The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  As was true in antiquity, sails were used on inland waterways, but the primary means of propulsion remained rowing with oars or yulohs, while moving against stronger currents or in narrow canals required towing. The monk Ennin describes how when he traveled from the coast to Yangzhou via canal, “Two water buffalo were tied to over forty boats, with either two or three of the latter joined to form a single craft and with these connected in a line by hawsers.” With this configuration, the Japanese embassy covered about thirty kilometers per day. The canal was busy around the clock, and writing of a night passage Ennin describes with wonder how “Boats of the salt bureau laden with salt, with three or four, or again, four or five boats bound side by side, followed one after another without a break for several tens of li,” their progress illuminated by blazing torches. (One li is about half a kilometer.) On tamer stretches of canal or river, a boat’s crew hauled their own vessel, but haulers with local knowledge were hired for treacherous stretches such as the Yangzi’s Three Gorges and the Sanmen Rapids on the Yellow River.

  The major development in construction technique of this period across China was the introduction of iron fastenings (nails and clamps) no later than the eighth century. Nonetheless, on the coast of China, the mouth of the Yangzi was the effective dividing line between the shallow waters of the keel-less, shallow-draft, flat-bottomed “sand ships” (shachuan) of the north, which are thought to date from the Tang Dynasty, and the fuchuan, with its deep, V-shaped hull intended for blue-water navigation and built along the rockbound and embayed southern coast between Fujian and Guangzhou. Ships typically had no cabins, the passengers being allotted space on deck for their goods and themselves; they carried companies of archers for protection against pirates; and they usually towed a smaller dispatch boat. Even less is known about the ships of Korea and Japan, although there is a tendency to see echoes of Chinese tradition in the vessels of the Korean and Japanese kingdoms.

  Chinese sources reveal more detail about Southeast Asian ships, which, according to an eighth-century source, were called kunlun bo: “With the fibrous bark of the coconut tree, they make cords which bind the parts of the ship together.… Nails and clamps are not used, for fear that the heating of the iron would give rise to fire. [The ships] are constructed by assembling [several] thicknesses of side planks, for the boards are thin and they fear they would break.” This explanation for why shipwrights did not employ iron is not unlike the Yuktikalpataru’s explanation for why Indian shipwrights did not use iron. Yet Southeast Asian sailors frequented Chinese ports at this time—which is how the author knew about their ships—and they were aware that Chinese hulls were fastened with iron without fear of fire. As Chinese merchant ships began sailing overseas from the tenth century, even sedentary shipwrights in Southeast Asia would have seen for themselves how they were built. Nonetheless, there is no evidence for iron fittings in Southeast Asian ships before the sixteenth century. Instead, they were fastened with a combination of lashings and dowels inserted into holes drilled into the edges of planks, a method of joinery that allowed for the construction of ships much larger than those in which the Portuguese first reached Southeast Asia in the early 1500s. Sewn-plank fastening was common throughout all of Southeast Asia and as far north as Hainan Island and Guangdong Province in southern China. Although the land of the Hundred Yue had been governed from the north since before the start of the common era, its people had greater cultural affinities with their Southeast Asian neighbors in northern Vietnam than with their Han overlords. We can perhaps discern a northern influence in the multiple thicknesses of planking in kunlun bo of the eighth century, but four hundred years later the seagoing vessels of southern China were still being built with the sewn-plank techniques familiar elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

  One of several vessels carved in the bas-reliefs representing scenes of daily life among the Khmers on the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom, Cambodia, around 1185. With its mast-and-batten sails, axial rudder, and anchor winch forward, the ship has been identified as a Chinese merchant junk. But the features of the passengers and crew—including two men playing a board game forward—seem Southeast Asian rather than Chinese. Detail of a photograph by l’Ecole Française d’Extréme-Orient in Jean Yves Claeys, Angkor (Saigon: Editions Boy-Landry, 1948).

  This period also saw the adoption of fore-and-aft sails in Chinese ships. All sailing traditions seem to have started with a square sail from which a variety of different fore-and-aft configurations derived. In Southeast Asia, “fore-and-aft sails of unspecified form set from two or more masts” were in use by the third century ce, and the canted, quadrilateral sails of the eighth-century Borobudur ships are clearly set fore-and-aft. Assuming a degree of cross-fertilization between Southeast and East Asian maritime traditions, the former was the source of the Chinese lugsail, a four-sided, battened sail set from a boom and yard that extend forward of the mast. The earliest representation of such a Chinese lugsail on a seagoing ship is on a frieze of the twelfth-century Bayon temple at Angkor Thom in Cambodia.

  A Southeast Asian paddled vessel from a bas-relief in the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom, Cambodia. Carved directly below the junk, this seems to show a riverboat of a type once ubiquitous on the lower reaches of the Mekong River. Above the boat, fishermen can be seen hauling their bulging nets while helmsmen steer their boats and a third member of the crew sorts the fish. Below are scenes from the market ashore. From a photograph in Jean Yves Claeys, Angkor (Saigon: Editions Boy-Landry, 1948).

