The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (42 page)

Ibn Battuta was so impressed with Chinese ships that he even rouses himself in the
Rihla
to offer a word or two about their nautical design. He was most interested, naturally, in the comforts they offered traveling notables like himself. The dhows of the western sea were only partially decked or not decked at all, and if some vessels had a rudimentary cabin or two, most of the passengers were expected to brave the elements the whole time they were at sea. Owing to bulkhead construction, which distributed weight evenly on the hull, ocean-going junks could support as many as five decks, as well as numerous enclosed cabins for the convenience of the more affluent passengers. Some of the rooms even had private lavatories, a convenience far superior to the little seat hooked over the side of a dhow. Fire-fighting equipment, steward service, lifeboats, and common rooms for the passengers added to the comfort and safety of a voyage across the eastern sea. Ibn Battuta, man of private pleasures that he was, informs us that

a good cabin has a door which can be bolted by the occupant, who may take with him his female slaves and women. Sometimes it so happens that a passenger is in the aforesaid residential quarters and nobody on board knows of him until he is met on arriving at a town.

He also claims that the crew of a sizable junk might number 1,000 men, counting both sailors and fighting marines. He may exaggerate, but within tolerable limits since Odoric of Pordenone, the Latin monk who traveled through South Asia earlier in the century, reports that he sailed out of Malabar on a junk with “seven hundred souls, what with sailors and merchants.”
¹³
Ibn Battuta says that in his time junks were built exclusively in the southern Chinese ports of Guangzhou (Canton) or Quanzhou
(Zaitun). Owing to the Yuan policy of encouraging foreign participation in the sea trade, however, the owners and captains of the ships, as well as the big merchants, were more often than not Muslims of Indian, Arab, or Persian descent.

Astonishing as they were in cargo capacity and technical efficiency, these “whales” of the sea, as the Chinese called them, could be simply too big and too rigid for their own safety if they chanced to blow into shallows or reef-infested waters. There was some truth in Ibn Battuta’s remark that “if a ship nailed together with iron nails collides with rocks, it would surely be wrecked; but a ship whose beams are sewn together with ropes is made wet and is not shattered.”

And so he discovered as his grand embassy to China was suddenly aborted in tragedy off Calicut harbor. What exactly happened the
Rihla
does not make entirely clear. As the day for the mission to embark arrived, probably sometime in Feburary 1342,
¹⁴
a minor difficulty arose over accommodations. Chinese merchants, it seems, had reserved in advance all the best cabins on the large junk the embassy was to board, and the Sultan of India’s ambassador was going to have to settle for a more modest room, one with no lavatory. Ibn Battuta had his luggage and entourage put aboard but then decided the following morning that the cabin was simply unsuitable and far too small. The ship’s agent, a Syrian gentleman, suggested that the best solution might be for the envoy and his personal retinue to travel on the
kakam
. This was a somewhat smaller junk-type vessel that would accompany the larger ship, but it had good cabins available.
¹⁵
Ibn Battuta thought this compromise was all right and so ordered his servants, concubines, personal friends, and belongings to be transferred. However, Zahir al-Din and Sumbul, the other officers of the mission, remained on the larger vessel along with the slaves, horses, and presents destined for Peking. Meanwhile Ibn Battuta spent the day in Calicut attending Friday prayer.

Then that evening a storm came up. Calicut harbor was not a deep, sheltered bay but a shallow roadstead. Recognizing the danger of riding at anchor close to shore, the captains of the junk, the
kakam
, and a third large vessel quickly put out to sea. Throughout the night Ibn Battuta waited helplessly on the beach and the next morning watched in horror as the two larger ships went aground in the shallows, broke up, and sank. Some of the passengers and crew on one of the junks were saved, but no one
survived on the vessel he himself was to have boarded the previous day. On Sunday morning the bodies of Zahir al-Din and Sumbul washed ashore, the one with his skull broken in, the other with an iron nail piercing his temples. The slaves, pages, and horses were all drowned, and the precious wares either sank or washed up on the beach, where the
zamorin
’s gendarmes struggled to prevent the townsfolk from making off with the loot. Meanwhile, the captain of the
kakam
steered his ship safely out to sea and, not wanting to risk entering the harbor again, sailed southward down the coast. On board were Ibn Battuta’s baggage, servants, and concubines, one of these women carrying her master’s child.

Alone on the Calicut shore, the lofty ambassador found himself suddenly reduced to the status of a penniless
faqih
. He had nothing to his name, save his prayer rug, the clothes on his back, and ten dinars an old yogi had given him. But for all that, he was fortunate to be alive. And it seems he still had the company of al-Tuzari and perhaps one or two other companions. Even more hopeful, there was still a chance of catching up with the
kakam
. The vessel, he was told, was almost certain to put in at the port of Quilon (Kawlam) 180 miles down the coast before sailing away from India altogether. So, hiring a Muslim porter to carry his carpet for him, he made his way to Quilon, traveling this time by riverine craft that plied the lagoons and interconnecting canals paralleling the southern Malabar shore.

After ten miserable days in the company of the porter, who turned out to be a quarrelsome drunkard, he arrived in the city, not to the applause of the local
raja
’s court, but to a modest reception in a Sufi hospice, the usual refuge of an anonymous wanderer. Much to his surprise his old associates, the Chinese envoys, turned up while he was there. They had left Calicut somewhat before the sea tragedy had occurred, but they had also barely escaped with their lives when their own ship ran aground. The Chinese merchants resident in Quilon helped them out with clothes and assistance and later sent them home on another junk. The forlorn ex-ambassador, however, waited in vain for his
kakam
to show up and after several hopless days in the Sufi lodge decided to move on.

But where indeed was he to go? “I wanted to return from Quilon to the sultan,” he remembers, “in order to tell him what had happened to the gifts. But I feared that he would condemn me, saying ‘Why did you separate yourself from the presents?’ ”
¹⁶
If the mission’s two other officials, together with the slaves, horses, and magnificent wares all went to the bottom of the sea, why was the Maghribi so shiftless in his duty that he failed to go down with them? Knowing well that his wish to travel in private comfort with his slave girls was hardly a convincing explanation for not boarding the junk, and perhaps imagining his head affixed to a pole or his skin stuffed with straw hanging from the wall of Jahanpanah palace, he concluded easily enough that, no, he would not return to Delhi. He did, however, need a patron to restore him to a position of dignity and perhaps give him a job while he waited for news of the
kakam
or figured out some new plan. The closest and most likely seigneur was Jamal al-Din Muhammad, the pious Sultan of Honavar and the only Muslim ruler on the southwestern coast of India.

Returning to Calicut, he found there a fleet of ships belonging to Muhammad Tughluq himself. They were
en route
to the Persian Gulf to recruit more Arab notables for service in the sultanate. Ibn Battuta struck up an acquaintance with the chief of the expedition, a former chamberlain in the Delhi government, who advised him to stay away from the capital but invited him to accompany the fleet as far up the coast as Honavar. Ibn Battuta gladly accepted the offer and sailed northward out of Calicut sometime around 1 April 1342.
¹⁷

If he expected Jamal al-Din of Honavar to elevate him at once to a high office on the strength of the imperial rank he had held the first time he visited the town, he was to be disappointed.

He quartered me in a house where I had no servant and directed me to say prayers with him. So I sat mostly in his mosque and used to read the Qur’an from beginning to end every day. Later on, I recited the whole Qur’an twice daily . . . I did this without a break for three months, of which I spent forty consecutive days in devotional seclusion.

While the Moroccan
faqih
quietly passed a steaming summer on the Kanara coast in a bout of spiritual renewal, Sultan Jamal al-Din busied himself plotting the violent overthrow of his neighbor, the
raja
of Sandapur. Wars between the little maritime states of the west coast do not appear to have occurred very often in medieval times. Conflict was terrible for trade, and in any case none of the petty princes had armies or fleets large enough to
sustain control over long stretches of the coast for indefinite periods of time. Yet a fortuitous opportunity to seize a neighboring port and milk its customs revenues might be too tempting to pass up. As the
Rihla
explains it, an internal struggle had broken out within the ruling family of Sandapur, a fine port located on an island in the estuary of a river about 90 miles north of Honavar. (In 1510 Sandapur would become Goa, capital of Portugal’s seaborne empire in Asia.
¹⁸
) A son of the
raja
of Sandapur, scheming to wrest the throne from his father, wrote a letter to Jamal al-Din, promising to embrace Islam if the sultan would intervene on his side in the quarrel. Once victory was achieved, the new
raja
would marry the sultan’s sister, sealing an alliance between the two towns. Forthwith, Jamal al-Din outfitted a war fleet of 52 ships, two of them built with open sterns to enable his cavalry to make a rapid amphibious assault on Sandapur beach.

