The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (55 page)

Once the ships were unloaded, and the camp established—“The site was cleared of bushes. The palace attendants put camps for women. The courtesans also got their tents”—the chief pilot of the expedition,
Taraka, took five ships to scout the shallow coastal waters. Again Dhanapala’s dialogue rings true as Taraka orders his men to avoid low-lying mangrove trees, rebukes others for grounding in the mud, and generally challenges their fitness for the work at hand: “Adhira, do not be diverted by my talk, proceed steadfastly. Wash your drowsy eyes with salt water. Rajilaka, regardless of my instructions the ship is sailing to the south. It seems that you have forgotten the direction. You do not follow the northern direction even when told.” Such literary treatment of maritime expeditions lacks the numerical specificity often found in western or Chinese accounts of comparable undertakings, which in their turn generally omit such intimate, nonheroic perspectives on military campaigns; but the distinct approaches are complementary. Taraka’s exasperation is certainly not unique to his command or this campaign, and though left unrecorded, similar expressions of encouragement and frustration were doubtless barked during the Andalusian invasion of Crete, the Norman landings in England, and countless similar missions. Like this one, the few extant accounts of
naval activity in the Indian Ocean focus almost exclusively on amphibious operations. While ship-to-ship and fleet engagements were not unknown—especially between pirates and merchants—reports of them are few and imprecise.

The Chola report of the destruction of fourteen Srivijayan cities is admittedly one-sided, but the raids so disrupted normal patterns of trade that the Chinese launched an inquiry into why so few ships from the
Nanhai were calling at Guangzhou. Yet the effects were short-lived. Srivijayan envoys returned to China in 1028, and over the rest of the century
trade missions from Srivijaya outnumbered those from Java and southern India combined; only
Champa (southern Vietnam) and Dashi, “the land of the Arabs,” accounted for more. The Cholas were unable to capitalize on Srivijaya’s weakness as much as they might have liked, but their
attacks did loosen
Palembang’s hold on more remote ports on the Strait of Malacca and the Malay Peninsula. The Cholas continued to intervene in the affairs of Southeast Asia until the 1060s, when they launched their last military venture across the Bay of Bengal. Shortly after this the emerging
Burmese kingdom of Pagan helped Sri Lanka’s
Vijayabahu I end the Chola occupation of their island. The Burmese may have offered no more than token support, but the Cholas withdrew shortly thereafter, and in 1075 Vijayabahu invited
Buddhist monks from Pagan to reconsecrate the
temples in his kingdom.

The nature of Indian
shipbuilding in the medieval period is difficult to assess.
Our assumptions about how
ships of the Indian Ocean were built are based on a handful of visual representations of negligible precision, a few quotations from written sources, and two archaeological sites. Given that the subcontinent was home to myriad states of great cultural, linguistic, and technological diversity, what is known from one isolated text or archaeological find may have no broader application. Sri Lanka seems to have had the reputation for building the largest ships. According to an early-ninth-century Chinese source, the biggest vessels calling at
Annam and Guangzhou were from Sri Lanka and had “
stairways for loading and unloading which are several tens of feet in height.” The only seagoing vessel of Indian Ocean origin known from the archaeological record, a ship of the same period found off Belitung Island in the Java Sea, was probably of more modest size. Believed to have sunk around 826, it was likely built in the Persian Gulf region using mostly imported African mahogany, with a keelson of
Afzelia bipindensis
(which had to be imported from the region of Zaire, in the interior of Africa) and beams of Indian
teak.
The Belitung ship probably measured between twenty and twenty-two meters long, with a beam of about eight meters, and a depth of hull of more than three meters. The hull was fastened by discontinuous stitching that passed
over the seams between the planks, and it was stiffened by frames stitched directly to the planks, again with the lashings passing through and visible from outside the hull. The woods found in the Belitung ship were of high quality—teak was especially prized for its durability—but other woods were perfectly acceptable
in shipbuilding.
Abu Zayd describes the
coconut tree as the almost perfect commodity for shipwrights and traders alike:

Abu Zayd notes that shipwrights in the Persian Gulf applied a
whale-oil preservative to their hulls. Despite the value of whale oil,
whaling was a cautious enterprise, probably limited to harpooning already dead whales and towing them to shore where “
This oil, mixed up with another kind of stuff, in use with seamen, serves for [preserving] of ships, to secure the seams of the planking, and to stop up leaks.” Whale oil was probably the substance of choice, but it was not the only one, and a later visitor to
Aden noted that shipwrights there coated their hulls with a compound of lime and animal fat called
nura
.