  Naval Warfare

  Given the number of rivals for the control of sea trade the potential for naval warfare was considerable, yet written notices are few, brief, and, apart from the battle of the Geum River between Chinese and Japanese fleets, refer almost exclusively to amphibious operations. Long distances presented no obstacle to determined campaigners. Srivijayan raiders sailed twelve hundred miles across the South China Sea to attack Kauthara, and even the Chinese campaigns against the Korean kingdoms—one per decade from 644 to 663—involved passages of at least three hundred miles across the Yellow Sea. The sources give few clues about the size or rig of the ships involved in any of these expeditions, but all references suggest that fighting, and even transport, was done in relatively small vessels.

  When Huanwang threatened Annam in the tenth century, the Chinese governor built a fleet of thirty-five fast boats carrying only fifty men each—twenty-three oarsmen, twentyfive warriors, and two crossbowmen. The Southern Han kingdom may have employed similar vessels when they invaded Annam in the 930s. Rather than risk an encounter with them on the water, the Annamese planted massive stakes tipped with iron points in a northern branch of the Red River so that the sharpened ends were covered at high tide. As the Southern Han sailed into the estuary, Vietnamese in smaller craft harassed the invaders in a feint, and when they retreated upstream, the Southern Han followed. As the tide fell, their ships were stuck on the stakes and about half the force was slaughtered in a battle that proved a turning point in Vietnamese history.

  Stray remarks in the Chinese annals suggest that the vessels employed on the Korean campaigns were not terribly large, either. The first involved nine hundred ships and forty thousand troops, an average of forty-four people per vessel. Even accounting for a number of these vessels being intended exclusively for carrying grain and other supplies, the largest ships probably had a total complement of no more than two hundred people, including crew. At the Geum River in 663, the Japanese lost 400 ships to a Chinese fleet of only 170. Whether this can be attributed to a difference in size between individual units, or to the Chinese securing a tactical advantage in the confined waters, is impossible to say. According to the Japanese chronicle, “The Japanese warships which first arrived engaged the Tang fleet, but had not the advantage, and therefore retired. Great Tang stood on its guard in strict order of battle.” Such deliberation in deciding when and how to deploy their forces suggests that commanders on both sides had at least some experience of fleet engagements, but how suc
h battles were fought remains unknown.

  Because the high civilization of China was the cultural cynosure of all Northeast Asia, the Yellow Sea figures prominently in the written accounts of trade and warfare from the earliest times. The Sea of Japan (in Korean, Tonghae, or Eastern Sea) played a far less obvious role in the relations between the underdeveloped east coast of Korea, western Japan, and the territory of the Jurchen. Apart from those on either side of the Korea Strait, the principal ports of Korea and Japan all had a southerly orientation, and there were no major ports on the eastern shore of the Korean Peninsula, or the western side of Honshu. Yet even the Jurchen in the vicinity of northeast Korea and modern Vladivostok had seafaring experience, and in 1019 fifty Jurchen ships raided along the east coast of Korea, the islands of Ise and Tsushima, and the Japanese port at Hakata Bay on Kyushu. Yet the Jurchen never fully exploited this maritime capability and the focus of their southward expansion was always on the more direct overland routes toward northern China.

  China’s embrace of sea trade under the Northern Song was due to a combination of misfortune and opportunity. The collapse of its western frontier forced the emperor and many of his subjects to relocate to the east, closer to the center of the empire’s elaborate canal system and to the seaports upon whose business the treasury increasingly relied for revenues. Through all these vicissitudes, the Chinese economy continued to grow, however. Imports once considered exotic and rare came to be seen as commodities, while mass-produced ceramics and other goods fed a growing export market that spanned the Monsoon Seas. At the same time that China’s sea trade was expanding, that of the Korean kingdoms was in decline, opening the way for Chinese merchants to dominate the traffic of Northeast Asia. China’s receptivity to trade had profound consequences for the states of Southeast Asia, not just in neighboring Vietnam, which achieved its independence from China, but also more southerly realms. From Champa to Srivijaya and Java, new, increasingly centralized states developed their own institutions to profit from and maintain trade. In the coming centuries, their prosperity would attract attention not only from their traditional trading partners in China and the Indian Ocean, but also from the Mediterranean world to the west.

  a The Song Dynasty is traditionally divided into the Northern Song (960–1127) and, after the Jurchen Jin invasions, the Southern Song (1127–1279).

  b Abu Zayd claims that the number of victims was known thanks to the Chinese penchant for record keeping.

  c A picul was a unit of weight equivalent to what one man could carry, about sixty kilograms.

  Chapter 12

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  The Medieval Mediterranean and Europe

  The establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt in the tenth century signaled the start of a major realignment of Mediterranean and European commerce. The Red Sea became the destination of choice for Indian Ocean trade, which had spillover effects across the Levant. Yet the rise of the only major Muslim state with maritime roots also led to a decline of Muslim fortunes in the central Mediterranean. The Fatimids possessed considerable naval experience, but they established their new capital up the Nile at Cairo and political realities directed their energies to threats from Southwest Asia, so that by the start of the Crusades at the end of the eleventh century they had lost their initiative on the Mediterranean. Political and religious factionalism likewise rendered the North African emirates incapable of effectively resisting the incipient commercial and military strength of Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, and Venice. The Italian city-states hardly presented a united front, but a host of religious, political, economic, and commercial changes in Latin (Catholic) Europe facilitated their takeover of Muslim-dominated trade routes and territories.

