noticed that the others had moved their belongings to the lean-to at the rear of the boat. I decided to stay where I was. A wave crashed over the bow and drenched me from head to foot. Another wave crashed over, and another. I was still moving my belongings to the rear with the others’, when I noticed that the deck had started to tilt at a twenty-degree angle.
The Qasid stopped moving forward. The crew had turned the ship’s nose out of the wind while they bailed water out of the hold and got the ship righted. Boxes were shifted about, and I decided the problem was only that the cargo’s weight had been poorly distributed. Then a fishing vessel came racing by, and I noticed how high it was riding. The Qasid was riding about seven feet lower. Our captain had overloaded the boat.
We set out and immediately waves started crashing over the bow. Again, we pulled over and bailed. This continued all day. Finally our crew became concerned that the cargo of “cookies” might be damaged by the salt water. The real problem, however, was that the Qasid was carrying mainly booze and AK-47s.
The booze was from Djibouti, but the guns, I was later told, were returning to Yemen after an unsuccessful sales trip to Eritrea. The weight of all those weapons was pulling us down.
The crew decided to find an island and wait out the gale. I write “the crew” because I realize now that I never saw Captain Abdou on board. No matter. The three teenagers and two old men who manned the Qasid soon had us anchored next to an island. All of us immediately hung our belongings out to dry. I noted that even here, out of the wind, the gale kept the clothes flapping at a ninety-degree angle. It was, I suppose, really the Red Sea equivalent of an interstate rest stop. But, technically, we were now shipwrecked on a desert island. I was rather pleased. After all the boat’s engine still ran. We’d probably get to Yemen eventually.
Some of my fellow passengers, however, were less sanguine about the situation. Paulious, for instance, an Ethiopian qat addict. Habitual chewers deprived of their daily mouthful are haunted by the demon katou, and Paulious was perturbed at being stranded in such an obviously qat-free environment.
“Oh, bad thoughts will come,” he kept whining. “We have to leave.”
The first fight broke out between an ancient sailor, whom I’d dubbed “the Toothless One,” and a passenger who had tried to steal his qat. The others quickly pulled them apart—Toothless had been threatening the young man with his flip-flop—but it was a bad omen. Toothless had earned his sobriquet when I’d noticed him grinding up a green purée in some sort of mill. At first I’d thought he was preparing food. Later I realized that it was his precious qat. Being toothless, he had to first “chew” it with this mechanical device in order to extract the leaf’s precious juices.
There was another crew member, a boy of perhaps sixteen, with curly hair, whom I’d caught staring at me a number of times. He had an honest, open face that bordered on simple, and a monkey-like way of moving that made me think he must have spent his life on boats like the Qasid. I was talking with the others and the word America came up. The boy, who was sitting on the crate above us, pointed in puzzlement toward al-Makkha.
“He is from al-Merica?” he inquired of the others. “Is that near al-Makkha?”
The others laughed, Paulious loudest of all. “He doesn’t even know what America is!” he said.
“Is it an island?” the boy asked.
I pointed northwest. “It’s over there.”
“By Eritrea?”
The others laughed again.
“No, no. It’s very far,” I said. “If you were to go there, you would come first to Eritrea, then Ethiopia, than all of Africa and Turkey and then Europe and then there’s another place, England, and the sea beyond that. A great sea. Beyond all that,” I said, “that’s where America is.” The others translated.
The boy looked at me as if he just couldn’t understand how a place could be that far away.
“It’s not as far as it sounds,” I said lamely.
He looked even more confused. Then his eyes narrowed—the others were still laughing. I think he thought that they were laughing at him and that I was lying, making fun of him. He moved away, with a look wavering between anger and puzzlement, and suddenly I thought, yes, he was right, it was impossibly far. Too far to go, and even if such a voyage was possible, why would anybody want to go so far from home? And why should he care about a place that might as well be on the moon? He, the boy, lived here. He had lived here all his life, probably on this very boat; this was his home, this and al-Makkha and the sand and the sea and the wind and the waiting. And one day he would be the Toothless One sitting by the mast, laughing and stealing orange cream cookies from the cargo. He would be thirty, maybe forty, but he would look much, much older.
After that, whenever I smiled at him he moved away. He referred to me only as the American, as did all the others. I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting alone.
The port we were headed for, al-Makkha in Yemen, is still one of the world’s most isolated areas. But back when coffee was brought there by kidnapped Africans, it verged on mythical, at least to Westerners. “Terrifically unhealthy even to sail by” was how the first-century Greek author of the Periplus Maris Erypraei described it. “A land full of ichthyophagoi [fish eaters] who plunder and enslave any who are shipwrecked there.” The Greeks believed that Arabs ate huge lizards and boiled their fat down for oil. Winged dragons were said to guard the coast, which was believed to be contaminated by horrific diseases.
Much of this propaganda was spread by the Arabs to discourage raiders from attacking the myrrh fields that were crucial to their trading empire. Using ships similar to the Qasid, Arab sailors from Oman were already bringing indigo, diamonds, and sapphires from India. To Africa they carried “weapons from Muza [al-Makkha] of local craftsmanship to gain the good will of the savages.” Back from Africa, they transported civet, musk, tortoiseshell, and rhino horn.
And slaves, lots of them, some of whom introduced coffee seeds to Arabia. Numbers are woefully inexact, but zanj slaves were in China by the first century. In 1474, eight thousand African slaves briefly took over Bengal in eastern India. This slave trade reached its apex when Oman’s Black Sultanate ousted the Portuguese and set up headquarters in Zanzibar, circa 1800, enslaving almost half of the population on the Swahili (eastern) coast of Africa.
We had rice for dinner. There seemed to be flickering lights coming from the direction of the Hanish Islands. I asked if it might be planes dropping bombs. The others said no, it was nothing. Everyone fell into a sullen silence except Paulious, who was getting positively twitchy over the lack of qat. He kept babbling to me how it was good, that the wind was dying, we could go soon. I pointed out the mini sand storms dancing in the darkness atop the island’s ridge, causing trails of silvery starlight to run down the face of the sky
“Is al-sichan,” he said, giving the dust devils their Ethiopian name. “Bad things will happen.”
The next day the wind had calmed enough for us to go on. We spied land around sunset and several hours later we dropped anchor just outside the port of al-Makkha. When we tried to dock the next morning, however, we found that Yemen didn’t want us. My fellow passengers, mainly Somali refugees, had no official papers. We were told to anchor twenty-five yards from the dock and stay put, forbidden to arrive, forbidden to leave. For three days and nights we drifted among the port’s derelict ships. Friendships formed and fell apart. More fights broke out. The Somali boy, Mohammed, refused to speak. When I asked what was the matter, he would only look
