The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (33 page)

The most compelling pictorial representation of an Indian Ocean ship is a seventh-century
wall painting at Ajanta, about 350 kilometers northeast of
Mumbai (
Bombay). The
Ajanta ship seems to correspond broadly to the vessels described in the
Jatakas,
with details not revealed in the stories. The principal sails, one on each of three masts, are oriented like square sails, but they are considerably taller than they are wide, and there is a single headsail set out over the bowsprit. (The “Suparaga Jataka” describes the
Bodhisattva’s ship running before a following wind with “
Her white sails outspread like beautiful wings,” which seems to describe square sails that are wider than they are tall.) The bow of the Ajanta ship incorporates an
oculus,
an eye intended to help a vessel see approaching dangers and an ancestor of the more elaborate figurehead. A helmsman works a quarter rudder and there is a structure aft with wide-mouthed jars stowed beneath it. The hull appears relatively deep, but the sheer of the gunwale is flatter than that on the ships shown in the Satavahana coins of the second century.

The lack of discernible
Mediterranean influence on Indian Ocean ship design is a helpful reminder that while most written testimony about the commerce and naval history of the period comes from Greek and Roman sources, and people of the eastern Mediterranean were actively engaged in trade on the Red Sea and Indian Ocean as shipowners, charterers, crew, and carpenters, their overall influence on maritime trade and technology was slight.
Strabo writes that
Aelius Gallus built 80 triremes and other Mediterranean types to carry his ten thousand men to
Yemen, but he does not mention the origin of the 120 ships (or their crews) he says sailed between Egypt and India in his
day, and today no trace of design elements characteristic of Mediterranean ships can be found in the traditionally built vessels of the Indian Ocean. Of demonstrably far greater and longer-lasting influence were elements of ship design introduced by mariners from island Southeast Asia.

Indian trade and traders had reached Indonesia by at least the early first millennium and first- and second-century finds from northwest Java and northern
Bali are identical to those recovered at
Arikamedu. Indian goods in Southeast Asia are not limited to Java and Bali, but these have the only concentrations of material that suggest the presence of South Asian traders rather than just their goods. While there is no evidence of Indian penetration farther east, it is likely that the chain of trade extended from the
Spice Islands (
Maluku and the Bandas) of eastern Indonesia to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. In the coming centuries, the urge to tap the flow of these spices at their source would become a primary driver of state formation, navigational ambition, and even international law across Eurasia. These contacts were not exclusively from west to east, however, and vessel types found throughout the Indian Ocean, including outrigger and double-hulled vessels, probably reflect Indonesian origin or influence. On the coast of India, single
outriggers sailed along the coast on alternate
monsoons. Double outriggers with floats set equidistant from the hull from either side of the hull are also found in Indonesia and as far west as
Madagascar, where they were introduced by Indonesian navigators.

Although Madagascar is only 250 miles from southern Africa, analysis of the
Malagasy language indicates that the world’s fourth largest island was first settled by natives of
Borneo, four thousand miles to the east. When exactly these
Austronesian-speaking navigators reached Madagascar, or why they came, is unknown, but it is unlikely to have been earlier than the late first millennium
BCE
, and probably somewhat later. One theory favors
a first migration between the second and fourth centuries ce, followed by the arrival of Bantu-speaking people from Africa, and a later wave of Indonesian settlers in the tenth century. It is likely that Austronesians reached Africa, too, although there is neither archaeological nor linguistic evidence that they did so. The absence of material finds has been attributed to changes in the geomorphology of the coast and the prevalence of perishable goods such as spices, fabrics, or slaves, rather than pottery and iron, which entered the mix in the Islamic era. Had Austronesians reached the coast, their numbers would have been too small to resist absorption by the larger African population, which would account for the lack of linguistic evidence comparable to that found in Madagascar.

If durable goods and language left few traces, studies in
ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, and genetics demonstrate the indelible impact of Austronesian migration
to Africa. Taro, banana, and the water yam were introduced from
Southeast Asia about two thousand years ago and all three are staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa as far west as the Atlantic coast of Senegambia. Austronesian sailors also seem to have introduced to Africa a variety of musical instruments, including the leaf-funnel clarinet and the stick zither. Affinities between Indonesian and continental
African zithers are so strong that some believe that stick zithers may have been introduced first to East
Africa and from there to Madagascar. On the other hand, Africans sailing to Southeast Asia, whether voluntarily or as slaves, may have brought the xylophone with them as early as the sixth century.

Southeast Asian navigators also introduced a number of boat construction techniques to East Africa. The
ngalawa,
a type of outrigger canoe found between the
Lamu archipelago and
Mozambique and on Madagascar and the Comoro Islands well into the twentieth century, resembles prototypes from Java in significant details. The
mtepe,
a nimble sewn boat used in coastal trade along the
Swahili coast, is considered “
a relic of an Indonesian type bereft of its
outriggers,” and “the lineal descendant of the large sailing vessels used by Indonesians in their ancient traffic” on the coast of East Africa. The most obvious clue to the
mtepe
’s Indonesian origins is the design of circle-and-dot (rather than naturally rendered)
oculi
. Indonesian craft traditionally have
oculi
painted not only on the bows but at the stern, as does the
mtepe
. A further parallel is the use of woven matting rather than cloth for sails. “
The only cargo-carrying vessel on the Swahili coast that is not obviously of Persian or Arab origin,”
mtepes
with a capacity of twenty tons were recorded in the nineteenth century. The similarity of East African and Indonesian vessels points to a channel of cultural transmission across the Indian Ocean free of influence from mainland Asia. In the second half of the first millennium, this divided into shorter segments oriented to the rejuvenated trading centers of Southwest Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

