He prayed hard, and reflected on his fate.
I was in the middle of these reflections, and everything about me spoke of dejection and trouble, when at length, by virtue of that Divine promise: 'Who is He who hears the prayers of the afflicted, and drives away his misery?' [Quran, s. 27, verse 63] on a sudden, the zephyr of God's infinite mercy began to blow upon me.... The morning of joy began to dawn from the East of happiness.... The impetuous hurricane was changed to a favourable wind, the tossing of the waves ceased, and the seas, in conformity with my desires, became completely calm.152
We get only glimpses of what it was really like travelling by sea at this time. Many of the accounts we do have, such as some of those just quoted in the discussion of 'superstition', are about the dangers of life at sea, for as one would expect these impacted decisively on landlubbers. Given the large role of Muslims in trade at this time, many accounts are from Muslim men travelling to trade, or for fun. There is a large and fabulous Islamic travel literature. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, from the time when the Abbasid empire was at its height, is best known, but there is also Buzurg's collection from the tenth century, with copious tall stories featuring giant whales, mermaids, islands with only women, a snake that ate an elephant, as so on. Sindbad is equally fabulous and exciting, but he does at least provide an evocative explanation for why people wanted to travel. He was constantly prompted to leave a secure and mundane life ashore and head off for adventure and profit. 'I was living a life of unexampled pleasure [in Baghdad] when, one day, the old desire entered my head to visit far countries and strange people, to voyage among the isles and curiously regard things hitherto unknown to me; also, the trading habit rose in me again.' This happens to explain the start of each voyage. For example, concerning the beginning of his sixth voyage:
I was sitting one day taking the air before my door and feeling as happy as I had ever felt, when I saw a group of merchants passing in the street, who had every appearance of returned travellers. This sight recalled to me how joyful a thing it is to return from journeying, to see the birth land after far voyage, and the thought made me want to travel again. I equipped myself with merchandise of price, suitable for the sea, and left the city of Baghdad for Basrah. There I found a great ship filled with merchants and notables as well provided with goods for trading as myself, so I had my bales carried on board, and soon we peacefully set sail from Basrah.153
Many Muslims travelled by sea to fulfil their pious obligation to perform the hajj. Ibn Jubayr was merely going across the Red Sea, from 'Aydhab to Jiddah, yet he had a horror voyage, one which, given the notorious difficulty of navigation in these treacherous waters, was probably not that unusual. It took eight days to cover a distance, as the crow flies, of about 300 km.
There had been the sudden crises of the sea, the perversity of the wind, the many reefs encountered, and the emergencies that arose from the imperfections of the sailing gear which time and again became entangled and broke when sails were raised or lowered or an anchor raised. At times the bottom of the jilabah would run against a reef when passing through them, and we would listen to a rumbling that called us to abandon hope. Many times we died and lived again....154
We quoted above Abd-er-Razzak's account of a storm in 1444, and how his prayers saved the ship. This occurred on his return voyage back to Hurmuz, but when he had set out from there in 1442 it was his first sea voyage, and he was already a bit apprehensive: 'The events, the perils, which accompany a voyage by sea (and which in themselves constitute a shoreless and a boundless ocean), present the most marked indication of the Divine omnipotence, the grandest evidence of the wisdom which is sublime.' His ship finally left from Hurmuz in May 1442, at the end of the monsoon, 'when tempests and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.' It was a terrible voyage. 'As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel, and all the terrors of the sea presented themselves before me, I fell into so deep a swoon, that for three days respiration alone indicated that life remained within me.' He need not have worried too much, as they had missed the season and they all got off at Muscat. Then he got sick, and finally had a good eighteen-day voyage to Calicut around September 1442. He recovered during the voyage:
In short, the air of the sea having become more salubrious, gave me the hope of a perfect cure; the morning of health began to dawn upon the longing of my hopes; the wounds caused by the sharp arrows of my malady began to heal, and the water of life, hitherto so troubled, recovered its purity and transparency. Before long a favourable breeze began to blow, and the vessel floated over the surface of the water with the rapidity of the wind.155
We can end this long chapter by returning one last time to our hero, Ibn Battuta. As a landlubber he left invaluable accounts of what it was like at this time. We have commented frequently on how his status as a prestigious scholar eased his passage, for everywhere he was accepted and patronised and helped by fellow Muslims. His Rehla also gives us evocative accounts of many different sorts of travel by water, and many different perils and pleasures, just as Abd-er-Razzack found too.
