The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (29 page)

Ashoka is the best documented Mauryan king thanks to the numerous inscriptions found throughout his domains—pillar edicts clustered in the Gangetic plain, and rock edicts on the subcontinent as far south as
Tamil Nadu, along the coasts, and as far west as Kandahar,
Afghanistan. Despite, or perhaps because of, his extensive military campaigns, Ashoka is remembered as a model of the repentant, ethical ruler. This transformation came about after he embraced
Buddhism in the wake of the horrors of his subjugation of
Kalinga, when “
A hundred fifty thousand people were deported, a hundred thousand were killed and many times that number perished. Afterwards, now that Kalinga was annexed, the Beloved of the Gods [Ashoka] very earnestly practiced
Dhamma
[ethical behavior], desired
Dhamma
and taught
Dhamma.
” The people of Kalinga were renowned for their seamanship; one text refers to the king of Kalinga as the “
Lord of the Ocean,” while another speaks of the “islands of the Kalinga Sea”—the Bay of Bengal. Although the conquest of the kingdom and its port at Samapa (Ganjam) opened the eastern trading world to the Mauryans, their main port remained
Tamralipti (Tamluk), north of Kalinga, which was connected to the capital at
Pataliputra via the Ganga and a royal road, a western branch of which led to the
Arabian Sea port of
Bharuch in Gujarat.

Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism paid little attention to issues of caste and birthright, and merchants could achieve a higher position in society than they theoretically could in Hinduism, and many donated the profits of agriculture and trade to the construction and maintenance of Buddhist sanghas (monasteries). The earliest such religious institutions in India, these initially catered to itinerant missionaries, but they later became permanent monasteries and as such both repositories for trade goods and centers of learning and literacy. As it had been for the Egyptians, the
Phoenicians, and the Greeks, literacy was a catalyst for the expansion of trade in India, facilitating the transmission
of knowledge about everything from
writing itself, which developed in India from about the fourth century
BCE
, to trade goods and their uses. The Buddhist healing arts, for example, relied in large part on imported spices and herbs, especially from Southeast Asia, and thus stimulated demand for these lucrative items of trade.

The earliest sustained narratives about Indian seafaring are found in the
Jatakas,
a collection of some 550 stories about the
Buddha’s past lives as a
Bodhisattva (enlightened being) first written down in the third century
BCE
. The stories’ antagonists come from various places around the subcontinent, but their overseas journeys invariably take them to Southeast Asia. The “Suparaga Jataka” describes the Bodhisattva as the renowned scion of a family of shipmasters from the west coast port of Bharuch who eventually settled elsewhere. Despite his age and infirmities (in one version of the story, he went blind from exposure to saltwater), a group of merchants beseeches him to sail with them on a voyage to
Suvarnabhumi, “the land of gold,” in Southeast Asia. Describing the Bodhisattva’s qualifications as a mariner, the “Suparaga Jataka” notes that “
he recognized all the tell tale signs around him … such clues as the fish, the color of the water, the type of [underwater?] terrain, the birds, and the rocks,” the same sort of skills one finds in descriptions of wayfinding in Oceania. In the course of their voyage, storms drive the ship well off course, and when the merchants and crew entreat him for their help, he brushes aside their concerns by saying “If you venture out into the middle of the ocean, you must not be surprised to face a cataclysmic storm.” The Bodhisattva’s virtue ensures their safety and after a succession of narrow escapes they return to Bharuch with a hold filled with jewels and gems. Although the “Suparaga Jataka” says that these were hauled up from the seabed, such mineral treasures are associated with Sri Lanka and the
Malay Peninsula.

In the “
Samkha Jataka” and “Mahajana Jataka,” the Bodhisattva is portrayed variously as a wealthy man esteemed for his generosity in endowing almshouses, and as the rightful heir to a throne usurped by an uncle. Concerned that he may run out of money to give away, Samkha decides to “go in a boat to the Land of Gold and bring wealth” from it.
Mahajanaka’s intent is to raise funds to pay for his uncle’s ouster, also by going to the Land of Gold, against his mother’s wishes: “
My child, a voyage does not always succeed, there are many obstacles, better not go.” Both Samkha’s and Mahajanaka’s ships sink, but they are rescued by the goddess of the sea,
Manimekalai, who returns them home together with the riches they had sought in the first place.

