The Indian Ocean Page 4

  Choke points are another topographical matter that influence the nature of the Indian Ocean. The Straits of Melaka, at their narrowest, where they join the Singapore Strait north of the Karimum Islands, are only 8 nautical miles wide. and today are used by 50,000 ships a year, including small country craft. The actual width of the channel that ships can use in this area is only 2½ miles off Melaka and a mere 1 mile off Singapore. The Persian/Arabian Gulf at its narrowest section, in the Straits of Hurmuz, is only 48 km (21 nautical miles) wide, and passage is made more difficult by many islands and reefs. The Suez Canal is an obvious choke point, as also is the Strait of Tiran, which is only about 5 kms wide at its narrowest point. At the entrance to the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb at its narrowest is only 12 kms wide. It is at these choke points that port cities are usually found, as we will see.

  Topography provides other important bounds and constraints. Some areas were very difficult to navigate. The Gulf is one such, but the Red Sea provides the best example. Past Jiddah was especially bad, so that only small specialised ships could make the passage from there to Suez. An Arabic account from the ninth century makes clear the dangers. Ships from the Gulf port of Siraf

  put into Judda, where they remain; for their Cargo is thence transported to Kahira [Cairo] by Ships of Kolzum, who are acquainted with the Navigation of the Red Sea, which those of Siraf dare not attempt, because of the extreme Danger, and because this Sea is full of Rocks at the Water's Edge; because also upon the whole Coast there are no Kings, or scarce any inhabited Place; and, in fine, because Ships are every Night obliged to put into some Place of Safety, for Fear of striking upon the Rocks; they sail in the Day time only, and all the Night ride fast at Anchor. This Sea, moreover, is subject to very thick Fogs, and to violent Gales of Wind, and so has nothing to recommend it, either within or without.12

  A pilgrim in 1183 wrote of the entry to the important port of Jiddah:

  The entry into it is difficult to achieve because of the many reefs and the windings. We observed the art of these captains and the mariners in the handling of their ships through the reefs. It was truly marvellous. They would enter the narrow channels and manage their way through them as a cavalier manages a horse that is light on the bridle and tractable. They came through in a wonderful manner that cannot be described....

  He had been eight days at sea, and it had been a hazardous time:

  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.13

  Daniel's account in 1700 similarly makes clear the hazards, in this case on a voyage from Suez to Yanbo, the port of Medina. His ship anchored each night in order to avoid reefs, rocks and shoals, and this short voyage took from 12 July to 10 August. They only reached Jiddah on 29 August.14 One of our most graphic accounts comes from Tomé Pires in the early sixteenth century. In the Red Sea

  there are many rocky banks and they are difficult to navigate. Men do not navigate except by day; they can always anchor. The best sailing is from the entrance to the strait as far as Kamaran. It is worse from Kamaran to Jiddah and much worse from Jiddah to Tor. From Tor to Suez is a route for small boats even by day, because it is all dirty ('cujo') and bad.15

  In our own time it has got no better. Jacques Cousteau sailed there many times, but even in the early 1950s much of it was uncharted and very dangerous. This applied especially to the Far-Sans reef complex, 350 miles long and 30 miles wide, along the Yemen and Hijaz coasts. It is a 'demented masterpiece of outcrops, shoals, foaming reefs, and other lurking ship-breakers.' Things are made worse by another deep structure element, the winds, which for most of the year are north and north-westerly, so that sailing south is extremely hot.16

  Scorching winds were an environmental hazard which many travellers commented on. Isabel Burton was in Aden in January 1876 and found it very hot: 'I think it is to Aden that is attached the legend of the sailors who died and went to a certain fiery place, and appeared, and on being asked why they came, they replied that they had caught cold, and had leave to come to fetch their blankets.'17 Similarly Marco Polo in Hurmuz: 'The fact, you see, that in summer a wind often blows across the sands which encompass the plain, so intolerably hot that it would kill everybody, were it not that when they perceive that wind coming they plunge into water up to the neck, and so abide until the wind have ceased.'18

  We have noted the dense network of islands characteristic of the Malay world. The more isolated islands in the ocean play a rather different role. Geologically they are various. Some are granite fragments of larger land masses, such as Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Socotra and part of the Seychelles. Other are volcanic from submarine eruptions: Mauritius, Reunion, Comoros, Kerguelen, while others are formed by coral buildup, such as the Cocos Islands. Many were unpopulated until recent times, yet in the last few centuries several of them, taking account of the deep structure matter of their location, have acted as hinges, connecting very distant parts of the ocean. There are of course variations to do with size and distance from the continent: for example, Sri Lanka has been profoundly influenced by its larger neighbour to the north. Some smaller islands contiguous to the continent are hardly to be considered as islands at all. Kilwa, Mombasa, the islands off the Burma coast, are really just partially detached parts of the mainland. Others are so large as to share mainland characteristics, where the influence of the sea is not paramount: Madagascar, Sumatra, obviously Australia.