His maritime career began inauspiciously. In 1329 in Jiddah he embarked on a jalba (a small sewn craft) which belonged to a person from Abyssinia. A sharif wanted him to travel with him on another jalba, 'but I did not do so on account of there being a number of camels with him in his jalba, and I was frightened of this, never having travelled by sea before.' Later that year he tells us what he had to eat. He was near Oman on a small ship:
My food during those days on that ship was dried dates and fish. Every morning and evening [the sailors] used to catch fish. . . . They used to cut them in pieces, broil them, and give every person on the ship a portion, showing no preference to anyone over another, not even to the master of the vessel nor to any other, and they would eat them with dried dates. I had with me some bread and biscuit... and when these were exhausted I had to live on those fish with the rest of them.156
Later he had good times and bad times at sea. Once he had a most luxurious trip with the governor of Lahari in Sind on the river of Sind. There were fifteen small ships to carry baggage and various retainers. Some were musicians and singers.
First the drums and trumpets would be sounded and then the musicians would sing, and they kept this up alternately from early morning to the hour of the midday meal. When this moment arrived the ships came together and closed up with one another and gangways were placed from one to the other. The musicians then came on board the governor's ahawra and sang until he finished eating, when they had their meal and at the end of it returned to their vessel.157
Another voyage a few years later was a very different matter. In the mid 1340s he was shipwrecked off the Coromandel coast:
During the voyage a gale sprang up and our ship nearly took in water. We had no knowledgeable pilot on board. We came to some rocks on which the ship narrowly escaped being wrecked, and then into some shallows where the ship ran aground. We were face to face with death, and people jettisoned all that they had, and bade farewell to one another. We cut down the mast and threw it overboard, and the sailors made a wooden raft. We were then about two farsakhs from the shore. I was going to climb down to the raft, when my companions (for I had two slave-girls and two of my companions with me) said to me: 'Are you going to go down and leave us?' So I put their safety before my own and said: 'You two go down and take with you the girl that I love.' The [other] girl said: 'I am a good swimmer and I shall hold on to one of the raft ropes and swim with them.' So both my companions... and the one girl went on the raft, the other girl swimming. The sailors tied ropes to the raft, and swam with their aid. I sent along with them all the things that I valued and the gems and ambergris, and they reached the shore in safety because the wind was in their favour. I myself stayed on the ship. The captain made his way ashore on the rudder. The sailors set to work to make four rafts, but night fell before they were completed, and the ship took in water. I climbed on the poop and stayed there until morning, when a party
of infidels came out to us in a boat we went ashore with them to the coast of Ma'bar.158
Ibn Battuta here showed a concern for his slave girls, and he wrote once of them that 'it is my habit never to travel without them.'159 He is not however referring to the same two girls all the time, for he was, as Dunn puts it in his excellent reconstruction of his travels, 'a man with a long history of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in various parts of the Muslim world.'160 He had a son to a Moroccan woman/wife in Damascus, who died age 10, a daughter to a slave girl in Bukhara, who died, a daughter in Delhi to a wife, another to a slave girl in Malabar, a son in the Maldives to a wife. Indeed, he 'married several women' in the Maldives. He pointed out that 'Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.'161 Given that he usually travelled with at least one slave girl, we can only assume his progeny were scattered all over the shores of the Indian Ocean and beyond.
In this matter he was not unusual, and we may assume that not only Muslim travellers had 'wives in every port'. Vincent Le Blanc was impressed with the system he found in Cambay (see page 98). Yet it has been found in the Muslim case much more than in other societies at this time. Some members of the crew that Alan Villiers sailed with had several wives in different places. One nakhoda from Sur had a son in Pemba, another in the Comoros, and a daughter from a secondary wife from the African interior.162 The Muslim custom of allowing several 'legal' wives, and then the practice, in theory only Shiah but in fact done more widely, of muta, or temporary marriage, which really became part of customary law among travelling Muslims, made it much easier for Muslims to follow this maritime tradition. Ibn Battuta may have been more scrupulous in this matter, for in the Maldives at least he divorced his wives before he left.
* * *
Chapter 5
Europeans in an Indian Ocean world
This chapter provides a long analysis of the arrival, and impact, of Europeans in the Indian Ocean up to the mid eighteenth century. The aim is to locate these Europeans in the structures we have already described in the previous chapter. In a possibly perverse way, what we intend to show is that the European presence over its first 250 years certainly varied from place to place and time to time, but overall the effects on the Indian Ocean, its trade, its people, even its politics, was limited. The next chapter deals in detail with continuing structures, which by and large the Europeans were forced to accommodate, or concerning which they had no knowledge at all. Here we will look not only at trade, the topic which so far has dominated the historiography of the Indian Ocean, but also at religious movements, and the social history of people on ships. Finally we will note how the Indian Ocean was now much more part of a wider world than had been the case in previous centuries. In the terms set out by Horden and Purcell, we increasingly have to write a history where the history in the ocean, that is a history which looks beyond its geographical bounds, is more important than an autonomous history of the ocean. Yet so far these links to the rest of the world were relatively benign: in the last two chapters of this book we will see how their nature changed as Europe changed, and the Indian Ocean became peripheral in the capitalist world economy.
