The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (54 page)

Southern India was famed for its
pepper, which had markets both east and west, and was known as a transshipment point for spices from Indonesia.
Indian sources are a poor guide to the activities of maritime merchants, but Abu Zayd includes a revealing description of a highly disciplined approach to long-distance seafaring that must have facilitated the expansion of trade along the routes favored by Indian navigators. “
There are, among the Indians,” he writes, “certain men … whose devotion consists in seeking after unknown islands, or such as are newly discovered, there to plant coco-nut trees, and to sink wells of water for the use of ships that sail to those parts.” The deliberate establishment of a network of such basic facilities—the versatile
coconut tree provided food, wood for ships, leaves for sails, and coir for rope—can only be explained by a need for them and an ability to share accurate navigational instructions with fellow sailors.

Despite the prosperous trade and great distances involved, relations between South and Southeast Asia were not always peaceful. Abu Zayd tells the curious story of a young king of Comorin—the southernmost part of India—who one day announced to his chief advisor: “
I am taken with a desire … to see before me, in a dish, the head of the mehrage [maharaja] King of Zapage.” Word of his intentions reached the king of
Zabaj (Srivijaya on Sumatra or Sailendra Java), who decided to punish “this giddy prince” and commanded his ministers “to prepare a thousand ships of middling burthen, and to equip them with all things necessary, arms and ammunition, and to man them with as many of his best forces as they could carry.” To conceal his true purpose, the king announced that he intended to call on his tributary subjects. The fleet reached India after “a passage of ten, or twenty days sail, with a very easy gale,” and because the king of Comorin and his courtiers “were effeminate creatures who all the day long, did nothing but consult their faces and rub their teeth, eternally with mirrors and tooth-picks in their hands, or carried after them by slaves,” they were taken completely by surprise. The giddy prince was captured and executed, and the king of Zabaj “departed for his own territories, and neither did he, or any of his [men], lay hands on the least thing in the kingdom of Komar [Comorin].” But he did send back the king’s head as a reminder to his successor. “The news of this action being conveyed to the kings of the Indies and of China, it added to the respect they before had for
the mehrage.” Even if this story is not strictly true, it was certainly plausible to contemporary audiences and demonstrates the expanding reach of the Malay maritime states of Southeast Asia.

The longest-lived and most influential power in Southeast Asia seems to have been Srivijaya, the name given to a succession of trading states between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, whose core lay in southeastern Sumatra and whose influence expanded from time to time to include parts of the Malay Peninsula and Java. Srivijaya’s raison d’être was the gathering flood of traffic that flowed via the
Strait of Malacca between the
Indian Ocean and
Southeast Asia and China. As had been the case in Funan before ships began sailing direct from the Strait of Malacca and across the South China Sea in the fifth century, Srivijaya’s prosperity depended on its ability to generate the surplus food, mostly rice, to sustain large communities, especially during the interlude between the monsoons. Reliant though it was on seafarers for its wealth, because of their mobility and frequent contact with potential or actual enemies, native and foreign merchants alike were highly suspect. In a seventh-century curse, the king singles out shippers and traders as “
most likely to rebel” and warns that “if you go over [to the enemy], you will be killed by the curse.”

