The Indian Ocean (17 page)

How did captains find their way over the ocean? There is a contrast here between blue water sailing and finding one's way in more restricted waterways. In the treacherous Red Sea, Ibn Jubayr was very impressed with the navigational skills of sailors in these confined waters: 'We observed the art of these captains and the mariners in the handling of their ships through the reefs. It was truly marvellous. They would
enter the narrow channels and manage their way through them as a cavalier manages a horse that is light on the bridle and tractable.'
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To a considerable extent, navigation was still like the way finding we described in the previous chapter (see page 56). It was a matter of the run of the water, experience, birds, seaweed, fishes, and sightings of known areas of land. Experienced navigators often wrote down what they had learnt. The most famous was Ibn Majid, who in the following passage, just like the Song source we quoted earlier, is using land sightings for guidance. When approaching Calicut, he says, 'look out for the hill between the mountains which are above the coast and there is no other such hill in these places and nothing so useful as a guide especially in the dark and its sides slope steeply.' When one is approaching from the north the ship should stay in about four and three-quarters fathoms of water until this hill is north-north-east of you, then approach the coast until the water is four and one-half fathoms and the hill becomes north by east and then north, and so on.
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Ibn Majid's work is an example of the pilot guides and navigational literature which were commonplace in the ocean. This geographical literature, from both the Chinese and the Arab side, showed that both knew the whole ocean, though Arabs found a limit at Madagascar. Ibn Majid wrote that 'to its south is the sea known to the Greeks as Uqiyanus which is known to the Arabs as the 'Ocean which encircles the world.' Here is the beginning of the southern Dark regions to the south of this island.'
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Tibbetts claims that there really was no exclusivity in nautical knowledge. Rather there was a common body of knowledge shared by Arabs, Chinese, Indians and Malays. It may be that practical navigational charts were not known before the Europeans, but there certainly were maps, as we will see. Charts may not have even been necessary, for navigation, apart from the use of wayfaring techniques, was done by observing the sun and the stars.
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In this the Arabs were simply following tradition, for the Beduin had long done this to find their way across the desert.

Again Ibn Jubayr tells us about this use. He was going on pilgrimage to Mecca, and embarked at Aydhab bound for Jiddah. They left on their jilabah, and on the evening of the second day there

rose a storm which darkened the skies and at last covered them. The tempest raged and drove the ship from off its course and backwards. The fury of the wind continued, and the darkness thickened and filled the air so that we knew not which way lay our course. Then a few stars appeared and gave us some guidance. The sail was lowered to the bottom of the mast, and we passed that night in a storm which drove us to despair....
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More usually either the North or Pole Star or the sun was used as a referent, and latitude was worked out from their height, measured in finger widths. The compass was apparently already known, as it had been long used by the Chinese, but it seems not to have been very widely used. In any case, it has been claimed that Arab empirical methods were more than adequate to determine latitude quite accurately. Based largely on a technical analysis of Ibn Majid's famous work, Clark
claimed that the methods he describes compare well with modern stellar methods using spherical trigonometry, the navigational triangle and data from nautical publications. In sum, we can perhaps claim that during this period Arab navigation was a mixture of a craft mystery, based on accumulated oral tradition, and an applied science, the latter being the dominant technique today. In Europe the latter was becoming dominant in the sixteenth century.
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While Arab navigation may ideally have served the sailors well, contemporary accounts do not always give an impression of 'scientific' exactitude on board ship. One tale from the first half of the tenth century, no doubt based on real experience but with some embroidery, concerns a man called Allama, who was going from India to China. It came the time for the dawn prayer, so he went to the lavatory to do ablutions. Then he looked at the sea and was terrified. He forgot his ablutions and prayers, and instead rushed up on deck and got the men to lower the sails, and throw overboard all the cargo. Then he got everyone to purify themselves and pray. Sure enough, a huge storm came up that night, and only this ship survived. A similar account tells of Captain Abhara, a native of Kirman, where he was a shepherd. Later he became a sea captain, and went to China seven times, which was unheard of as it was so dangerous. 'If a man reached China without dying on the way, it was already a miracle. Returning safe and sound was unheard of. I have never heard tell of anyone, except him, who had made the two voyages there and back without mishap.' Other similar tales make Arab navigation sound very ad hoc indeed. The same Abhara knew that on the way to China on each thirtieth day the water went down very greatly and ships ran onto rocks, especially as a violent gale would come up at the same time. Another captain proffered that 'if you want to know whether or not you are near land or a mountain, look out after the afternoon prayer, when the sun is going down. At that time, if you are opposite a mountain or an island, you will see it distinctly.'
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European map making was revolutionised following Marco Polo's journey to and from China in 1271–92. Drawing on this, Europeans produced two famous maps, greatly in advance of what they had done before: the Catalan map of 1375, and especially Fra Mauro's map of 1458. East Asia had relatively sophisticated charts and maps by at least the fifteenth century.
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Mills has discussed in detail the Mao K'un map, which refers to the time of Zheng He's voyages.
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He considers it to be far superior to European maps of the same time, when the Portuguese had just started voyaging down the west African coast. This Chinese chart goes all the way from East Asia to India, and on to Persia, Arabia and East Africa. Mills' claim is that obviously Europeans did better in mapping the west, and Chinese the east; Chinese superiority is seen in their much better attempt to map the area in between, that is Arabia, India, and East Africa. This Chinese map showed a more accurate knowledge over a much larger area of the world than was available to Europeans at the same time. Several of their accounts depict a western and an eastern ocean, with the division at the Straits of Singapore. This is seen most clearly in the account by Wang Dayuan, who travelled extensively in the 1330s.
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My own brief to a large extent follows this division, for most of the time I also stop around these straits.

