by Ross E. Dunn
This mentality may be partly attributed to the general tendency of minority groups in foreign societies to preserve and strengthen links with the wider cultural world of which they feel themselves members. But more to the point was the fact that Muslim minorities of the Indian Ocean were heavily concentrated in coastal towns, all of whose economies turned on long-distance seaborne trade. The intensity of this trade continuously reinforced the world-awareness of the populations of these towns, and compelled anyone with a personal stake in mercantile ventures to keep himself keenly informed of market conditions throughout the greater maritime world. A measure of the internationalism of Indian Ocean ports, whether in India, Africa, Malaysia, or the Arab and Persian lands, was the degree to which the inhabitants responded more sensitively to one another’s economic and political affairs than they did to events in their own deep hinterlands.
In the high age of the Abbasid Caliphate Muslim mariners, mostly Arabs and Persians, penetrated the southern seas, establishing trading colonies as far distant as China. The decline of the Caliphate undercut the dominant role of these merchants, but it had no contrary effect on the prestige of Islam as the religion of trade. In Ibn Battuta’s time the western half of the Indian Ocean was every bit a Muslim lake, and the seas east of India were becoming more so with every passing year.
The ascendancy of Muslim trade is partly to be explained by simple Eurasian geography — the central position of the Irano–Semitic region in funneling goods between the Mediterranean and the spice and silk lands. But equally important was the ease with which Muslim merchants set themselves up in alien territories. The shari’a, the legal foundation on which they erected their communities and mercantile enterprises, traveled along with them wherever they went, irrespective of any particular political or bureaucratic authority. Moreover a place in the commercial community was open to any young man of brains and ambition, whatever his ethnic identity, as long as he were first willing to declare for God and the Prophet. As the repute of Muslims as the movers and shakers of international trade and the prestige of Islam as the carrier of cosmopolitan culture spread across the southern seas, more and more trading towns voluntarily entered the Islamic orbit, producing what the historian Marshall Hodgson calls a “bandwagon effect” of commercial expansion.19 Concomitant to this was a great deal of conversion in coastal regions and the rise of scholarly establishments and Sufi orders having their own webs of international affiliation overlaying the mercantile network.
The Muslim communities of these maritime towns kept their faces to the sea, not the interior forest and bush, since the difference between prosperity and survival depended urgently on the arrivals and departures of ships. The development of complex interrelations among urban centers as far distant from one another as Aden and Malacca followed upon a basic natural discovery known among peoples of the ocean rim since ancient times. Across the expanse of the sea the direction of winds follows a regular, alternating pattern. During the winter months, from October to March, the northeast monsoon wind blows from off the Eurasian continent, passing across India and both the eastern and western seas in the direction of East Africa. In the west the wind extends about as far as 17 degrees south latitude, that is, near the mid point of the Mozambique Channel. In summer, from April to September, the southwest monsoon prevails and the pattern is reversed. Centuries before Islam, mariners of the Arabian Sea possessed a rich body of technical information on the monsoons in relation to other climatic and geographic factors, data on whose strength they could plan, and survive, long-distance voyages. By the later Middle Period, Muslim knowledge of the timing and direction of the monsoons had advanced to a state where almanacs were being published with which port officials and wholesale bazaar merchants could predict the approximate time trading ships would arrive from points hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
The seasonal rhythm of the winds gave Indian Ocean trade and travel an element of symmetry and calculability not possible in the Mediterranean. There, the wind patterns were more complicated, and the fury of the winter storms, howling down through the mountain passes of Europe, all but prohibited long-distance shipping for a few months each year. The Indian Ocean, lying astride the equator, was a warmer, calmer, friendlier sea. It was especially so in the months of the northeast monsoon, when, notwithstanding the possibility of hurricanes, waters were placid and skies clear for weeks at a time, and when navigators could depend on a long succession of starry nights to make astronomical calculations of their position. Shipping activity was greater in the winter season than it was in summer, when the rain-bearing southwest monsoon brought stormier conditions. Still, trans-oceanic circulation depended on the full annual cycle of the winds, by which ships sailed to a distant destination during one half of the year and home again in the other.20
We may suspect that when Ibn Battuta arrived in Aden, he did not know exactly what his next move would be. If India and a job at the court of Delhi were already in his mind, he may have changed his plans on the strength of the sailing schedules. Presuming he reached Aden about mid January 1329 (1331),21 the northeast monsoon would have been at its peak, producing strong easterly winds. This was not a normal time for ships to embark from that port on direct voyages to the western coast of India. Nor was it the ideal time to set out for Africa, though some vessels did so. The problem was getting out of the Gulf of Aden against the wind. Once a ship beat eastward far enough to round Ras Asir (Cape Guardafui), the headland of the Horn of Africa, it could run before the northeast wind all the way to Zanzibar and beyond.22 There is no evidence in the Rihla that before reaching Aden Ibn Battuta had a plan to visit tropical Africa. But his past record of impulsive side-tripping suggests that he may have been improvising his itinerary once again. If a ship were embarking for the East African coast, then he would go along too.
