Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Yet this benign spirit, a product of the trade and other civilizational contacts of the medieval Islamic centuries—strangely reaching fruition in the twenty-first century in the person of Sultan Qabus himself—does not, of course, prevent the ocean from becoming a zone of conflict and competition among great powers, for whom the importance of Oman must only grow.

  Although Oman’s influence declined with the age of steam, it is now recovering with newly enlarged container ports. From the blank desert of Dhofar a mass of gargantuan gantry cranes are visible from miles away, at the port of Salalah. Salalah, whose downtown, with its large outdoor markets and eateries exudes the sweaty African-like intimacy of nearby Yemeni towns across the border, is becoming a major global transshipment center for A. P. Moller-Maersk, one of the largest container terminal firms in the world.* A similar expansion has occurred at Sohar, at the other end of Oman, Sohar was home to Sindbad the Sailor and Ahmad ibn Majid; now Sohar constitutes one of the world’s largest port development projects, as well as maritime and industrial hubs, with investments of more than $12 billion. Sohar is able to handle containerships with fifty-nine-foot drafts, and boasts petrochemical, metals, and logistics complexes.

  A look at the map shows why all this is happening. The oil hub of the world, the Persian Gulf, is increasingly crowded and dangerous. Not only a possible war between the United States and Iran threatens it, but also a plethora of terrorist scenarios that could involve one or a number of containerships or oil tankers. Moreover, with the rise of India and China, the Gulf is not just a lifeline to the West, but to the East as well. If the Gulf were ever closed to shipping, the ports close by, connected to it by railways and oil pipelines, would therefore become ever more vital—ports like Oman’s Sohar, which sits just outside the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, a beacon of stability, is being configured as the Gulf countries’ alternative link to the outer world. Though twenty-first-century Dubai may be the true successor to nineteenth-century Aden—the great coaling station of the British Empire in the Indian Ocean—Dubai, inside the Gulf, is geographically vulnerable. And because going to Dubai involves a detour for transoceanic container shipping, it is more of an air transshipment hub than a sea one.10 Meanwhile, Salalah in Dhofar has the added advantage of being near the midpoint of the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, almost equidistant between the Indian Subcontinent and the Red Sea: the perfect transshipment point both in antiquity and in the twenty-first century. Unlike Dubai, no geographical detour is involved for shipping routes, and consequently Salalah—with its repair, bunkering, warehousing, and freight station facilities—services more than fifteen hundred vessels per year, with consistent double-digit growth for port revenues over the past decade. Railways and pipelines culminating at massive port complexes have finally conquered the anarchy of the desert, leaving the sea—itself conquered from time immemorial by the monsoon winds—as the final victor.

  * Nevertheless, we must be careful, since this interrelationship between geography and politics is never that cut-and-dried, and is full of contradictions. Actually, it can be a very fluid dynamic, particularly when great cataclysms occur. Just as conditions at sea occasionally can affect the desert interior, the reverse has been true. For example, in the thirteenth century, a sea route linked Canton in China with Basra in Iraq, from where goods were transshipped to Baghdad, and from there portered overland westward to the Mediterranean. Indeed, Basra functioned as Baghdad’s port, giving the great medieval city of the Abbasid caliphs access to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, and hence to the entire East. But in 1258 the Mongols, coming out of the desert, sacked Abbasid Baghdad and security broke down throughout Iraq. The result was that the sea route up the Persian Gulf became unfavorable, and Indian Ocean trade routes shifted from the Persian Gulf by Oman to the Red Sea by Yemen. Engseng Ho, Harvard University professor of anthropology, presentation for a conference on “Port City States of the Indian Ocean,” Harvard University and the Dubai Initiative, Feb. 9–10, 2008.

  * The Nizam of Hyderabad, in south-central India, recruited his bodyguards exclusively from among Hadhrami tribesmen. I have written extensively about Yemen elsewhere—see Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), ch. 1, and Robert D. Kaplan, “A Tale of Two Colonies,” The Atlantic, April 2003.

  * In fact, Persian influence in Oman goes back to antiquity. The falaj irrigation system—a system of tunnels, small dams, and storage tanks—was brought to Oman by Persian settlers in the seventh century B.C., as part of the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire.

  * It should be said that on the whole, the Omani slavers were not nearly as cruel as their European counterparts. Rather than enforce a living death upon the poor Africans they captured, they often integrated them into their families, clothed them, and provided them with wives, according to the laws of Islam.

  † This was particularly galling, given that around the turn of the nineteenth century, Oman was a sea power second only to Great Britain in the northern Arabian Sea. Richard Hall, Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 355.

  * In general, it seems that Oman lacks political freedom but largely respects human rights. The U.S. State Department’s 2008 Human Rights Report on Oman notes that while the government is centralized in the sultan’s authority, “In October 2007 approximately 245,000 registered voters participated in generally free and fair elections” for the Majlis as-Shura. Similarly, rights of press, speech, assembly, and religion are restricted. However, basic human rights are largely respected. There were no reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government, no reports of politically motivated disappearances, and the government “generally observes” prohibitions on arbitrary arrests and detentions.

  * It is more commonly known as Maersk Sealand, a Danish firm.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “LANDS OF INDIA”

  Muscat, Oman’s capital, is a series of whispering, fairy-tale bays. Jetties elbow their way out into the water that turns a hypnotic silver-blue at dusk. The white harborscapes composed of Mughal and Persian architecture, with green and gold domes, huddle against steep, jagged mountains the introspective color of gray. There are no modern buildings with ugly signage to destroy the spectacle. India feels very close, but nearby Dubai with its Disney-style globalization feels half a world away.

  In the main bay out of which Muscat has grown, crawling up two rocky outcrops like the horned backs of reptiles, are the blotched walls of two Portuguese forts, Jalali and Mirani, constructed in 1587 and 1588, respectively, to strengthen the Portuguese hold on the Gulf against the Ottoman Turks. Together they flank Sultan Qabus’s Al Alam Palace. Dominating the harbor with their humbling symmetry, these two forts appear charged with meaning. They recall the bulwarks and “cyclopean” dimensions of Portuguese forts in Hormuz, Malacca, Macao, Mozambique, and particularly Diu, off northwestern India’s Kathiawar Peninsula in Gujarat.1 With their three-foot-thick outer walls, curved battlements, circular towers and spiral stairways, cavernous rooms and mazes, they are pieces of superb architectural engineering that conjure up the whole fantastic story of the Portuguese. It is not only Oman whose shores are graced by Portuguese remains, but much of the entire Indian Ocean littoral.

  ——

  The Indian Ocean began its modern history as a Portuguese imperial lake. Within two decades of Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1498, the Portuguese came to dominate the most important sea routes and trading networks between East Africa and modern-day Indonesia.2 This is not to say that the Portuguese were the first distant power to have a presence in the Indian Ocean—very far from it—only that they were the first to do something comprehensive with it.

  In fact, Europe’s involvement with the Indian Ocean has a deep basis in antiquity. The ancient Greeks sailed as far south as Rhapta, located somewhere on the East African coast near Zanzibar. The Greeks were also familiar with Ceylon, of which Claudius Ptolemy giv
es a description in his Geographia, and they sailed up the Bay of Bengal into the mouth of the Ganges not far from present-day Kolkata (Calcutta).3 In the first century B.C. the Greek navigator Hippalus plotted a direct route from the Red Sea to India by observing the workings of the monsoon winds, the knowledge of which he passed on to the Romans.*

  Every year, “about the time of the summer solstice,” writes Edward Gibbon, a Roman commercial fleet, aided by the monsoon, sailed from Egypt to India’s southwestern Malabar coast by way of Arabia, returning in winter, after the winds reversed, with a cargo rich in silks, precious stones, wood, ivory, exotic animals, and aromatics like frankincense.4 Christianity may have been introduced to the Malabar coast (which Ptolemy describes) in late Roman times.5 And along the farther-removed Coromandel coast in southeastern India, archeologists have found Roman amphora containers and coins.6

  Fifteen hundred years later, the Ottoman Turks had a presence on the Red Sea in Yemen and on the Persian Gulf at Basra in Iraq. By seizing Yemen they were able to close the Red Sea to the rival Portuguese. The Turks launched raids against the Portuguese as far afield as East Africa. Yet their attempts to solidify a strong presence in Arabia in and around the Persian Gulf and to establish one in India ultimately came to naught, even as they controlled northern Arabian Sea shipping routes for significant periods in the sixteenth century. It was the Portuguese who can claim credit for ultimately thwarting Muslim Turkish ambitions.7 But though the Ottomans clearly recognized the importance of the Indian Ocean—indeed, they were obsessed with competing globally with the Portuguese—they were too much of a land-based empire to sustain operations in its tropical waters. Battling the Venetians in the Mediterranean and the Austrian Hapsburgs in central Europe, with their resources in Constantinople, so far from the Indian Ocean, they were limited. The Indian Ocean became in due course a sideshow for them.8

  Contrast all these efforts with those of the Portuguese, whose soldiers and mariners occupied Goa on the western coast of India in 1510, Malacca in the Malay Strait in 1511, Hormuz (near Muscat) on the Persian Gulf in 1515, and Colombo in Ceylon in 1518. Only twenty-three years after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese reached Java. The European fort design in Asia was of Portuguese origin. By 1571 there were some forty Portuguese forts and outposts like Jalali and Mirani in the Greater Indian Ocean, challenging and in some cases controlling the trade routes to the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and East Asia.9 Portuguese carracks and galleons might have been clumsy by the standards of ships that would appear in the seventeenth century in the Mediterranean, but by combining lateen sails and square rigging, and by putting artillery aboard ships, they were vastly superior to the Turkish, Egyptian, and Malayan corsairs in oared galleys and single-masted foists—as well as to the Chinese “junks” and Arab dhows—that they met in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. *

  This seaborne world empire was the bounty of obsessed adventurers: men ruthless for wealth, heroic to the point of fanaticism, freighted with the cruel mental baggage of the Middle Ages, and intoxicated with a poignant love for the Virgin Mary. Faith and greed went together. The Portuguese stole, but only from those whom they saw as the corrupt of God. Such an iron faith brought them through many an ocean storm, as well as through months upon months in battering seas; their troops deep in the hull, beset with malaria and scurvy, packed together in the hundreds. Between 1629 and 1634, of 5228 soldiers who left Lisbon, only 2495 reached India alive, most dying of sickness, exposure, or shipwreck.* The story of Portuguese travel to and from India is biblical in its record of suffering.

  The Indian scholar and statesman K. M. Panikkar describes Portuguese maritime expansion in the Persian Gulf and South Asia as an attempt to “get around the overwhelming land power of Islam in the Middle East,” and thus to break out of the “ ‘prison of the Mediterranean.’ ”10 Along with this dry strategic logic came a hot-blooded Catholic religious fervor. Panikkar reminds us that the spirit of the Crusades lingered much longer in Iberia than it did in Europe proper. In Iberia, Islam was not a mere “distant menace” but a close threat, owing to the existence of Muslim kingdoms that still flourished on Portugal’s doorstep. “Islam was the enemy and had to be fought everywhere.”11 This fact, more than any other, explains both the cruelty and ferocity of so much Portuguese behavior in the Greater Indian Ocean. Indeed, as one Portuguese historian of the era, João de Barros, writes, justifying the awful deaths meted out to local populations:

  The Moors … are outside the law of Jesus Christ, which is the true law which everyone has to keep under pain of damnation to eternal fire. If then the soul be so condemned, what right has the body to the privileges of our laws?12

  Arguably, Portugal’s efforts in the Indian Ocean constituted nothing less than an Eighth Crusade. While the previous seven had focused on the Levant (the Muslim lands abutting the eastern Mediterranean), this one sought conquests much farther east, where of the four great empires in the region—Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, Mughal India, and Ming China—three were Muslim.13

  These factors came together in the myth of Infante Henrique, or Prince Henry the Navigator, who “imbibed early in his life,” writes Panikkar, a spirit of “militant Christian mysticism” combined with a “bitter hatred” of Islam. As a young man in 1415, Prince Henry organized a successful expedition against Ceuta in Morocco—the first ever Portuguese attack on Islam’s African base. This carried deep significance since Ceuta was the place from where Islam had entered Iberia in 711. From then on, at least according to the myth, Henry lost interest in limited military actions and began to plan a grand strategy to outflank the Islamic world from bases in the Indian Ocean. This strategy carried the added benefit of undermining the middleman role played by the Arabs in the Eastern spice trade. Thus, Prince Henry, this myth continues, developed an obsession with India, which led, in turn, to an interest in sailing and navigation. To his castle and fortified camp on the Cape of Sagres—jutting out on three sides into the windswept Atlantic, on Portugal’s and Europe’s southwestern tip—Henry was said to have invited “mathematicians, cartographers, astronomers, and Moorish prisoners with knowledge of distant islands.”14 Amid the wild tableau of one ocean, plans were laid to conquer another.

  In fact, as Oxford scholar Peter Russell writes in Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life, contradicting Panikkar and others, much of this simply was not true. Henry conceived of India as only what is today the Horn of Africa, and no farther. Though much the crusader, Henry probably did not have a developed concept for outflanking the Muslim world, and he did not retire to Sagres to study cartography and navigation.15 But the myth of Henry that grew after his death is true in the way that myths often are: they reveal the authentic motives and desires of a people, in this case of the Portuguese.

  In addition to searching for grains, gold, and spices, the Portuguese truly did have a desire to outflank Islam, made more intense by the Muslim Turkish conquest of Greek Christian Constantinople in 1453.* So it is ironic that Prince Henry comes down to us through history not as a character in the story of the Crusades—which he actually was—but as a benevolent figure in the age of discovery, whose school of navigation (which might have never existed) laid the groundwork for the pathbreaking global journeys of Portuguese mariners.

  Prince Henry died in 1460. Building on Henry’s store of knowledge in organizing expeditions down the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, in 1483, Diego Cão was able to sail from Portugal as far south as the Congo River in Africa. Finally, five years later, it was a hitherto obscure mariner, Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the African continent and brought Portugal into the Indian Ocean for the first time. According to one story, it was Dias who named the Cape of Good Hope, for he hoped to return there and reach India on a succeeding voyage. But Dias died on another voyage when his ship broke apart in the South Atlantic. It would be Vasco da Gama in 1497 who passed the cape with four square-rigged ships and sailed up the East African coast
to Malindi, in present-day Kenya.

  In Malindi, hundreds of years of Arab knowledge of the Indian Ocean—its winds and currents and haunts—were gathered into the head of one man: an Omani-born navigator, Ahmad ibn Majid, who agreed to help da Gama. Majid had sailed the Indian Ocean for half a century, and was a veritable Arab cultural repository of the seas.* He knew the best entry points to the mouths of the Tigris and the Indus, the way to negotiate the shoals off Mozambique, and the best landfalls in India and on both sides of the Red Sea.16 Because the Arab world was so loose and diversified, in East Africa, so far from Iberia and the Middle East, the Portuguese could collaborate with an Arab like Majid, even as they planned to outflank the Arabs elsewhere on the map.

  Whether it was Majid himself or another pilot perhaps recommended by him, an Arab pilot helped da Gama cross the Indian Ocean from Kenya to Calicut on India’s Malabar coast in just twenty-three days in the spring of 1498, a spectacularly quick journey made possible by the winds of the southwest monsoon.† (Compare this to the late sixteenth century, when it took two months just to cross a stretch of the Mediterranean from Venice to the Holy Land.) Rather than “find” India, which the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs had done long before, the Portuguese put Europe back into intimate contact with it, for it was not so much Asia that da Gama had rediscovered for Europe as the wind system that brought him there.