Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The envoys sailed first, leaving the Indian delegation to follow in the remaining two junks. The slaves and horses were taken aboard, as were all the other gifts, as well as Ibn Battuta’s money and his entourage of slaves and concubines. When the loading was complete, however, there was no room for Ibn Battuta himself. Instead, he was invited to sail on a smaller junk, to which, with some resentment, he agreed. It was as well he did because, while waiting for transport to his humbler vessel, a storm blew up. The two large junks sank, their contents being washed up on the beach, where they were looted by the inhabitants of Calicut, and everyone on board was drowned. Meanwhile, the small junk fled to sea and did not return. Destitute and friendless, Ibn Battuta was saved by the arrival of a small fleet under Mohammed Tughluq’s flag. Offering his services, he sailed up and down the west coast of India on campaigns of conquest until he had earned enough money to pay his passage to China. But when he returned to Calicut in January 1343 the first ship he met was bound for the Maldives. So he went there instead.

  In every Asian kingdom he had visited Ibn Battuta had been welcomed as a representative of the Old Islamic World, a figure of authority and a repository of wisdom. In the Maldives, an isolated and backward realm of atolls which sat so low in the water that they would have been invisible were it not for their palm trees, he was revered almost as a god. Within a few months he had become one of the most important personages in the kingdom and had married the daughters of four of its most influential officials. ‘After I had become connected by marriage with the above-mentioned people,’ he explained, ‘the viziers and islanders feared me for they felt themselves to be weak.’ He later divorced two of these wives, and married another pair, as the political fancy took him.* By the time he sailed for Sri Lanka in August 1344 he was so sure of his standing in Maldivian society that he hatched a plot with the Singhalese sultan to overthrow its ruler. Eventually, however, he abandoned his coup in favour of continuing to China.

  His route, via Bengal, was beset with calamity. On the crossing to India his ship sank – ‘Death stared us in the face and the passengers jettisoned all that they possessed and bade adieu to each other’ – and after being rescued he found himself in a plague zone – ‘whoever caught infection died on the morrow, or the day after, and if not on the third day, then on the fourth’. After that he was robbed – ‘They left nothing on my body save my trousers’ – and in the fertile but noisome plains of Bengal, which he described as ‘a hell crammed with good things’, he caught a fever. Yet, despite these setbacks, he took a ship to Sumatra and then sailed to China, in dogged pursuit of the envoys he had last seen in Calicut.

  Among Ibn Battuta’s many remarkable qualities was his capacity for self-preservation. Again and again he bounced from disaster to success, from poverty to riches, at every opportunity finding help and funds from the potentates he encountered. In some degree this was due to the close-knit Muslim fraternity and its tradition of helping fellow believers, particularly those with a smattering of religious authority. But largely it was down to Ibn Battuta himself: he was a chancer who had charm, resilience and, above all, luck on his side. After the destruction of his junks off Calicut, for example, he had been a penniless nobody. But by the time his next ship sank he had already acquired several slaves and concubines. When they drowned, he found a sponsor to buy him more. And when he was robbed it took no time at all before he had a pocketful of rubies and diamonds to cover the cost of a journey to China. A qadi of Delhi, one-time hermit, would-be ruler of the Maldives, shipwrecked mariner, friend to the Mongol khans, twice a pilgrim to Mecca, he was a man who seemed destined to see and do everything.

  In sailing for China he took perhaps the biggest risk of his career. Although the Great Khan tolerated all religions, and had allowed Arab traders to establish colonies in his kingdom, he was the only Mongol ruler not to have accepted Islam. Ibn Battuta was entering a world where the cultural givens no longer applied and where, without letters of introduction or any certainty of encountering fellow Muslims, he would be lost. His luck held. Not only did he meet the envoys from Calicut, but – miraculously – he stumbled upon a fellow Moroccan. The man was expressive on the subject of China’s wealth. When Ibn Battuta mentioned the magnificence of India his compatriot laughed and said that it was nothing compared to China. He had not been there long, but in that time he had ‘prospered exceedingly and acquired enormous wealth. He told me that he had about fifty white slaves and as many slave-girls, and presented me with two of each.’ How far Ibn Battuta travelled into China is uncertain. He probably did go to Canton and may, by his own account, have visited Beijing. But he may also have invented a great deal, or relied on reports from merchants he met in the south. Either way, he had reached his limits. He returned to India in January 1347, and within the year was back in Syria.