In the meantime he rested at Aden for at least several days. Part of the time he stayed as a guest in the home of one of the rich international merchants:
There used to come to his table every night about twenty of the merchants and he had slaves and servants in still larger numbers. Yet with all this, they are men of piety . . . doing good to the stranger, giving liberally to the poor brother, and paying God’s due in tithes as the law commands.
When the young scholar was not sharing in this bounty, he was probably exploring the city and the harbor and perhaps sizing up the reliability of any ships bound for Africa. In the Middle Period the commercial life of Aden was concentrated at the eastern end of a mountainous, balloon-shaped peninsula jutting out from the South Arabian coast. Part of this presque-isle was an extinct volcano, Aden town occupying its crater, which on the eastern side was exposed to the sea. The harbor, facing the town, was enclosed within a stone wall with sea-gates, which were kept padlocked at night and opened every morning on the order of the governor.23
Like ’Aydhab, Aden was an international transit center whose famed prosperity had little to do with the trade of its local hinterland, whose contribution to the import–export economy was modest. It controlled the narrows of Bab al-Mandeb and skimmed off the tariffs on a continuous flow of low-bulk luxury goods moving predominantly westward: spices, aromatics, medicinal herbs, plants for dyeing and varnishing, iron, steel, brass and bronze containers, Indian silks and cottons, pearls, beads, ambergris, cowrie shells, shoes, Chinese porcelain, Yemeni stoneware, African ivory, tropical fruits, and timber. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta gives a list of ten different Indian ports from which merchants commonly sailed to Aden.
Walking along Aden beach, Ibn Battuta is likely to have seen a crowd of ships moored in the harbor or laid up on the beach, since mid winter was a season for cleaning hulls and refitting. The scene would not have been the same as the one he grew up with in Tangier bay, since Mediterranean and Indian Ocean shipbuilding traditions were as different as the patterns of wind and climate. For one thing, he would probably not have seen any galleys, whose use in the Indian Ocean was confined mainly to pirate gangs and navi
es. He would certainly not have seen any of the square-rigged round ships, which were just beginning to enter the Mediterranean from Atlantic Europe in his time. To his untrained eye the dhows of Aden might have looked tediously alike, except for variations in size and hull design. All of them would have been double-ended, that is, their hulls would have come to an edge at both ends of the ship, the square, or transom, stern being a sixteenth-century development introduced by the Portuguese. All of them would have been carvel built, that is, the teak or coconut wood planks of the hull laid edge to edge and lashed together with coir cord rather than nails. And most of them would have carried two triangular, or lateen, sails, a big mainsail and a smaller one on a mizzenmast aft. The largest of fourteenth-century trading vessels were as big as the dhows of modern times, having cargo capacities of up to 250 tons and mainmasts reaching 75 feet or more above the deck.24
The lack of variety in Indian Ocean shipbuilding was far less a reflection of stolid mariner conservatism than of centuries of experimentation and refinement to solve the technological problems of using the monsoons to full advantage. The key breakthrough was the lateen sail, that gracefully curved, wing-like form that brings to Western minds all the images of Sindbad and the Arabian Nights. The lateen was probably first developed in the western Indian Ocean in ancient times, then diffused into the Mediterranean in the wake of seventh-century Muslim expansion. Square sails, such as those being used in northern Europe in the fourteenth century, performed efficiently when the wind was astern. But if the breeze turned too much toward the beam of the ship, the sail was taken aback, that is, it was pushed against the mast. The lateen, on the other hand, was a fore-and-aft sail. The wooden yard to which it was attached sloped downward toward the bow and thereby provided a stiff leading edge against the breeze. Consequently the sail could be set much closer to the wind without being taken back. A well-built lateen-rigged craft could sail in almost any direction except into the eye of the wind.
Dhow under sail off the west coast of India
Ray Smith
Daulatabad, The Deccan, Central India
Ray Smith
The Indian Ocean dhow was not, however, in total harmony with its monsoonal environment. The sewn, unreinforced hull construction, whatever the advantages of its plasticity, could not tolerate more than a modest tonnage of cargo. The size of ships was also limited by the rigging itself, since the mainsail yard was usually about as long as the vessel and extremely heavy. A large crew was required to hoist it (perhaps thirty or more on the biggest ships), and they of course displaced precious space for goods and paying passengers. Moreover the crew had to perform extremely laborious and difficult procedures to maneuver the sail and spar. When wind conditions changed, the sail was never reefed aloft. Rather the yard was hauled down, the sail removed, and a smaller or larger one hoisted in its place, a task that might have to be carried out in a heavy gale. Going about, that is, turning the ship to the opposite tack, was an even trickier operation. It was always done by wearing round (turning tail to wind), and this involved pushing the luff end of the yard up to a position vertical to the mast, swinging it from one side of the mast to the other, then letting it fall again, all the while preventing the loose, sheet end of the enormous sail from flapping wildly out of control. The heavier the weather, the harder it was to control the rigging, all the worse if the crew had to push and stumble its way through a muddle of passengers, cargo, and livestock. Many a ship was lost when it blew too close to a dangerous shore, and the crew could not bring it round in time or lost control of the sail altogether. The danger was especially great during the high season of the southwest monsoon, when only a very brave captain or a fool would dare to approach the western coast of India. The conventional method for survival in violent storms was to haul down the yard, jettison the cargo, and make vows to God.
