The Indian Ocean (25 page)

There was accompanying us in the vessel a pilgrim [who] knew the Qur'an by heart and could write excellently. When he saw the storminess of the sea, he wrapped his head in a mantle that he had and pretended to sleep. When God gave us relief from what had befallen us, I said to him 'O Mawlana Khidr, what kind of thing did you see?' He replied 'When the storm came I kept my eyes open, watching to see whether the angels who receive men's souls had come. As I could not see them, I said 'Praise be to God. If any of us were to be drowned, they would come to take the souls.' Then I would close my eyes and after a while open them again, to watch in the same manner, until God relieved us.
151

In 1444 Abd-er-Razzak was troubled at the prospect of travelling by sea from Honavar (Onor) to Hurmuz, but then he came across a Quranic passage which read, 'Fear nothing, for thou hast been preserved from the hand of unjust men.' He took this as a good omen, though nevertheless he had a terrible 65 day passage from Honavar to Hurmuz. His ship ran into a violent storm once it reached the open ocean, and he called on divine intercession to save him and his fellows. His account, even in translation, is full of Islamic images and metaphors. It is a stunning depiction by a landlubber of a storm at sea, rivalling, in my opinion, the best accounts in European literature, including those by Conrad.

On a sudden there arose a violent wind on the surface of the sea, and on all sides were heard groaning and cries. The night, the vessel, the wind, and the gulf, presented to our minds all the forebodings of a catastrophe. On a sudden, through the effect of the contrary winds, which resembled men in their drink, the wine which produced this change penetrated even to the vessel. The planks of which it was composed, and which by their conformation seemed to form a continuous line, were on the point of becoming divided like the separate letters of the alphabet. . . . The sailor, who, with regard to his skill in swimming, might be compared to a fish, was anxious to throw himself into the water like an anchor. The captain, although familiarised with the navigation of all the seas, shed bitter tears, and had forgotten all his science. The sails were torn, the mast was entirely bent by the shock of the wind. The different grades of passengers who inhabited this floating house threw out upon the waves riches of great value, and, after the manner of the Sufis, voluntarily stripped themselves
of their worldly goods. Who could give a thought to the jeopardy in which their money and their stuffs were placed, when life itself, which is so dear to man, was in danger? For myself, in this situation, which brought before my eyes all the threatening terrors which the ocean had in its power to present, with tears in my eyes I gave myself up for lost. Through the effect of the stupor, and of the profound sadness to which I became prey, I remained, like the sea, with my lips dry and my eyes moist, and resigned myself entirely to the Divine Will. At one time, through the driving of the waves, which resembled mountains, the vessel was lifted up to the skies; at another, under the impulse of the violent winds, it descended like divers to the bottom of the waters.

He prayed hard, and reflected on his fate.

I was in the middle of these reflections, and everything about me spoke of dejection and trouble, when at length, by virtue of that Divine promise: 'Who is He who hears the prayers of the afflicted, and drives away his misery?' [Quran, s. 27, verse 63] on a sudden, the zephyr of God's infinite mercy began to blow upon me.... The morning of joy began to dawn from the East of happiness.... The impetuous hurricane was changed to a favourable wind, the tossing of the waves ceased, and the seas, in conformity with my desires, became completely calm.
152

We get only glimpses of what it was really like travelling by sea at this time. Many of the accounts we do have, such as some of those just quoted in the discussion of 'superstition', are about the dangers of life at sea, for as one would expect these impacted decisively on landlubbers. Given the large role of Muslims in trade at this time, many accounts are from Muslim men travelling to trade, or for fun. There is a large and fabulous Islamic travel literature.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
, from the time when the Abbasid empire was at its height, is best known, but there is also Buzurg's collection from the tenth century, with copious tall stories featuring giant whales, mermaids, islands with only women, a snake that ate an elephant, as so on. Sindbad is equally fabulous and exciting, but he does at least provide an evocative explanation for why people wanted to travel. He was constantly prompted to leave a secure and mundane life ashore and head off for adventure and profit. 'I was living a life of unexampled pleasure [in Baghdad] when, one day, the old desire entered my head to visit far countries and strange people, to voyage among the isles and curiously regard things hitherto unknown to me; also, the trading habit rose in me again.' This happens to explain the start of each voyage. For example, concerning the beginning of his sixth voyage:

I was sitting one day taking the air before my door and feeling as happy as I had ever felt, when I saw a group of merchants passing in the street, who
had every appearance of returned travellers. This sight recalled to me how joyful a thing it is to return from journeying, to see the birth land after far voyage, and the thought made me want to travel again. I equipped myself with merchandise of price, suitable for the sea, and left the city of Baghdad for Basrah. There I found a great ship filled with merchants and notables as well provided with goods for trading as myself, so I had my bales carried on board, and soon we peacefully set sail from Basrah.
153

Many Muslims travelled by sea to fulfil their pious obligation to perform the hajj. Ibn Jubayr was merely going across the Red Sea, from 'Aydhab to Jiddah, yet he had a horror voyage, one which, given the notorious difficulty of navigation in these treacherous waters, was probably not that unusual. It took eight days to cover a distance, as the crow flies, of about 300 km.

