The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (56 page)

This is the first period in which writers began to record the sorts of navigational practices and aids to navigation employed around the Indian Ocean and its subsidiary seas. The best documented were found in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, the
Shatt al-Arab, and the headwaters of the Persian
Gulf, which were notoriously difficult to navigate, as a succession of writers attest. Two of the most ambitious
improvements to navigation dating from the caliphate were the stemming of a whirlpool in the lower Tigris and the erection of light towers. According to
Nasir-i Khusraw, who sailed down the Euphrates in a vessel called a
busi
in 1052, the former project was undertaken by a local woman who presumably had a vested interest in safe navigation, perhaps as a shipowner: “
They say that once, at the mouth of the
Ubulla channel, there was a huge whirlpool that prevented boats from passing but a wealthy lady of
Basrah had four hundred boats [perhaps small
quffas
] constructed and filled with date pits. The boats were then tightly sealed and sunk in the whirlpool, and now ships can sail through.” Less easily remedied were the shifting sandbars and flats formed by silt deposited by the Tigris and Euphrates, which could only be avoided by prudent seamanship and local knowledge. As the tenth-century geographer al-Istakhri wrote, “
In this sea there are many marshes, and difficult narrows, the worst of which is between
Jannaba [on the coast of Persia] and Basra at a place called Haur Jannaba, which is a place to be feared and through which scarcely a ship comes unscathed in rough seas.”

At some point after this, the route was marked by massive, manned light towers. About a day after passing
Abadan, which was effectively an island in the middle of a marsh, Nasir-i Khusraw described how “
At dawn something like a small bird could be seen on the sea. [The] closer we approached the larger it appeared.” The ship was forced to anchor when the wind changed, and he learned that the structure was an elaborately wrought and finished lighted navigational mark called a
khashab
.

These light towers were intervisible, so that the one ahead would come into view as the other was receding astern, and the obvious expense—teak was imported from India—and care that went into their construction testifies to
the importance that merchants and local authorities attached to the maintenance of safe navigation.

Although
Jeddah,
Qulzum, and
Aydhab remained regionally important ports in this period, improvements to
navigation on the Red Sea were few. Local knowledge was a prerequisite, and at Jeddah goods bound from the
Indian Ocean to Egypt were generally put aboard ships from Qulzum, not only because they were smaller and safer than the larger Sirafi ships, but because their captains were better acquainted with the natural and man-made hazards. “
Upon the whole coast there are no kings,” reports
Abu Zayd, “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 at anchor. This sea, moreover, is subject to very thick fogs, and to violent gales of wind, and so has nothing to recommend it.”

The evidence for navigational practice per se comes from scattered references to individuals and their training rather than to the theories and instruments actually employed.
Dhanapala’s tenth-century
Tilakamanjari
refers to the accomplishments of the expedition’s lead pilot,
Taraka, whose father was a pilot and who thanks to his own mastery of the nautical sciences became head of the
sailors’ guild. His first job as an independent shipmaster came only “
after studying all technical texts” and he is also described as “well versed in nautical science.” Indians were not alone in producing guides to navigation, and the earliest pilot books known by name were written by
Persians who sailed in Indian ships around the year 1010. Their works, called
rahmanis
in Arabic—a corruption of the Persian
rah nama
(book of the road)—and their accompanying maps are also mentioned by al-Muqaddasi when he describes researching his treatise,
The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the World
(985). In the course of visiting ports on the
Arabian Peninsula from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, al-Muqaddasi interviewed countless “
shipmasters, cargo masters, coastguards, commercial agents, and merchants—and I considered them among the most discerning of people.… I noticed, too, in their possession navigation instructions which they study carefully together and on which they rely completely, proceeding according to what is in them” regarding anchorages, winds, soundings, and courses between ports.

In his fifteenth-century
Book of Profitable Things in the Principles of Navigation,
the Omani navigator
Ahmad ibn Majid explains that navigators should be able to track the courses of the sun and moon, de
termine “
the risings and settings of the stars,” know distances and routes between ports, and how to use various navigational instruments to determine latitude. “It is also desirable that you should know all the coasts and their landfalls and the various guides
such as mud, or grass, animals or fish, sea-snakes and winds. You should consider the tides, and the sea currents and the islands on every route, make sure all the instruments are in order, and inspect the protection afforded the ship and its instruments and its men.” Although Ibn Majid’s epitome of navigational practice dates from the fifteenth century, he refers to a number of antecedent navigational manuals, the oldest of which are Persian works from the twelfth century, and his recommendations bear comparison with the advice given in the “Suparaga Jataka,” as well as late-first-millennium practice in the Mediterranean and northern Europe.

