sail on it. Age-old routes connecting parts of our ocean are no longer plied by passenger ships; only a few short-distance ferries remain. Some people still do travel by sea: pirates, refugees, drug traffickers who find it much easier to import illicit bundles when there is no airport security involved. For most the ocean now is simply a place for recreation, and indeed modern technology has reduced this to a very sparsely maritime experience. An American scholar wrote scathingly about the ultimate in the alienation of people from the sea. The typical beachgoer today is a fat person in a huge four-wheel drive who speeds up the beach, scattering sand and crushing delicate marine life, to park facing the ocean. This person stays inside, with the engine running so that the air conditioning will keep working.107 He is writing about the American Atlantic shore, but this stage is getting closer by the day around the Indian Ocean also. Cruise ships try to replicate landed society, and come close to succeeding. The most important warships today, aircraft carriers, are not really maritime at all. Again landed society is faithfully created on board these monsters, and in essence they are airfields which happen to be able to float. But what of trade? Certainly most trade in the ocean is still done by sea: in the case of India 90 per cent of its overseas trade arrives over water. But then most economic activity in India is internal, so that for example the sanctions imposed after the nuclear tests of May 1998 had little effect. In any case, sea trade today is not carried on by a race of men set apart, the sort of people we have encountered so often in this book, and whom Conrad, Villiers, and many others celebrated. Rather it is handled in unappealing oil tankers and bulk carriers. The crews are essentially low-paid unskilled labourers, who could as well be working on a building site or in a factory. This separation of mankind from the sea is likely to be amplified in the near future, for today it is technologically possible to sail a ship from one port to another with no one on board. Labour would be required only to leave one port and enter the other.
Yet in one ominous area the sea, and the Indian Ocean, may even see an expansion of interest from the land. Most of the oceans of the world are still part of the commons, that is the areas beyond the 200 nautical mile limit. One scholar wrote forebodingly,
As the UN celebrates 1998 as the International Year of the Oceans, conflicts over multiple peaceful uses of the ocean and coastal areas – such as commercial and recreational fisheries, oil development, marine aquaculture, marine transport, marine recreation, etc – proliferate. The living resources of the seas are coming under intensifying pressures and military (ab)uses of the oceans (such as refusing to share oceanographic information) continue despite the ending of the Cold War. Coastal-based communities are increasingly displaced and marginalised by the destruction of littoral and marine resources. The oceans are also being used as a dumping ground for effluents and even radioactive nuclear waste.108
As vital supplies dry up the ocean will be under increasing pressure to make up shortfalls, in for example oil, or gas, or fish to feed an expanding global population. It could well be that the oceans at present are benefiting from only a transitory respite before full-scale exploitation begins. Very deep sea trawling, penetrating down 1.5 km, is already having profoundly detrimental effects. Deep sea mining is not yet a problem; the technology is not yet ready, and minerals' prices have been relatively low over the past few decades. There is no reason to assume that either of these will apply in coming decades. At present people ignore the sea: soon they may destroy it. The Indian Ocean cannot expect to be spared from this catastrophic prospect.
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Notes
Introduction
1 Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, and other Tales, New York, New American Library, 1963, p. 42 (from 'The Nigger of the "Narcissus''').
2 Ibid., p.