The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [194]
These Goan women make up only one thread in the rich tapestry of people travelling around the ocean. Another is petty traders, pedlars, people who travel incessantly, chaffering their way around the littoral. Literally for millennia these people, at least by number, are the main travellers on the ocean. Some have regular routes, like transhumant pastoralists on land, others go wherever there is opportunity. By 1877 Singapore was a thriving colonial port, the crucial hinge between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Yet it also played host to a regular arrival of humble pedlars. Lady Brassey noticed them:
Towards the end of the south-west monsoon, little native open boats arrive from the islands 1,500 to 3,000 miles to the southward of Singapore. Each has one little tripod mast. The whole family live on board. The sides of the boat cannot be seen for the multitudes of cockatoos, parrots, parrakeets, and birds of all sorts, fastened on little perches, with very short strings attached to them. The decks are covered in sandal-wood. The holds are full of spice, shells, feathers, and South Sea pearl shells. With this cargo they creep from island to island, and from creek to creek, before the monsoon, till they reach their destination. They stay a month or six weeks, change their goods for iron, nails, a certain amount of pale green or Indian red thread for weaving, and some pieces of Manchester cotton. They then go back with the north-east monsoon, selling their goods at the various islands on their homeward route. There are many Dutch ports nearer than Singapore, but they are over-regulated, and preference is given to the free English port, where the simple natives can do as they like so long as they do not transgress the laws.7
On the other side of the ocean, in the Comoros, we have been left an oral tradition to do with the origins of the leading Indian merchant family there. So much of his story is familiar to us; it could stand as a pattern of life beneath the imperial umbrella. Hadji Yakub Ismael was born in Gujarat, in Kutch Mandvi, and was from a family of cloth merchants. Undercut by European machine-made cloth, he was forced to travel, first to Zanzibar, then to Iraq, Madagascar, and other parts of Africa. Zanzibar was his base for many years, but once he was blown off course and ended up in one of the Comoro islands. He saw opportunities. Returning to Zanzibar, he loaded up with cloths (that is, manufactured goods) and in Grand Comoro exchanged them for sisal, coir and other primary products. This was in the 1880s. Much later, when the French acquired the islands, he had extensive dealings with them, but he also continued to travel and trade up and down the East African coast and offshore islands.8
Alan Villiers sailed on a dhow in 1938–39 on what seems to be a typical peddling voyage. Essentially it went where there was opportunity, and where the monsoons would let them go. It set off in August 1938 from Kuwait, and went to Basra to get dates for Mukalla. On the way they called at Muscat. From Mukalla it went on to Aden to take on goods and passengers, then back to Mukalla for more of the same. They then set off for Africa, and did some smuggling at Haifun, in northern Somalia. There was no trade in Mogadishu, so they went straight on to Lamu and Mombasa where cargo and passengers were landed, then to Zanzibar where they arranged to load mangrove poles in the Rufiji delta, then to Zanzibar again and finally back to Muscat and so to Bahrain, where the mangrove poles were sold. They got home to Kuwait in June 1939.9