Common to both Samkha’s and Mahajanaka’s stories are the nearly identical accounts of how the protagonists prepare to survive
shipwreck. The “Samkha Jataka” relates that the prince “
never wept nor lamented nor invoked any
deities, but knowing that the vessel was doomed he rubbed some sugar and ghee, and, having eaten his belly full, he smeared his two clean garments with
oil and put them tightly around him and stood leaning against the mast. When the vessel sank the mast stood upright. The crowd on board became food for the fishes and tortoises, and the water all around assumed the colour of blood.” Samkha is also said to have taken “
precaution against the dangers caused by the fishes and tortoises,” though what these might have been is not revealed. These preparations against hypothermia by smearing oneself and one’s clothes with oil are realistic. So, too, is the account of what happens to the unprepared Mahajanaka, who “
had his whole body burnt while remaining in sea water for seven days,” an accurate summary of the gruesome effects of dehydration and a week’s exposure to sun and saltwater. While the ventures described in the
Jatakas
are fundamentally successful, the focus on the perils of seafaring is in stark contrast to the emphasis on heroic exploits lavished on western heroes like Gilgamesh and
Odysseus.

While ancient Indian texts with maritime content describe voyages across the Bay of Bengal to
Suvarnabhumi and
Suvarnadvipa, “the island of gold,” in Southeast Asia, there was a lively western trade on the Arabian Sea. Greek and
Latin texts mention Bharuch (also called Barygaza and
Broach) as an important port of call. Located at the mouth of the
Narmada River on the
Gulf of Khambhat—near the ancient
Harappan port of
Lothal—Bharuch had ready access to the wealth of the
Indo-Gangetic plain and the
Deccan. The port’s founding in the mid-first millennium
BCE
followed the revival of sea trade between
India and the
Persian Gulf and the growth of the trans-Arabian caravan trade that carried Indian goods from the gulf to the Mediterranean ports of
Phoenicia and Syria, where they were shipped to Egypt, Greece, and beyond. Whatever the causes for its renaissance, this seaborne trade was significant enough for Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Hellenistic rulers in turn to take an active interest in the Persian Gulf.

In the early sixth century
BCE
, a Neo-Babylonian king established the port of Teredon near
Basra, Iraq. Within twenty years of his death,
Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and thereby acquired an empire that stretched from eastern
Iran to the Mediterranean seaboard. Cyrus came from the province of
Fars (also called Pars or Persis) in the tableland of southern Iran, a region separated from the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea by the
Zagros Mountains. The coast is inhospitable and freshwater often has to be brought in by canals and
aqueducts. As a result, coastal rulers often operated independently of states in the interior, and ties between people living on opposite shores of the Persian Gulf could be as strong as, or stronger than, those between coastal communities and their respective hinterlands. Cyrus was a lenient ruler celebrated for proclaiming freedom of religion for all the people within his domains, which he describes as “
the entire world from the Upper to the Lower Sea,” an echo of the language used in Sargon’s day 1,800 years before.

Between about 525 and 510
BCE
, the Persian Empire expanded to encompass a broad swath of Anatolia and the Near East from
Ionia and Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley. Before his preoccupation with punishing the Greeks for the
Ionian Revolt, which precipitated the
Persian Wars,
Darius took an interest in the maritime borders of his empire, and he established Aginis (Ampe) on the site of Teredon. The extent of Achaemenid involvement in Persian Gulf navigation in the early centuries of the empire is difficult to judge. However in the late fourth century
BCE
Alexander the Great’s admiral
Nearchus recorded the names of sixteen Persian river and coastal ports, and described navigational aids near an island about 150 miles from the Shatt al-Arab, where “
the shallows … were marked on either side by poles driven down, just as in the strait between the islands of
Leucas and Acarnania [in the
Ionian Sea just north of
Ithaca] signposts have been set up for navigators to prevent the ships grounding in the shallows.”

Navigation on the Persian Gulf was not as vital to the Achaemenids in the sixth century
BCE
as it would become, perhaps because it was overshadowed by the commerce of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. In Egypt,
Darius may have completed the canal between the Nile and the Red Sea first attempted by
Necho II in the previous century, and he commissioned
Scylax of Caryanda (in
Asia Minor) to sail from the Indus to the Red Sea. Scylax hugged the coast of
Pakistan and Iran, crossed the
Gulf of Oman to the Arabian Peninsula, and, according to Herodotus, “
after a voyage of some thirty months reached the place from which [Necho II] had sent out the
Phoenicians” to circumnavigate Africa. Scylax wrote an account of his voyage, but this earliest known description of these waters has not survived.

Darius died before his apparent ambition to initiate sea trade between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf bore fruit, and his successors had little interest in following his lead. The next comparable effort was the initiative of Alexander, Darius’s heir in spirit if not in fact. After heeding the wishes of his troops to halt his eastward march at the Indus River in 325
BCE
, Alexander divided his force in three. Two armies returned to the former Persian capital of
Susa overland, while Nearchus was commissioned to sail from the Indus to the Persian Gulf. According to Nearchus, “
Alexander had a vehement desire to
sail the sea … from India to Persia; but feared lest … his whole fleet might be destroyed; and this, being no small blot on his great achievements, might wreck all his happiness.” After building a fleet of
triremes and other craft, the Greeks waited at the city Alexander founded at Patala (or Potana, near Hyderabad, Pakistan) until “the trade winds had sunk to rest, which continue blowing from the Ocean to the land all the summer season, and hence render the voyage impossible.”

The prevailing winds change around the world between winter and summer, but nowhere is this more apparent than in the Monsoon Seas of the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia, where the prevailing winds shift from northeast to southwest.

This is actually a description of the southwest monsoon, the stronger of two seasonal winds—“monsoon” comes from the Arabic,
mawsim,
meaning “season”—that dictated sailing schedules across the Indian Ocean and the waters of Southeast and East Asia until the development of the steam engine.
The
monsoons are de
termined by the relative temperatures of the Asian landmass and the Indian Ocean. In summer, warm air rising over the land creates a high-pressure system that draws strong winds and often torrential rains from
the southwest. High winds batter the coasts of the Indian subcontinent and inhibit even coastal navigation, and several times a decade tropical cyclones with winds in excess of 150 kilometers per hour devastate the northern end of the Bay of Bengal. In winter, when the land is colder than the water, a low-pressure system over the
Indian Ocean draws the northeast monsoon winds from China and Japan toward the Strait of Malacca, and from South Asia toward Africa. The seasonal variation in wind direction and intensity had a far greater impact on navigation than did the distances involved. Sailors did not hesitate to sail across two thousand miles of open ocean between Aden and southern India or Sri Lanka, but they did so only when the winds were in their favor.
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Nearchus’s fleet of eight hundred “
ships of war, merchantmen and horse transports” sailed in stages along the coast of Pakistan and Iran, before turning into the Persian Gulf. Hugging the eastern shore, they reached the head of the gulf and proceeded up the Pasitigris River to rendezvous with Alexander at
Susa. Shortly before his death the next year, Alexander dispatched three other expeditions with a view to establishing a connection between the gulf and the
Red Sea. Two explored the Persian Gulf, but no farther, while a third, under
Anaxicrates, sailed down the Red Sea to the south coast of Yemen, the source of most of the aromatic gums, resins, frankincense, and myrrh so important in religious rituals. Red Sea trade would grow rapidly in the following century, but for the moment the long south coast of the Arabian Peninsula between the Red Sea and Persian Gulf remained all but unknown to outsiders.