After a long period of decline following the fall of the Indus Valley civilization and the withdrawal of Mesopotamian merchants from trade beyond the Persian Gulf, navigation on the Indian Ocean revived in the first millennium
BCE
and quickly came to encompass some of the longest uninterrupted sea routes in the world, across the Arabian Sea and the
Bay of Bengal, with southern India and Sri Lanka lying at the crossroads of east–west exchange. While Mediterranean sailors tended to think in terms of new frontiers lying to the west, in the Indian Ocean the east was more alluring. Greco-Roman sailors from the Ptolemaic period to the Roman Empire were attracted to the point of decadence by the exotica and
spices of India and beyond, while
Indian merchants in story and in fact were lured east by the land and islands of gold—
Suvarnabhumi and
Suvarnadvipa—in Southeast Asia, to which they incidentally transplanted their religions, language, and other cultural phenomena, as well as new goods and crafts. In so doing they laid the foundation for the prosperous trade that followed the rise of Islam and the consequent prosperity of the Near East in the seventh century and after. They also had a demonstrable impact on the political landscape of Southeast Asia and to a lesser extent, chiefly through the reinforcement of Buddhist ties, on China, Korea, and Japan.

That
China should have exercised an attraction on the maritime merchants of the Indian Ocean is not surprising, for it was home to one of the world’s oldest and richest cultures. Traders from India to Rome knew of and traded with China (at least indirectly) in antiquity via the silk roads of Central Asia. With their continental origins, the
Chinese approached the maritime world more circumspectly than did their contemporaries, but approach it they did. First they harnessed their webs of elaborately branching rivers through feats of hydraulic engineering that protected the land from flooding, improved agricultural capacity, and facilitated inland communication. They then began their annexation of southern China, the Land of the Hundred
Yue whose
Austronesian-speaking ancestors had launched themselves into Southeast Asia in the second millennium
BCE
. As a result of these efforts, before the start of the common era it was possible to travel via river and canal from Guangzhou in the southeast to the ancient capital of Chang’an in the northwest.

Although the exploitation and development of reliable water routes through the interior was crucial to the formation and maintenance of the Chinese state, the cultivation of domestic and foreign sea trade helped assure China’s primacy among its maritime neighbors. If, as some claim, the catalyst for sea trade was the desire to circumvent the
Parthian Empire, centered in modern
Iran, and trade directly with Rome, it fell far short of expectations. But the effort brought riches to
China and effected cultural and political change in Southeast Asia. Merchant mariners chasing the monsoons helped
spur the development of agriculture—to generate food surpluses adequate to attract and feed these sojourners—and gave rise to the earliest recognizable states in
Vietnam,
Cambodia, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula,
Sumatra, and Java.
Foreign sailors and their ships dominated long-distance trade, but China was the unmoved mover of maritime commerce and contributed directly to the diffusion of tangible and intangible goods. Buddhism first reached China overland from India, but seafaring monks reinforced it there and established it from Sumatra and Vietnam to
Korea and Japan.

The geography of the contiguous waters of the South China and
East China Seas; the continental landmass from the Malay Peninsula to Korea; and the
Indonesian, Philippine, and Japanese archipelagoes is far more complex than that of either the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean. The Indonesian archipelago extends about two thousand miles from east to west, about the length of the Mediterranean; but the contiguous seas of East and Southeast Asia extend over two thousand miles from south to north, across fifty degrees of latitude from Java to Korea (roughly 10ºS to 40ºN)—the same span of latitude as from
Tanzania to
Turkey,
Angola to Portugal, or
Peru to New York. The region’s physical environments range from the
equatorial rain forests of coastal Indonesia to the cooler and drier continental
climates of northern China, Korea, and Japan. This geographical diversity had enormous implications for the types of commodities and manufactured goods found there. The rhythm of trade was dictated by the monsoons, the seasons and severity of which differ slightly from those of the Indian Ocean, although the general pattern is similar. In the words of a thirteenth-century Chinese authority, seagoing ships “
take advantage of the reliability of the seasonal winds. They go south in the winter and come north in the summer, never the other way around.”
^a

The Japanese archipelago consists of four main islands—
Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, and
Hokkaido—and nearly four thousand smaller ones, including offshore chains like the Ryukyus. Japan’s mountainous terrain makes overland transportation and agriculture difficult, and the Japanese have always relied on coastwise navigation for transportation. A hundred miles across the
Korea Strait from Kyushu lies the mountainous Korean Peninsula, the ragged coasts of which are fringed with hundreds of islands, especially on the Korea Strait and
Yellow Sea. China’s coast wends more than 7,500 miles from the Yalu
River to the
Gulf of Tonkin. North of Hangzhou Bay and the mouth of the Yangzi River, the coast is generally low-lying and sandy, while the rockier southern coast is more heavily islanded and indented. The coast of Vietnam is divided into three topographically distinct regions. The Red (Hong) River of the north flows off the
Yunnan Plateau to create a broad alluvial floodplain flanked by mountains. To the north of the delta is Halong Bay, which is distinguished by thousands of limestone islets that thrust up from the sea and are capped by lush, junglelike vegetation. To the south, the Truong Son Mountains spill down to the coast as far as Hue, where forest gives way to long beaches and a broader coastal plain that abuts the dense swamps and mangrove jungle of the Mekong delta.