The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [13]
If then there is a wide, expansive Indian Ocean, around its edges and margins are a host of seas. Among them are the Mozambique Channel, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea, Strait of Melaka, and the Laccadive Sea. Yet the same Sulaiman who wrote about the vast, open ocean also commented sourly on too much schematisation; he travelled where I have not been, and so must be listened to:
There is not really a clear separation between the seas we crossed [from the Gulf to Siam]. An ordinary traveller would not be able to perceive where one sea ended and the next began. . . . The scholars of travel and geography, confronted with many different place names... have wandered into the discords of choppy seas, doldrums and foul winds and they divide the great expanse of water which lies along this path into seven distinct parts.10
The topography obviously varies from place to place, being for example quite different in the bays as compared with coasts exposed to the wide ocean. Some shores are uninhabited desert, others cut off from the interior by impenetrable mountains, but most of the shores of the Indian Ocean are not quite as inhospitable as these examples. In India a fertile coastal fringe, especially in the south, the area of Kerala, is backed by the high mountain range called the western Ghats, but these are nowhere completely impassable. So also on the Swahili coast, where again behind a productive coastal zone is the nyika, a mostly barren area difficult, but not impossible, to travel through on the way to more fertile land further inland. On the northern shores of the ocean the coastal fringe is mostly much less productive, and leads to inland areas which often are hostile deserts. Yet topography has favoured this area even so, for the Red Sea goes into the Gulf of Aden, and this gives places around there, especially the Hadhramaut area east of Aden, a possible role in servicing ships going to East Africa or western India.
We will discuss islands presently, but most of those in the Indian Ocean proper are relatively isolated and scattered. Such is not the case in Indonesia, and this then provides another reason to place this area outside the Indian Ocean proper. Geography makes the sea in the island-studded Malay world much more central; if one likes, this is a much more maritime area, both topographically, and (as we will see soon) humanly. The region has an extremely high ratio of coastline to land area; indeed the highest in the world if one takes into account population.11 The Malay world can be seen as a Mediterranean area, just like the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean area. All three are enclosed, but with access to oceans, that is to the Indian Ocean and Pacific in the first, to the Atlantic in the last two. And when we add in rivers this applies even more strongly to make this a much more aquatic area, strongly contrasting with the situation in the Indian Ocean. The only comparable area in the true Indian Ocean may be the area that the Portuguese called the Sea of Ceylon, that is the narrow strait of the Gulf of Mannar between Sri Lanka and southeast India, where again geography dictates that the sea is much more central simply because it is close on both sides of this passage.
Choke points are another topographical matter that influence the nature of the Indian Ocean. The Straits of Melaka, at their narrowest, where they join the Singapore Strait north of the Karimum Islands, are only 8 nautical miles wide. and today are used by 50,000 ships a year, including small country craft. The actual width of the channel that ships can use in this area is only 2½ miles off Melaka and a mere 1 mile off Singapore. The Persian/Arabian Gulf at its narrowest section, in the Straits of Hurmuz, is only 48 km (21 nautical miles) wide, and passage is made more difficult by many islands and reefs. The Suez Canal