The Indian Ocean (4 page)

If it would take a lifetime to visit all the shores and islands of the Pacific, one sometimes feels that it would take nine lives to master fully the vasty literature of the deep…. The work is inevitably based on secondary source and on printed collections of primary and sub-primary sources.... I can only say that I have tried to arrive at a synthesis drawn from reputable authorities. I have no doubt at all that specialists will find superficialities
and errors in my treatment of some of the multitudinous topics which a study of this scope and scale involves. But this is the occupational hazard of playing the generalist game, and I have also no doubt that it is a game well worth playing, as an effort to see the theme as a whole, and not as cut up into discrete sectors.
38

As Braudel stressed for the Mediterranean, there is still a vast mass of documentation to be studied, and how much more so for the Indian Ocean. Only a minuscule part of the coasts of the Indian Ocean have been searched by maritime archaeologists so far.
39
We are told that less than 5 per cent of the deep sea has been seen at all;
40
so also for the potential sources available to write a history of the Indian Ocean. I have not even read all the books, but I take heart from Janet Abu-Lughod's claim that at a certain point the historian reaches closure, which we can do regardless of how many other books there may be, because we have already achieved pattern recognition (not that I would endorse all of the patterns that she finds).
41
Specialists will no doubt find gaps and even misstatements or lack of familiarity with the most recent esoteric article, but I hope that they will find the patterns interesting.

Organising my material has been a perplexing task, though no doubt this goes with the territory of the historian. Conventionally the history of the Indian Ocean has been divided into four periods: before Islam; from then to the arrival of Europeans in 1500; early Europeans, to about 1800; European dominance. In the 'modern' period the important dates are considered to be 1498 (Vasco da Gama), 1757 (beginning of British conquest of India) and 1869 (Suez Canal). Perhaps perversely, I find only two major periods. The first chapter of this book will deal with the deep structure of the ocean, and here my debt to Braudel is plain to see. This will include climate and topography, currents and winds, all of which are easy enough, but the picture becomes more complicated once people are introduced, for this again raises questions about limits and boundaries and connections and littorals. The first historical period will deal with the history of the ocean from its beginnings in geology and myth to around 1800. There are two assumptions here. First, it implies that I do not find the early Europeans introducing any qualitative change into the ocean for the first three hundred years of their presence there. This is a familiar, yet difficult, claim. The difficulty lies in the fact that from 1500 we have much more documentation, most of it European. The task then is to write an autonomous history of the Indian Ocean using documentation mostly generated by those Europeans who later came to dominate the area. Second, I claim to be able to find some broad continuities right through these millennia. This is, however, very definitely
not
to say that this is the unchanging and mysterious East where time stood still until the northern Europeans took over. Certainly there were changes as well as continuities, and these will be presented, but in an old-fashioned way I still believe that modern industry and capitalism, the Great Transmutation in Europe,
did
make a difference. The impact of these important exogenous economic and technological changes into the ocean around 1800 marks a systemic or qualitative change, and introduces my second broad historical period. It was in the early nineteenth century that many of the deep structure elements outlined in my first chapter become much less important: monsoons, currents and land barriers are all overcome by steam ships and steam trains in the service of British power and capital; the Indian Ocean world becomes embedded in a truly global economy and for the first time production, as opposed to trade, is affected. This tendency to global integration continues to today, so that,
pace
Horden and Purcell, so strong is this integration to worlds far beyond the ocean that it is now impossible to write a history
of
the Indian Ocean. All Indian Ocean history is now a history
in
the ocean, part of a larger, indeed a global, story.

Braudel wrote of the first part of his classic study of the Mediterranean that it dealt with 'all the permanent, slow-moving, or recurrent features of Mediterranean life. In the pursuit of a history that changes little or not at all with the passing of time, I have not hesitated to step outside the chronological limits of a study devoted in theory to the latter half of the sixteenth century.'
1
This is what I aim to do in this chapter. And like Braudel I am not limiting my study to any discrete time period. I then can draw data from about five millennia, always however being aware that this must be data to do with invariant matters. I will discuss the name of the ocean, its geographical boundaries, its topography, winds and currents, and then introduce people. This is when the whole study of deep structure will become problematic and complicated, as we will see.

Frank Broeze suggested that the term 'Indian Ocean' is inappropriate. He wrote of 'a string of closely related regional systems stretching from East Asia around the continent and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa (to which sea space a new generic name, such as "the Asian Seas", might well be given)'.
2
Despite my customary privileging of India, I also have some hesitancies about the term 'the Indian Ocean'. The terminology implies that India is the centre, the fulcrum, but this needs to be demonstrated, not just assumed. I recently argued that a better name for the part of the Indian Ocean known as the Arabian Sea was the Afrasian Sea. 'The Arabian Sea' seems to give Arabs a role much more prominent than is appropriate. Some years ago people began to write about Eurasia, the idea being to stress connections rather than the artificial separation between a reified (and implicitly successful) Europe and a timeless (implicitly backward, even redundant) Asia. We were reminded of millennia of contact, especially between the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. Now some have urged us to go further still. In what seems to be the ultimate uniformitarianism, the desire to show 'one world' before capitalism, to stress links between areas long before the European voyages, the term Afrasia has been suggested. This would make up a vast area, with western Europe to be seen as a tiny appendage on the western edge. But this also is controversial, for it is stretching things to see most of sub-Saharan Africa sharing in the history of Eurasia before the European voyages. This however does not apply to the