  Damascus was all but empty. A new disease had emerged in China, travelling along the trade routes until it hit the Middle East. The Black Death, as Europeans called it, was a combination of bubonic plague, spread by rats’ fleas, and pneumonic plague, spread by airborne droplets. There was no cure, and the end was swift. From first contact, a victim of the pneumonic strain had only 12 hours to live – just long enough to infect those around him. The crowded cities of medieval Europe and the Middle East were perfect incubators for the disease. There was the horrible tale of a ship that sailed from the Black Sea, trying to escape the epidemic: when it left it had 332 healthy passengers and crew; by the time it reached Alexandria only 45 were still alive. The survivors died shortly after arrival, but not before they had passed on their sickness. From Alexandria the plague spread to Cairo, where within weeks 2,000 people were dying every day. From more than half a million, the city’s population shrank to 200,000 in a matter of months. Nowhere was left untouched, the most virulent and prolonged outbreaks occurring, naturally, in those places that attracted travellers – ports, capitals and religious centres. With sublime lack of concern, Ibn Battuta decided it would be a good plan to make another pilgrimage to Mecca.

  He left Damascus in the summer of 1348, taking in the devastated cities of Alexandria and Cairo before crossing the Red Sea to Mecca, where the annual caravans of pilgrims had unleashed a fresh surge of pestilence. He stayed there for four months while the plague raged around him, then returned to Cairo, where the funeral processions were at last beginning to abate, and came home to Morocco in November 1349, having not even caught a cold. After 24 years away from his homeland it might have been expected that he would settle down. But Ibn Battuta remained irrepressibly inquisitive. Now in his late forties, he went north to examine the Mediterranean port of Ceuta, and was then struck by another good plan. Why not go to Mali?

  The West African kingdom of Mali was far removed from the interconnected Islamic nations that occupied North Africa, the Middle East and India. But it was a realm that traders ignored at their peril, being so rich in gold that when its ruler, Mansa Musa, went on the hajj to Mecca in 1324 his spending devalued Cairo’s currency for several years thereafter. The moneylenders were still talking about it when Ibn Battuta first visited the city in 1326. Mali was the most remote part of the Dar al-Islam, separated from North Africa by 1,000 miles of desert. But as he had made his living on the fringes of the Islamic world, Ibn Battuta saw no reason why he should not visit it. In the autumn of 1351 he joined a trans-Saharan caravan for the long journey to Mali.

  His first stop in the desert was the salt mine of Taghaza. ‘This is a village with nothing good about it,’ he wrote. The slave miners worked in filthy conditions, suffering from the heat and the south-east winds that brought blinding sandstorms. Their only natural resource was salt, from which they built their houses and mosques. There were no trees and no wells, and it was 20 days to the nearest source of supplies. Other than the sacks of dates deposited by passing caravans, they had nothing to eat but their own camels. If a caravan failed they died; whereupon a new batch of slaves was brought out to replace them. It was not the worst place of
its kind – the salt mines of Taoudeni, to the south, were even more remote and hideous – but it was nasty enough. ‘We stayed in it but ten days,’ Ibn Battuta wrote, ‘in miserable condition because its water is bitter and it is of all places the most full of flies.’ As soon as the salt had been loaded – the slabs being hung either side of the camels like thick paving stones – he left.

  The rains had been heavy that year, with the result that the wells were full and the journey to Mali passed with the loss of only one man. (Typically, the Sahara claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives every year.) Ibn Battuta exhibited his customary fascination for minutiae. ‘In that desert truffles are abundant,’ he announced. ‘There are also so many lice in it that people put strings around their necks in which there is mercury which kills [them].’ On the other side of the Sahara, whose traverse took a good three weeks, he remarked upon the appearance of baobabs, the upside-down trees of Africa, which were so tall and so wide that ‘a caravan can find shade in the shadow of one tree ... Some of these trees have rotted inside and rainwater collects in them ... Bees and honey are in some and people extract the honey from the trees.’ Some of the trunks were so spacious that they had become homes: ‘I have passed by one of these trees and found inside it a weaver with his loom set up in it – he was weaving. I was amazed by him.’ Further on there were trees that bore plums, apricots, apples and peaches, but of a species he had never met before. There was also a tree that bore a cucumber-like fruit ‘when it ripens it bursts, uncovering something like flour’ – which the natives cooked and ate. They also dug from the ground a crop like beans – ‘and they fry it and eat it. Its taste is like fried peas. Sometimes they grind it and make from it something like a sponge cake.’ The oil from these beans, maybe peanuts, was also used as ointment, lamp fuel, cooking fat and, mixed with earth, as plaster for their houses.

  Ibn Battuta did not like the region very much. The natives were too morally relaxed for his taste and the food was awful. Of one town he wrote dismissively that it was ‘a big place with black merchants living in it’. He reached Mali on 28 June 1353 and was gone by 27 February of the following year. Travelling south, he met the Niger, which he confusingly mistook for the Nile, but dared go no further: of the territories to the south he had been told, ‘A white man cannot go there because they would kill him.’ He did, however, visit Timbuctoo, from which he ventured a short distance along the river. He saw a crocodile that looked ‘like a small canoe’ and a herd of hippopotamuses ‘with enormous bodies’. He thought they were elephants until they sank beneath the surface. ‘They are more thickset than horses and they have manes and tails, their heads are like the heads of horses and their legs like the legs of elephants,’ he wrote. ‘The boatmen feared them and came in close to the shore so as not to be drowned by them.’ He visited, too, many towns which were short on splendour but rich in hospitality. He remarked of one sultan that ‘He was a gentle person, fond of making jokes, a man of merit. He died there after I left.’

  Ibn Battuta left the Niger at Gao and went north-east to the Hoggar, the strange, mountainous plateau at the heart of the Sahara, so high that sometimes it snowed. He had very little to say about it other than that ‘it has a scarcity of plants and an abundance of stones; the road, too, is rough’. He went north, again through the desert, until he reached the Tuat, a string of oases that led him eventually to the Atlas Mountains on 29 December 1353. The hills were covered with snow and the passes were icy. ‘I have seen many rough roads and much snow in Bukhara and Samarkand and in Khurasan and in the land of the Turks,’ he wrote, ‘but I have never seen anything more difficult than the road of Umm Janaiba.’ After many difficulties, he reached Fez later that winter.

  This was Ibn Battuta’s last journey. He had spent almost 30 years away from home, during which time his mother and father had died and he had become almost a stranger in his own land. He adapted to the situation with his usual panache. He was appointed qadi of Fez, and instructed by the Sultan of Morocco to produce an account of his exploits. Like Marco Polo, he did not write it himself but dictated it to a scribe. It was an incredible story, flawed in parts but mostly true, that circulated widely in the Islamic world. By the time of his death, in 1368 or 1369, Ibn Battuta had become the most famous traveller of his age. His fame, however, was restricted to the Dar al-Islam, and when his journal was finally translated into French in the 19th century nobody paid it much attention. Countless Europeans had since retraced his steps through Africa, Arabia, India and China: in terms of discovery Ibn Battuta’s travelogue was an interesting but outdated curiosity. What they failed to appreciate was that it had taken them several hundred years to explore the known world, and they had succeeded with the aid of guns, swords, artillery and fleets of ships. Ibn Battuta had done the same thing in little more than a quarter of a century armed only with a Koran.

