The Indian Ocean

Michael N. Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134609598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this stimulating and authoritative overview, Michael Pearson reverses the traditional angle of maritime history and looks from the sea to its shores - its impact on the land through trade, naval power, travel and scientific exploration. This vast ocean, both connecting and separating nations, has shaped many countries' cultures and ideologies through the movement of goods, people, ideas and religions across the sea.

The Indian Ocean moves from a discussion of physical elements, its shape, winds, currents and boundaries, to a history from pre-Islamic times to the modern period of European dominance. Going far beyond pure maritime history, this compelling survey is an invaluable addition to political, cultural and economic world history.

Chapter 1

Deep Structure

Braudel wrote of the first part of his classic study of the Mediterranean that it dealt with ‘all the permanent, slow-moving, or recurrent features of Mediterranean life. In the pursuit of a history that changes little or not at all with the passing of time, I have not hesitated to step outside the chronological limits of a study devoted in theory to the latter half of the sixteenth century.’¹ This is what I aim to do in this chapter. And like Braudel I am not limiting my study to any discrete time period. I then can draw data from about five millennia, always however being aware that this must be data to do with invariant matters. I will discuss the name of the ocean, its geographical boundaries, its topography, winds and currents, and then introduce people. This is when the whole study of deep structure will become problematic and complicated, as we will see.

Frank Broeze suggested that the term ‘Indian Ocean’ is inappropriate. He wrote of ‘a string of closely related regional systems stretching from East Asia around the continent and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa (to which sea space a new generic name, such as “the Asian Seas”, might well be given)’.² Despite my customary privileging of India, I also have some hesitancies about the term ‘the Indian Ocean’. The terminology implies that India is the centre, the fulcrum, but this needs to be demonstrated, not just assumed. I recently argued that a better name for the part of the Indian Ocean known as the Arabian Sea was the Afrasian Sea. ‘The Arabian Sea’ seems to give Arabs a role much more prominent than is appropriate. Some years ago people began to write about Eurasia, the idea being to stress connections rather than the artificial separation between a reified (and implicitly successful) Europe and a timeless (implicitly backward, even redundant) Asia. We were reminded of millennia of contact, especially between the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. Now some have urged us to go further still. In what seems to be the ultimate uniformitarianism, the desire to show ‘one world’ before capitalism, to stress links between areas long before the European voyages, the term Afrasia has been suggested. This would make up a vast area, with western Europe to be seen as a tiny appendage on the western edge. But this also is controversial, for it is stretching things to see most of sub-Saharan Africa sharing in the history of Eurasia before the European voyages. This however does not apply to the Swahili coast. I suggested that the appropriate term for what used to be called the Arabian Sea could be the Afrasian Sea. This is an encompassing term and does include East Africa. Chandra de Silva recently wrote that it was incorrect to call this coast part of the Indian Ocean, and I agree with him, but to separate it out and call it the African Sea, as he suggests, seems unnecessarily divisive: the great advantage of the Afrasian Sea notion is its inclusiveness, and its failure to imply the dominance of any one area around the shore.³

Mutatis mutandis, I could now argue that this term would be even more appropriate for the whole area of what is conventionally called the Indian Ocean, for it would avoid assuming Indian centrality as implied in the Indian Ocean term, or Arab dominance as in the Arabian Sea, and instead would be all inclusive, taking in not only the Asian shores, which clearly are most important if only because of length, but including also the often ignored area of the East African coast. Yet this book is called The Indian Ocean so, a little reluctantly, I must continue to use this term. I will also use the familiar term of the Arabian Sea, while, to demonstrate impartiality, the Persian/Arabian Gulf will be simply the Gulf. My aim so far has merely been to alert the reader to the assumptions, arguably invalid, in the use of this term. It really all depends on where one is standing when one looks at and names an ocean. After all, Arabs refer to the Mediterranean as the Syrian Sea.

In any case, to assume that the Indian Ocean unduly emphasises India is to ignore the way a major group who were not Indian referred to the area. Arabs were happy to call the ocean al-bahr al Hindi, and indeed our term the Indian Ocean is an exact translation of this Arabic phrase. Hind derived from the Sanskrit, sindhu, to Persian and Arabic hind, and then via Greek and Latin to modern European languages as some variant of India. It is true that sometimes the Arabs were referring only to the Arabian Sea, but at times they also seem to have used the term to refer to an area that we today call the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean covers some 27 per cent of the maritime space of the world. It is the third largest ocean in the world, and covers 14 per cent of the total globe. Before I try to delineate its borders, we can first consider the whole matter of borders as such. One of the great advantages of writing maritime history, or for that matter the currently fashionable world history, is that by definition one escapes the land/political borders which have shackled traditional history for so long. States fade into the background in this sort of history, and we can look rather at ‘worlds’ and ‘zones’, along the lines of the MCC discussion in the introduction (see page 7). This said, I still have to depict the geographic (not human) limits of the Indian Ocean.

