The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [18]
The previous year [1986] in Bangalore, for example, the city fathers paid a yogi to pray for rain. Seated on a tigerskin rug beside the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board guesthouse, the yogi chanted for 2 hours and 4 minutes while his supporters chewed leaves and swallowed burning camphor. Afterwards he was able to inform senior Water Board officials – prostrated before him with offerings of coconuts – that the rain god Varuna, though invisible to the naked eye, now approached them 'like waves of clouds.' The rain fell, all right, and torrentially, but only over neighbouring Cochin.29
The implications of the monsoons are endless, and will underlie most of our discussion of movement by sea before the age of steam. Pirates moved according to the season, leaving the west coast of India for the Bay of Bengal around May each year. They also affect fisheries. Along the southeast Arabian and Somali coasts when the strong winds of the southwest monsoon blow coastal water away from the shore, one gets an upwelling of nutrient rich cold water This may have ten or even twenty times the nutrients of normal surface water. One gets rich blooms of plankton, ideal for fish. However, if this goes on too long the plankton becomes too thick. Lack of oxygen kills the fish. In 1957 such a bloom was estimated to have killed the equivalent of the world's entire fish catch for a year.30
The monsoons are essentially tropical winds. The further south one goes the weaker they are. In the southeast African case, up to Mozambique Island there was really no monsoon. Square rigged ships had to wait for the occasional cold front from Antarctica, take it until it petered out, and then wait for the next one. And there is the added complication of doldrums around the equator, nowhere near as bad as those in the Atlantic that Coleridge wrote about so powerfully, but still at times a hazard or an inconvenience.
South of the monsoon region lies a belt of southeast trade winds, around 15 to 30° S. These are more or less year-round. Alan Villiers took these once. In the 1930s he was crew on a big four-master barque with thirty sails and 35,000 square feet of canvas. These huge ships were very definitely not the more famous clipper ships, which he dismissed as 'lightly loaded kite-filled clippers'. This ship, and the other Cape Horn ships, he considered as 'Among man's working creations for the carriage of his goods, they alone were supremely beautiful.'31 The cargo was 5,000 tons of Victorian grain. The ship picked up an easterly as they left Melbourne, so the captain decided to go via the Cape of Good Hope rather than the more usual Cape Horn. Past Cape Leeuwin they got the southeast trades in latitudes 25–28° S. These would carry them to the south of Madagascar, where they would pick up the Agulhas current which would take them southeast to the Cape. Once around this they could pick up the southeast trades in the Atlantic. This was a recognised route, being used by some Dutch East India Company ships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the Torrens when Joseph Conrad was first mate, and once John Galsworthy went that way on the same ship when he was on a health trip.32
Being trades, these are more or less continuous year-round. People from Indonesia could pick them up and reach Madagascar, but getting back in the same latitude was near enough to impossible. To do this they would have had to head further south, to 40 or even 50° S, where 'The wind has a fetch that goes round the world in the southern Indian Ocean, unchecked by any land.'33 This was the place for a wild, fast passage eastwards, where winds could reach 70 knots in the winter. Villiers said that these westerlies in the roaring 40s and fearsome or screeching 50s could blow a square rigged ship from the Cape to Australia, 6,000 miles, in three weeks or less. He did it in the well-named Joseph Conrad in the mid 1930s, 'I raced from off Good Hope to off the Leeuwin in less than three weeks, the little ship sometimes almost flying before the shrieking squalls. How the