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:
There was noise all around. People began talking. “Sir, give us a little way.” “Anga, don’t push me.” “Mangalaka, pushing others with the elbow does not show your bravery.”…“Tarangika, run away. Your fat thighs are impeding the entire army.”…“Brother, while falling down you have unnecessarily broken your thigh bone dashing against the ship. Now you will have to be guided by your servant.”…The soldiers were talking among themselves.… In this way, after everyone had assembled on the shore the atmosphere was filled with a fresh wave of courage.
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 lowlying 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.
Indian Ocean Ships
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:
There are people, at Oman, who cross over to the islands [probably the Maldives] that produce the coconut, carrying with them carpenters’ and all such like tools; and having felled as much wood as they want, they let it dry, then strip off the leaves, and with the bark of the tree they spin a yarn, wherewith they sew the planks together, and so build a ship. Of the same wood they cut and round away a mast; of the leaves they weave their sails, and the bark they work into cordage. Having thus completed their vessel, they load her with coconuts, which they bring and sell at Oman. Thus is it that, from this tree alone, so many articles are convertible to use, as suffice not only to build and rig out a vessel, but to load her when she is completed, and in a trim to sail.
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 seagoing 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 seagoing 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 lodestone.” 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 sourc
e 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.
Improvements to Navigation
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.
It consisted of four enormous wooden posts made of teak and was shaped something like a war machine, squarish, wide at the base and narrow at the top. It was about forty ells above the surface of the water and had tile and stone on top held together by wood so as to form a kind of ceiling. On top of that were four arched openings where a sentinel could be stationed. Some said this khashab had been constructed by a rich merchant, others that a king had it made. It served two functions: first, that area was being silted in and the sea consequently [was] becoming shallow so that if a large ship chanced to pass, it would strike bottom. At night lamps encased in glass so that the wind would not blow them out were lit for people to see from afar and take precaution, since there was no possibility of rescue. Second, one could know the extent of the land and, if there were pirates, steer the ship away.
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.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 40