Although Ibn Battuta logged thousands of miles at sea in the course of his adventures, the Rihla is a disappointing record of fourteenth-century shipbuilding and seamanship. Since he presumably had no sailing experience in early life, and his Tangerian upbringing was no doubt remote from the workaday world of the port, he was excusably indifferent to the rudiments of nautical technology. He is far better at recalling the characteristics of port towns and the pious personages inhabiting them than the humdrum details of navigation and life at sea.25
Sailing out of Aden, he has nothing whatsoever to say about the size or design of the ship to which he committed his fate, not even a classificatory name.26 Since it was bound for the distant reaches of the East African coast, it was probably a relatively large vessel. Trading dhows of that age sometimes had cabins of a sort, presumably with roofs that served as decks. But they were probably not completely decked, obliging passengers to endure the voyage in an open hold, settling themselves as best they could amongst shifting bales of cargo.
Dhows making the run from Aden (or Omani and Persian gulf ports) to East Africa carried a wide assortment of goods, some of them destined for the interior trade and some exclusively for the Muslim coastal towns, whose inhabitants depended on manufactured imports to maintain households of reasonable civility and comfort. The staples of the upland trade were cloth (fine, colored stuffs produced mainly in India) and glass beads. The coastal population, especially the well-to-do families of merchants, scholars, and officials, consumed most of the luxury items. No genteel household would have been without its celadon porcelain from China, its “yellow-and-black” pottery from South Arabia, its silk wardrobes, glassware, books, paper, and manufactured tools. In exchange for these goods, the ships returned north with a range of raw, higher-bulk African commodities destined for dispersal throughout the greater Indian Ocean basin: ivory, gold, frankincense, myrrh, animal skins, ambergris, rice, mangrove poles, and slaves.
Embarking from Aden, Ibn Battuta’s ship made a southwesterly course for the port of Zeila on the African shore of the gulf. Zeila was a busy town, the main outlet for inland trade extending to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, but the ship anchored there for only one night. Ibn Battuta made a quick foray into the bazaar, but his nostrils were assaulted by the unhappy combination of fresh fish and the blood of slaughtered camels. Pronouncing Zeila “the dirtiest, most diasgreeable, and most stinking town in the world,” he and his sailing companions beat a fast retreat to the ship.
The following day the vessel made an eastward course out of the gulf. In the winter monsoon season this could be accomplished only by making long tacks, beating to windward until they cleared Ras Asir. Once past the headland, they swung round to the southwest, hoisted the largest mainsail aboard, and ran before the monsoon.27 Ibn Battuta reckoned a voyage of 15 days from Zeila to the next port-of-call, Mogadishu. The captain almost certainly coasted the whole way. His passengers would never have been out of sight of the great sand dunes heaped along the desolate Somali shore.
Until around the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit, Mogadishu was the busiest and richest port of the coast. It was in easy sailing range of the Persian Gulf, even easier than from the Yemen. The winter monsoon had carried the first Muslim settlers there, probably from the Gulf, in the tenth century or even earlier. Within two hundred years the town was booming, owing partly to its landward connections with the Horn and Ethiopia and partly to the transit trade in ivory and gold shipped there from the smaller towns further south.
Like any of the other emporiums of the western ocean, Mogadishu had plenty of employment for the commercial brokers (called dallals in South Arabia) who provided the crucial mediation between the arriving sea merchants and the local wholesalers. Their speciality was knowledge of market conditions and working familiarity with both the civilities of the local culture and the relevant languages. In this case Arabic and Persian were the linguae francae of the ocean traders. Somali, as well as Swahili, the Bantu tongue that may have just been coming into use along the coast at this time, were the languages of the townsmen and hinterlanders.28 When Ibn Battuta’s ship anchored in Mogadishu harbor, boa
tloads of young men came out to meet it, each carrying a covered platter of food to present to one of the merchants on board. When the dish was offered, the merchant fell under an obligation to go with the man to his home and accept his services as broker. The Mogadishi then placed the visitor under his “protection,” sold his goods for him, collected payment, and helped him find a cargo for the outbound passage — all this at a healthy commission deducted from the profits. Sea merchants already familiar with the town, however, had their own standing business connections and went off to lodge where they pleased.29
When the ship’s company informed the greeting party that Ibn Battuta was not a merchant but a faqih, word was passed to the chief qadi, who came down to the beach with some of his students and took the visitor in charge. The party then went immediately to the palace of Mogadishu, as was the custom, to present the learned guest to the ruler, who went by the title of Shaykh. Upon arriving there, the Moroccan recalls,
one of the serving-boys came out and saluted the qadi, who said to him, “Take word to the intendant’s office and inform the Shaykh that this man has come from the land of al-Hijaz.” So he took the message, then returned bringing a plate on which were some leaves of betel and areca nuts. He gave me ten leaves along with a few of the nuts, the same to the qadi, and what was left on the plate to my companions and the qadi’s students. He brought also a jug of rose-water of Damascus, which he poured over me and over the qadi.