Weary of inactivity and perhaps hoping to ingratiate himself with his patron by some more vigorous show of homage, Ibn Battuta had the idea of offering his services to the expedition. He claims that Jamal al-Din was so pleased with his proposal that he put him in charge of the campaign, though we may presume the office was more or less honorific. Preparations complete, the fleet set sail from Honavar on 12 October 1342.
¹⁹

On Monday evening we reached Sandapur and entered its creek and found the inhabitants ready for the fight. They had already set up catapults. So we spent the night near the town and when morning came drums were beaten, trumpets sounded and horns were blown, and the ships went forward. The inhabitants shot at them with the catapults, and I saw a stone hit some people standing near the sultan. The crews of the ships sprang into the water, shield and sword in hand . . . I myself leapt with all the rest into the water . . . We rushed forward sword in hand. The greater part of the heathens took refuge in the castle of their ruler. We set fire to it, whereupon they came out and we took them prisoner. The sultan pardoned them and returned them their wives and children . . . And he gave me a young female prisoner named Lemki whom I called Mubaraka. Her husband wished to ransom her but I refused.

Having acquitted himself well in this day-long holy war and even acquired part of the living spoils, Ibn Battuta remained at
Sandapur for about three months in the company of Jamal al-Din, who seems to have been in no hurry to turn the town over to his Hindu ally, the
raja
’s son. Then about the middle of January 1343
²⁰
Ibn Battuta decided to take leave of his patron and travel back down the coast in search of information on the fate of the
kakam
. On this trip he visited once again most of the ports he had seen the previous year, including Calicut, and spent “a long time,” perhaps a few months, in Shaliyat (Shalia), a famous Malabar weaving town.

Then, returning to Calicut, he came upon two of his own servants who had been aboard the
kakam
and had somehow made their way back to Malabar. The news was bad. The ship had sailed to the Bay of Bengal, apparently without stopping at Quilon, and after reaching Indonesia had been seized by an infidel ruler of Sumatra. The concubine who was carrying Ibn Battuta’s child had died, and the other slave girls, as well as his possessions, were in the hands of this king. The mystery of the
kakam
finally settled in more tragedy, he returned immediately to Sandapur, arriving there in June 1343.
²¹

However, any expectation he had of taking up an official career in the service of Jamal al-Din soon ended in yet another disaster. Sometime in August the deposed
raja
of Sandapur, who had escaped at the time of the invasion, suddenly reappeared with a Hindu force, rallied the peasants of the hinterland, and laid siege to the town. Most of Jamal al-Din’s troops, apparently unaware of an impending attack, were scattered in the surrounding villages and could not get back into the city to defend it. Having attached himself to Jamal al-Din in victory, Ibn Battuta saw no reason to stick by him in defeat, a point of view in the best tradition of Muslim public men, for whom loyalty to one sultan or another was of no great importance. In the thick of the assault, he somehow managed to get past the siege line and headed down the coast again, perhaps this time by land. In a few weeks he reached Calicut, entering that city now for the fifth time.
²²

Sometime during the months following the Calicut tragedy, he decided to try to visit China on his own. His prospects for a career on the west coast of India were no longer encouraging, he could not return to Delhi, and he had no immediate urge to make another pilgrimage to Mecca. Moreover, he knew that he could find hospitality among the Muslim maritime communities all along the sea routes to the South China coast. He even had a potential
entrée to the Yuan government through the 15 Chinese diplomats, who were presumably then on their way home. His plan would be to make a brief tour of the Maldive Islands (“of which I had heard a lot”), continue to Ceylon to see the famous religious shrine of Adam’s Peak, then cross over to the southeastern coast of India to visit the Sultanate of Ma’bar, whose ruler was married to a sister of Hurnasab, the ex-wife Ibn Battuta had left back in Delhi. From there he would go on to Bengal, Malaysia, and China.