The Indian Ocean (9 page)

Some centuries later Aden rose again when inefficient early steam ships needed to take on coal at short intervals. Aden was well located to be one such stop. The needs of the early steam ships influenced other ports also. In the early days when they gobbled up coal, it was of the essence that they load coal quickly, preferably from both sides at once. This meant that good natural harbours for a time did well, such as Galle and Albany. But as steam ships became more efficient and needed less coal, and then ships converted to oil, other political factors came into play and these ports declined.

They were replaced by ports which met different needs, even if they had few natural advantages. Fremantle, located adjacent to the capital of Western Australia, and closer to the areas producing exports and needing imports, was built up at
considerable expense in the late nineteenth century, although Albany had by far the better harbour. Yet even after this decision political matters continued to influence what happened. Fremantle was still subject to the vagaries of local politics. Labour relations were usually appalling, leading to frequent strikes. For decades wooden piles were used to build new wharves, even though they rotted very quickly: the state government wanted to protect the local timber industry.

Most of the great ports of British India were located according to economic and political factors, not whether or not they had good harbours. Kolkata is an obvious example, keeping in mind the appalling difficulties of getting from the sea to the docks. Similarly Mumbai had a much better harbour than Surat, yet took over a century to displace it, and really only rose once the British built rails to the interior to provide it with an hinterland. There is an excellent harbour there to be sure, but building the city was a difficult task. The city was built on what was seven islands, separated at high tides, but joined by mud flats at low tide. Essentially the history of the city was a history of reclamation; the city was invented from marshes, salt flats, isolated islands, even open sea. Indeed one version is that Mumbai was created long ago by coconut palms, which grew on small islands. As they shed leaves into the shallow sea they extended the area of the land. Once the palms were exploited for their coconuts, people began to fertilise them with fish meal. In short, Mumbai is built on coconut leaves and rotten fish.
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Chennai also shows the primacy of politics over geography. For all of the nineteenth century it had no decent harbour and was a very difficult place to load and unload. Nevertheless, it suited the economic and political needs of the British rulers. Mrs Graham in 1810 well described the hazardous nature of getting ashore:

A friend who, from the beach, had seen our ship coming in, obligingly sent the accommodation boat for us, and I soon discovered its use. While I was observing its structure and its rowers, they suddenly set up a song, as they called it, but I do not know that I ever heard so wild and plaintive a cry. We were getting into the surf; the cockswain now stood up, and with his voice and his foot kept time vehemently, while the men worked their oars backwards, till a violent surf came, struck the boat, and carried it along with a frightful violence; then every oar was plied to prevent the wave from taking us back as it receded, and this was repeated five or six times, the song of the boatmen rising and falling with the waves, till we were dashed high and dry upon the beach.
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Nor was it only the ports of British India. Goa was the central port for the Portuguese from 1510, and it seems that as ships got bigger the estuary of the Mandovi, leading to Panaji and Old Goa, became too dangerous. However, as the capital of the Estado da India, Goa obviously had to be kept. Isabel Burton left a harrowing account of arriving and leaving from this port in April and May 1876. She and her husband Richard were in a steamer coming down from Mumbai. It let them off far off the mouth of the river, and they had eight miles in a row boat to reach
Panaji. A little later, getting back on a steamer for Mumbai was an equally dangerous experience. They were told to reach the steamer at midnight. They set off in a large open boat with four rowers:

We rowed down the river and then the bay for three hours against wind and tide, bow on to the heavy rollers, and at last reached the mouth of the bay [that is, the mouth of the Mandovi river], where is the fort. We remained bobbing about in the open sea in the trough of great waves for a considerable time. A violent storm of rain, thunder, and lightning came on . . .

so they went back to the fort to take shelter. On finally hearing the gun of the steamer, they set off again and reached the steamer after an hour, and then had a hazardous time getting on board it.
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A similar impact of colonial needs was seen in East Africa, again then showing the impact of political decisions on the fate of port cities. In earlier times the sheltered river mouths or estuaries were accessible through the coral, as the rivers' discharges affect coral growth and create gaps in the reef for ships to enter. Once steam ships arrived bigger harbours were needed, and Mombasa replaced all the others as only it had a reasonable harbour. But even in Mombasa economic changes dictated changes in the port. The old dhow harbour was incapable of taking larger ships, and was replaced by the new Kilindini harbour on the other side of the island.

Sri Lanka again bears out the dominant influence of land matters over maritime ones, that is that again a good harbour does not necessarily create an important port. At one time Galle was the main port for Sri Lanka, but in the later nineteenth century Colombo was better placed to serve the plantations inland, and so a viable port was created at vast expense. For that matter, Trincomalee had a much better harbour, but its location, in the wrong place to service through-traffic crossing the Indian Ocean, dictated that it never flourish.

The Red Sea also shows how ports are often located on intrinsically hostile shores simply because this location is determined by inland needs. Suez was located to service through-traffic from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, both before and after the opening of the Suez Canal. Isabel Burton in 1876 wrote that 'Suez is a most inaccessible place, and steamers anchor in the bay, an hour's steam from the town, and much more by sail; if you leave your steamer, and if there is a contrary wind you can never be sure of getting back to it.' Nor did things improve as her ship went down the Red Sea. Jiddah if anything was worse, yet was essential as the disembarkation place for pilgrims bound for nearby Mecca, and as the hinge connecting the northern and southern reaches of the Red Sea.

I never could have imagined such an approach to any town. For twenty miles it is protected by nature's breakwaters – lines of low, flat reefs, huge slabs of madrepore and coralline that cut like a knife, barely covered, and not visible till you are close upon them; there is no mark or lighthouse, save two little white posts, which you might mistake for a couple of
good sized gulls; in and out of these you wind like a serpent; there is barely passage for one ship between them, and no pilot will attempt it, save in broad daylight...

and in fact her ship did collide with another when they finally reached the open roadstead.
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Port cities by definition are located on water, whether it be a river, a lake, an estuary, a delta, a harbour or an open coast. Yet not all maritime people, people
of
the sea, are in port cities. We can now consider the more general matter of coastal or littoral society. One focus here will be fisherfolk, and a discussion of them will segue easily into a concluding description of the most truly maritime people of all, those who actually live on the water.

We can first consider the very narrow strip where the tide has an effect, what Winton called 'the distinct ink line where the water meets the shore – the ever-contested margin of high water.'
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As Lencek put it rather melodramatically: 'it was on the borders of continents and islands that the first living creatures crawled out from the sea to begin their inexorable march toward conquest of terra firma.' Here the ressac notion is even more compelling and appropriate than in our earlier discussions, at least in part because the term itself comes from geography. Again Lencek puts it well: 'one cannot help being intrigued by the face-off between land and water... Here, two titanic forces – one stationary and one in motion – engage in eternal dispute.'
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Dakin says the seashore is 'that narrow strip of land over which the ocean waves and the moon-powered tides are masters – that margin of territory that remains wild despite the proximity of cities or of land surfaces modified by industry.' It is a magic place: 'one of the most delightful and exciting areas of the earth's surface – the seashore, that marginal strip where the sea meets the land, and which is covered and uncovered by the tides. From the dark ocean abysses to the mountain-tops, from the desert to the luxuriant jungle there is no place with more variety and flexibility of life than where the tides ebb and flow.'
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This narrow strip, the quintessential littoral, is constantly changing. Sand dunes move back and forth, rocks are exposed and then submerged, the sea itself is always changing and moving. The littoral is always fluctuating, moving, changing, advancing and retreating. Standing on the edge of the surf, with your ankles in the water, you are precisely where land and sea meet. How pleasant this is, even more so with rod in hand.

What we have here is ambiguity, lack of definition and boundaries, a zone where land and sea intertwine and merge, really the fungibility of land and sea. Emily Eden looked at the Sunderbunds down from Kolkata in 1837 when she was travelling on a 'flat' or large barge towed by a steamer. The scene she saw was 'a composition of low stunted trees, marsh, tigers and snakes, with a stream that sometimes looks like a very wide lake and then becomes so narrow that the jungle wood scrapes against the sides of the flat'. Then she reflected, very acutely, that 'It looks as if this bit of world had been left unfinished when land and sea were originally parted.'
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We have been describing the beach, the area where land and sea meet. Humans
are rather different here than are other species. 'Beaches are beginnings and endings. They are frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange'.
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The question is whether we can see people who live on the littoral as making up a distinctive society, one that can be separated from those further inland. And if so, can we find any commonality in littoral society all around the far flung shores of the Indian Ocean? Does location on the shore transcend differing influences from an inland which is very diverse, both in geographic and cultural terms, so that the shorefolk have more in common with other shorefolk thousands of kilometres away on some other shore of the ocean, than they do with those in their immediate hinterland?

Littoral society is usually considered to be the same as coastal society. Heesterman stresses that it is transitional, permeable: 'The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.'
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Braudel wrote evocatively about coastal society, stressing that it was as much land as sea oriented. The life of the coast of the Mediterranean

is linked to the land, its poetry more than half-rural, its sailors may turn peasant with the seasons; it is the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the round-ships of merchants, and its history can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.
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Several modern scholars have ruminated on the nature of the shore folk of the Indian Ocean. Middleton focused on the East African coast.

Part of the coast is the sea: the two cannot be separated. The Swahili are a maritime people and the stretches of lagoon, creek, and open sea beyond the reefs are as much part of their environment as are the coastlands. The sea, rivers, and lagoons are not merely stretches of water but highly productive food resources, divided into territories that are owned by families and protected by spirits just as are stretches of land. The Swahili use the sea as though it were a network of roads.
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We may note here that the very term 'Swahili' means 'shore folk', those who live on the edge of the ocean. As Pouwels has it, Swahili culture was 'a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly African nor "Arab," but distinctly "coastal", the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.'
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Islands are perhaps where we are most likely to find littoral societies, for one would expect to find here more concentrated mixings from various cultural influences. Indeed, on smaller ones there would be nothing but coastal people, for the sea would permeate the whole area. The Seychelles, the Andamans and Nicobar Islands, tiny fragments of land in the ocean, are purely littoral. Similarly, islands in
the rivers can be seen as making up small littoral societies all their own, even far 'inland'. The Zambezi system had many islands, as also did other river basins and deltas: the Hugli, the Ganga, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Irrawaddy and so on.

Despite all these general statements, the precise elements of commonality of littoral society have not yet been adequately worked out. We could look at food, obviously largely derived from the sea, even if some fisherfolk prefer to trade some of their catch for cereals. Houses are usually different from those inland. As one would expect, locally available materials are usually employed. For much of the coast this means that palm trees are used to provide a housing structure, and a thatched roof. In some areas however coral is available; on the Swahili coast it is widely employed as a building material. Jacques Cousteau in fact found it to be of universal utility in the Maldives. It was used to construct the landing strip and the houses, and even the beaches were pulverised coral, not sand. 'Everywhere we saw tiny cemeteries under palm clusters. The tombs themselves, crosses and all, were made of coral. Everything here is bound up with the sea, even life and death.'
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