rim of the sea, East Africa was a kind of medieval America, a fertile, well-watered land of economic opportunity and a place of salvation from drought, famine, overpopulation, and war at home. There is even some evidence of a thirteenth-century plantation at Mogadishu of a group of settlers from Tashkent, refugees from a Central Asian war.
³⁰
The great majority of immigrants were males, who quickly married into the local families or took slave concubines, thereby obliterating any tendencies toward racial separatism.

Among new arrivals, the warmest welcome went out to
sharifs
(or
sayyids
), who probably represented a substantial proportion of colonists from South Arabia. A
sharif
was a person recognized as a descendant of the Prophet. As a group,
sharifs
brought to the coastal towns two qualifications in unlimited demand. One was literacy and knowledge of the
shari’a
; the other was that elusive attribute called
baraka
, the aura of divine blessing that was believed to attend sharifian status. Aside from commerce, which everyone seemed to have had a hand in, sharifian families performed multiple functions as town officials, judges, secretaries, political mediators, Sufi teachers, miracle-workers, and general validators of the Islamic status of the community and its government. Above all, the
sharifs
, as well as other literate immigrants, strove to implant the Sacred Law, specifically the Shafi’i school predominant in South Arabia. This was their most significant contribution to East African cosmopolitanism, for the law was the seal of oceanic unity on which the towns thrived.