Chapter 2
The structural elements of the ocean both facilitated and constrained the circulation of people, who carried with them goods and ideas. When we introduce people it becomes much more difficult to set boundaries. Yet this is essential, for it is people, not water, that created unity and a recognisable Indian Ocean that historians can study. As Braudel wrote of the Mediterranean: 'The different regions of the Mediterranean are connected not by the water, but by the peoples of the sea.'1 I am concerned now with people around the ocean, especially those in port cities and those strung along the coast outside the cities, with their attitudes to the sea, its role in their lives. There is also the related matter of the land boundaries of the ocean, that is connections not across and beyond the ocean, but inland: a maritime historian has to face the question of how far inland must we go before we can say that the ocean no longer has any influence? We must try to identify people whose social life is importantly tied in to the ocean, that is people of the sea, not just on it: for the latter the sea is optional, non-essential, for the former it is life.2 In all that follows it is important to realise that I am trying to sketch some constant, invariant aspects of the lives of people around and on the sea. But very emphatically this is not a matter of an unchanging East. I have chosen to draw out and examine certain structural elements; the rest of this book will be, I hope, suitably diachronic.
How have historians approached the central matter of the human frontiers of the ocean, with regard to the extent to which one must leave the margin of land and sea and go inland? K.N. Chaudhuri recognises the problem: 'How far the Indian Ocean made its influence felt in the vast sweep of land in the north and the south west, in the direction of Asia and Africa, is a fascinating question'3 and one he does little to resolve. Matvejevic has addressed this matter of land and sea connections, albeit somewhat opaquely. 'The city where I was born is located fifty kilometres from the Adriatic. Thanks to its location and the river that runs through it, it has taken on certain Mediterranean traits. Slightly further upstream, the Mediterranean traits disperse and the mainland takes over.' He then notes how hard it is to find boundaries. In some areas a mountain cuts off the sea area definitively, but in others it does not, despite analogous obstacles.4
The general problem is to be more precise about the frontiers of the sea. Years ago Braudel wrote poetically about this: 'The circulation of men and of goods, both material and intangible, formed concentric circles round the Mediterranean. We should imagine a hundred frontiers, not one, some political, some economic, and some cultural.' The Mediterranean is a very wide zone: 'We might compare it to an electric or magnetic field, or more simply to a radiant centre whose light grows less as one moves away from it, without one's being able to define the exact boundary between light and shade.'5
None of this is very precise. Yet in fact a certain fuzziness is in order; rather than try to lay down rigid borders where land takes over and the sea disappears, we should accept, and even celebrate, complexity and heterogeneity. We should proceed case by case, asking on each occasion what is the question or problem that concerns us at present, and then extending the range of the data to take account of all the material needed to answer this particular question. If I am looking at a coastal fisher catching for his local community I do not have to go far at all; if I am looking at factory prawn production in Bangladesh for the American market then I must go far and wide; if I want to write about the horses which mounted the Indian Army in the nineteenth century I have to go to New South Wales; if I want to write about where the Indian railways got their sleepers from, I have to go to Australia and also to the Baltic.
To cases, and some examples of very close and intricate connections between land and sea in the Indian Ocean. A young Portuguese scholar recently published an excellent book on the 'Mar de Ceilão,' that is the Gulf of Mannar.6 In the first part of his book, before the Portuguese arrived, he finds that this defined maritime area made up a 'world'. This world contained interaction in both deep structural and human terms. There were connections made by the sea itself, the coasts of both southeast India and northern Sri Lanka, and the intricate wind and current patterns of this sea, where two systems met. He also discusses the ports on these coasts, and all the people involved in this sea: maritime people like fishers, pearl divers, traders, sailors, these perhaps being people of the sea, and people on the shore, on the sea, who seldom went to sea but were intricately connected to it. He deals with the states on the shores, and their efforts, usually futile, to control the sea and its shores and its travellers. Echoing Braudel, this small sea or strait certainly divided the two countries from each other, yet it also connected them and created intricate links between them.
One useful way to conceptualise land/sea relation and connections is Jean-Claude Penrad's useful notion of ressac, the three-fold violent movement of the waves, turning back on themselves as they crash against the shore. He uses this image to elucidate the way in which the to-and-fro movements of the Indian Ocean mirror coastal and inland influences which keep coming back at each other just as do waves.7
What we find on most of the shores of the Indian Ocean for most of history is a peasant agricultural economy inland interacting and connecting with a fishing and trading economy on the coast, yet it is the inland which is economically and socially dominant. Indeed, it could be argued that sea travel is unnatural for our species. Once early life came ashore and became land based, walking became the 'natural' means of getting about, not travelling over water. Over time people developed an extensive network of land communication in Eurasia; these were the essence of communication, but at certain places they intersected with the sea, and land routes were extended or duplicated by sea passages. There were intricate connections between land caravans and sea trade, or today between railways and container ships: indeed the containers are merely moved from a sea form of locomotion to a land one. Also today, sea and air sometimes intersect, so that travellers going on a cruise will often fly to meet their liner in some convenient port. Over all of history land transport and sea transport were often reciprocal, sometimes competing, and sometimes alternatives.
Sea travel has both advantages and problems. It was recognisably more dangerous, both for cargo and people, than land travel, as reflected in insurance rates, which were several times higher for sea travel than for land. Yet before steam as a general rule sea traffic was far more cost effective than that overland. Chittick claimed that one needs, roughly, the same energy to move 250 kg on wheels on a road, 2,500 on rails, and 25,000 on water.8 Similarly, it has been calculated that a dhow can travel the same distance as a camel caravan in one-third the time; each boat could carry the equivalent of 1,000 camel loads, and only one dhow crew member was needed for several cargo tons, as compared with two or more men for each ton in a camel caravan.9 So far so good, yet this refers only to technological factors. There are many others, such as politics, piracy, and the nature of the land terrain as compared with the hazards of the voyage. 'The "lubricant" required to ease as much as possible the "friction" of passage by land is as much a matter of social engineering as of communications technology.' Certainly travel by sea
was 'cheaper' in human terms, and developed much sooner, not just because of energy requirements, but because at sea the incidental hazards of negotiation, protection-money, wilful obstruction and downright violence were so much rarer than in the carrying of goods across region and region, through settlement after settlement, by land.10
Horden and Purcell note that the relativities vary from place to place. Arguably, because of the land terrain, it is easier to move goods by sea in the Mediterranean area than by land,11 but this would not necessarily apply in other seas.
Land and sea routes are often reciprocal, but they can also compete, or act as alternatives. When pipe lines are blocked or destroyed today the oil must go by sea. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese made the sea traffic in spices difficult; where it was possible, land routes were used instead. In the early seventeenth century it was cheaper to take goods from northern India to Iran by land, going Agra, Lahore, Kandahar and Isfahan, as compared with the sea/land route of Agra, Surat, Bandar Abbas and Isfahan. Similarly, Agra to Constantinople overland was cheaper than the sea equivalent of either Agra, Surat, Mocha, Constantinople or Agra, Surat, Basra, Constantinople.12 Clearly the sea/land route was more complicated, and involved much more breaking and repacking of cargo than the land route, but this does not apply to a voyage from, say, Aceh to Surat.
It may also be the case that at least on some routes land travel was faster than that by sea, for example where a powerful state had set up secure roads and a courier system and so less lubrication was needed. Where these were available, mails, commercial advice, and low bulk preciosities would go by land. Finally, we noted that much local traffic in the enclosed Mediterranean sea was chaffering from one shore or port to the next. In the much more expansive Indian Ocean this was also the case, but the peddler had much longer times at sea.
In modern times there are still a variety of factors which determine whether transport be by land or by sea. Passengers on long-distance travels go by air, on shorter distances variously by land or sea. Yet even here there can be variations: if people have a lot of luggage they may prefer to go by sea if ships are still available. Most bulk goods travel by sea when they can, though if a shorter land option is available it will be used, such as the railways across North America, and across India. Few goods go by sea from Mumbai to Kolkata, or New York to San Francisco. Some specialised goods can be moved more easily by land than by sea. The best example is oil, where pipelines can obviate the need for sea passage; yet even here, as we have seen so often in the twentieth century, politics can block a pipe line much more easily than a tanker.
What this rather diffuse discussion is saying is that we need to be amphibious when we write of land and sea, rather like a fish found by Jacques Cousteau in the Seychelles in 1967, which was
a species of amphibious fish, Periophthalmus koelreuteri – more commonly, and much less grandly, known as the mudskipper. It is acknowledged to be the most amphibious of all fishes, for it can stay out of water for longer periods than it spends in the water. When on land, the mudskipper carries a supply of water in the gill cavity, and it also gulps air. It is at home on mudflats and among mangrove roots, where it propels itself by 'walking' on its pectoral fins and – in order to move hurriedly – by means of rather spectacular, froglike leaps. In the water, however, the mudskipper swims quite normally. Its diet consists of insects and small crustaceans, in pursuit of which it makes optimum use of its highly functional popeyes to keep watch in every direction.13
Throughout history only a small minority of people have travelled on or depended on the sea. And of those who did, most moved easily between land and sea, and were far from exclusively maritime. Fish demonstrate this matter. For many coastal people fish are not central in their diets, and indeed fisherfolk often will exchange their fish for the preferred land staples of wheat or meat. In any case, fish are a nutritionally inefficient resource – a kilogram of fish provides only about two-thirds the calories of a kilogram of wheat. And fish also are an aleatory resource, that is depending on chance, as compared with rather more routine land-based food production. Yet fish also can be sent far inland, thanks to another part of the maritime scene. Coastal areas produce salt too, at low tides or when marshes dry up seasonally, and salt is vital in transforming perishables, especially fish, into items which can be exported for long distances and so can enter distant markets.
Port cities have been much discussed. They are the quintessential merging of town and sea, the conduit through which maritime and terrestrial influences mingle and merge. Broeze made some useful comments: to use the term port city
means that the economic, social, political and cultural life of that city is also predominantly determined by and has to be analysed in the light of that port function.... It is above all the active intertwining of all forces from foreland and hinterland through the physical and mediating function of the port which explains the extent, pace and manner of each port city's specific development.14
Matvejevic put this in more abstract terms: 'Cities with ports differ from city-ports, the former building their piers out of necessity, the latter growing up around them by the nature of things. In the former they are a means and an afterthought; in the latter, starting-point and goal.'15
In discussing the connections and character of port cities, we can use concepts which have long been in use in European studies. A useful one is the geographers' term, 'umland'. This is defined as 'formerly applied in a general way to surroundings, and included in hinterland; now more precisely applied to an area which is culturally, economically and politically related to a particular town or city.'16 It is then the immediate surrounding area, directly connected to the city, frequently because it provides foodstuffs for the city. The umland may be best seen as transitional between the dominant town and the pure countryside.
Port cities have relationships both with the sea and the land. For the former, the term 'foreland' is much used. The foreland is the area of the overseas world with which the port is linked through shipping, trade and passenger traffic. It is separated from the port city by maritime space. The 'hinterland' radiates out from the port city inland and so begins at the end of the umland. It is the landed area to which the port's imports go, and from which come its exports. To try and be more specific than this is difficult. One obvious point is that while all cities have umland and hinterlands, only port cities also have forelands.17 All port cities act as hinges, connecting different maritime areas. In the early modern period Hurmuz connected the Gulf with the Arabian Sea; Melaka, and now Singapore, connect two oceans. Many are located on choke points, as with the examples just given.