Even more extraordinary is the Korean Kangnido Map of 1402, which seems to draw on earlier Chinese and Arab works. It has clear delineations of Africa and the Arabian peninsular, and a recognisable outline of Europe, though India is submerged in the Chinese continent. Not surprisingly, Korea is shown as very large indeed, as large as all Africa. At a time when Europeans knew almost nothing of East Asia, this map has a clearly recognisable Mediterranean Sea, and Iberia, Italy and the Adriatic Sea. There are some hundred as yet unidentified place names in the Europe area, and about thirty-five in Africa, most of them on the southern Mediterranean coast.
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Another example of sophisticated map making comes from Java, and like the previous two shows that there was a large degree of interaction and exchange of knowledge between map makers at this time. In 1512 the Portuguese captain Albuquerque was shown a Javanese chart which delineated the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal, Brazil, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the country where the gold is (Minangkabau in Sumatra), the clove islands, the Malukus, Java, the Banda islands, Siam, the navigation of the Chinese, and the courses followed by their ships. All the names are marked in Javanese script.
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This sort of interchange extended in some surprising directions. The Chinese, even if they did not travel, certainly picked up much information at second or third hand. One eighth-century Chinese author described the people of Bobali, which is somewhere in northern East Africa. They 'eat only meat. They often stick a needle into the veins of cattle and draw blood which they drink raw, mixed with milk.' Intriguing to find that this is clearly a description of the same people whom a sixteenth-century Portuguese cleric found. He wrote of the Segeju that 'They own much cattle, the milk and blood thereof being to them as food; they eat the flesh raw without any other manner of ordinary food, as it is said, and they bleed the oxen every other day.'
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Finally, another Muslim example, this time the Turk Piri Reis and his magnificent
Kitab
, completed in 1521 and now available in a stunning four volume facsimile edition with translation. He wrote of the 'great sea', that is the all-encircling sea:

All the others are united with the Bahr-Azam. The Ocean is the sea into which they are all collected. It encircles the world. It is the head of all the seas; from it all seas emerge and to it all return. As I have told you, the fact is that all the other seas are but gulfs of the Ocean. The sea is like a tree that spreads everywhere left and right. The source of them all is the Ocean, of which they are the branches and twigs.

