Journey
The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
The only ocean with a wind that reverses twice a year, which made a return voyage predictable two thousand years before anyone could sail against the wind. India sits in the middle of it, and this runs the rim: East Africa, Arabia, the Gulf, both Indian coasts, Lanka and the Straits.
Stops (25)
- Kilwa Kisiwani · Swahili coast
The most powerful of the Swahili city-states, on an island off southern Tanzania, controlling the gold shipped north from Sofala and paying for it in Indian cloth and beads. Ibn Battuta called it one of the most beautiful towns in the world; its mangrove poles roofed houses in Gujarat and the Gulf.
- Aden · the Red Sea gate
Almost all Indian cargo for Egypt and the Mediterranean passed through Aden, whose customs made Yemen rich. The Cairo Geniza letters show Jewish India traders and Gujarati and Malabar goods moving through it constantly. Albuquerque failed to take it in 1513, which is why the old Red Sea route survived the Portuguese.
- Hormuz · the Gulf gate
The island kingdom at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, with no water and no agriculture, living entirely on transit dues between India and Basra. The horse trade ran the other way: Arabian and Persian cavalry mounts were shipped to Indian armies in thousands, because the subcontinent could not breed them at scale.
- Hoq Cave, Socotra · Socotra
A cave on Socotra whose walls carry inscriptions left by Indian sailors and merchants in Brahmi and South Arabian script, dated to the first centuries CE. It is the westward counterpart of the Tamil inscriptions in Sumatra: evidence of Indian crews, not just Indian cargo, at the far end of the run.
- Makli Necropolis, Thatta · Sindh
The Mughal port city of Sindh above the Indus delta, with a school of tilework and half a million graves on the Makli ridge above it. Royal, Sufi and merchant memory accumulated in one cemetery over four centuries, and the river then moved and took the trade to Karachi. The English had a factory here from 1635, and abandoned it when the river moved.
- Surat · Gujarat
The Mughal empire's western port and the embarkation point for the Hajj, whose shipowners' vessels carried pilgrims, horses and cotton across the Arabian Sea under a Portuguese licence they resented and bought anyway. The largest Indian merchant fortunes of the seventeenth century were made here. Virji Vora, reckoned the richest merchant in the world in the 1660s, kept his counting house here.
- Murud-Janjira · Janjira
A sea fort on a rock in a Konkan bay, held by Siddi rulers of Abyssinian descent who kept it against the Marathas, the Mughals, the Portuguese and the English alike. It is the clearest reminder that the western coast's maritime power was not only Indian, and that the ocean moved people as well as goods.
- Vijaydurg · the Maratha navy
A Konkan sea fort rebuilt by Shivaji as a base for a navy most accounts of the Marathas leave out, and later Kanhoji Angre's. The Angres levied their own passes on European shipping for forty years — an Indian power imposing on Europeans the system the Portuguese had invented. The Company paid the Angres for passes for nearly forty years rather than fight them.
- Beypore · Malabar shipbuilding
The Malabar port where the ocean-going uru is still built in Nilambur teak by Khalasi shipwrights working without drawings. The hull type is essentially the one the Periplus and the Geniza letters describe, and it is still made here for Gulf owners — the trade's technology outliving the trade. They are still ordered by Gulf owners, hull by hull, without a drawing.
- Ponnani · Malabar scholarship
The port and college at the Bharathappuzha mouth where the Makhdum jurists wrote, including the Tuhfat al-Mujahidin, the fullest Indian account of the Portuguese wars from the Indian side. The ocean carried texts and legal opinions along the same routes as pepper, and to the same cities. The Tuhfat al-Mujahidin was written to be read aloud, and it is the only sustained Indian narrative of the Portuguese wars.
- Kozhikode / Calicut · Malabar pepper
The Zamorin's port, called at by Ibn Battuta, Abd al-Razzaq, Zheng He's fleets and finally da Gama. Its Mappila shipowners financed the pepper trade and fought the Portuguese for a century under the Marakkar admirals. Every Indian Ocean power of the period appears in its harbour records. Zheng He's fleets called here in the 1400s, and Ibn Battuta was shipwrecked off it.
- Kavaratti / Lakshadweep · Lakshadweep
An island node in the middle of the Arabian Sea rather than an empty gap between Gujarat and Malabar. The Laccadives were held by the Ali Rajas of Cannanore and lived on coir rope and coconut, both of which were shipping supplies — the islands provisioned the trade that passed them.
- Minicoy · Minicoy
The southernmost inhabited Lakshadweep island, Divehi-speaking and culturally closer to the Maldives than to the Indian mainland, on the main sailing route between Malabar and Aden. 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 its Divehi script are both unlike anything on the Indian mainland.
