The Indian Ocean (6 page)

Moving around to the Red Sea area and southern Arabia, there were other particular things to take account of. An English traveller in 1780 wrote of the pattern in and around the Red Sea:

As different winds prevail on the different sides of the Tropic in the Red Sea, ships may come to Gedda [Jiddah] from opposite points at the same season of the year; those which come from Suez at the above mentioned time [that is, November to January], benefit by the N.W. wind, while those that come from India and Arabia Felix are assisted by the regular S.W. monsoon. The pilgrims... embark at Gedda time enough to avail themselves of the Khumseen [according to Capper this is Arabic for 50, which is the length of time this wind blows] wind, which blows southerly from the end of March to the middle of May, and conveys them in less than a month back again to Suez; the India vessels must also quit Gedda so as to be out of the straits of Babelmandel before the end of August.
21

Even today within the Red Sea the monsoons act as a governing factor for traditional navigators, as a modern account of the sea's routes, winds and sailing times makes clear.
22

This situation of course pertained even more strongly concerning the traffic between the Red Sea and western India. In the great fifteenth-century trade between Calicut and the Red Sea, ships left Calicut in January, and vessels from the Red Sea arrived there between August and November. The Portuguese described the military significance of this on the Malabar coast. The west coast of India was unnavigable for sailing ships between roughly June and September. In the 1530s the Portuguese were concerned at the way ships from the hostile port of Calicut could sail just before or just after this, before their blockading fleets could arrive. The solution seemed to be to build a fort very near to Calicut. Then they could patrol right up to the end of May, just before navigation became impossible, and resume the blockade early in September as soon as the slackening of the southwest monsoon made navigation possible again.
23

As for Gujarat, Terry wrote that the great ship going from Surat to Mocha

beginnes her voyage about the twentieth of March, and finisheth it towards the end of September following. The voyage is but short and might easily bee made in two months; but in the long season of raine, and a little before and after it, the winds are commonly so violent that there is no coming but with great hazard, into the Indian Seas.
24

The matter was most pithily expressed by an Arab author, who wrote that 'He who leaves India on the 100th day [2 March] is a sound man, he who leaves on the 110th will be all right. However, he who leaves on the 120th is stretching the bounds of possibility and he who leaves on the 130th is inexperienced and an ignorant gambler.'
25

Moving south to the end of the ocean, the west coast of Malaysia is a lee shore during the southwest monsoon, and at this time it is, just as on the west coast of India, very difficult to sail or land. This monsoon pattern also dictated that a passage from the far west of the ocean, say the Red Sea, to the far east, to Melaka, could not be accomplished in one hit; rather a stop over was necessary, probably in southern India, until the correct monsoon came to continue one's voyage.

Those who ignored the monsoons, or were ignorant of them, came to grief. In
1541 a Portuguese marauding fleet in the Red Sea set sail to return to India in early July. The headstrong captain refused to listen to the advice of his Muslim pilots, who, basing their views on centuries of experience, told him that by leaving at this time he would have no trouble getting to the entrance to the Red Sea, but that once in the Arabian Sea weather of such vileness could be expected that no ship could navigate. And this advice, of course, turned out to be correct.
26
In 1980 Tim Severin, sailing on his Sindbad voyage from the Gulf to China, was becalmed east of Sri Lanka on the replica dhow
Sohar
for thirty-five days in March and April; earlier voyagers could have told him that this would happen.
27

All this said, it is not quite as clockwork like as some accounts claim. For example, Severin picked up the southwest wind that he wanted in early April, which is much earlier than the books allow for. Thor Heyerdahl, in another replica boat, this one made of reeds, passed the Straits of Hurmuz and knew he was now in the monsoon area, which 'blows regularly across the Indian Ocean as if set in motion by clockwork, turning like a pendulum to move in opposite directions every half year.' However, what happened next showed how variable they can be. In January they picked up a faint south-southwest wind, 'and there was no sign of the strong northeast winter monsoon we could have expected in the middle of January'. The next day, before sunrise, the wind changed from south-southeast to north-northwest – in other words still coming from the wrong direction.
28

For monsoon Asia the arrival of the rain-bearing southwest wind is vital, not only for maritime affairs but also for the much more basic matter of growing crops. In India, for example, there are monsoon ragas, they are a theme in miniature painting, and in some of the works of the poet Kalidasa. There are also methods to cope with any variability, again then showing that they are not totally predictable. Andrew Frater wrote engagingly about the problem if they are late, or fail altogether:

The previous year [1986] in Bangalore, for example, the city fathers paid a yogi to pray for rain. Seated on a tigerskin rug beside the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board guesthouse, the yogi chanted for 2 hours and 4 minutes while his supporters chewed leaves and swallowed burning camphor. Afterwards he was able to inform senior Water Board officials – prostrated before him with offerings of coconuts – that the rain god Varuna, though invisible to the naked eye, now approached them 'like waves of clouds.' The rain fell, all right, and torrentially, but only over neighbouring Cochin.
29

The implications of the monsoons are endless, and will underlie most of our discussion of movement by sea before the age of steam. Pirates moved according to the season, leaving the west coast of India for the Bay of Bengal around May each year. They also affect fisheries. Along the southeast Arabian and Somali coasts when the strong winds of the southwest monsoon blow coastal water away from the shore, one gets an upwelling of nutrient rich cold water This may have ten or even twenty times the nutrients of normal surface water. One gets rich blooms of plankton, ideal
for fish. However, if this goes on too long the plankton becomes too thick. Lack of oxygen kills the fish. In 1957 such a bloom was estimated to have killed the equivalent of the world's entire fish catch for a year.
30

The monsoons are essentially tropical winds. The further south one goes the weaker they are. In the southeast African case, up to Mozambique Island there was really no monsoon. Square rigged ships had to wait for the occasional cold front from Antarctica, take it until it petered out, and then wait for the next one. And there is the added complication of doldrums around the equator, nowhere near as bad as those in the Atlantic that Coleridge wrote about so powerfully, but still at times a hazard or an inconvenience.

South of the monsoon region lies a belt of southeast trade winds, around 15 to 30° S. These are more or less year-round. Alan Villiers took these once. In the 1930s he was crew on a big four-master barque with thirty sails and 35,000 square feet of canvas. These huge ships were very definitely not the more famous clipper ships, which he dismissed as 'lightly loaded kite-filled clippers'. This ship, and the other Cape Horn ships, he considered as 'Among man's working creations for the carriage of his goods, they alone were supremely beautiful.'
31
The cargo was 5,000 tons of Victorian grain. The ship picked up an easterly as they left Melbourne, so the captain decided to go via the Cape of Good Hope rather than the more usual Cape Horn. Past Cape Leeuwin they got the southeast trades in latitudes 25–28° S. These would carry them to the south of Madagascar, where they would pick up the Agulhas current which would take them southeast to the Cape. Once around this they could pick up the southeast trades in the Atlantic. This was a recognised route, being used by some Dutch East India Company ships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the
Torrens
when Joseph Conrad was first mate, and once John Galsworthy went that way on the same ship when he was on a health trip.
32

Being trades, these are more or less continuous year-round. People from Indonesia could pick them up and reach Madagascar, but getting back in the same latitude was near enough to impossible. To do this they would have had to head further south, to 40 or even 50° S, where 'The wind has a fetch that goes round the world in the southern Indian Ocean, unchecked by any land.'
33
This was the place for a wild, fast passage eastwards, where winds could reach 70 knots in the winter. Villiers said that these westerlies in the roaring 40s and fearsome or screeching 50s could blow a square rigged ship from the Cape to Australia, 6,000 miles, in three weeks or less. He did it in the well-named
Joseph Conrad
in the mid 1930s, 'I raced from off Good Hope to off the Leeuwin in less than three weeks, the little ship sometimes almost flying before the shrieking squalls. How the wind and sea could play down there! This was their home, this wild reach of the Indian Ocean where the wind and sea have almost uninterrupted rule all round the world'.
34
This is not for the faint hearted. Kay Cottee, sailing alone around the world some years ago, went below 40° S, and had winds of 40–65 knots with continuous huge southern ocean swells and waves of 18 metres. The strength and predicability of these winds can produce strange results. Alan Villiers tells of one voyage from Melbourne to Bunbury, on the Western Australian coast, a voyage of about 3,000 miles. Once the
barque
Inverneil
got out into the Great Australian Bight the captain found the westerlies so strong that he gave up and simply headed east right around Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, and so to Bunbury.
35

Apart from winds, there are also broader climatic changes which have substantially affected the Indian Ocean. Even something as apparently fixed and immutable as the sea level can change over time, true very long time, as a result of climatic change. Some 15,000 years ago the sea level was about 100 metres lower than it is at present, and even only 10,000 years ago it was still some 40 metres lower. The Gulf was more like a river than a sea channel. Australia and New Guinea were linked, and the passage from Sundaland to the north was only a short one, though a claim that one could go from one place to the other dryshod is an exaggeration.
36
Between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago the sea rose dramatically, in some places by 100 or even 150 metres. Then change slowed or stopped completely. Since the maximum transgression of the middle of the fifth millennium BCE, sea levels overall have fallen by a global process known as eustatic adjustment, but not by enough to affect history very much, and not uniformly.
37
At present we are witnessing what seems to be a new and very major change in sea levels, the first significant one for some 7,000 years. Low-lying Indian Ocean islands are threatened with being submerged as global warming raises sea levels comparatively precipitously.

Rainfall distribution could produce major consequences, another example then of a deep structural element impacting decisively on humans. We know something of the little ice age in the seventeenth century in Europe, but this seems to have been a worldwide event. Rainfall data from Java, based on tree rings in teak forests, show that the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century were very dry. The consequences could include drought, and so famine, as in India in the early 1630s, less flooding in the delta areas and so less fertile soils, and possibly a slight drop in the sea level.
38

Three other deep structure matters affected travel by sea. First are ocean currents, which experienced sailors can 'read' and use to their advantage. Generally speaking, the earth's rotation along with winds means that it is in the western parts of the huge circulating gyres that currents are strongest. In other words, currents are more of a problem, or opportunity, off the East African coast than elsewhere. During the northeast monsoon, November to April, a weak counter-clockwise gyre produces a westward current that travels as fast as one knot. It hits the coast of Somalia and then turns south, and then east between 2 and 10° S. During the time of the southwest monsoon this current reverses, going east, and then north along the coast of Somalia, where it becomes the strong Somali Current. The situation below the monsoon zone is quite different. Here, south of 10° S, is a steady anti-cyclonic gyre, which means the South Equatorial Current flows west between 10 and 20° S, and divides at Madagascar. One arm goes north of Madagascar, and then south between Madagascar and Africa. The other branch goes south to the east of Madagascar and then curves back to the east towards South India. The first branch is known as the Lagullas or Agulhas current, and Marco Polo claimed that this
meant Muslim sailors never went south of Madagascar, or even Zanzibar, because they thought the current meant there was no way to return to the north.
39
Lobo, when his ship had trouble getting around the Cape, claimed that if it had kept closer to land in southeast Africa they could have made good progress as the Agulhas current between Madagascar and the East African coast was so strong that it would carry a ship to the south even when the winds were contrary.
40
In April 1811 Mrs Graham was on a navy frigate off southeast Africa at about 32° S. It was very stormy: