The Indian Ocean (7 page)

On the 7th the weather gradually moderated, the sea went down, and we had fine weather; so that though we seemed to have made but little way, the current, which had been checked on the 6th by the contrary wind [that is the southwest monsoon], returning to its usual course with impetuosity, carried us ninety-three miles to the southward of our reckoning in twenty-four hours.
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The combinations further north could produce problems. In 1592 James Lancaster was in Zanzibar, and wanted to go northeast to Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin) to take prizes. He left in February, but was carried by a very strong current and winds from the northeast and east, towards the north and west, and ended up near Socotra. Then the wind went to northwest and they got around Ceylon in May 1592, just in time to avoid the monsoon from the southwest.
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If one ignored the wind/current combination things could go badly astray. In March 1604 Pedro Teixeira left Hurmuz to sail north to Basra. His ship was foiled by inclement weather, lack of provisions, strong currents, and (predictable for this time of year) contrary winds. After five weeks spent being battered in the Gulf, they returned to Hurmuz.
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Two final deep structure geographical matters could also affect how and when one travelled. Tides can be an extreme hazard in narrow waterways like the Red Sea and Gulf. The effects of the tides in the latter can be felt 100 miles up the Shatt al Arab and into the actual Tigris river.
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In estuaries and deltas this problem is exaggerated. In the Gulf of Cambay the tide purportedly travelled as fast as a man on horseback, and this, combined with silting, led to the decline of the port of Cambay at the head of this gulf. The approach to Kolkata up the Hugli has always presented a daunting challenge to mariners. In northwest Australia the tidal flow is ten metres or more, a hazard for ignorant seafarers and unwary picnickers.

Finally waves. We have described some huge ones in the far south, though some of these may have been exaggerated by excited sailors. Waves higher than 25 feet from trough to crest are rare in any ocean, but storm waves may be twice as high, or even more. Kay Cottee and other voyagers in the Great Southern Ocean experienced these.

Waves beating on a lee shore can make difficult approaches to poor harbours, or coasts where there are no harbours. We pointed out that the west coasts of India and of Malaya, when they are lee shores, are almost unapproachable in a sailing boat. Off
the East African coast this is less of a problem, as small ships can go through gaps in the coral reefs which line the coast as far south as Maputo and then approach the land in calm waters. The east coast of India, the Coromandel coast, has a perilous combination of more or less constant high surf and no harbours of any merit. Mrs Kindersley in Chennai wrote to a friend in June 1765, 'I am detained here by the tremendous surf, which for these two days has been mountains high: and it is extraordinary, that on this coast, even with very little wind, the surf is often so high that no boat dares venture through it; indeed it is always high enough to be frightful.'
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The structural elements of the ocean both facilitated and constrained the circulation of people, who carried with them goods and ideas. When we introduce people it becomes much more difficult to set boundaries. Yet this is essential, for it is people, not water, that created unity and a recognisable Indian Ocean that historians can study. As Braudel wrote of the Mediterranean: 'The different regions of the Mediterranean are connected not by the water, but by the peoples of the sea.'
1
I am concerned now with people around the ocean, especially those in port cities and those strung along the coast outside the cities, with their attitudes to the sea, its role in their lives. There is also the related matter of the land boundaries of the ocean, that is connections not across and beyond the ocean, but inland: a maritime historian has to face the question of how far inland must we go before we can say that the ocean no longer has any influence? We must try to identify people whose social life is importantly tied in to the ocean, that is people
of
the sea, not just
on
it: for the latter the sea is optional, non-essential, for the former it is life.
2
In all that follows it is important to realise that I am trying to sketch some constant, invariant aspects of the lives of people around and on the sea. But very emphatically this is not a matter of an unchanging East. I have chosen to draw out and examine certain structural elements; the rest of this book will be, I hope, suitably diachronic.

How have historians approached the central matter of the human frontiers of the ocean, with regard to the extent to which one must leave the margin of land and sea and go inland? K.N. Chaudhuri recognises the problem: 'How far the Indian Ocean made its influence felt in the vast sweep of land in the north and the south west, in the direction of Asia and Africa, is a fascinating question'
3
and one he does little to resolve. Matvejevic has addressed this matter of land and sea connections, albeit somewhat opaquely. 'The city where I was born is located fifty kilometres from the Adriatic. Thanks to its location and the river that runs through it, it has taken on certain Mediterranean traits. Slightly further upstream, the Mediterranean traits disperse and the mainland takes over.' He then notes how hard it is to find boundaries. In some areas a mountain cuts off the sea area definitively, but in others it does not, despite analogous obstacles.
4

The general problem is to be more precise about the frontiers of the sea. Years ago Braudel wrote poetically about this: 'The circulation of men and of goods, both
material and intangible, formed concentric circles round the Mediterranean. We should imagine a hundred frontiers, not one, some political, some economic, and some cultural.' The Mediterranean is a very wide zone: 'We might compare it to an electric or magnetic field, or more simply to a radiant centre whose light grows less as one moves away from it, without one's being able to define the exact boundary between light and shade.'
5

None of this is very precise. Yet in fact a certain fuzziness is in order; rather than try to lay down rigid borders where land takes over and the sea disappears, we should accept, and even celebrate, complexity and heterogeneity. We should proceed case by case, asking on each occasion what is the question or problem that concerns us at present, and then extending the range of the data to take account of all the material needed to answer this particular question. If I am looking at a coastal fisher catching for his local community I do not have to go far at all; if I am looking at factory prawn production in Bangladesh for the American market then I must go far and wide; if I want to write about the horses which mounted the Indian Army in the nineteenth century I have to go to New South Wales; if I want to write about where the Indian railways got their sleepers from, I have to go to Australia and also to the Baltic.