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....
154

We quoted above Abd-er-Razzak's account of a storm in 1444, and how his prayers saved the ship. This occurred on his return voyage back to Hurmuz, but when he had set out from there in 1442 it was his first sea voyage, and he was already a bit apprehensive: 'The events, the perils, which accompany a voyage by sea (and which in themselves constitute a shoreless and a boundless ocean), present the most marked indication of the Divine omnipotence, the grandest evidence of the wisdom which is sublime.' His ship finally left from Hurmuz in May 1442, at the end of the monsoon, 'when tempests and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.' It was a terrible voyage. 'As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel, and all the terrors of the sea presented themselves before me, I fell into so deep a swoon, that for three days respiration alone indicated that life remained within me.' He need not have worried too much, as they had missed the season and they all got off at Muscat. Then he got sick, and finally had a good eighteen-day voyage to Calicut around September 1442. He recovered during the voyage:

In short, the air of the sea having become more salubrious, gave me the hope of a perfect cure; the morning of health began to dawn upon the longing of my hopes; the wounds caused by the sharp arrows of my malady began to heal, and the water of life, hitherto so troubled, recovered its purity and transparency. Before long a favourable breeze began to blow, and the vessel floated over the surface of the water with the rapidity of the wind.
155

We can end this long chapter by returning one last time to our hero, Ibn Battuta. As a landlubber he left invaluable accounts of what it was like at this time. We have commented frequently on how his status as a prestigious scholar eased his passage, for everywhere he was accepted and patronised and helped by fellow Muslims. His
Rehla
also gives us evocative accounts of many different sorts of travel by water, and many different perils and pleasures, just as Abd-er-Razzack found too.

His maritime career began inauspiciously. In 1329 in Jiddah he embarked on a jalba (a small sewn craft) which belonged to a person from Abyssinia. A sharif wanted him to travel with him on another jalba, 'but I did not do so on account of there being a number of camels with him in his jalba, and I was frightened of this, never having travelled by sea before.' Later that year he tells us what he had to eat. He was near Oman on a small ship:

My food during those days on that ship was dried dates and fish. Every morning and evening [the sailors] used to catch fish. . . . They used to cut them in pieces, broil them, and give every person on the ship a portion, showing no preference to anyone over another, not even to the master of the vessel nor to any other, and they would eat them with dried dates. I had with me some bread and biscuit... and when these were exhausted I had to live on those fish with the rest of them.
156

Later he had good times and bad times at sea. Once he had a most luxurious trip with the governor of Lahari in Sind on the river of Sind. There were fifteen small ships to carry baggage and various retainers. Some were musicians and singers.

First the drums and trumpets would be sounded and then the musicians would sing, and they kept this up alternately from early morning to the hour of the midday meal. When this moment arrived the ships came together and closed up with one another and gangways were placed from one to the other. The musicians then came on board the governor's ahawra and sang until he finished eating, when they had their meal and at the end of it returned to their vessel.
157

Another voyage a few years later was a very different matter. In the mid 1340s he was shipwrecked off the Coromandel coast:

During the voyage a gale sprang up and our ship nearly took in water. We had no knowledgeable pilot on board. We came to some rocks on which the ship narrowly escaped being wrecked, and then into some shallows where the ship ran aground. We were face to face with death, and people jettisoned all that they had, and bade farewell to one another. We cut down the mast and threw it overboard, and the sailors made a wooden raft. We were then about two farsakhs from the shore. I was going to climb down to the raft, when my companions (for I had two slave-girls and two
of my companions with me) said to me: 'Are you going to go down and leave us?' So I put their safety before my own and said: 'You two go down and take with you the girl that I love.' The [other] girl said: 'I am a good swimmer and I shall hold on to one of the raft ropes and swim with them.' So both my companions... and the one girl went on the raft, the other girl swimming. The sailors tied ropes to the raft, and swam with their aid. I sent along with them all the things that I valued and the gems and ambergris, and they reached the shore in safety because the wind was in their favour. I myself stayed on the ship. The captain made his way ashore on the rudder. The sailors set to work to make four rafts, but night fell before they were completed, and the ship took in water. I climbed on the poop and stayed there until morning, when a party of infidels came out to us in a boat we went ashore with them to the coast of Ma'bar.
158

Ibn Battuta here showed a concern for his slave girls, and he wrote once of them that 'it is my habit never to travel without them.'
159
He is not however referring to the same two girls all the time, for he was, as Dunn puts it in his excellent reconstruction of his travels, 'a man with a long history of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in various parts of the Muslim world.'
160
He had a son to a Moroccan woman/wife in Damascus, who died age 10, a daughter to a slave girl in Bukhara, who died, a daughter in Delhi to a wife, another to a slave girl in Malabar, a son in the Maldives to a wife. Indeed, he 'married several women' in the Maldives. He pointed out that 'Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.'
161
Given that he usually travelled with at least one slave girl, we can only assume his progeny were scattered all over the shores of the Indian Ocean and beyond.

In this matter he was not unusual, and we may assume that not only Muslim travellers had 'wives in every port'. Vincent Le Blanc was impressed with the system he found in Cambay (see page 98). Yet it has been found in the Muslim case much more than in other societies at this time. Some members of the crew that Alan Villiers sailed with had several wives in different places. One nakhoda from Sur had a son in Pemba, another in the Comoros, and a daughter from a secondary wife from the African interior.
162
The Muslim custom of allowing several 'legal' wives, and then the practice, in theory only Shiah but in fact done more widely, of muta, or temporary marriage, which really became part of customary law among travelling Muslims, made it much easier for Muslims to follow this maritime tradition. Ibn Battuta may have been more scrupulous in this matter, for in the Maldives at least he divorced his wives before he left.