Few writers today would follow the Indian scholar-diplomat K.M. Panikkar and write about a Vasco da Gama period of Asian history, beginning in 1498 when the Portuguese navigator arrived in southwest India. Some however would accept his succeeding claim, that it 'was a great event from the point of view of the results that followed from it.'1 The tendency here, much to be found also in Victorian English accounts of their empire, is that this was the crucial insertion of the wedge which later led to European dominance. My whole argument is that the presence of Europeans is one thing, and certainly there were increasing numbers of them in the Indian Ocean region in the period covered by this chapter, but to see this as the beginning of the demonstrable dominance of the nineteenth century is to take a very teleological view indeed. There had, after all, been 'foreigners' in the Indian Ocean for millennia: Romans, Greeks, a host of others. Early Europeans fitted into a very broad and diverse complex of people living around and sailing across the ocean. There was contact certainly, both hostile and peaceful, but until the power dimension changed in the later eighteenth century this did not become an impact, let alone dominance.
One useful way to get a perspective is to remember Zheng He's expeditions, which we described in the previous chapter (see pages 90–1). He commanded massive fleets. The first one in 1405 included sixty-two large ships, some of them over 100 metres long. There were about 28,000 men in this expedition. The best perspective is to remember that in the early fifteenth century, as the Portuguese began their slow progress down the West African coast (they took Ceuta, in Morocco, in 1415), Chinese fleets came close to the Cape of Good Hope; some think they sailed around it. At the end of this century Europeans rounded the Cape, and soon after reached the Straits of Melaka, at the other end of the ocean. Thus at the beginning of this century these straits saw a great Chinese fleet, and at the beginning of the next a much smaller European one. At these two times the port city of Melaka became first a sender of tribute to the Chinese emperor, and then at the end was conquered by the Portuguese.
Another even wider comparison is also instructive. Andrew Hess points out that between the Portuguese capture of Ceuta and 1522, when Magellan set off around the world, the Europeans began maritime expansion, or even empires. The Ottoman Turks did this at the same time, and the two collided in the northern Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. By the accession of Suleyman in 1520 the Ottomans ruled a coastline stretching from the Crimea to Yemen, and also including the Black Sea and much of the Mediterranean. Yet the Portuguese and Ottoman empires were very different. As we will see, the Portuguese version was essentially maritime, but for the Ottomans taxing and controlling land was always the key, with maritime matters merely an adjunct. In 1526 Suleyman lost interest in the Indian Ocean and instead turned to Hungary.2
Broadly speaking, the evolution of the European presence goes like this. From 1500 to well into the eighteenth century Europeans controlled some ports: some they created, some they conquered. In this period these ports had a totally maritime focus; the Europeans controlled little except some mostly long-distance oceanic trade. Only the umland was usually also taken, this being where food came from. Indigenous ports were different, for they had connections with the inland as well as the umland, even if they were not part of an inland state. The at least tacit support and patronage of land-based powers was essential for them to survive. In the eighteenth century some European ports began to be more closely linked to their hinterlands, and soon after, Europeans conquered these hinterlands, fundamentally altering the situation. The focus of the ports moved from one concentrating on the foreland to one looking more to the hinterland.
I will argue later that the Portuguese introduced politics into the Indian Ocean. To set them in context, I will first provide a discussion of the attitudes of Asian rulers to sea trade and maritime matters more generally. In all this the crucial distinction is between Asian rulers of port cities, and those controlling vast landed empires in the interior.
As we noted in the previous chapter, the rulers of the autonomous port cities – such as Mombasa, Kilwa, Mogadishu, Aden, Hurmuz, Calicut and Melaka – were completely dependent on trade for their revenue: controlling only small areas of land, the usual Asian resource of a tax on land and its products was not available to them. Some of these rulers traded for themselves, especially those in southeast Asia, though we have claimed that this was done as a merchant rather than as a ruler. To advantage oneself as a merchant by using political power (such as monopolies or forced purchase) would be to drive away the visiting merchants on whom the ruler depended almost completely.
The link between politics and trade in the various port polities of southeast Asia was much closer to that of other port cities controllers in the wes
tern ocean than to the situation in the landed states, whether they be the three great Islamic empires or China. Kathirithamby-Wells has shown that in the Malay world the entrepot and the polity was always concentric. Controllers of port polities obtained prestige and luxury goods from their trade, and this flowed into economic and political power. The geography of the area dictated that agrarian matters were much less dominant and, unlike, say, India and China, were not set off from maritime matters: rather they were complementary. Some southeast Asian rulers at times tried to use their political control to give themselves economic advantage, such as by proclaiming a monopoly over some products. Most however acted in the way we have sketched above, in other words tried to provide fair treatment for merchants so that they would continue to call.
The Indian Ocean Page 19