The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [32]
However this in turn raises other questions and problems: remembering our past distinction between people on the sea and people of the sea, can we assume that littoral people are necessarily of the sea? We can look particularly at fisherfolk. 'For the fisherman and the sailor, water is life and death, sustenance and menace; it eats away the wood of the ship just as it does the life of a man who ventures out on the treacherous, bitter sea, putting his trust in the fragile board his foot stands on'.47
Fisherfolk are different from peasants. Their catches usually depend on chance, not on wise husbandry. Certainly fishing is more dangerous than cultivating land, but we should remember that the further out one fishes the more dangerous it gets. In far offshore fishing it is not so much individualism which is created, but rather a necessary stress on cooperation. While it is true that gender divisions are more important than in peasant societies, this also is significant in terms of our current discussion of land and sea. Essentially a fishing family links land and sea, with the woman on the former, the man on the latter. Indeed, women may not only do the cleaning and processing and marketing, they may well cultivate land as well. The fishing family, whether extended or nuclear, has the possibility of exploiting both land and sea, while peasants have only the former option. Yet this exploitation differs dramatically between land and sea, for unlike agriculture fishing is a purely exploitative activity; as Dakin says, 'man is always taking away life from the sea – he neither sows nor fertilises the waters; only reaps.'48
All this said, and while there is no doubt that fisherfolk are of the sea, not on it, the fact remains that they live as much on land as on sea, and fishing activities are crucially dependent on land matters: middle men, markets, processing plants. If we were to try to construct a continuum of dependence on the sea, we would have peasants and pastoralists at one end, then maybe various gradations of the inhabitants of the port cities, then fisherfolk, and finally the truly and purely maritime people, to whom we now turn. We have frequently stressed the dominance of land over sea, but just for a while we can turn to people who are by definition exceptional. These people are people of the sea, and unlike all others on the shore they are not amphibious: their lives are spent on or in the water.
Some such people are simply sailors who sail for a long time, so long that they may lose their land ties. We have an account of the merchants of the great port of Siraf around 1000. Some of them travelled so much that they were away at sea all their lives. The contemporary account goes on:
I was told of one man of Siraf who was so accustomed to the sea that for nearly forty years he did not leave his ship. When he came to land he sent his associates ashore to look after his business in all the towns, and he crossed over from his boat to another, when the vessel was damaged and needed to be repaired.49
Yet such people must have been uncommon. For most sailors in the Indian Ocean the monsoon regime meant that there was considerable 'down time', as they waited for the change in the winds, and this time would be spent in port.
The best studied truly aquatic people today are the famous Marsh Arabs of the Tigris-Euphrates delta, occupying the vast palustral triangle between An-Nasiriyah, Al-'Amarah, and Basra. The classic account is by the colourful and somewhat anachronistic Wilfred Thesiger. He lived in the marshes off and on from 1951 to 1958, and loved it despite the mosquitos, snakes, very large wild pigs (some the size of a donkey, weighing over 300 lbs), fleas, and flooding each year. The area was also riddled with disease: dysentery was endemic, also bilharzia, yaws, hookworm, eye infections, and tuberculosis. He spent so much time with them because
They were cheerful