The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [34]
Today many of the rice boats which for centuries have moved large cargoes of rice around the region have been converted into luxury house boats for western tourists and Indian yuppies and dot.com millionaires.
In other places we find floating markets, extremely venerable, yet today also tourist attractions. The Bangkok one is a compulsory sight for any visitor. Long before this, in 1833 an American traveller had some perceptive comments to make. He had come up river from the mouth, and reached the town:
We now threaded our way among junks, boats and floating houses, jumbled together in glorious confusion, and totally concealing the banks from our view. Hundreds of small canoes, some not larger than clothes-baskets, were passing to and fro, many of them containing talapoins or priests, paddling lazily from house to house, collecting presents of provisions. The occupants of the floating houses were taking down the shutters which formed the fronts, exposing their wares for sale: printed calicoes, paper-umbrellas, sweet-meats, fruits, pots, pans, etc being placed in situations the best calculated to attract the notice of the passers-by. This occupation was carried on entirely by the women, the men being either seated on the platforms smoking their segars, or making preparations to take a cruise in their canoes.
Later he noted that:
The best shops are built on wooden floats on the river; indeed when the waters are out, they flood the whole town, the only communication between the different dwellings being by means of boats. At this period of the year, when the river becomes swelled by the rains, whole streets of floating houses, together with their inhabitants, sometimes break adrift from their moorings, and are carried down the river, to the utter confusion of the shipping. These floating streets, nevertheless, possess their advantages. A troublesome neighbour may be ejected, house, family, pots and pans, and all, and sent floating away to find another site for his habitation. A tradesman, too, if he finds an opposition shop taking away his custom, can remove to another spot with very little difficulty.58
It is tempting to see these people as typical maritime folk, but better simply to locate them at one end of a continuum which goes from totally landed to totally seabound. And indeed the careful reader will have noticed that not even all these people are purely aquatic. Most people located in the countries around the Indian Ocean, even on its shores, were not and are not in any true sense maritime people. Location is not the only signifier; one can live with the sound of surf in one's ears and not be maritime, one can even travel by water and still not be aquatic. Take the priests at the Vivekenanda temple on an island just off Kanya Kumari in the extreme southern tip of India. They travel frequently by water to the mainland, but are in no sense maritime. Nor are the pilgrims that the priests serve. How complicated it can get: what, for example, of female fisherfolk, who never go to sea yet exist to service those who do and to market their product?
Indeed, one could take this further and claim that by and large events at sea are not very significant. Braudel wrote of the famous battle of Lepanto in 1571: 'All one can say is that after all Lepanto was only a naval victory and that in this maritime world surrounded and barred by land-masses, such an encounter could not destroy Turkey's roots, which went deep into the continental interior.'59 Battles at sea are far less sanguinary and destructive than those on land. Armies on the land kill many people including non-combatants, especially in this century, and destroy crops and infrastructure. All naval battles do is kill a few sailors. It has been claimed that the decline of landed empires affects port cities and sea trade detrimentally, something we will have to examine later. But no one would claim that losses at sea affect production on the land. Maritime