It is fairly straightforward. The longitudes are roughly 20° E to 110° E. Southern Africa, more precisely Cape Agulhas, is one limit, and we then go around the coast, including the Red Sea and the Gulf, past South Asia and through the Bay of Bengal and so to what geographically is the obvious limit, that is the Malay peninsula and the Sunda Islands. Past this the monsoons change. Possibly the Sunda Deep of the Java Trench off the southern coast of Java, which is 24,442 feet (7,450 metres) deep, forms a bathymetric boundary which separates the southeast Asian maritime region from the Indian Ocean. From here we go south to Cape Leeuwin in southwest Australia.

So far we have followed the borders as recognised by the United Nations Oceans Atlas, and the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO), but both these authorities then go past Western Australia to around Melbourne, the west coast of Tasmania, and then down to Antarctica. This opinion is not to be taken lightly, especially as it is congruent with those of Alan Villiers, who was a real sailor.⁴ Nevertheless, I would be inclined to stop at Cape Leeuwin, and go no further east. Certainly I agree with the International Hydrographic Organisation on the southern boundaries. In early 2000 the IHO delimited a fifth world ocean, the southern parts of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific. This extends from the coast of Antarctica to latitude 60° S.⁵ We still have a lot of the Great Southern Ocean included in the Indian Ocean, including the peri-Antarctic islands on either side of 45° S, namely the Prince Edward Islands, Iles Crozet, Iles Kerguelen, Ile Amsterdam, Ile Saint-Paul, McDonald Islands, and Heard Island. From the late eighteenth century these islands provided places for sealers to winter, and today most of them have permanent populations of scientists, but they will play a small part in our history of the Indian Ocean.⁶ They will be of interest only when we have ships using the roaring 40s and the fearsome 50s as they go from one end of our ocean, south Africa, to another, western Australia.⁷ For most of history ships never went below the tropic of Capricorn.

One way to visualise what I think of as the Indian Ocean proper is to see it as a vast equilateral triangle. The base is the tropic of Capricorn, that is 23° 27’ S. The two sides go north, the western one then including the Swahili and south Arabian coasts, up to north India, and then down from the apex through Burma, Sumatra and to northwest Australia. The only real problem with this is that it excludes the Gulf and Red Sea, and these were intricately connected with the Indian Ocean; apart from this it works quite well to depict the area of concern in this book. An alternative, perhaps even one to be preferred, is to see it as a vast letter M, with the Red Sea and Gulf on one side, and the Bay of Bengal on the other, divided by India.

The ocean proper, the vast wide expanse of water that we quoted Conrad on in the introduction (see pages 1–2), was well described by a Persian traveller in the eighteenth century:

It is not possible to measure the full extent of that sea except with the eye of fantasy. No one will ever delve to the bottom of that sea except by plunging into the waves of his wildest dreams. We were surrounded by a limitless desert of water. The days were white and the nights were black. You could not spy a single speck afloat on those fields of water, only the dark blue of the heavens reflected on the blue black of the sea.⁸

Opposed to this are the various bays and smaller seas and gulfs. Joseph Conrad saw the bays, in this case the Gulf of Thailand, as being rather different from the real ocean. One of his characters said that

from Bankok [sic] to the Indian Ocean was a pretty long step…. Extreme patience and extreme care would see me through the region of broken land, of faint airs, and of dead water to where I would feel at last my command on the great swell and list over to the great breath of regular winds, that would give her the feeling of a large, more intense life.⁹

If then there is a wide, expansive Indian Ocean, around its edges and margins are a host of seas. Among them are the Mozambique Channel, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea, Strait of Melaka, and the Laccadive Sea. Yet the same Sulaiman who wrote about the vast, open ocean also commented sourly on too much schematisation; he travelled where I have not been, and so must be listened to:

There is not really a clear separation between the seas we crossed [from the Gulf to Siam]. An ordinary traveller would not be able to perceive where one sea ended and the next began…. The scholars of travel and geography, confronted with many different place names … have wandered into the discords of choppy seas, doldrums and foul winds and they divide the great expanse of water which lies along this path into seven distinct parts.¹⁰

The topography obviously varies from place to place, being for example quite different in the bays as compared with coasts exposed to the wide ocean. Some shores are uninhabited desert, others cut off from the interior by impenetrable mountains, but most of the shores of the Indian Ocean are not quite as inhospitable as these examples. In India a fertile coastal fringe, especially in the south, the area of Kerala, is backed by the high mountain range called the western Ghats, but these are nowhere completely impassable. So also on the Swahili coast, where again behind a productive coastal zone is the nyika, a mostly barren area difficult, but not impossible, to travel through on the way to more fertile land further inland. On the northern shores of the ocean the coastal fringe is mostly much less productive, and leads to inland areas which often are hostile deserts. Yet topography has favoured this area even so, for the Red Sea goes into the Gulf of Aden, and this gives places around there, especially the Hadhramaut area east of Aden, a possible role in servicing ships going to East Africa or western India.

We will discuss islands presently, but most of those in the Indian Ocean proper are relatively isolated and scattered. Such is not the case in Indonesia, and this then provides another reason to place this area outside the Indian Ocean proper. Geography makes the sea in the island-studded Malay world much more central; if one likes, this is a much more maritime area, both topographically, and (as we will see soon) humanly. The region has an extremely high ratio of coastline to land area; indeed the highest in the world if one takes into account population.¹¹ The Malay world can be seen as a Mediterranean area, just like the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean area. All three are enclosed, but with access to oceans, that is to the Indian Ocean and Pacific in the first, to the Atlantic in the last two. And when we add in rivers this applies even more strongly to make this a much more aquatic area, strongly contrasting with the situation in the Indian Ocean. The only comparable area in the true Indian Ocean may be the area that the Portuguese called the Sea of Ceylon, that is the narrow strait of the Gulf of Mannar between Sri Lanka and southeast India, where again geography dictates that the sea is much more central simply because it is close on both sides of this passage.

Choke points are another topographical matter that influence the nature of the Indian Ocean. The Straits of Melaka, at their narrowest, where they join the Singapore Strait north of the Karimum Islands, are only 8 nautical miles wide. and today are used by 50,000 ships a year, including small country craft. The actual width of the channel that ships can use in this area is only 21/2 miles off Melaka and a mere 1 mile off Singapore. The Persian/Arabian Gulf at its narrowest section, in the Straits of Hurmuz, is only 48 km (21 nautical miles) wide, and passage is made more difficult by many islands and reefs. The Suez Canal is an obvious choke point, as also is the Strait of Tiran, which is only about 5 kms wide at its narrowest point. At the entrance to the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb at its narrowest is only 12 kms wide. It is at these choke points that port cities are usually found, as we will see.

Topography provides other important bounds and constraints. Some areas were very difficult to navigate. The Gulf is one such, but the Red Sea provides the best example. Past Jiddah was especially bad, so that only small specialised ships could make the passage from there to Suez. An Arabic account from the ninth century makes clear the dangers. Ships from the Gulf port of Siraf

put into Judda, where they remain; for their Cargo is thence transported to Kahira [Cairo] by Ships of Kolzum, who are acquainted with the Navigation of the Red Sea, which those of Siraf dare not attempt, because of the extreme Danger, and because this Sea is full of Rocks at the Water’s Edge; because also upon the whole Coast there are no Kings, 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 fast at Anchor. This Sea, moreover, is subject to very thick Fogs, and to violent Gales of Wind, and so has nothing to recommend it, either within or without.¹²

A pilgrim in 1183 wrote of the entry to the important port of Jiddah:

The entry into it is difficult to achieve because of the many reefs and the windings. We observed the art of these captains and the mariners in the handling of their ships through the reefs. It was truly marvellous. They would enter the narrow channels and manage their way through them as a cavalier manages a horse that is light on the bridle and tractable. They came through in a wonderful manner that cannot be described. …

He had been eight days at sea, and it had been a hazardous time:

There had been the sudden crises of the sea, the perversity of the wind, the many reefs encountered, and the emergencies that arose from the imperfections of the sailing gear which time and again became entangled and broke when sails were raised or lowered or an anchor raised. At times the bottom of the jilabah would run against a reef when passing through them, and we would listen to a rumbling that called us to abandon hope. Many times we died and lived again.¹³

Daniel’s account in 1700 similarly makes clear the hazards, in this case on a voyage from Suez to Yanbo, the port of Medina. His ship anchored each night in order to avo...