  Even these deep structural topological characteristics of our ocean can change over time. We will consider changes in climate presently, but some coastal areas have been profoundly affected by other factors, most obviously the silting up of rivers. The Gulf of Cambay has contracted quite substantially. Once it extended up to where Ahmadabad is located. Vallabhi, now 40 kms inland, was once a riverine port. The ground level at the spot where the Tigris and Euphrates meet has risen 20 feet over the last few millennia.

  The next deep structure element in the Indian Ocean which constrained human movement was the monsoon winds. Felipe Fernández-Armesto claims that what really matters in maritime history is wind systems, and especially the difference between monsoonal systems, and those with year-long prevailing winds. The monsoons follow a quite regular pattern, in the Arabian Sea essentially southwest from May to September, and northeast from November to March. This relatively predictable pattern contrasts strongly with trade wind regions like the Atlantic, where there is a regular pattern of prevailing winds year-round: essentially northeast in the northern hemisphere, southeast in the southern, though both veer more easterly nearer the equator. They are separated, around the equator, by doldrums. North and south of the trades are westerlies, especially strong in the southern hemisphere. While both oceans have predictable winds, more or less, it is clearly much easier to do a round trip in the Indian Ocean than it is in the Atlantic. 'The predictability of a homeward wind made the Indian Ocean the most benign environment in the world for long-range voyaging.'19

  In simple terms, the monsoons are generated by the rotation of the earth, and by climate. Heat during the summer warms the continental land mass in the north of the ocean. Hot air rises and creates a low pressure zone at the earth's surface. Moisture-laden air from the sea then moves in to this low pressure area, rises in the upward air current, cools, and so produces clouds and rain. In winter the reverse occurs; as the sea cools more slowly than the land, winds flow out from the land. This pattern is most clearly seen in the Arabian Sea, thanks to the high plateau of Tibet to the north, and warm tropical seas to the south. Another arm of the southwest monsoon avoids southern India and flows directly over the Bay of Bengal to Bengal and Bangladesh: these areas often get
the monsoon before Mumbai. It is also in this area that the monsoons sometimes progress into the notoriously destructive and all too common tropical cyclones, with winds over 120 kph, and sometimes reaching 200 kph with gusts even up to 400 kph.

  It was these winds which very largely determined when people could sail where. The monsoon winds were absolutely vital, even if Felipe Fernández-Armesto was putting it a bit strongly when he wrote that

  Throughout the age of sail – that is, for almost the whole of history – wind determined what man could do at sea: by comparison, culture, ideas, individual genius or charisma, economic forces and all the other motors of history meant little. In most of our traditional explanations of what has happened in history there is too much hot air and not enough wind.20

  There are some regional specificities and details to consider, these acting to complicate the simple pattern outlined above, and also to put a premium on experience and knowledge. The pattern of winds in the Arabian Sea is familiar enough. Many authorities stress the divide of the Swahili coast at Cape Delgado, which is just south of the mouth of the Ruvuma River, which river forms the boundary today between Tanzania and Mozambique. As a rule of thumb, down to Cape Delgado is one monsoon from Arabia and India, but south of there is two. Here then we see a deep structure element, the monsoons, privileging the northern Swahili coast, for it was more accessible to centres in India and Arabia than was the south.

  The northeast monsoon starts in November and one can leave the Arabian coast at this time and reach at least Mogadishu. However, the eastern Arabian sea has violent tropical storms in October and November, so for a voyage from India to the coast it was best to leave in December, by which time the northeast monsoon was well established as far south as Zanzibar: a rapid passage of twenty to twenty-five days could be expected. By March the northeast monsoon was beginning to break up in the south, and by April the prevailing wind was from the southwest. This was the season for sailing from the coast to the north and east. At its height, in June and July, the weather was too stormy, so ships departed either as this monsoon built up in May, or at its tail end in August. An important general point here is that both monsoons prevailed longer the further north on the coast one was. In the far south we are really outside the monsoon system. In particular, the southwest monsoon is not nearly as strong and predictable as it is further north in the monsoon zone. Up to Mozambique Island there was really no monsoon, and indeed some would claim that the notion of a monsoon system really only applies in the northern hemisphere, or at most to about 10° S.

  Moving around to the Red Sea area and southern Arabia, there were other particular things to take account of. An English traveller in 1780 wrote of the pattern in and around the Red Sea:

  As different winds prevail on the different sides of the Tropic in the Red Sea, ships may come to Gedda [Jiddah] from opposite points at the same season of the year; those which come from Suez at the above mentioned time [that is, November to January], benefit by the N.W. wind, while those that come from India and Arabia Felix are assisted by the regular S.W. monsoon. The pilgrims... embark at Gedda time enough to avail themselves of the Khumseen [according to Capper this is Arabic for 50, which is the length of time this wind blows] wind, which blows southerly from the end of March to the middle of May, and conveys them in less than a month back again to Suez; the India vessels must also quit Gedda so as to be out of the straits of Babelmandel before the end of August.21

  Even today within the Red Sea the monsoons act as a governing factor for traditional navigators, as a modern account of the sea's routes, winds and sailing times makes clear.22

  This situation of course pertained even more strongly concerning the traffic between the Red Sea and western India. In the great fifteenth-century trade between Calicut and the Red Sea, ships left Calicut in January, and vessels from the Red Sea arrived there between August and November. The Portuguese described the military significance of this on the Malabar coast. The west coast of India was unnavigable for sailing ships between roughly June and September. In the 1530s the Portuguese were concerned at the way ships from the hostile port of Calicut could sail just before or just after this, before their blockading fleets could arrive. The solution seemed to be to build a fort very near to Calicut. Then they could patrol right up to the end of May, just before navigation became impossible, and resume the blockade early in September as soon as the slackening of the southwest monsoon made navigation possible again.23

  As for Gujarat, Terry wrote that the great ship going from Surat to Mocha

  beginnes her voyage about the twentieth of March, and finisheth it towards the end of September following. The voyage is but short and might easily bee made in two months; but in the long season of raine, and a little before and after it, the winds are commonly so violent that there is no coming but with great hazard, into the Indian Seas.24

  The matter was most pithily expressed by an Arab author, who wrote that 'He who leaves India on the 100th day [2 March] is a sound man, he who leaves on the 110th will be all right. However, he who leaves on the 120th is stretching the bounds of possibility and he who leaves on the 130th is inexperienced and an ignorant gambler.'25

  Moving south to the end of the ocean, the west coast of Malaysia is a lee shore during the southwest monsoon, and at this time it is, just as on the west coast of India, very difficult to sail or land. This monsoon pattern also dictated that a passage from the far west of the ocean, say the Red Sea, to the far east, to Melaka, could not be accomplished in one hit; rather a stop over was necessary, probably in southern India, until the correct monsoon came to continue one's voyage.

  Those who ignored the monsoons, or were ignorant of them, came to grief. In 1541 a Portuguese marauding fleet in the Red Sea set sail to return to India in early July. The headstrong captain refused to listen to the advice of his Muslim pilots, who, basing their views on centuries of experience, told him that by leaving at this time he would have no trouble getting to the entrance to the Red Sea, but that once in the Arabian Sea weather of such vileness could be expected that no ship could navigate. And this advice, of course, turned out to be correct.26 In 1980 Tim Severin, sailing on his Sindbad voyage from the Gulf to China, was becalmed east of Sri Lanka on the replica dhow Sohar for thirty-five days in March and April; earlier voyagers could have told him that this would happen.27

  All this said, it is not quite as clockwork like as some accounts claim. For example, Severin picked up the southwest wind that he wanted in early April, which is much earlier than the books allow for. Thor Heyerdahl, in another replica boat, this one made of reeds, passed the Straits of Hurmuz and knew he was now in the monsoon area, which 'blows regularly across the Indian Ocean as if set in motion by clockwork, turning like a pendulum to move in opposite directions every half year.' However, what happened next showed how variable they can be. In January they picked up a faint south-southwest wind, 'and there was no sign of the strong northeast winter monsoon we could have expected in the middle of January'. The next day, before sunrise, the wind changed from south-southeast to north-northwest – in other words still coming from the wrong direction.28

  For monsoon Asia the arrival of the rain-bearing southwest wind is vital, not only for maritime affairs but also for the much more basic matter of growing crops. In India, for example, there are monsoon ragas, they are a theme in miniature painting, and in some of the works of the poet Kalidasa. There are also methods to cope with any variability, again then showing that they are not totally predictable. Andrew Frater wrote engagingly about the problem if they are late, or fail altogether:

  The previous year [1986] in Bangalore, for example, the city fathers paid a yogi to pray for rain. Seated on a tigerskin rug beside the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board guesthouse, the yogi chanted for 2 hours and 4 minutes while his supporters chewed leaves and swallowed burning camphor. Afterwards he was able to inform senior Water Board officials – prostrated before him with offerings of coconuts – that the ra
in god Varuna, though invisible to the naked eye, now approached them 'like waves of clouds.' The rain fell, all right, and torrentially, but only over neighbouring Cochin.29

  The implications of the monsoons are endless, and will underlie most of our discussion of movement by sea before the age of steam. Pirates moved according to the season, leaving the west coast of India for the Bay of Bengal around May each year. They also affect fisheries. Along the southeast Arabian and Somali coasts when the strong winds of the southwest monsoon blow coastal water away from the shore, one gets an upwelling of nutrient rich cold water This may have ten or even twenty times the nutrients of normal surface water. One gets rich blooms of plankton, ideal for fish. However, if this goes on too long the plankton becomes too thick. Lack of oxygen kills the fish. In 1957 such a bloom was estimated to have killed the equivalent of the world's entire fish catch for a year.30

  The monsoons are essentially tropical winds. The further south one goes the weaker they are. In the southeast African case, up to Mozambique Island there was really no monsoon. Square rigged ships had to wait for the occasional cold front from Antarctica, take it until it petered out, and then wait for the next one. And there is the added complication of doldrums around the equator, nowhere near as bad as those in the Atlantic that Coleridge wrote about so powerfully, but still at times a hazard or an inconvenience.