Charts corresponding to our coordinates were spread on a table and updated every hour with a notation in pencil tracing our sea route. The wheelhouse abounded with electronic devices, and the captain and his officers directed the ship using global positioning systems (GPS) and radar. Nevertheless, the conventions of seafaring – at least for this shipping company – required that the ship’s officers regularly update these gorgeous charts. The charts recorded depths, forbidden areas, coastal zones, submarine ammunition dumping grounds, port approaches, and less frequent and often fascinating notations about whales, anomalous magnetic zones, volcanic activity, and treacherous reefs that had been sighted but not confirmed. On this route, the one legend that was repeated consistently across all charts was a warning about taking care with dragging the anchor along the seabed for fear of snagging submarine cables and pipelines.
The charts were a palimpsest of past pencilled routes, erased and replaced on every trip. The lines seemed to follow more or less the same latitudes and longitudes on every trip. Like the rhumb lines which connected ports on seventeenth-century European maps,3 these pencilled lines showed the persistence of certain routes. Many – at least those that have not been erased by war or ‘natural’ disaster or a gradual decline in the importance of a port – are hundreds of years old, if not older. Some connect the harbours of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian coast to their counterparts on East African or Indian shorelines, and further to Southeast Asian archipelagos and China. Others trace coastal connections around the Peninsula, or across narrower seas – the Red Sea, for example – and on to nearby shores.
Before the age of steam, sailing ships were largely captive to currents, winds, and especially to the monsoons of the Arabian Sea, whose winds dictated the direction of travel for ships. The ‘huge sum of free energy provided by the monsoons’4 was at once the most significant barrier to and the biggest advantage for determining the timing and routes of maritime trade. The monsoon systems allowed the ships to sail with the winds, and because of the predictability of the seasons, monsoon winds determined the dates for sailing to and from the facing coasts of the western Indian Ocean. The south-western monsoon blows from June through September from the Himalayas towards the Arabian coasts. The north-eastern monsoon sweeps from the Horn of Africa towards the shores of India. The winds bring ‘rainwater running in rills’ (in Rabindranath Tagore’s evocative words). High swells vibrate through the bones of seafarers and wash over the decks of dhows. On a container ship, heavy-bottomed and cargo-laden, all one feels is a gentle sway that slightly changes the calibration of your walk. Even a ten-metre swell is dwarfed by a megaship’s high freeboard: the distance of the deck from the waterline can be as far as fifteen metres above the surface of the sea.
In the age of sail, if a port’s ship designers, shipwrights, and master seafarers could harness the force and energy of the wind in sailing across the ocean, that port could come to preeminence. But most deepwater ports also served coastal trade, and different merchants specialised in transhipping goods brought in from afar and their distribution to nearer harbours. Aden, Muscat, and Peninsular ports on the Indian Ocean served as such entrepôts during medieval times (and perhaps even before) precisely because of their command over the monsoon routes.
But the monsoons were not the only consideration in determining the optimal routes and their termini. Geography also mattered. As Indian Ocean historian R.N. Chaudhuri paraphrases the son of Portuguese conqueror Afonso de Albuquerque: ‘There are three places in India … which serve as markets for all the trade in merchandise in that part of the world and are the principal keys of it. The first is Malacca, the second Aden, and the third Hormuz. All three command the entrance and the exit in narrow sea passages.’5 Beyond their mastery of monsoons and straits, ports in the age of sail could flourish because they provided safe – or ‘noble’ – havens. Aden had a naturally deep harbour that sheltered from the winds and a hard enough sea-floor complementing its depth to host oceangoing ships. The wondrous account of Sulayman, the ninth-century itinerant merchant, similarly indicates the reasons Siraf, on the Persian shores of the Gulf, became the early medieval entrepôt for the western Indian Ocean:
Most of the Chinese boats are loaded at Siraf and the goods are carried to Siraf from al-Basra, Uman and other [ports], and then they are loaded on the Chinese boats at Siraf. This is because the waves are abundant in this sea and the water is at a low [level] in some places … So when the goods are loaded at Siraf, they store sweet water from there and set sail.6
Aden and Siraf, however, languished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and while Aden became a major port after being colonised, Siraf never regained its early prominence. Politics and social relations were often more important than geographic felicity. So many of the ports of the Red Sea and the coasts of the Persian Gulf were placed there despite their location. Mudflats, treacherous coral reefs, and access only to brackish water supplies and meagre ships’ stores did not prevent the emergence of ports in inhospitable locales. Access to hinterlands, credit, networks of trade, and seafaring skills all played a role.
Long before Europeans found the maritime route to the Indian Ocean, Arabs and the archipelago peoples of the eastern Indian Ocean before them had already developed sophisticated navigational methods for travel across the unruly waters. In his beautiful manual of navigation, the fifteenth-century Arab seafarer Ahmad ibn Majid al-Najdi writes about the knowledge required to traverse the perilous deeps that lay between the Arabian Peninsula and the far shores of Asia and Africa:
Know oh reader, that sailing the sea has many principles. Understand them: the first is the knowledge of lunar mansions and rhumbs and routes, distances, latitude measuring, signs (of land), the courses of the sun and moon, the winds and their reasons, and the seasons of the sea, the instruments of the ship … It is desirable that you should know about risings and ‘southings’ and the methods of taking latitude measurements and their variations and graduations, the risings and settings of the stars, their latitudes, longitudes and distances and their passing the meridian … It is also desirable that you should know all the coasts and their landfalls and their 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.7
The accumulated corpus of navigation knowledge came not only from a panoply of navigation manuals written by seasoned seafarers over the course of centuries, but also from the quotidian experience of nakhodas (captains) aboard both oceangoing and coastal ships. This vast archive of experience and memory also served to make ephemeral sea routes more concrete.
But, beyond geophysical accident and the congealed skills of seafarers in great ports, what mattered greatly to the making of routes in the Indian Ocean was relations of trade and pilgrimage that made sea routes so much more than imagined lines on maps. If port cities were designated neutral or free ports, they attracted these transoceanic networks of trade more readily. As trade relations flourished, so did credit, exchange, and trade. Merchants and other traders could borrow money in one port for the purchase of goods and repay in another port. When ports flourished, taxes and fees for the rulers followed.
We know a great deal about transoceanic networks of merchants throughout the Indian Ocean’s history, where ties of kinship and community lubricated the machinery of exchange. But kinship and trust alone did not suffice; trade networks also depended on legal frameworks and mechanisms for enforcement of contracts.8 The routes of exchange were many-cornered9 and goods and people – merchants, slaves, soldiers, adventurers, imperial officers, seafarers, immigrants and pilgrims – were transported between the coasts of East Africa, Arabia, India and the Southeast Asian archipelagos. Long before the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British East India