By the seventh century, and for several hundred years thereafter, the seat of Srivijayan power seems to have been in the vicinity of modern
Palembang, about eighty kilometers up the Musi River from the eastern approaches to the Strait of Malacca. Palembang figures prominently in the accounts of the Chinese Buddhist monk
Yijing, who recorded the peregrinations of more than
thirty-seven
monks, himself included, who had sailed for or from India. His ship left at the start of the winter monsoon and after weathering storms in which “
the pair of sails, each in five lengths [of material], flew away, leaving the somber north behind,” made its first port of call in Sumatra. Yijing subsequently made his way to
Kedah, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, before crossing the Bay of Bengal to the mouth of the Ganga via the
Andaman Islands, “the land of the Naked People” who “eagerly embarked in little boats, their number being fully a hundred. They all brought cocoa-nuts, bananas, and things made of rattan-cane and bamboos and wished to exchange them. What they are anxious to get is iron only.” Yijing does not say whether he was still aboard a Persian ship at this point, and he may well have boarded a Malay or Indian vessel to reach
Tamralipti on the
Hugli River, a major port of entry into northern India since Mauryan times. Earlier in the century, another
Chinese monk named
Xuanzang had described Tamralipti as a flourishing, protected port in “
a recess of the sea; the water and the land embracing each other. Wonderful articles of value and gems are collected here in abundance, and therefore the
people of the country are in general very rich.” From Tamralipti Yijing made his way up the Ganga to the Buddhist monastery complex at
Nalanda, which was then home to more than thirty-five hundred monks. He also visited other monasteries, narrowly escaping death from disease and robbers in the process. While the dangers encountered by Yijing and his fellow monks were considerable, they were hardly worse than those encountered by overland travelers, and as his experiences beyond the confines of Nalanda show, peregrinations ashore were neither safer nor more comfortable than travel by sea. Whether merchant or monk, no matter how one traveled to India the journey was arduous.

As important to the east–west trade as Srivijaya were various city-states and stopping places
on the Malay Peninsula, notably the east coast states of
Panpan and
Langkasuka, from the fifth to eighth centuries, and
Tambralinga, from the end of the tenth century. These may have been tributary to Palembang from time to time, but for the most part they were autonomous if not fully independent entities. To the west, the mountains come much closer to the sea, which makes agriculture and territorial consolidation more difficult, and alien influence—from India, Srivijaya, or elsewhere—was far less pronounced.
Yet it is the west coast that figures most prominently in Arabic sources, which refer repeatedly to places called
Kalah, which may have been a generic term for a stopping place where sailors could await a favorable wind, acquire tin (the primary mineral export from the “land of gold”), and make repairs.
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Ambiguity similarly revolves around the name
Zabaj, which Arabic authors used for Srivijaya or the
Sailendra kingdom on neighboring Java, or both. Separated from Sumatra by the twelve-mile-wide
Sunda Strait, Java became a destination for Indian merchants early in the first millennium, and the Javanese state of Heluodan (Ho-lo-tan) sent tribute to China in the fifth century. However, the political history of Java is known only from the establishment of the Hindu Mataram kingdom (732–928) on the
Kedu plain of south-central Java. The Kedu plain was the richest center of rice agriculture in the Indonesian archipelago, and its prosperity drew foreign merchants, scholars, and religious figures, especially from India. The people of Mataram adopted many aspects of Indian culture, especially
Hinduism and, during the brief eighth-century rule of the
Sailendras, Buddhism. During the ninth century, Sailendra
authority shifted to Sumatra. On Java, the seat of power
moved eastward to the valley of the
Brantas River, a region that combined agricultural productivity with a strategic location astride the principal trade route to the
Spice Islands, nine hundred miles to the east. The Brantas is the only major river of central Java that flows into the Java Sea, near the modern city of
Surabaya, and it connected the
trade of the Indonesian archipelago with Java’s agricultural hinterland. The rise of the lower Brantas region was due to its importance as an international port of call, and ninth- and tenth-century inscriptions record the
presence of foreigners from Malabar, Sri Lanka,
Kalinga, and Bengal in South Asia, and Angkor,
Champa, and what is now
Myanmar in mainland Southeast Asia. Java’s growth encouraged expansion and excited envy.

An inscription of the period notes the presence of 135 vessels at a port in
East Java, but the nature of the monsoon meant that buyers and sellers of spices rarely encountered one another. The winter monsoon that brought western traders to East Java to purchase spices and exotic woods sent the purveyors of those goods homeward to the east. Merchants from the Indian Ocean and China returned home on the summer monsoon, when traders from eastern Indonesia shipped their goods to East Java to be laid up for the next season. As a result, foreign writers thought that the spices themselves originated in East Java. Although this was not true, the impression that it was one of the richest emporia in the world was close to the mark. As a Chinese report of the late twelfth century puts it, “
Of all the wealthy foreign lands which have great store of precious and varied goods, none surpasses the realm of the
Arabs. Next to them comes Java, while Srivijaya is third.… Srivijaya is an important thoroughfare on the sea routes of the foreigners on their way to and from [China].”