The relationship of the port city or emporia to the surrounding areas varies greatly. They can be seen as Janus-faced, looking at both hinterland and foreland, and most of them are affected by changes in either. Yet even this is not invariant; all are bound to and affected by the sea, but those which are mere redistribution centres, like again Singapore, and earlier Aden, Melaka, Hurmuz and Mocha, are little affected by events in the hinterland. These are 'entrepot' ports, which live by redistribution. Such ports draw little or nothing from the interior, but rather repackage, break up, and send on foreign goods to a foreign destination. On the other hand those which draw goods from the hinterland will clearly be affected by changes there: Colombo, Surat, Mumbai, Jakarta, Bangkok.
As Broeze implied, location on the shore does not necessarily produce a port city. It is a matter of which function is dominant. Two examples of cities on the shore which are even so not port cities are primate cities, and cities with ports. Kuwait is, and Hong Kong used to be, a primate city, because they are really city states which include a port role among their many functions. So also with Colombo and Bangkok. They dominate in terms of population, industry, politics, culture, or at least high culture, and so while they have docks, they are not really port cities, but rather cities with ports, for they have so many other functions. Contrariwise, today some ports have no cities: they are simply jetties which provide facilities to load cargoes of oil, or iron ore, onto huge carriers or tankers. These purpose built, single function ports are located close to the source of the raw materials, and have no need for cities or people. Examples are Ra's Tannurah for Saudi oil, or Port Hedland and Dampier for iron ore from Australia.
The true port city by definition links very distant maritime spaces, and this is the reason for what is perhaps its most noticeable characteristic. Ports are inclusive, cosmopolitan, while the inland is much less varied, much more exclusive, single faceted rather than diverse. As Murphey noted:
Port functions, more than anything else, make a city cosmopolitan.... A port city is open to the world, or at least to a varied section of it. In it races, cultures, and ideas as well as goods from a variety of places jostle, mix, and enrich each other and the life of the city. The smell of the sea and the harbour, still to be found... in all of them, like the sound of boat whistles or the moving tides, is a symbol of their multiple links with a wider world, samples of which are present in microcosm within their own urban areas.18
An English writer on the Gulf in the late nineteenth century put it well:
A sea-coast people, looking mainly to foreign lands and the ocean for livelihood and commerce, accustomed to see among them not infrequently men of dress, manners, and religion differing from their own, many of them themselves travellers or voyagers to Basrah, Bagdad, Bahreyn, 'Oman, and some even farther, they are commonly free from that half-wondering, half-suspicious feeling which the sight of a stranger occasions in the isolated desert-girded centre; in short, experience, that best of masters, has gone far to unteach the lessons of ignorance, intolerance, and national aversion.19
The location of port cities depended on many variables. In the Red Sea Jiddah was both a trade centre and the gateway to the Holy City of Mecca. Aydhab, on the other shore, prospered entirely because of its location. It funnelled African Muslim pilgrims across to Jiddah. As described in 1183, it
has no walls, and most of its houses are booths of reeds. It has, however, some houses, newly-built, of plaster . . . its people, by reason of the pilgrims, enjoy many benefits, especially at the time of their passing through, since for each load of victuals that the pilgrims bring, they receive a fixed food tax.... A further advantage they gain from the pilgrims is in the hiring of their jilab: ships which bring them much profit in conveying the pilgrims to Jiddah and returning them when dispersing after the discharge of their pious duty. There are no people of easy circumstances in 'Aydhab but have a jilabah or two which bring them an ample livelihood. Glory to God who apportions sustenance to all in divers forms. There is no God but He.20
One would assume that ports are on the coast, and indeed this is the case today. Modern port cities have to deal with huge tankers and carriers and container ships, and so must be located on the sea shore, for the ships are too large to easily travel far up rivers or estuaries, the Rhine and the St Lawrence system notwithstanding. In earlier times when ships were smaller and artificial harbours unknown this was far from the case. Smaller ships could penetrate up rivers and estuaries, thereby getting closer to production centres, and further away from pirates.
Among rivers where important ports were located are the Mekeong system, the Irrawaddy, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Ganga, and the Zambezi system. Malyn Newitt has described this last system. 'The valley of the Zambezi... is in many ways like an extension of the coastal zone, a finger of low veldt extending 300 miles [480 km] into the interior.' In the East African case what we are used to conceptualising as port cities, Kilwa, Sofala, Angoche, and Mombasa, shared very similar roles with Sena and Tete, respectively 260 and 515 km from the sea.21 The best term for Sena and Tete is 'inland port cities', or maybe 'fluvial ports'.
Important river ports are also to be found in southeast Asia. Thomas Bowrey described several of them. Kedah was on a large river in Malaya, and ships of even 250 tons could get over the bar at the river mouth and right up to the town, 60 miles above the bar. Aceh was two or three miles beyond the bar, and vessels of 60–80 tons could come this far. Bangkok was on the Chao Phraya river, about twenty miles from where this river enters the Gulf of Thailand. In the Middle East, Basra is about 75 miles up the Shatt al Arab from the Gulf.
In India also many ports are far inland on rivers, or at least a considerable distance from the coast. The Jatakas refer to a port near modern Varanasi,22 and at other times Patna and Allahabad have been major ports. Even Surat is three leagues from the sandbar at the mouth of the Tapti River. Deep sea vessels berthed some 10 or 20 miles away at places like Swally Hole, and discharged into lighters. A similar regime occurred at Cambay. On the west coast of India, the city of Cranganore was some fifteen miles inland from the seashore, located on several small rivers. Traders included Syrians, Egyptians, Persians, Arabs, Medes and many other races.23 On the Konkan coast indigenous ports are on navigable estuaries and creeks as these provide shelter against storms, protection from pirates, and possible inland water connections. Dabhol is two miles from the sea, Rajapur is at the head of a tidal creek and 20 km from the sea. Turning to the Indus river, the first major port there was Daybul, or Dewal, until Lahari Bandar took over in the late twelfth century, but there also was Thatta, which was nearly 200 km up river from the coast and was a major trade centre in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries at least.
Kolkata provides an excellent case study of the advantages and hazards of an estuarine or deltaic location. On the one hand, land transport in deltaic areas is very difficult. On the other, these lands are very fertile, being constantly replenished by floods. These lands were able to feed the city, and also grow the jute which was for long Kolkata's main export. Yet river navigation can be very difficult indeed, and their courses can move very often. Kolkata is about 80 miles from the sea, and has a tidal range of 22 feet. However, all these problems are outweighed by the advantage of a dense network of waterways giving access to the vast riparian hinterland. Hence through history, and long before Kolkata, there were major ports in this general area.24
In the locations of many of these port cities we have been seeing an interaction of geographical and human matters. Much of the time it is land influences which determine where a port is located. This explains the initially puzzling fact that many fine harbours have no ports, while many ports have miserable or no harbours. Again we have a caution against giving the sea and maritime matters too much agency. Gujarat in the sixteenth century provides an excellent case study. The area was incorporated into the major inland state, the Mughal empire, in 1572, and thus its hinterland was extended, and its ports were made responsive to the needs of the inner core of the empire, that is the Agra–Delhi doab region. The fate of the various ports in the Gulf of Cambay was also changed. Pre conquest, Cambay and its outer ports had been dominant, and the main route to the north went via Rajasthan, where hostile raiders were common and deserts were difficult to cross. After the conquest the main route to the north went east from Gujarat and then north to Agra. Traffic on this route passed through fertile lands, and the area was also much more closely controlled by the Mughal state and hence was safer. As a result Surat rose in importance, and Cambay fell.25
The locations the Portuguese chose for their main ports in the sixteenth century demonstrate the role of political and strategic factors. Many of them seemed on the face of it to be extremely unpromising. Hurmuz had to import all its water, and its climate was extreme. Mozambique Island similarly was extremely hot and unhealthy, and again had no local water. Aden yet again had a shocking climate, and was cut off from the surrounding country by mountains so that it also was nearly an island. Yet these ports fitted in with Portuguese strategic designs, and so they were taken, except Aden, and even prospered for a time.
Some centuries later Aden rose again when inefficient early steam ships needed to take on coal at short intervals. Aden was well located to be one such stop. The needs of the early steam ships influenced other ports also. In the early days when they gobbled up coal, it was of the essence that they load coal quickly, preferably from both sides at once. This meant that good natural harbours for a time did well, such as Galle and Albany. But as steam ships became more efficient and needed less coal, and then ships converted to oil, other political factors came into play and these ports declined.
They were replaced by ports which met different needs, even if they had few natural advantages. Fremantle, located adjacent to the capital of Western Australia, and closer to the areas producing exports and needing imports, was built up at considerable expense in the late nineteenth century, although Albany had by far the better harbour. Yet even after this decision political matters continued to influence what happened. Fremantle was still subject to the vagaries of local politics. Labour relations were usually appalling, leading to frequent strikes. For decades wooden piles were used to build new wharves, even though they rotted very quickly: the state government wanted to protect the local timber industry.
Most of the great ports of British India were located according to economic and political factors, not whether or not they had good harbours. Kolkata is an obvious example, keeping in mind the appalling difficulties of getting from the sea to the docks. Similarly Mumbai had a much better harbour than Surat, yet took over a century to displace it, and really only rose once the British built rails to the interior to provide it with an hinterland. There is an excellent harbour there to be sure, but building the city was a difficult task. The city was built on what was seven islands, separated at high tides, but joined by mud flats at low tide. Essentially the history of the city was a history of reclamation; the city was invented from marshes, salt flats, isolated islands, even open sea. Indeed one version is that Mumbai was created long ago by coconut palms, which grew on small islands. As they shed leaves into the shallow sea they extended the area of the land. Once the palms were exploited for their coconuts, people began to fertilise them with fish meal. In short, Mumbai is built on coconut leaves and rotten fish.26
Chennai also shows the primacy of politics over geography. For all of the nineteenth century it had no decent harbour and was a very difficult place to load and unload. Nevertheless, it suited the economic and political needs of the British rulers. Mrs Graham in 1810 well described the hazardous nature of getting ashore:
A friend who, from the beach, had seen our ship coming in, obligingly sent the accommodation boat for us, and I soon discovered its use. While I was observing its structure and its rowers, they suddenly set up a song, as they called it, but I do not know that I ever heard so wild and plaintive a cry. We were getting into the surf; the cockswain now stood up, and with his voice and his foot kept time vehemently, while the men worked their oars backwards, till a violent surf came, struck the boat, and carried it along with a frightful violence; then every oar was plied to prevent the wave from taking us back as it receded, and this was repeated five or six times, the song of the boatmen rising and falling with the waves, till we were dashed high and dry upon the beach.27
Nor was it only the ports of British India. Goa was the central port for the Portuguese from 1510, and it seems that as ships got bigger the estuary of the Mandovi, leading to Panaji and Old Goa, became too dangerous. However, as the capital of the Estado da India, Goa obviously had to be kept. Isabel Burton left a harrowing account of arriving and leaving from this port in April and May 1876. She and her husband Richard were in a steamer coming down from Mumbai. It let them off far off the mouth of the river, and they had eight miles in a row boat to reach Panaji. A little later, getting back on a steamer for Mumbai was an equally dangerous experience. They were told to reach the steamer at midnight. They set off in a large open boat with four rowers:
We rowed down the river and then the bay for three hours against wind and tide, bow on to the heavy rollers, and at last reached the mouth of the bay [that is, the mouth of the Mandovi river], where is the fort. We remained bobbing about in the open sea in the trough of great waves for a considerable time. A violent storm of rain, thunder, and lightning came on . . .
so they went back to the fort to take shelter. On finally hearing the gun of the steamer, they set off again and reached the steamer after an hour, and then had a hazardous time getting on board it.28
A similar impact of colonial needs was seen in East Africa, again then showing the impact of political decisions on the fate of port cities. In earlier times the sheltered river mouths or estuaries were accessible through the coral, as the rivers' discharges affect coral growth and create gaps in the reef for ships to enter. Once steam ships arrived bigger harbours were needed, and Mombasa replaced all the others as only it had a reasonable harbour. But even in Mombasa economic changes dictated changes in the port. The old dhow harbour was incapable of taking larger ships, and was replaced by the new Kilindini harbour on the other side of the island.
Sri Lanka again bears out the dominant influence of land matters over maritime ones, that is that again a good harbour does not necessarily create an important port. At one time Galle was the main port for Sri Lanka, but in the later nineteenth century Colombo was better placed to serve the plantations inland, and so a viable port was created at vast expense. For that matter, Trincomalee had a much better harbour, but its location, in the wrong place to service through-traffic crossing the Indian Ocean, dictated that it never flourish.
The Red Sea also shows how ports are often located on intrinsically hostile shores simply because this location is determined by inland needs. Suez was located to service through-traffic from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, both before and after the opening of the Suez Canal. Isabel Burton in 1876 wrote that 'Suez is a most inaccessible place, and steamers anchor in the bay, an hour's steam from the town, and much more by sail; if you leave your steamer, and if there is a contrary wind you can never be sure of getting back to it.' Nor did things improve as her ship went down the Red Sea. Jiddah if anything was worse, yet was essential as the disembarkation place for pilgrims bound for nearby Mecca, and as the hinge connecting the northern and southern reaches of the Red Sea.
I never could have imagined such an approach to any town. For twenty miles it is protected by nature's breakwaters – lines of low, flat reefs, huge slabs of madrepore and coralline that cut like a knife, barely covered, and not visible till you are close upon them; there is no mark or lighthouse, save two little white posts, which you might mistake for a couple of good sized gulls; in and out of these you wind like a serpent; there is barely passage for one ship between them, and no pilot will attempt it, save in broad daylight...
and in fact her ship did collide with another when they finally reached the open roadstead.29
Port cities by definition are located on water, whether it be a river, a lake, an estuary, a delta, a harbour or an open coast. Yet not all maritime people, people of the sea, are in port cities. We can now consider the more general matter of coastal or littoral society. One focus here will be fisherfolk, and a discussion of them will segue easily into a concluding description of the most truly maritime people of all, those who actually live on the water.
We can first consider the very narrow strip where the tide has an effect, what Winton called 'the distinct ink line where the water meets the shore – the ever-contested margin of high water.'30 As Lencek put it rather melodramatically: 'it was on the borders of continents and islands that the first living creatures crawled out from the sea to begin their inexorable march toward conquest of terra firma.' Here the ressac notion is even more compelling and appropriate than in our earlier discussions, at least in part because the term itself comes from geography. Again Lencek puts it well: 'one cannot help being intrigued by the face-off between land and water... Here, two titanic forces – one stationary and one in motion – engage in eternal dispute.'31 Dakin says the seashore is 'that narrow strip of land over which the ocean waves and the moon-powered tides are masters – that margin of territory that remains wild despite the proximity of cities or of land surfaces modified by industry.' It is a magic place: 'one of the most delightful and exciting areas of the earth's surface – the seashore, that marginal strip where the sea meets the land, and which is covered and uncovered by the tides. From the dark ocean abysses to the mountain-tops, from the desert to the luxuriant jungle there is no place with more variety and flexibility of life than where the tides ebb and flow.'32
This narrow strip, the quintessential littoral, is constantly changing. Sand dunes move back and forth, rocks are exposed and then submerged, the sea itself is always changing and moving. The littoral is always fluctuating, moving, changing, advancing and retreating. Standing on the edge of the surf, with your ankles in the water, you are precisely where land and sea meet. How pleasant this is, even more so with rod in hand.
What we have here is ambiguity, lack of definition and boundaries, a zone where land and sea intertwine and merge, really the fungibility of land and sea. Emily Eden looked at the Sunderbunds down from Kolkata in 1837 when she was travelling on a 'flat' or large barge towed by a steamer. The scene she saw was 'a composition of low stunted trees, marsh, tigers and snakes, with a stream that sometimes looks like a very wide lake and then becomes so narrow that the jungle wood scrapes against the sides of the flat'. Then she reflected, very acutely, that 'It looks as if this bit of world had been left unfinished when land and sea were originally parted.'33
We have been describing the beach, the area where land and sea meet. Humans are rather different here than are other species. 'Beaches are beginnings and endings. They are frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange'.34
The question is whether we can see people who live on the littoral as making up a distinctive society, one that can be separated from those further inland. And if so, can we find any commonality in littoral society all around the far flung shores of the Indian Ocean? Does location on the shore transcend differing influences from an inland which is very diverse, both in geographic and cultural terms, so that the shorefolk have more in common with other shorefolk thousands of kilometres away on some other shore of the ocean, than they do with those in their immediate hinterland?
Littoral society is usually considered to be the same as coastal society. Heesterman stresses that it is transitional, permeable: 'The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.'35 Braudel wrote evocatively about coastal society, stressing that it was as much land as sea oriented. The life of the coast of the Mediterranean
is linked to the land, its poetry more than half-rural, its sailors may turn peasant with the seasons; it is the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the round-ships of merchants, and its history can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.36
Several modern scholars have ruminated on the nature of the shore folk of the Indian Ocean. Middleton focused on the East African coast.
Part of the coast is the sea: the two cannot be separated. The Swahili are a maritime people and the stretches of lagoon, creek, and open sea beyond the reefs are as much part of their environment as are the coastlands. The sea, rivers, and lagoons are not merely stretches of water but highly productive food resources, divided into territories that are owned by families and protected by spirits just as are stretches of land. The Swahili use the sea as though it were a network of roads.37
We may note here that the very term 'Swahili' means 'shore folk', those who live on the edge of the ocean. As Pouwels has it, Swahili culture was 'a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly African nor "Arab," but distinctly "coastal", the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.'38
Islands are perhaps where we are most likely to find littoral societies, for one would expect to find here more concentrated mixings from various cultural influences. Indeed, on smaller ones there would be nothing but coastal people, for the sea would permeate the whole area. The Seychelles, the Andamans and Nicobar Islands, tiny fragments of land in the ocean, are purely littoral. Similarly, islands in the rivers can be seen as making up small littoral societies all their own, even far 'inland'. The Zambezi system had many islands, as also did other river basins and deltas: the Hugli, the Ganga, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Irrawaddy and so on.
Despite all these general statements, the precise elements of commonality of littoral society have not yet been adequately worked out. We could look at food, obviously largely derived from the sea, even if some fisherfolk prefer to trade some of their catch for cereals. Houses are usually different from those inland. As one would expect, locally available materials are usually employed. For much of the coast this means that palm trees are used to provide a housing structure, and a thatched roof. In some areas however coral is available; on the Swahili coast it is widely employed as a building material. Jacques Cousteau in fact found it to be of universal utility in the Maldives. It was used to construct the landing strip and the houses, and even the beaches were pulverised coral, not sand. 'Everywhere we saw tiny cemeteries under palm clusters. The tombs themselves, crosses and all, were made of coral. Everything here is bound up with the sea, even life and death.'39
The whole rhythm of coastal life is geared to the monsoons. Ship styles historically were relatively uniform, as we will describe in detail in the next chapter. Certainly, as we have noted, littoral society is much more cosmopolitan than are parochial inland people for, at the great ports which constitute the nodes of the littoral, traders and travellers from all over the ocean, and far beyond, were to be found. This characteristic of cosmopolitanism produced another element of unity. Certain languages achieved wide currency, such as Arabic in the earlier centuries. There are some 5,000 words of Arabic influence in Malay, and more than that in Swahili, and about 80 per cent of these are the same, that is in Malay and Swahili, so that we have a 'corpus of travelling Arabic words'.40Freeman-Grenville tried to find links and commonalties between Swahili and the language of the Sidis of Sind.41 Later a sort of nautical Portuguese, and today some variant of English, have achieved a similar quasi-universal status.
Folk religion on the littoral similarly is to be distinguished from inland manifestations. The concerns of coastal people were usually quite different from those of peasants and pastoralists inland. On the coast religion had to do with customs to ensure safe voyages, or a favourable monsoon. Particular gods were propitiated for these purposes. Specifically maritime ceremonies marked the beginning and end of voyages.
A particular west coast Indian rite celebrates the end of the southwest monsoon and so the beginning of the sailing year. The always quotable and always acerbic Dr John Fryer noted this in Mumbai in the 1670s: 'After this Full Moon, the Banyans, assisted by their Brachmins, go in Procession to the Sea-shore, and offer Cocoe Nuts to Neptune, that he would restore them their Mare Pacificum; when they make Preparations to go to Sea, and about their Business of Trade.'42 Ovington in Mumbai at about the same time wrote that
the Bannians endeavour to appease the incensed Ocean by offerings to its inraged Waves, and in great plenty throw their gilded Coco-nuts into the Sea to pacify its storms and Fury, and render it peaceable and calm. And after these Ceremonious Oblations are past, the Oraculous Bramins declare safety to the Ships that will venture upon the Ocean, before which not one of them will offer to weigh Anchor
and similarly in the Maldives, in Goa and in Mumbai.43
Dr Varadarajan's ethnographic work in Gujarat has found rather similar things happening today, though based on very old traditions. Her account makes clear that littoral location, and occupation, transcend religion. On the 'narial prunima' day both Hindus and Muslims take part in ceremonies when the forces governing the sea are worshipped, and boats are symbolically taken out to mark the beginning of the season. Rites are conducted by the community rather than the temple priest. 'As the ritual is so intimately connected with their vocational life, all seafaring folk come together to celebrate this day coalescing religious heterogeneity through group participation.' The god Darya Lall is worshipped under various names by different communities, both Muslim and Hindu. His protection is invoked to avoid peril at sea, but formal thanksgiving occurs on safe return to land. Hindus observe vows on the second day of the bright half of every month by passing water through a sieve. Muslims wade into the sea with votive offerings on any convenient day, and allow the sea to carry their gifts. The third important saint or god is Khizr Pir, the immortal one, invoked in times of distress at sea by both Muslims and Hindus. At Porbander there is a shrine dedicated to him, and at the start of the season boats salute this shrine as they leave. There is also a saint called Shah Murad Bukhari. When his grave covers are replaced they make pennants from the discarded cloth. These relics are hoisted in times of danger at sea so that the saint will save them: again both Muslims and Hindus do this. In general 'occupational hazards to which they are exposed cut across religious differences.'44
Setting out and returning are obvious times to celebrate and propitiate. Qaisar found this in the seventeenth century. When a ship departed those on board may sip holy water, and offer curd, milk, rice, coconuts and garlands to the sea. Seafarers also printed auspicious palm prints over the vessels, especially on the seams. Sometimes an oculus was painted on the ship's bows, this being based on a very ancient Egyptian practice. Carrying bodies was considered to bring bad luck, so they had to be hidden. He also notes the importance of Khwaja Khizr, the guardian of the sea, whom we just met as the present day Khizr Pir. He could be relied on to answer an appeal for help from a traveller in distress. He is the patron saint of sailors, is omnipresent and has eternal life.45
In Goa in the late sixteenth century we again find specific rites geared to the needs of those who go to sea. 'When they will make a voyage to the sea, they use at the least fourteene days before [they enter into their ships] to make so great a noyse with sounding of Trumpets, and to make fiers, that it may be heard both by night and day; the ship being hanged about with flaggers wherewith [they say] they feast their Pagode, that they may have a good voyage. The like do they at their returne for a thanksgiving fourteen days long'.46 In Goa today fishing boats are named after saints, and the owners and crew make offerings to the relevant saint on his or her feast day.
However this in turn raises other questions and problems: remembering our past distinction between people on the sea and people of the sea, can we assume that littoral people are necessarily of the sea? We can look particularly at fisherfolk. 'For the fisherman and the sailor, water is life and death, sustenance and menace; it eats away the wood of the ship just as it does the life of a man who ventures out on the treacherous, bitter sea, putting his trust in the fragile board his foot stands on'.47
Fisherfolk are different from peasants. Their catches usually depend on chance, not on wise husbandry. Certainly fishing is more dangerous than cultivating land, but we should remember that the further out one fishes the more dangerous it gets. In far offshore fishing it is not so much individualism which is created, but rather a necessary stress on cooperation. While it is true that gender divisions are more important than in peasant societies, this also is significant in terms of our current discussion of land and sea. Essentially a fishing family links land and sea, with the woman on the former, the man on the latter. Indeed, women may not only do the cleaning and processing and marketing, they may well cultivate land as well. The fishing family, whether extended or nuclear, has the possibility of exploiting both land and sea, while peasants have only the former option. Yet this exploitation differs dramatically between land and sea, for unlike agriculture fishing is a purely exploitative activity; as Dakin says, 'man is always taking away life from the sea – he neither sows nor fertilises the waters; only reaps.'48
All this said, and while there is no doubt that fisherfolk are of the sea, not on it, the fact remains that they live as much on land as on sea, and fishing activities are crucially dependent on land matters: middle men, markets, processing plants. If we were to try to construct a continuum of dependence on the sea, we would have peasants and pastoralists at one end, then maybe various gradations of the inhabitants of the port cities, then fisherfolk, and finally the truly and purely maritime people, to whom we now turn. We have frequently stressed the dominance of land over sea, but just for a while we can turn to people who are by definition exceptional. These people are people of the sea, and unlike all others on the shore they are not amphibious: their lives are spent on or in the water.
Some such people are simply sailors who sail for a long time, so long that they may lose their land ties. We have an account of the merchants of the great port of Siraf around 1000. Some of them travelled so much that they were away at sea all their lives. The contemporary account goes on:
I was told of one man of Siraf who was so accustomed to the sea that for nearly forty years he did not leave his ship. When he came to land he sent his associates ashore to look after his business in all the towns, and he crossed over from his boat to another, when the vessel was damaged and needed to be repaired.49
Yet such people must have been uncommon. For most sailors in the Indian Ocean the monsoon regime meant that there was considerable 'down time', as they waited for the change in the winds, and this time would be spent in port.
The best studied truly aquatic people today are the famous Marsh Arabs of the Tigris-Euphrates delta, occupying the vast palustral triangle between An-Nasiriyah, Al-'Amarah, and Basra. The classic account is by the colourful and somewhat anachronistic Wilfred Thesiger. He lived in the marshes off and on from 1951 to 1958, and loved it despite the mosquitos, snakes, very large wild pigs (some the size of a donkey, weighing over 300 lbs), fleas, and flooding each year. The area was also riddled with disease: dysentery was endemic, also bilharzia, yaws, hookworm, eye infections, and tuberculosis. He spent so much time with them because
They were cheerful and friendly and I liked the look of them. Their way of life, as yet little affected by the outside world, was unique and the Marshes themselves were beautiful. Here, thank God, was no sign of that drab modernity which, in its uniform of second-hand European clothes, was spreading like a blight across the rest of Iraq.50
This was a totally aquatic society. 'The ground looked solid but felt very soggy. Actually it consisted of a layer of roots and decomposed vegetation floating on the surface.' Some of the islands were only a few square yards, others an acre, some tethered, some floating about.51 The houses were built on these reed platforms floating on the water, and all transport was in boats, usually very small. As Thor Heyerdahl noted, 'A Marsh Arab can rarely walk more than a couple of steps before he has to enter his canoe.'52When it floods they just add a few more layers of reeds on the floors of their houses so they can keep dry. Once Thesiger was treating patients, and there were so many of them that 'the weight of my patients submerged the floor. I finished treating them ankle-deep in water. My host assured me that it did not matter, but nevertheless he seemed relieved when I moved on.'53
This way of life goes back perhaps 5,000 years. Yet even when Thesiger was there in the 1950s the oil boom in Iraq had begun, and many Madan, as the Marsh Arabs call themselves, had moved off to Basra and Baghdad in search of fortune. As he noted: 'Soon the marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear.'54 Gavin Young was a bit of a protégé of Thesiger, and first visited the marshes with him. He spent a considerable time there in the early 1970s, but by then things had already changed dramatically. There was a tourist invasion, with guests living in floating house boats or government guest houses or tourist bungalows, and people got about in motor launches rather than canoes.55 Much marsh land was being reclaimed for rice cultivation, and there were even then schemes to control the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates and so reduce further the size of the marshes, or even drain them completely. Since Young's time this process has continued; Saddam Hussein may have the political aim of ending the marsh sanctuary of his Shia political opponents, but in any case the marshes would be doomed regardless of who ruled in Baghdad.
Tourists have invaded other aquatic areas also, such as the backwaters of Kerala in southwest India. These lie behind a coastal sand spit, and again their inhabitants can be seen as moving beyond amphibious to aquatic. The area consists of narrow strips of land, with flooded rice paddies all around. The men fish: indeed when Frater was travelling along them in 1987 he was surprised to see heads sticking up out of the water. These were the bottom walkers, who trawl by hand, walking along the bottom of the shallow waters.56 The women work in the neighbouring paddy fields, and indeed many of the paddy fields are reclaimed to make islands. Some islands are substantial with stone levees or dykes, locally called bands. Others are less substantial, having only earthen bands which can collapse, especially during the monsoon. Transport and commerce, and getting to school, is by water, mostly in tiny dugouts.
A Dutchman in 1689 left us an enchanting picture of this society:
So pleasing that it is really worth seeing how nicely the embankment on all sides has been divided into small and some large village-plots by trees and houses, and how everywhere around these villages there are beautiful large and small islands, planted with grain, as far as the eye can gaze. Everything looks so pretty and green that every view pleases the heart and every time, through the beautiful tincture and perspective, the sight is equally enjoyable. And not least pleasing are the many small dikes, galley and other creeks, the cattle grazing here and there, fences of long reed around the houses and mats very finely braided. Many different kind of crafts from one piece of wood float to and fro, some only one fathom long, in which men are standing upright, carrying some goods.57
Today many of the rice boats which for centuries have moved large cargoes of rice around the region have been converted into luxury house boats for western tourists and Indian yuppies and dot.com millionaires.
In other places we find floating markets, extremely venerable, yet today also tourist attractions. The Bangkok one is a compulsory sight for any visitor. Long before this, in 1833 an American traveller had some perceptive comments to make. He had come up river from the mouth, and reached the town:
We now threaded our way among junks, boats and floating houses, jumbled together in glorious confusion, and totally concealing the banks from our view. Hundreds of small canoes, some not larger than clothes-baskets, were passing to and fro, many of them containing talapoins or priests, paddling lazily from house to house, collecting presents of provisions. The occupants of the floating houses were taking down the shutters which formed the fronts, exposing their wares for sale: printed calicoes, paper-umbrellas, sweet-meats, fruits, pots, pans, etc being placed in situations the best calculated to attract the notice of the passers-by. This occupation was carried on entirely by the women, the men being either seated on the platforms smoking their segars, or making preparations to take a cruise in their canoes.
Later he noted that:
The best shops are built on wooden floats on the river; indeed when the waters are out, they flood the whole town, the only communication between the different dwellings being by means of boats. At this period of the year, when the river becomes swelled by the rains, whole streets of floating houses, together with their inhabitants, sometimes break adrift from their moorings, and are carried down the river, to the utter confusion of the shipping. These floating streets, nevertheless, possess their advantages. A troublesome neighbour may be ejected, house, family, pots and pans, and all, and sent floating away to find another site for his habitation. A tradesman, too, if he finds an opposition shop taking away his custom, can remove to another spot with very little difficulty.58
It is tempting to see these people as typical maritime folk, but better simply to locate them at one end of a continuum which goes from totally landed to totally seabound. And indeed the careful reader will have noticed that not even all these people are purely aquatic. Most people located in the countries around the Indian Ocean, even on its shores, were not and are not in any true sense maritime people. Location is not the only signifier; one can live with the sound of surf in one's ears and not be maritime, one can even travel by water and still not be aquatic. Take the priests at the Vivekenanda temple on an island just off Kanya Kumari in the extreme southern tip of India. They travel frequently by water to the mainland, but are in no sense maritime. Nor are the pilgrims that the priests serve. How complicated it can get: what, for example, of female fisherfolk, who never go to sea yet exist to service those who do and to market their product?
Indeed, one could take this further and claim that by and large events at sea are not very significant. Braudel wrote of the famous battle of Lepanto in 1571: 'All one can say is that after all Lepanto was only a naval victory and that in this maritime world surrounded and barred by land-masses, such an encounter could not destroy Turkey's roots, which went deep into the continental interior.'59 Battles at sea are far less sanguinary and destructive than those on land. Armies on the land kill many people including non-combatants, especially in this century, and destroy crops and infrastructure. All naval battles do is kill a few sailors. It has been claimed that the decline of landed empires affects port cities and sea trade detrimentally, something we will have to examine later. But no one would claim that losses at sea affect production on the land. Maritime empires can take part in, and even try to control, trade, but land empires can control production – a very important difference.
Normative statements in both Hindu and Muslim cultures reflect a profound hostility to or distrust of the sea. The Manusmriti imposes penalties for anyone who would dare to cross the Black Water. While it is true that some Hindus travelled by sea anyway, it is obviously significant that Indian coastal traders and fisherfolk are usually from lower castes. As for Muslims, aphorisms abound. 'Merchants who travel by sea are like silly worms clinging to logs.' 'Wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of kings.' And the Caliph Umar was advised that
The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm, the sailor's heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death.60
Yet Muslims overwhelmingly ignored these warnings and played a dominant role in Indian Ocean trade for a millennium.
An experienced captain once said 'I love going to sea. I do not love the sea out there. That is not my friend. That is my absolute 24-hour-a-day sworn enemy.'61 Dr Johnson predictably had something oratorical to say on the matter: 'Why, sir, no man will be a sailor, who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for, being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.'62 However, Dr Johnson was a rare man among the English, for he was a landlubber. He was born in Lichfield, one of the few cities in England more than 100 miles by road from the coast and was 52 before he saw the sea. Most Englishmen did have some sea knowledge or even experience, as Conrad pointed out as he began his story Youth, 'This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak – the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.'63
More soberly, we can ask how many people actually make a living from the sea, or work in occupations connected with it. This could become a very large discussion indeed, but I will merely point out that the Indian censuses of 1891, and 1901 demonstrate that the numbers engaged in anything to do with the sea are infinitesimal as compared with agriculture. In 1891 61 per cent of the Indian population were identified as being in 'Pasture and Agriculture', while the total from even a very generously defined maritime category is still well under 1 per cent. The figures for 1901 are similar.
As is only appropriate, we will give Braudel the last word. He ended his classic work with these words:
the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly a world of peasants, of tenant farmers and landowners: crops and harvest were the vital matters of this world and anything else was superstructure, the result of accumulation and of unnatural diversion towards the towns. Peasants and crops, in other words food supplies and the size of the population, silently determined the destiny of the age. In both the long and the short term, agricultural life was all-important. Could it support the burden of increasing population and the luxury of the urban civilization so dazzling that it has blinded us to other things? For each succeeding generation this was the pressing problem of every day. Beside it, the rest seems to dwindle into insignificance.64