  SAILING WEST TO AMERICA

  Christopher Columbus (1492–1506)

  Resourceful, ambitious and possessed of an insatiable urge to prove himself, Christopher Columbus was the archetypal adventurer. Born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver, he joined the Genoese fleet* and spent several years sailing the Mediterranean until, at last, he got his break. It came in an unconventional manner: in 1476 his ship was attacked and sunk off the Portuguese coast; paddling ashore on a piece of wreckage, Columbus made his way to Lisbon where he found employment in the city’s large colony of expatriate Genoese merchants. Within a few years he had made several voyages – one, in 1477, which may have gone as far as Iceland, and at least one other to West Africa – had set up a small mapmaking business with his younger brother Bartholomew and had secured a wealthy and well-connected wife. For a shipwrecked mariner, it was a meteoric rise. But Columbus wanted more; and the place he thought he might find it was Cathay, China or, as it was generically known, the ‘Indies’.

  The spices, ivory, gems, silks and other exotic goods that trickled overland from the Far East showed that the region was wealthy. The journal of Marco Polo (which Columbus read and revered) proved it was possible for foreigners not only to enter Cathay but to thrive there. Since Polo’s time, however, the Mongol Empire had disintegrated, and although trans-Asian trade continued it did so with more difficulty and at greater expense. Moreover, such goods as reached Europe had to pass through the Middle East, whose resurgent Muslim nations applied extortionate taxes. Therefore, if a man could find a direct sea route between west and east, one that would bypass the Muslim bottle-neck, his fortune would be assured. Columbus saw no reason why he should not be that person. Moreover, a successful voyage would reap spiritual as well as financial dividends. Of the few descriptions that remain of Columbus, all agree that he was a devout man. ‘In religion he was so strict in fasting and prayer that one could easily have taken him to be a member of a religious order,’ wrote his son Ferdinand. ‘He hated swearing and blasphemy; the only oath I ever heard him say was, “By St. Ferdinand!”’ Unaware that several missionaries had already travelled overland to China – and maybe not having read Polo’s book very thoroughly – he dreamed of bringing Christianity to the Far East. As he later wrote, ‘In the New Heaven and Earth which our Lord made He made me Cristoval Colon the messenger and showed me where to go’.

  During his voyages to Africa he had estimated (incorrectly) that the earth’s circumference at the equator was 20,400 miles. Given the distance that ships already covered between Portugal and Africa, he saw no reason why they should not sail that little bit further to China. True, there were several problems. The current state of navigation meant that most voyages were coastal, with ships rarely being out of sight of land for more than a few days. To sail halfway round the world in the open ocean with no certainty of finding an island along the way, with no idea whether the winds that took one there would carry one back, and with no guarantee that even if the winds were fair one would be able to find the port one had left, was a daunting prospect. On the other hand, the Portuguese had already probed into the Atlantic, dis
covering the Azores and the Canary Islands, so there were at least two revictualling points before one entered the unknown. And if the world was as small as Columbus thought it was, then maybe the journey was not so far-fetched. Indeed, by his calculations – which were short by more than 300 per cent – China was just 3,550 miles beyond the Canaries.

  Columbus was not on his own. A map made 25 years earlier by the respected Florentine scientist Paolo da Toscanelli agreed precisely with his views. All contemporary charts of the Atlantic carried rumours of islands just beyond the horizon. Mostly imaginary, these bodies of land had a persuasive feel to them. There was, for instance, St Brendan’s Land, reportedly sighted in the 6th century by an Irish monk who had sailed west for 40 days before discovering a series of islands, one of which was exceptionally lush and pleasant and may or may not – probably not – have been Barbados. There was also Antilia, a large island surrounded by other smaller ones, that 15th-century mapmakers consistently placed in the approximate position of the West Indies. And then there was Brazil, which lay off the west coast of Ireland – a position that appears less silly when one considers that St Brendan’s Land, the putative Barbados, was supposed to be west of Iceland. By the muddled cartographic standards of the time, it was reasonable to assume that a ship sailing across the Atlantic should at least meet something, if not Cathay itself.