Between the seventh and eleventh centuries,
Indian Ocean mariners led the process of integrating the disparate regional markets of the Monsoon Seas between East Africa and the Red Sea in the west, and Southeast Asia and China in the east. In so doing, they laid the foundations for the all but uninterrupted maritime growth of this region that has lasted to the present day. The maritime
trade of Monsoon Asia shows many of the hallmarks of what we now call globalization, a process that creates networks of interdependence in which changes in one place can have ripple effects that spread from region to region. The clearest manifestations of this are seen in the rise and shifting fortunes of the Islamic caliphates and the Tang and Song Dynasties, whose wealth exerted powerful forces on the maritime endeavor of the two realms, as well as on other regions from East Africa and India to Southeast Asia and Japan. The resulting interdependency had many positive benefits, facilitating the growth of commerce and its underlying enterprises from agriculture to crafts, and encouraging the spread of religion and technology. At the same time, technological and political change in one place could have a negative impact on another thousands of miles away. Overall, however, the period was one of growth in maritime trade and political consolidation. While much of this resulted from local initiative, these were spurred by the unification and intensifying sea-mindedness of China in the Tang and Song Dynasties.

The founding of the
Tang Dynasty (618–907) ushered in a golden age of Chinese civilization, when an ecumenical and broad-minded spirit infused the visual, written, and performing arts, gave new life to religious, philosophical, and political discourse, and made China an object of wonder and renown across Asia. The Tang emperors pushed Chinese influence farther west than ever before or since, but by the middle of the ninth century the borders of the Celestial Kingdom had contracted so far that the venerable capital of Chang’an was closer to barbarian lands than to the center of Han China. Between the later Tang and the Song (960–1279) Dynasties, the Chinese capital was displaced ever eastward, to
Luoyang, Kaifeng, and ultimately Hangzhou (Lin’an).
^a
The former two are on the Yellow River and closer to the heart of the canal system that knit the empire together while Hangzhou lay on the sea itself.

These moves by the court bureaucracy were accompanied by a dramatic demographic shift as hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled the western and northern provinces for the relative security found south of the Yellow River and later of the Yangzi. Faced with dramatic reversals on their continental borders and insecurity on the silk road, the government adopted a more flexible approach to overseas trade and traders as it sought to increase its revenue from customs duties and other taxes. Dependent on Korean intermediaries for trade with
Korea and Japan in the early Tang, by the tenth century Chinese merchants were plying the sea-lanes of Asia, and their influence was felt from
southern India to Japan. While China’s near neighbors adopted policies similar to those of the Middle Kingdom, the states of Southeast Asia tended to be more laissez-faire, largely because they were subject to a far greater number of influences:
Chinese, of course; Arabs and Persians (mostly Muslim, but also Zoroastrian,
Nestorian Christian, and Jewish); Hindus and Buddhists from India and Sri Lanka; and above all indigenous
Malays, Javanese,
Burmese,
Khmers, and others.

As important as the Belitung wreck is for what it reveals about shipbuilding techniques in the Indian Ocean region, it is equally so for the evidence its so-called Tang cargo yields about the nature of east–west sea trade. Apart from about ten tons of lead ingots that served as ballast, and which could be sold or traded at the ship’s final destination, the overwhelming bulk of the ship’s cargo consisted of Chinese ceramics, sixty thousand pieces in all, many of them still intact. Most were bowls turned out by kilns in Changsha, now the capital of landlocked Hunan Province, south of the Yangzi; but there were also hundreds of mass-produced inkpots, spice jars, and ewers. One of the bowls bears a Chinese date that corresponds to the year 826, which falls squarely within the date ranges suggested by Chinese coins and radiocarbon dating of the ship’s timbers and of a sample of star anise, a spice native to
China and Vietnam. When shipped, the Changsha bowls were nested and wrapped in straw or packed in large storage jars from Vietnam. In addition to this mass-market cargo, the Belitung ship also included numerous pieces of silverware, some etched in gold, and the largest gold cup of Tang origin in existence, as well as more refined ceramics with cobalt blue decorations from
Zhejiang Province.

The discovery of a Chinese cargo in a ship almost certainly built in, and manned by sailors from, Southwest Asia and sunk
in Southeast Asian waters is in itself indicative of the international nature of trade thirteen hundred years ago. More striking still is the choice of decorative motifs applied by the Chinese potters, which testifies to a keen understanding of their intended markets. Most of the bowls bear geometric designs or inscriptions from the
Quran rendered in red and green and were obviously destined for markets in the
Abbasid Caliphate. Green-splashed bowls were popular in Persia, while those adorned with lotus symbols were intended for Buddhist customers. The symbiotic relationship between maker and market is obvious from the potters’ design choices, but the striking blue employed in the Zhejiang ware required cobalt, which in the ninth century had to be imported from Persia. While it is
not difficult to envision the circumstances under which pieces of exceptional quality would have appealed to elite customers, the Near East did not want for potters of its own. One is forced therefore to wonder about the social dynamic that made a small, inland city in south-central China a producer of everyday goods that would grace the tables of people thousands of miles away by sea. Even if we take this initiative to be a form of early globalization resulting from cheaper labor and other inputs—some of which had to be imported—these would have to have been inexpensive enough to offset the relatively high cost of transportation, the cheapness of which is a defining characteristic of globalization today. Finally, we have to consider the interrelationships among manufacturers, maritime merchants, and an ubiquitous
Chinese officialdom, and how these affected long-range trade, and people’s attitudes toward it, during and after the Tang Dynasty.