Journey
Indian port cities — the coast itself
The Indian Ocean rim seen from the Indian shore alone: nineteen harbours and two crafts running anticlockwise from the Gulf of Khambhat to the Ganges delta. Most of them were killed by their own rivers rather than by any rival, and the survivors are the ones that found deep water.
Stops (19)
- Bharuch (Barygaza) · Barygaza
The Narmada-mouth emporium of the Periplus, the greatest port of western India for six centuries, which sent pilots out in long boats to tow ships over the shoals of a dangerous tidal estuary. It exported cotton, agate, long pepper and ivory, and it is still a working river town. Ptolemy and the Periplus both fix its position precisely.
- Khambhat / Cambay · Cambay
The Gulf of Khambhat port that Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Barbosa all call western India's greatest market, shipping cotton, indigo and the agate and carnelian worked at Ratanpur inland. Its tidal bore and its silt finished it, and the trade moved south to Surat. Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Barbosa all describe the same port and none of them mentions its tides.
- Surat · Surat
The Mughal empire's western port and Hajj embarkation point, where the first English factory opened in 1613. Shivaji sacked it twice, the Company left for Bombay in 1687, the river silted, and a city of two hundred thousand became a district town — and, much later, the world's diamond-polishing centre.
- Beypore · Beypore
The Malabar port where the ocean-going uru is still built in Nilambur teak by Khalasi shipwrights working from experience rather than drawings. The hull is essentially the type the Periplus and the Geniza letters describe, and Gulf owners still order them. Nilambur teak went downriver to the yard, and the yard's Khalasi shipwrights are a hereditary guild whose measurements are not written down anywhere. Gulf owners still order urus from them by the hull.
- Kozhikode / Calicut · Calicut
The Zamorin's port, called at by Ibn Battuta, Abd al-Razzaq and Zheng He's fleets long before da Gama anchored off it in 1498. Its Mappila shipowners financed the pepper trade, and the Marakkar admirals fought the Portuguese out of its creeks for a century. Zheng He's fleets called here in the 1400s, half a century before any European ship did.
- Ponnani · Ponnani
The port at the Bharathappuzha mouth, both a harbour and the Makhdum family's Islamic college, whose jurists wrote the Tuhfat al-Mujahidin on the Portuguese wars. It is the clearest case in India of a port that exported scholarship on the same ships as pepper. The Makhdums also taught the Mappila jurists who served every Malabar port from Kannur to Kollam.
- Muziris / Pattanam · Muziris
The pepper port of the Periplus and Pliny, where Roman gold left the empire. Pattanam on the Periyar is the leading candidate for its site, with amphorae, Mediterranean glass and a wharf; the identification is strong but unsettled, which is why the repository marks it contested. The Muziris papyrus, a loan contract in Vienna, is the nearest thing to a bill of lading from this trade.
- Alappuzha · Alappuzha
The backwater port laid out in the 1760s by Travancore's minister Raja Kesavadas, with a canal grid cut inland so that coir, copra and pepper could be brought to a sea frontage that had no natural harbour. The coir industry it created is still the district's largest employer. It is still the busiest inland-waterway town in Kerala.
- Korkai · Korkai
The Pandya port on the Tamraparni that controlled the Gulf of Mannar pearl banks the Periplus, Pliny and the Arab geographers all single out. Roman coin and rouletted ware have been excavated here, and the fishery was worked continuously into the twentieth century. Pearl diving in the Gulf of Mannar was still being licensed by the Madras government in the 1920s.
- Kaveripattinam (Puhar) · Puhar
The Sangam-age Chola port of the Silappadikaram, with a foreign merchants' quarter the poems describe street by street, now largely under the sea. Its remains are worked as coastal marine archaeology, and the Chola fleets that reached Sumatra in 1025 sailed from this coast. The Silappadikaram describes its foreign quarter street by street, which no excavation can now check.
- Machilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar · Masulipatnam
The Golconda port through which Coromandel painted cottons reached Persia, Arabia, Burma and Java, holding Dutch, English and French factories at once. Bussy took it for France in 1751 and Forde stormed it in 1759, which transferred the Northern Circars to the Company. That transfer gave the Company the Northern Circars, which it then held until 1947.
- Coromandel chintz, Machilipatnam · chintz
The painted and resist-dyed cottons of the Coromandel, mordanted and madder-dyed so the colour survived washing — which European printers could not do. They reached Europe as chintz, were banned in France and England to protect local weavers, and were copied once the chemistry was understood. The word chintz is from chitta, spotted, and calico is from Calicut, so two English fabric names come from this coast.
- Balasore (Baleshwar) · Balasore
The Odisha roadstead that was Europe's first entrance to Bengal before the Hooghly was surveyed, with English, Danish, Dutch and French factories in one silting river mouth. Ships anchored miles offshore and lightered cargo in, which is why the trade eventually went upriver to Calcutta. The Danes reopened their factory here in 1763 under a Maratha farman and kept it until the 1845 sale to Britain.
- Sonargaon · Sonargaon
The old capital of eastern Bengal on the deltaic channels that took Dhaka and Sonargaon muslin to the Bay; Ibn Battuta sailed from here for Java in 1346. The Ganges shifted east and left it off the water, and Panam Nagar's street of merchant houses is what remains. Panam Nagar's street of merchant houses is what remains of it, standing in a field.
- Dhaka muslin · muslin
Dhaka muslin was spun from one Bengal cotton variety at counts no machine has matched, workable only in river humidity at dawn. Its named grades ran from running water to evening dew. Machine competition, Company procurement and the loss of the cotton strain ended it inside a century. Attempts to revive it since 2014 have had to rebreed the cotton first.
- Makli Necropolis, Thatta · Thatta
The Mughal port city of Sindh above the Indus delta, with its own school of tilework and half a million graves on the Makli ridge above it. The English had a factory here from 1635; the river moved, Karachi took the trade, and the cemetery is now larger than the town.
- Kavaratti / Lakshadweep · Lakshadweep
An island node in the middle of the Arabian Sea rather than a gap between Gujarat and Malabar. The Laccadives were held by the Ali Rajas of Cannanore and lived on coir rope and coconut — both shipping supplies, so the islands provisioned the trade that passed them. Coir rope does not rot in salt water, which made it a strategic commodity.
- Minicoy · Minicoy
The southernmost inhabited island of the group, Divehi-speaking and closer to the Maldives than to the mainland, sitting on the Nine Degree Channel between Malabar and Arabia. Its navigators crewed Arabian Sea vessels, and its language is the evidence that the sea joined rather than divided. Its four-tiered village council and Divehi script are unlike anything on the mainland coast.
- Mantai · Mantai
The pearl and cinnamon port at Lanka's northern tip, where Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea cargo was transhipped across the isthmus instead of being sailed around the island. Roman, Sasanian, Chinese and Islamic material turns up in the same excavated levels. The cargo was carried across the Jaffna isthmus by land, which is why two ports faced each other across a strait too shallow to sail. Both were fought over for two thousand years.