  The wealth of the Byzantine Empire, the caliphates, and Levantine ports continued to attract western traders and rulers, but the expansion of east–west trade across the Mediterranean was especially beneficial to merchants from western and northwest Europe and contributed incidentally to the establishment of wholly distinct and vibrant trading regimes on the Baltic and North Seas. And as the volume and value of trade between south and north grew, so did the impetus for mastering the Atlantic sea-lanes between the Mediterranean and northwest Europe. The consequent merging of northern and southern Europe’s distinct approaches to shipbuilding and navigation resulted in the development of many of the tools European sailors would employ to illuminate the sea of darkness and discover for themselves new worlds.

  The Mediterranean

  The rise of the Italian port cities and the ascendancy of the merchant class to a place of privilege and authority are hallmarks of the earliest stages of Europe’s medieval commercial revolution. In no Mediterranean society since Phoenicia and Carthage did merchants enjoy such respect or influence as they did in the great emporia of Venice on the Adriatic, Genoa on the Ligurian, and Pisa and Amalfi on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Though few in number, the Venetians and Genoese extended their commercial and political influence throughout the Mediterranean, to the Black Sea, and, most influentially, to northern Europe, which they first reached via Alpine routes to the fairs of Champagne and the centers of German trade, and after the thirteenth century by sea through the Strait of Gibraltar to Flanders and England.

  Situated in the midst of an extensive lagoon that runs about fifty kilometers from the Po estuary in the south to the mouth of the Piave River in the north and with an average width of about eleven kilometers between the lidi and the mainland, the islands of Venice were home to an amphibious people who congregated in island parishes characteristically dominated by a church overlooking a wharf or boatyard. The Venetians depended on wheat purchased in the Italian interior since they could grow none themselves, and Venetian barges routinely ascended the Po the more than three hundred kilometers to Pavia—capital of the kingdom of Italy—and Milan as early as the sixth century. It was in the river trades that the Venetians honed the commercial, martial, and diplomatic skills that served them in their expansion down the Adriatic and into the eastern Mediterranean. Aghlabid raids rendered the Adriatic an anarchic sea in the tenth century, but the Venetians grew increasingly assertive. In the year 1000, Pietro II Orseolo defeated Dalmatian pirates in a series of battles that established Venice’s primacy in the northern Adriatic. Diplomatically, Orseolo secured the backing of both the Byzantines and what would be known as the Holy Roman Empire by arranging marriages between Venetians and the ruling families of each. In later centuries, Orseolo’s rule came to be seen as the commencement of the Most Serene Republic’s rise, and the anniversary of his departure on the Dalmatian campaign was celebrated in an ever more elaborate ceremony by which Venice was spiritually joined to the Adriatic. The sposalizio (“wedding”) took place annually on Ascension Day when the doge, his retainers, members of the clergy, and ambassadors to Venice put out in the splendid state barge Bucintoro. Declaring “We wed thee, Adriatic, as a sign of our true and perpetual dominion,” the doge dropped into the sea a gold ring blessed by the Patriarch of Grado. In this act, Venice proclaimed its mastery over the sea and affirmed its exclusive relationship against other prospective suitors.

  Naval power in the Italian maritime cities evolved in completely different ways from that of the Byzantine Empire and the caliphates. Lacking a vast territory, Venice’s fleet was concentrated in one place, and when the city did acquire colonies, these were astride shipping lanes with which the Venetians were already intimately familiar; thus the exercise of naval power evolved organically from merchants’ priorities. The organization of Venice’s naval forces likewise reflected the city’s commercial foundations. Merchants sailed in armed ships as a matter of course—the difference between “armed” and “unarmed” vessels was usually determined by the size of the crew—and regulations specifying the type and quantity of weapons carried by both crew and merchants merely codified standing practice. Ships on long voyages routinely sailed together for safety, but in 1308 the Signoria required that ships bound for Cyprus and Cilician Armenia or for the Black Sea port
of Tana sail in convoy.

  The majority of ships in Venice were privately built and owned, although the government regulated their size and rig so that in the event of war it would have access to the sorts of vessels it needed. Shipbuilders were originally concentrated on the Rialto, but by the twelfth century they had moved to the area of the Arsenale, which combined the functions of government shipyard, chandlery, and weapons depot. In wartime, the state purchased or hired ships from private owners, and if additional vessels were needed, these could be ordered from private yards or shipwrights could be seconded to the Arsenale. By the 1200s, Venice had the industrial capacity to provide the Fourth Crusade with about three hundred ships including horse transports, round ships, and fifty galleys. A century later, Dante drew on his memory of the government shipyard to describe the eighth circle of hell where,

  As in the Venetians’ arsenal in winter the

  tenacious pitch boils to recaulk their worn ships,

  for they cannot sail; instead this man works on a

  new ship, that one plugs the ribs of a craft that has