To cases, and some examples of very close and intricate connections between land and sea in the Indian Ocean. A young Portuguese scholar recently published an excellent book on the 'Mar de Ceilão,' that is the Gulf of Mannar.
6
In the first part of his book, before the Portuguese arrived, he finds that this defined maritime area made up a 'world'. This world contained interaction in both deep structural and human terms. There were connections made by the sea itself, the coasts of both southeast India and northern Sri Lanka, and the intricate wind and current patterns of this sea, where two systems met. He also discusses the ports on these coasts, and all the people involved in this sea: maritime people like fishers, pearl divers, traders, sailors, these perhaps being people
of
the sea, and people on the shore,
on
the sea, who seldom went to sea but were intricately connected to it. He deals with the states on the shores, and their efforts, usually futile, to control the sea and its shores and its travellers. Echoing Braudel, this small sea or strait certainly divided the two countries from each other, yet it also connected them and created intricate links between them.

One useful way to conceptualise land/sea relation and connections is Jean-Claude Penrad's useful notion of
ressac
, the three-fold violent movement of the waves, turning back on themselves as they crash against the shore. He uses this image to elucidate the way in which the to-and-fro movements of the Indian Ocean mirror coastal and inland influences which keep coming back at each other just as do waves.
7

What we find on most of the shores of the Indian Ocean for most of history is a peasant agricultural economy inland interacting and connecting with a fishing and trading economy on the coast, yet it is the inland which is economically and socially dominant. Indeed, it could be argued that sea travel is unnatural for our species. Once early life came ashore and became land based, walking became the 'natural' means of getting about, not travelling over water. Over time people developed an extensive network of land communication in Eurasia; these were the essence of communication, but at certain places they intersected with the sea, and land routes
were extended or duplicated by sea passages. There were intricate connections between land caravans and sea trade, or today between railways and container ships: indeed the containers are merely moved from a sea form of locomotion to a land one. Also today, sea and air sometimes intersect, so that travellers going on a cruise will often fly to meet their liner in some convenient port. Over all of history land transport and sea transport were often reciprocal, sometimes competing, and sometimes alternatives.

Sea travel has both advantages and problems. It was recognisably more dangerous, both for cargo and people, than land travel, as reflected in insurance rates, which were several times higher for sea travel than for land. Yet before steam as a general rule sea traffic was far more cost effective than that overland. Chittick claimed that one needs, roughly, the same energy to move 250 kg on wheels on a road, 2,500 on rails, and 25,000 on water.
8
Similarly, it has been calculated that a dhow can travel the same distance as a camel caravan in one-third the time; each boat could carry the equivalent of 1,000 camel loads, and only one dhow crew member was needed for several cargo tons, as compared with two or more men for each ton in a camel caravan.
9
So far so good, yet this refers only to technological factors. There are many others, such as politics, piracy, and the nature of the land terrain as compared with the hazards of the voyage. 'The "lubricant" required to ease as much as possible the "friction" of passage by land is as much a matter of social engineering as of communications technology.' Certainly travel by sea

was 'cheaper' in human terms, and developed much sooner, not just because of energy requirements, but because at sea the incidental hazards of negotiation, protection-money, wilful obstruction and downright violence were so much rarer than in the carrying of goods across region and region, through settlement after settlement, by land.
10

Horden and Purcell note that the relativities vary from place to place. Arguably, because of the land terrain, it is easier to move goods by sea in the Mediterranean area than by land,
11
but this would not necessarily apply in other seas.

Land and sea routes are often reciprocal, but they can also compete, or act as alternatives. When pipe lines are blocked or destroyed today the oil must go by sea. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese made the sea traffic in spices difficult; where it was possible, land routes were used instead. In the early seventeenth century it was cheaper to take goods from northern India to Iran by land, going Agra, Lahore, Kandahar and Isfahan, as compared with the sea/land route of Agra, Surat, Bandar Abbas and Isfahan. Similarly, Agra to Constantinople overland was cheaper than the sea equivalent of either Agra, Surat, Mocha, Constantinople or Agra, Surat, Basra, Constantinople.
12
Clearly the sea/land route was more complicated, and involved much more breaking and repacking of cargo than the land route, but this does not apply to a voyage from, say, Aceh to Surat.

It may also be the case that at least on some routes land travel was faster than that by sea, for example where a powerful state had set up secure roads and a courier
system and so less lubrication was needed. Where these were available, mails, commercial advice, and low bulk preciosities would go by land. Finally, we noted that much local traffic in the enclosed Mediterranean sea was chaffering from one shore or port to the next. In the much more expansive Indian Ocean this was also the case, but the peddler had much longer times at sea.

In modern times there are still a variety of factors which determine whether transport be by land or by sea. Passengers on long-distance travels go by air, on shorter distances variously by land or sea. Yet even here there can be variations: if people have a lot of luggage they may prefer to go by sea if ships are still available. Most bulk goods travel by sea when they can, though if a shorter land option is available it will be used, such as the railways across North America, and across India. Few goods go by sea from Mumbai to Kolkata, or New York to San Francisco. Some specialised goods can be moved more easily by land than by sea. The best example is oil, where pipelines can obviate the need for sea passage; yet even here, as we have seen so often in the twentieth century, politics can block a pipe line much more easily than a tanker.