He described the Portuguese voyages to India, and among other places identified Madeira, Cape Verde, Brazil, Abyssinia, and Mogadishu, which he says is near the entrance to the Red Sea. Below 55° S all is Darkness, and similarly above 55° N. He has a brief account of China, which he says is based on what the Portuguese say, and then a fabulous account of an island with all sorts of monstrous people, based on 'those who voyaged there'. His account of India is rather vague, and he thinks it is
winter in India when it is summer in Europe. A few years after this
Kitab
he drew a map of the Atlantic which included the North American coast from Greenland to Florida, and was quite accurate.
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We have already quoted the famous Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta several times. This much-travelled scholar left a copious account of his travels and adventures all around the Indian Ocean and beyond, for he also visited many parts of Europe and West Africa; indeed he came from Morocco. In sum he covered 75,000 miles in a period of nearly thirty years. His travels date from the first half of the fourteenth century. In the rest of this chapter I intend to use him as a 'tin opener', to introduce the various topics I want to cover in this account of the Indian Ocean to about 1500. Each section will start with his observations, and will introduce my general discussion of the relevant topic, the latter based on other contemporary, and much secondary, literature. My intention here is rather different from Ross Dunn's.
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He has provided an excellent account of Ibn Battuta's travels and much detail to locate his descriptions. However, I will use his account merely to open up general matters to do with the Indian Ocean, such as port cities, piracy, the dangers of travels by sea, Muslim attitudes to sea travel, and especially his frequent mentions of a network of Islamic scholars, of whom he was one, who were spread all around the ocean, travelling frequently, and serving to spread and consolidate the faith. We will start with this topic.

We described in the previous chapter many Buddhist and Hindu people travelling to service or convert kings and others in southeast Asia, and a reverse flow of Buddhist pilgrims, especially from East Asia, going to India to see the holy places. However, the first of these declined as Buddhism declined in India. It was replaced by a circulation of students and pilgrims to the new centres of the faith, especially Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand. The fact that Buddhism in India was slowly sucked back into a new Hinduism similarly meant that fewer from outside now wanted to visit the homeland of the faith, though some pilgrims continued to come, and indeed still do, to see the holy places associated with the life of the Buddha. Nevertheless, by this time the dominant religious circulation in the Indian Ocean was being done by Muslims, and Ibn Battuta gives us numerous accounts of such people.

In 1331 he was in Mogadishu. As a man of learning Ibn Battuta was very well treated, and lodged with the qadi. The Sultan spoke Arabic, but his first language was Maqdishi. Ibn Battuta was taken by the qadi, who had originated in Egypt, to the sultan. As a man who had come from al-Hijaz he was treated with respect. He was given robes, including a tunic of Egyptian linen, a furred mantle of Jerusalem stuff, and an Egyptian turban. There were many jurists, sharifs, sheikhs and people who had done a hajj in Mogadishu. Ibn Battuta then went on to Kilwa, then at its height of power and riches. He found the sultan to be very generous, and commented on the large number of sharifs from Iraq and the Hijaz and other countries who had flocked in to benefit from his pious patronage.
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Once he got to Malabar, Ibn Battuta found a similarly diverse assemblage of Muslims in positions of secular and religious authority. At one place the qadi and
preacher was a man from Oman. The amir (leader) of the merchants in Calicut was from Bahrain. On one of the junks that he travelled on the factor was from Syria, while in Quilon the chief Muslim merchant was from Iraq, and the qadi from Qazwin.
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What our traveller is describing is a vast network of Muslims all around the periphery of the Indian Ocean. He was welcomed everywhere as a prestigious scholar, an exemplar of the faith. Yet our hero was not really a very prestigious person in the Muslim heartland. He would have been unlikely to flourish in Mecca or Damascus or Cairo, but he was a big fish in Delhi and other newer Islamic places such as the Swahili coast where rulers were keen to implant and strengthen Islam. His perhaps surprisingly cordial reception in so many places was probably helped by his own very strong sense of his own worth. He was rather self-important, and judgemental to a fault of other Muslims. He took it on himself to correct people who got things wrong, even merely in matters of pronunciation.