The wealth that underlay the political power of Srivijayan and Javanese rulers derived from their access to the world’s most sought-after spices—
cloves,
nutmeg, and mace—from the Spice Islands (
Maluku) of eastern Indonesia. The Spice Islands have had a far greater role in shaping world trade than their minute size, remote location, small population, and modest selection of exports would ever suggest. While there is a tendency to think of them as an influence in world history only as a result of European interest in the fifteenth century and later, the scent and profit of spices were no less alluring to Asian merchants for centuries before that. Cloves are the dried buds of the clove tree, a tropical evergreen native to a handful of volcanic islands in Indonesia’s North Maluku Province, the most important being
Ternate and
Tidore, which have a combined area of about 220 square kilometers—about a quarter the size of
New York City. Three hundred miles to the south are the ten volcanic
Banda Islands, with a combined area of roughly fifty square kilometers,
mere pinpricks in a sea ten thousand times as big. These are home to the
nutmeg tree, sought after for its seed, the nutmeg, and the seed’s dried husk, mace. Both clove and nutmeg trees are particular about their environment—a traditional saying has it that “
nutmegs must be able to smell the sea, and cloves to see it”—and they require careful cultivation. Their spices were sought as much for medicinal as for culinary uses; nutmeg was valued for providing gastrointestinal relief, and perhaps as a mild hallucinogen, while cloves have anesthetic and, purportedly, aphrodisiac properties. The overlords of the islands on which they grew prevented their successful transplantation elsewhere until the sixteenth century, and it was this limited availability that gave Javanese merchants their advantage and in time would lure Europeans to the farthest reaches of Asia. Such were the stakes in the conflicts that engaged kingdoms and lesser states from southern India and
Sri Lanka to Sumatra and Java, the
Malay Peninsula and mainland
Southeast Asia, all of which were also rivals for the profits and prestige that came from trading with China.

While merchants from Java, Srivijaya, and the Malay Peninsula competed for the portion of this trade that passed through the
Strait of Malacca, a new contender for supremacy in the region emerged in southern India, where the Cholas embarked on a period of imperial expansion under
Rajaraja I. This began with the conquest of the
Maldives in 1007, followed by the capture of Sri Lanka, with its all-important port of Mantai.
Rajendra I continued his father’s policy with a campaign into
Bengal, which was known especially for its cotton, “
the like of which is not found in any other” kingdom, according to Sulayman al-Tajir. “A piece of this cloth can be passed through the circle of a ring as it is so fine and beautiful.” Finished cotton was a staple of the maritime trade to Southeast Asia, where cotton manufacturing became an important craft in its own right, as well as to China. Rajendra next set his sights east and launched a massive raid on Srivijaya and its tributaries in 1025. Sailing from the port of
Nagapattinam, more than fifteen hundred miles across the
Bay of Bengal, the Cholas attacked a number of places on Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. According to an inscription from the Chola capital at Thanjavur (Tanjore), Rajendra “
dispatched many ships in the midst of the rolling sea and having caught … the king of Kadaram” (Srivijaya and its peninsular tributaries) went on to capture or plunder a total of fourteen places. Eleven have been identified with a fair degree of certainty, including
Palembang “with the jeweled wicket-gate adorned with the great splendor and the gate of large jewels,”
Langkasuka “undaunted in fierce battles,”
Tambralinga “[capable of] strong action in dangerous battles,” and
Kedah “of fierce strength, which was protected by the deep sea.”

Medieval South Asian literature offers few clues about the size or logistics
of such long-range operations. The fullest extant account of a naval campaign comes from
Dhanapala’s tenth-century prose romance, the
Tilakamanjari,
which recounts the story of a Sri Lankan expedition to punish feudatories who withheld taxes and did not come to court when summoned, among other affronts. After extensive military and ritual preparations—offering “
oblations to the sea with curd, milk, rice, food, ointment, garlands and ornaments”—the ships were loaded with supplies: water, of course, and “ghee, oil, blankets and medicines and articles which are not available in the Eastern Archipelago.” The voyage across the Bay of Bengal was uneventful, but the shouts and murmurs of the landing are recounted in boisterous detail: