If then there is a wide, expansive Indian Ocean, around its edges and margins are a host of seas. Among them are the Mozambique Channel, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea, Strait of Melaka, and the Laccadive Sea. Yet the same Sulaiman who wrote about the vast, open ocean also commented sourly on too much schematisation; he travelled where I have not been, and so must be listened to:
There is not really a clear separation between the seas we crossed [from the Gulf to Siam]. An ordinary traveller would not be able to perceive where one sea ended and the next began. . . . The scholars of travel and geography, confronted with many different place names... have wandered into the discords of choppy seas, doldrums and foul winds and they divide the great expanse of water which lies along this path into seven distinct parts.
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The topography obviously varies from place to place, being for example quite different in the bays as compared with coasts exposed to the wide ocean. Some shores are uninhabited desert, others cut off from the interior by impenetrable mountains, but most of the shores of the Indian Ocean are not quite as inhospitable as these examples. In India a fertile coastal fringe, especially in the south, the area of Kerala, is backed by the high mountain range called the western Ghats, but these are nowhere completely impassable. So also on the Swahili coast, where again behind a productive coastal zone is the nyika, a mostly barren area difficult, but not impossible, to travel through on the way to more fertile land further inland. On the northern shores of the ocean the coastal fringe is mostly much less productive, and leads to inland areas which often are hostile deserts. Yet topography has favoured this area even so, for the Red Sea goes into the Gulf of Aden, and this gives places around there, especially the Hadhramaut area east of Aden, a possible role in servicing ships going to East Africa or western India.
We will discuss islands presently, but most of those in the Indian Ocean proper are relatively isolated and scattered. Such is not the case in Indonesia, and this then provides another reason to place this area outside the Indian Ocean proper. Geography makes the sea in the island-studded Malay world much more central; if one likes, this is a much more maritime area, both topographically, and (as we will see soon) humanly. The region has an extremely high ratio of coastline to land area; indeed the highest in the world if one takes into account population.
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The Malay world can be seen as a Mediterranean area, just like the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean area. All three are enclosed, but with access to oceans, that is to
the Indian Ocean and Pacific in the first, to the Atlantic in the last two. And when we add in rivers this applies even more strongly to make this a much more aquatic area, strongly contrasting with the situation in the Indian Ocean. The only comparable area in the true Indian Ocean may be the area that the Portuguese called the Sea of Ceylon, that is the narrow strait of the Gulf of Mannar between Sri Lanka and southeast India, where again geography dictates that the sea is much more central simply because it is close on both sides of this passage.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.