Swahili coast. I suggested that the appropriate term for what used to be called the Arabian Sea could be the Afrasian Sea. This is an encompassing term and does include East Africa. Chandra de Silva recently wrote that it was incorrect to call this coast part of the Indian Ocean, and I agree with him, but to separate it out and call it the African Sea, as he suggests, seems unnecessarily divisive: the great advantage of the Afrasian Sea notion is its inclusiveness, and its failure to imply the dominance of any one area around the shore.
3

Mutatis mutandis
, I could now argue that this term would be even more appropriate for the whole area of what is conventionally called the Indian Ocean, for it would avoid assuming Indian centrality as implied in the Indian Ocean term, or Arab dominance as in the Arabian Sea, and instead would be all inclusive, taking in not only the Asian shores, which clearly are most important if only because of length, but including also the often ignored area of the East African coast. Yet this book is called
The Indian Ocean
so, a little reluctantly, I must continue to use this term. I will also use the familiar term of the Arabian Sea, while, to demonstrate impartiality, the Persian/Arabian Gulf will be simply the Gulf. My aim so far has merely been to alert the reader to the assumptions, arguably invalid, in the use of this term. It really all depends on where one is standing when one looks at and names an ocean. After all, Arabs refer to the Mediterranean as the Syrian Sea.

In any case, to assume that the Indian Ocean unduly emphasises India is to ignore the way a major group who were not Indian referred to the area. Arabs were happy to call the ocean al-bahr al Hindi, and indeed our term the Indian Ocean is an exact translation of this Arabic phrase.
Hind
derived from the Sanskrit,
sindhu
, to Persian and Arabic hind, and then via Greek and Latin to modern European languages as some variant of India. It is true that sometimes the Arabs were referring only to the Arabian Sea, but at times they also seem to have used the term to refer to an area that we today call the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean covers some 27 per cent of the maritime space of the world. It is the third largest ocean in the world, and covers 14 per cent of the total globe. Before I try to delineate its borders, we can first consider the whole matter of borders as such. One of the great advantages of writing maritime history, or for that matter the currently fashionable world history, is that by definition one escapes the land/political borders which have shackled traditional history for so long. States fade into the background in this sort of history, and we can look rather at 'worlds' and 'zones', along the lines of the MCC discussion in the introduction (see page 7). This said, I still have to depict the geographic (not human) limits of the Indian Ocean.

It is fairly straightforward. The longitudes are roughly 20° E to 110° E. Southern Africa, more precisely Cape Agulhas, is one limit, and we then go around the coast, including the Red Sea and the Gulf, past South Asia and through the Bay of Bengal and so to what geographically is the obvious limit, that is the Malay peninsula and the Sunda Islands. Past this the monsoons change. Possibly the Sunda Deep of the Java Trench off the southern coast of Java, which is 24,442 feet (7,450 metres) deep, forms a bathymetric boundary which separates the southeast Asian
maritime region from the Indian Ocean. From here we go south to Cape Leeuwin in southwest Australia.

So far we have followed the borders as recognised by the United Nations Oceans Atlas, and the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO), but both these authorities then go past Western Australia to around Melbourne, the west coast of Tasmania, and then down to Antarctica. This opinion is not to be taken lightly, especially as it is congruent with those of Alan Villiers, who was a real sailor.
4
Nevertheless, I would be inclined to stop at Cape Leeuwin, and go no further east. Certainly I agree with the International Hydrographic Organisation on the southern boundaries. In early 2000 the IHO delimited a fifth world ocean, the southern parts of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific. This extends from the coast of Antarctica to latitude 60° S.
5
We still have a lot of the Great Southern Ocean included in the Indian Ocean, including the peri-Antarctic islands on either side of 45° S, namely the Prince Edward Islands, Iles Crozet, Iles Kerguelen, Ile Amsterdam, Ile Saint-Paul, McDonald Islands, and Heard Island. From the late eighteenth century these islands provided places for sealers to winter, and today most of them have permanent populations of scientists, but they will play a small part in our history of the Indian Ocean.
6
They will be of interest only when we have ships using the roaring 40s and the fearsome 50s as they go from one end of our ocean, south Africa, to another, western Australia.
7
For most of history ships never went below the tropic of Capricorn.

One way to visualise what I think of as the Indian Ocean proper is to see it as a vast equilateral triangle. The base is the tropic of Capricorn, that is 23° 27' S. The two sides go north, the western one then including the Swahili and south Arabian coasts, up to north India, and then down from the apex through Burma, Sumatra and to northwest Australia. The only real problem with this is that it excludes the Gulf and Red Sea, and these were intricately connected with the Indian Ocean; apart from this it works quite well to depict the area of concern in this book. An alternative, perhaps even one to be preferred, is to see it as a vast letter M, with the Red Sea and Gulf on one side, and the Bay of Bengal on the other, divided by India.

The ocean proper, the vast wide expanse of water that we quoted Conrad on in the introduction (see pages 1–2), was well described by a Persian traveller in the eighteenth century:

It is not possible to measure the full extent of that sea except with the eye of fantasy. No one will ever delve to the bottom of that sea except by plunging into the waves of his wildest dreams. We were surrounded by a limitless desert of water. The days were white and the nights were black. You could not spy a single speck afloat on those fields of water, only the dark blue of the heavens reflected on the blue black of the sea.
8

Opposed to this are the various bays and smaller seas and gulfs. Joseph Conrad saw the bays, in this case the Gulf of Thailand, as being rather different from the real ocean. One of his characters said that

from Bankok [
sic
] to the Indian Ocean was a pretty long step.... Extreme patience and extreme care would see me through the region of broken land, of faint airs, and of dead water to where I would feel at last my command on the great swell and list over to the great breath of regular winds, that would give her the feeling of a large, more intense life.
9