- Mantai · the Palk hinge
The pearl and cinnamon port at Lanka's northern tip, where Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea cargo was transhipped across the isthmus rather than sailed around the island. Roman, Sasanian, Chinese and Islamic material appears in the same excavated levels. Roman, Sasanian, Chinese and Islamic material all appear in the same excavated levels, which is unusual anywhere and ordinary here. The Cholas eventually took the whole northern coast of the island for exactly this reason.
- Kaveripattinam (Puhar) · the Chola port
The Sangam-age Chola port of the Silappadikaram, with a foreign merchants' quarter the poems describe in detail, now largely under the sea. The Chola fleets that reached Srivijaya in 1025 sailed from this coast, which is the one Indian Ocean campaign launched from India rather than towards it. That is the one Indian Ocean campaign launched from India rather than towards it.
- Machilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar · Coromandel
The Golconda port through which painted cottons reached Persia, Arabia, Burma and Java, with Dutch, English and French factories at once. Coromandel cloth was the currency of the Southeast Asian spice trade: Europeans bought Indian textiles in order to buy Indonesian pepper with them. Europeans had to buy Indian textiles in order to buy Indonesian pepper with them, and this is where they bought the textiles.
- Sonargaon · Bengal
The old capital of eastern Bengal on the deltaic channels that carried Dhaka and Sonargaon muslin to the Bay. Ibn Battuta sailed from here for Java in 1346. The Ganges then shifted east and left the city off the water, which is why the merchant street at Panam Nagar stands in a field.
- Malacca (Melaka) · the Straits
The port at the narrowest point between the two monsoon systems, where Indian cloth was exchanged for Southeast Asian spice. Gujarati and Tamil merchants were its largest foreign communities. Tome Pires wrote that whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice, and Albuquerque took it in 1511.
- Kedah / Kadaram · Kadaram
The first place named in the Tanjore account of Rajendra Chola's 1025 overseas campaign, generally identified with the Kedah region on the Malay peninsula's western coast. It sat on the portage across the isthmus, which is why a south Indian fleet was interested in it. The portage across the Kra isthmus avoided the Straits altogether, which is what a south Indian fleet would want to control.
- Pannai, Sumatra · Sumatra
Pannai, named among the places taken in the 1025 campaign and usually located in northern Sumatra. Its identification and its political status are both debated, which is characteristic: the Srivijayan world is known mostly from other people's inscriptions, including this Tamil one. The Srivijayan world is known largely from other people's inscriptions, and this Tamil one is among the most detailed of them.
- Tambralinga / Nakhon Si Thammarat · the peninsula
Tambralinga, named in the Tanjore inscription and associated with the Nakhon Si Thammarat region of southern Thailand. Its relationship to Srivijaya, and whether the Chola campaign was a conquest, a raid or the enforcement of a trade route, are all still argued. A century and a half later Tambralinga sent its own army north into the Malay peninsula, so the Chola raid did not end it.
- Quanzhou · China
The great southern Chinese port of the Song and Yuan, with a Tamil inscription of 1281 recording the dedication of a Shiva temple by a merchant, and the remains of that temple's carvings built into a local mosque and museum. It is the eastern end of the Tamil merchant-guild network.
- Marco Polo · 1292–1294
The Venetian returned from Kublai Khan's service by sea, coasting Sumatra, the Nicobars, Ceylon and both Indian coasts, and dictated the fullest European account of the thirteenth-century Indian Ocean in a Genoese prison. He is the one traveller whose route is the whole eastern half of this network. His route is effectively the eastern half of this network, sailed once and written down.
- Myos Hormos / Quseir al-Qadim · the Egyptian shore
The Red Sea port the monsoon fleets left from, and where the Indian end of the trade is physically legible. Quseir al-Qadim has produced potsherds inscribed in Tamil-Brahmi — personal names scratched on storage jars by their owners — with Indian pepper, teak, rice and coconut in the same deposits. Strabo says a hundred and twenty ships a year sailed from here for India under Augustus. The sherds are the difference between knowing the trade existed and knowing that Tamil speakers stood on the quay.
- Adulis · the African shore
Aksum's harbour, eight days below the highland capital, and the point where Ethiopia joined the monsoon system. The Periplus names it as the outlet for ivory, rhinoceros horn and tortoiseshell; Cosmas Indicopleustes — Cosmas who sailed to India — came through in the sixth century and wrote up both Aksum's commerce and the Indian pepper and silk trade. Aksum struck gold and silver on a Roman standard, and that coinage is how the kingdom's reach along these routes is measured.