The primary
fastener employed by shipwrights around the Indian Ocean was cordage. According to a passage on ships and shipbuilding in the eleventh-century
Yuktikalpataru,
“
iron should not be tied to a sea-going vessel by means of a string because that iron may be attracted with magnetic iron in the sea and may cause danger.” A widely accepted interpretation of this passage is that “
no iron [should be] used in holding or joining together the plank of bottoms intended to be sea-going vessels, for the iron will inevitably expose them to the influence of magnetic rocks in the sea, or bring them within a magnetic field and so lead them to risks.” But magnetic attraction was probably not regarded as a significant problem, for a later passage in the
Yuktikalpataru
refers to “
special vessels, made of the foil of iron and copper etc. or of lode-stone.” Certainly a hull sheathed in “the foil of iron” would be at as much risk from “magnetic iron in the sea” as a hull merely fastened with iron fittings. An injunction against iron also makes little sense given
the importance of iron as a cargo in Indian Ocean trade; it was routinely carried between the
subcontinent, Arabia, and East Africa, the last of which was the source of most of the iron used in Southwest Asia by the twelfth century.

Only one medieval hull has been found in all of India and it does little to clarify our understanding of shipbuilding traditions on the subcontinent, and especially injunctions against the use of iron. Excavated on the
Kerala coast about thirty kilometers south of Cochin in 2002–2003, the
Thaikkal-Kadakkarappally boat was a two-masted vessel about twenty-one meters long and four meters in beam. Most unexpected, the planks, which have been dated to between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, were fastened with clenched nails. The vessel has many other features not normally attributed to Indian Ocean shipbuilding traditions, including a double thickness of planking, and bulkheads inserted into the frames to divide the hull into eleven compartments. Although these features are common to Chinese vessels, the wood is native to Kerala, where the vessel likely spent its working life. If these attributes are not characteristic of indigenous practice in medieval Kerala, they may have been introduced by Chinese sailors who began frequenting southern India during the
Song Dynasty (960–1279).

Probably the most significant development traceable to this period is the adoption of a
centerline rudder in place of steering oars or
quarter rudders mounted on the sides of the hull. Al-Muqaddasi alludes to such a steering system in his account of the tricky navigation in the northern Red Sea, where captains served as their own lookouts. “
If a rock should be sighted he cries out: ‘To the right!’ or, ‘To the left!’ Two cabin boys are so stationed to repeat the cry. The helmsman has two ropes in hand which he pulls right or left, according to the directions. If they are negligent about this, the ship may strike the rocks, and be wrecked.” Much has been made of the development of centerline rudders and the singular problems associated with mounting them to sewn hulls on vessels with tapered sterns, as shown on ships depicted in four eleventh-century
hero stones found near
Mumbai. Unfortunately, how these rudders are mounted is unclear from the illustrations. The hero stones show one-masted, sewn-plank warships going into battle under oars with archers and spearmen fighting from platforms erected amidships. These do not show any sails, but so far as is known, Indian Ocean ships were rigged with square sails, and there is no evidence of fore-and-aft sails in the western Indian Ocean until the coming of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.

The best source of information about ships built and sailed in Southeast Asia are the bas-reliefs on the ninth-century Buddhist
temple of
Borobudur. Built near modern Yogyakarta between 760 and 830, the stupa rises through nine terraces of diminishing perimeter from a base 160 meters square. Borobudur is not only “
the largest and most elaborate Buddhist monument” in
the world, but a unique source of information about Southeast
Asian ships: seven are depicted,
five ships with
outriggers and two smaller vessels without. While the carvings are not overly detailed, they give a good overall impression of how the ships were built and rigged. The five largest carry two bipod masts, each setting a canted rectangular sail. When set in the fore-and-aft position (parallel to the hull) as they are shown at
Borobudur, about a third of the boom and yard extended forward of the mast. When running before the wind, the sails could be let out so that they lie forward of the mast perpendicular to the hull, as in a square-rigged ship. In addition, the ships all have bowsprits, and three are shown setting a quadrilateral headsail, one of which may have been canted like the main and foresails. The ships’ most distinctive features are the outriggers, which are apparently set on both sides of the hull of the larger ships. Unlike outriggers found on most vessels around the world,
these are relatively short, from slightly more than half to three-quarters the length of the hull. Judging from their size, they may have been intended not as stabilizers but as
obstacles against enemy boarders. This defensive aspect is confirmed by the hull superstructure, which includes deckhouses amidships with pitched roofs, but the details of which are hidden behind what appear to be protective screens running the length of the ship and intended to shield the crew from attackers.

One of only a handful of vessels depicted in the nearly five linear kilometers of ninth-century bas-reliefs carved into the walls of Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world, in central Java. The most distinctive features of the Borobudur ships are the outriggers, which might have been used as platforms for paddlers and barriers against attack rather than for stability. The bipod main- and mizzenmasts set a distinctive type of sail called a
layar tanja,
a sort of oblique square sail or lugsail. Quarter rudders are mounted on a large beam that projects from either side of the hull. Courtesy of Anandajoti Bhikkhu,
www.photodharma.net
.

The
Samudra Raksa
(Defender of the Seas) was built by traditional shipwrights from the Tanjean Islands north of Bali from a model based on interpretations of five bas-reliefs of ships from the temple at Borobudur on the island of Java. Between August 30, 2003, and February 23, 2004, the ship sailed from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Accra, Ghana. It is now housed in its own museum in the Borobudur Archaeological Park. Courtesy of Nick Burningham.