There is no need here to retell all the details of the story of how Whatonga went in search of Toi, though the most detailed accounts described in great detail a lavishly decorated canoe with places for sixty-six men, including several chieftains; images of three gods were carried on board. Having secured the help of these gods, the canoe was said to have circumnavigated much of North Island, finally reaching Whakatane and the home of Toi, who was now chieftain of a great tribe generated by his followers after they took native women as their brides.44 There is something in these stories that recalls Telemachos going out to find his father, Odysseus, and though contamination by Greek myths seems unlikely, it cannot be excluded, for all the versions we have were recorded after the arrival of European missionaries and settlers.
Finally, supposedly in the mid-fourteenth century, we hear of a mass movement of people, in stories that tell how all the great lineages of Aotearoa descended from the heke or Great Migration of a fleet of canoes from Hawaiki. The canoes, rather than Kupe and Toi, marked the real beginning of time on Aotearoa for the Māori tribes. In the oral accounts they were described in sometimes meticulous detail, including even the exact position where individual sailors sat by the thwarts; later generations knew which canoe had brought their own ancestors. When the gods were brought on board a vessel became taboo (tapu) and only fresh food could be eaten; no cooking was allowed. Bags made of seaweed were filled with fresh water and towed behind the boat, keeping the water cool and reducing the weight of the cargo.45 To calm the waves, the sailors sang magical incantations as they crossed the ocean:
Fiercely plies the shaft of this my paddle,
Named Kautu ki te rangi.
To the heavens raise it, to the skies uplift it.
It guides to the distant horizon,
To the horizon that seems to draw near,
To the horizon that instils fear,
To the horizon that causes dread,
The horizon of unknown power,
Bounded by sacred restrictions.
All of this reflects the everyday practices of later generations, whose skill in building beautifully carved boats can still be admired in Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand at Wellington; such boats could easily measure twenty or even thirty metres in length. The stories of this migration report quarrels over the food tribute paid to chieftains on Hawaiki, so one might like to argue that pressure on food supplies motivated the migrants. They also report the arrival of all the canoes but one on the east coast of North Island, followed by a tour of the coast so that each chieftain could acquire his own patch of territory without getting in the way of his neighbours. Once again, we hear of the introduction of the sweet potato and of ceremonies to dedicate a tuber to one of the patron gods of the migrants; otherwise the migrants seem to have brought few plants or none, and to have been content with what grew in the unfamiliar temperate climate of New Zealand. Dogs, hens and rats (themselves often eaten as food, as a delicacy conserved in fat) are also mentioned in the oral traditions. There is some debate about the Carbon 14 dating of rat bones, some of which appear to be 2,000 years old, but this is far earlier than other evidence for a human presence will allow. Two dogs were sacrificed to the god Maru by the crew of the boat Aotea (‘White Cloud’) that arrived on the west coast.46
Hard evidence for the coming of the Māori as far back as the tenth century has not been found. Increasingly, archaeologists have been content to argue from silence and to insist that the date for migration should be pushed later, right into the middle of the fourteenth century, but possibly a little earlier. This does not discount the possibility that people vaguely comparable to Kupe and Toi arrived much earlier, without establishing a settlement. Discovery is not generally a sudden process; awareness of new land spreads thinly but does not necessarily lead to further action, as the example of the Norse arrival in North America shows: the crucial change occurs when this new knowledge takes its place in a wider world view.
Early settlements, which according to tradition were concentrated on the west coast of North Island, would have left few traces, and some material such as stone adzes is hard to date. More suggestive is the discovery of Māori refuse piled up in middens that also included the bones of now extinct flightless birds known as moa. On South Island graves were found that included among the burial goods blown moa eggs alongside adzes and fish hooks of typical Polynesian design. Did the Māoris hunt these birds to extinction? The name moa was simply a Polynesian word for domestic fowl. Arriving in Aotearoa, the settlers transferred the name to several species of flightless bird that had lived in relative peace on an island that lacked mammals which might have preyed on the birds; humans, indeed, were the first mammals to arrive – as a general rule isolated islands do not contain native mammals. In some of the oral traditions there are references to native birds of this sort.47 Particularly on the cool South Island, where cultivation of the soil posed greater challenges to those used to traditional Polynesian agriculture, the settlers may for a while have relied on the flesh of birds and on fish and seafood for sustenance. But most of this is speculation. It cannot be proved that land clearance was under way before about 1200.48 The important point is that newly arrived people who settled previously uninhabited islands rapidly changed the ecological balance, whether by clearing the land for crops, by introducing Pacific rats that attacked wildlife, or by themselves throwing off balance the delicate relationship between native flora and fauna and the environment.49 What was true in Aotearoa was true in virtually every island humans settled, in all the oceans.
In Aotearoa, as in Hawai’i, the population turned its back on the sea, and regular contact with the rest of the Polynesian world ceased. The new territory offered the resources the settlers needed, without the shortages of vital goods that would stimulate trade. For instance, the characteristic green stone out of which implements and adornments were made was plentiful on New Zealand, and so was obsidian, a volcanic product that not surprisingly is abundant on these two islands where volcanic activity has always been lively. The Polynesians had reached the limit of their spread across the Pacific by the middle of the fourteenth century AD. The settlement of the Pacific had, with a significant interruption, taken 3,000 years, but had embraced distances of more than 3,000 miles. We shall return to the open Pacific when European sailors entered its waters – first Magellan, and later the famous Manila galleons linking the Philippines to Central and South America. Yet it has to be admitted that the simple but effective maritime technology of the Polynesians trumped that of European sailors, not to mention the Chinese and the Japanese.
Part Two
* * *
THE MIDDLE OCEAN: THE INDIAN OCEAN AND ITS NEIGHBOURS,
4500 BC–AD 1500
3
The Waters of Paradise
I
Even a cursory look at a map reveals a fundamental difference between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Whereas the Pacific is dotted with islands, especially in the south-west, the human presence in the Indian Ocean is defined by its coasts. The scattered, empty islands of the Pacific meant that it became an ocean of migrants; the settled, connected shores of the Indian Ocean made it into a network of traders. Remote, widely scattered islands such as Mauritius and Réunion were discovered and settled by Europeans and those they brought with them as slaves or indentured servants long after the Polynesians had already set foot on every habitable Pacific island. Besides, the great concentration of Indian Ocean islands only begins beyond the ocean’s eastern edge, spilling into the Pacific, in the territories now known as Indonesia and Malaysia. Among other islands, the Andamans were made famous by Marco Polo and other travellers because the inhabitants were said to kill or even eat any visitors; but only one island of any great size stands off Africa, and that place, Madagascar, was partly settled by Malays or Indonesians who had travelled all the way from the edges of the Pacific.
This comparison does, however, leave out of account an area within the Pacifi
c that only gradually became an important area of maritime activity: the South China Sea, stretching from Singapore across to the Philippines and up to Taiwan, and the seas beyond, the Yellow Sea and the Japan Sea, encompassing the coasts of northern China, Korea and the Japanese archipelago. This great arc, unlike the vast tracts of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, developed close links with the Indian Ocean and can sensibly be treated as an extension of the Indian Ocean world. Nothing symbolizes these links better than the appetite of Chinese and Japanese Buddhists in the first millennium AD for Indian texts, relics and even works of art, so that a fresco painted in the Nara region of Japan in AD 759 clearly portrays an Indian princess, and carries the imprint of the Hellenistic artists who, in the wake of Alexander the Great, brought Greek artistic styles to north-western India.1 The waters to the east of China remained remarkably quiet for much longer than the waters of the Indian Ocean, whose history as a thoroughfare began, in fits and starts, as Egyptians and Sumerians sent their first trading expeditions down the Red Sea and the Gulf. All this testifies to the extraordinary vitality of the Indian Ocean since antiquity; by the first millennium the only sea where exchanges of goods and the movement of people were more intense was the much smaller and more confined Mediterranean.
Historians of the Indian Ocean have in consequence tended to think of the Indian Ocean as a sort of Mediterranean, a sea defined by its edges, even if there exists no southern edge. Like the Mediterranean, it is a sea that falls neatly into two halves, with Ceylon, the modern Sri Lanka, playing the role of Sicily, a substantial island looking both ways, while southern India has something of the role of Italy, with its western and eastern flanks connected to one another by land or sea, so that these areas functioned as bridges between the trading world of the western and eastern ‘Indies’. That is a term drawn from Latin and Greek, and ultimately from Hindi, which by its very indeterminacy says something important about the vast space of the Indian Ocean; for in antiquity and the Middle Ages the term ‘Indies’ embraced not just India and Indonesia but the east coast of Africa, that is, anywhere lapped by the Indian Ocean. This later led to much confusion about where to find the mythical medieval king Prester John, a Christian prince who would come to the salvation of western Europe in the struggle against Muslim power; and it led to equal confusion when the first Gypsies to reach western Europe around 1400 talked blithely of origins in India, or maybe ‘little Egypt’, but somewhere out there, at any rate. The confusion was magnified further when the New World was defined by Columbus as the ‘Indies’, so we do not think twice about using such terms as ‘West Indian’ for inhabitants of the Caribbean, and have only recently substituted ‘Native American’ for ‘Red Indian’. Not surprisingly, some of the ocean’s historians have expressed dislike for the term ‘Indian Ocean’, which appears to privilege one part of the extensive shoreline, but this is to apply modern rather than ancient and medieval concepts of India – a small India rather than the greater Indies.2
The Indian Ocean is hard to measure. To say it covers 75,000,000 square kilometres or 27 per cent of the world’s maritime space is to assume we know where its arbitrarily drawn southern limit should lie.3 It can be defined by its historic exit points: past Aden and up the Red Sea, which acted as a bridge between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; through the Strait of Malacca past Singapore into the Pacific. To these can be added, much later, with the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in 1497, the Cape of Good Hope, giving access to the Atlantic. Another southern edge, the west coast of Australia, was not of much interest to anyone sailing the seas until the nineteenth century, and even then to a very limited degree. But one of the earliest and most vibrant exit points, even though it leads to rivers rather than the open sea, passes through the waters between Arabia and Iran variously known as the Persian and the Arabian Gulf.4
It seems odd to speak of ‘the slow creation’ of the Indian Ocean, as if this space had not been in existence for millions of years before sea traffic began to pass along its shores and across its open spaces. But from the perspective of maritime history the question is when the Indian Ocean began to function as a unit – in other words, when the coasts of east Africa, Arabia, India and south-east Asia began to interact across the sea, whether through migration or through trade. In addition to breaking down these shores into a series of discrete, and at times quite disconnected, coasts, attention has to focus on the two major gulfs that penetrate deep into the Middle East, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, channels that gave access to two of the earliest, richest and most innovative civilizations of the ancient world, those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. To say that they made very profitable use of the sea routes running south-eastwards from their lands is not to say that the pharaohs or the merchants of the Sumerian and Babylonian cities made uninterrupted use of these routes; nor is it to claim that they ventured very far out into the ocean, though, as will be seen, the Sumerians did make contact by sea with another great civilization that lay to the east of Mesopotamia. The beginnings of Indian Ocean trade were jerky; maritime ventures such as the Egyptian expeditions down the Red Sea to the ‘land of Punt’ were intermittent, and there is no evidence in the earliest documents or in the archaeological records that regular voyages took place around Arabia, linking Egyptian ports on the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. And yet the produce of the lands along the shores of the Indian Ocean was irresistible: expensive necessities such as copper, luxury materials such as black ebony and white ivory, as well as aromatic resins such as frankincense and myrrh. Egyptians talked of the products of Punt, which they described as ‘the god’s land’, and in early Mesopotamia the route down the Persian Gulf was said to lead to the abode of the Blessed.
The nearer edges of the Indian Ocean and even the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were vaguely defined, according to mental maps on which place names moved around and seem to have indicated where particular products could be found, rather than where a destination actually lay: the land of copper, the land of perfumes, and so on. Despite their impressive mastery of astronomy, the ancient Babylonians had no sense of the scale of the great ocean that lay beyond the Gulf. A highly schematic Babylonian world map preserved on a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, dating from 700–500 BC, not surprisingly placed Iraq at the centre of the world, with the Bitter Sea (Persian Gulf) leading off to the south-east and a Salt Sea surrounding the landmass. The aim of the mapmaker was to illustrate Babylonian mythology rather than to guide sailors to a safe haven, and in this sense it is comparable to the equally schematic world maps of medieval Europe such as the Hereford mappamundi. But there is a sense that, even 2,000 years after the first regular voyages crept out of the Persian Gulf, knowledge of and interest in the wider expanses of the Indian Ocean had not progressed very far. That would happen when Greek and Roman trade began to penetrate ever deeper into the ocean in search of the spices of the Indies.
One famous physical feature of the Indian Ocean gives the area unity: the monsoons. They determine the sailing seasons and, more importantly, the cycle of production of the foodstuffs consumed by the inhabitants and of the goods that have for millennia been sought out along the ocean’s shores. Perhaps the most striking feature of food production linked to the monsoons is the distinction between the areas growing wheat (sometimes mixed with millet or similar grains) and those producing rice. In the regions to the west the best hope was to await winter rains, or to dig canals and irrigate the soil with the help of the great river systems – the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Indus in what is now Pakistan. There, bread became ‘the staff of life’ for Arabians, Persians and north Indians. The western sector was the sector of bread. But the eastern sector, from southern India across to the paddy fields of south-east Asia, was wedded to rice in a great variety of types: husky and round, thin and polished, even (once one reached China) white, brown, pink and yellow, new and old – this was considered the tastiest type.5 Grain surpluses, in wheat or rice, underwrote the political success
of the states that emerged close to the ancient and medieval Indian Ocean – whether Sumer in Iraq, far back in the third and second millennia BC, or Angkor in Cambodia in the ninth to twelfth centuries AD. With the strong economic base these surpluses provided, there was plenty of capacity for diversification into crafts and into the production and distribution of luxury foodstuffs and dyes, notably the pepper for which the Romans and their successors had such a powerful craving. Rice, the monsoon crop par excellence, could also be traded to those areas that did not produce it, or produced little of it; once the trade routes had been established, there was more to commerce across the ocean than the conveyance of aromatic spices.
The origin of the monsoons lies in the high air temperatures created in the Asian landmass during the summer; cooler air is drawn north-eastwards across the ocean. And then in winter it is much the opposite, as the landmass cools sharply but the ocean retains its warmth. So between June and October winds blow favourably for shipping bound from the south-west of the ocean towards Indonesia, even if that often means sailing through thick blankets of warm rain. On the other hand, strong winds and tempests at sea made navigation in the western Indian Ocean very hazardous in high summer, interrupting traffic to western India, and sailors had to await the slackening of the winds in late August before essaying this route, although there was a window of opportunity for the Omani dhows that had a good chance of reaching India from Arabia in May, June and July. September to May was the period of the year when sailing from Gujarat in western India to Aden proved most feasible. During the fifteenth century, vessels set out from Calicut in January, bound for Aden, and then returned in late summer or early autumn. Winter was also the ideal time to head down from Aden or Oman to the coast of east Africa, returning in April and May – a slow return, generally, as it involved sailing against the currents. Within the Red Sea one had to know that the safe period for a journey northwards lay in January and February, while those bound southwards would need to take advantage of winds that blew southwards in summer time. So, both in the ocean at large and in its subsidiary seas, it was vital to understand how and when the winds shifted from south to north.
The Boundless Sea Page 8