The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [35]
Normative statements in both Hindu and Muslim cultures reflect a profound hostility to or distrust of the sea. The Manusmriti imposes penalties for anyone who would dare to cross the Black Water. While it is true that some Hindus travelled by sea anyway, it is obviously significant that Indian coastal traders and fisherfolk are usually from lower castes. As for Muslims, aphorisms abound. 'Merchants who travel by sea are like silly worms clinging to logs.' 'Wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of kings.' And the Caliph Umar was advised that
The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm, the sailor's heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death.60
Yet Muslims overwhelmingly ignored these warnings and played a dominant role in Indian Ocean trade for a millennium.
An experienced captain once said 'I love going to sea. I do not love the sea out there. That is not my friend. That is my absolute 24-hour-a-day sworn enemy.'61 Dr Johnson predictably had something oratorical to say on the matter: 'Why, sir, no man will be a sailor, who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for, being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.'62 However, Dr Johnson was a rare man among the English, for he was a landlubber. He was born in Lichfield, one of the few cities in England more than 100 miles by road from the coast and was 52 before he saw the sea. Most Englishmen did have some sea knowledge or even experience, as Conrad pointed out as he began his story Youth, 'This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak – the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.'63
More soberly, we can ask how many people actually make a living from the sea, or work in occupations connected with it. This could become a very large discussion indeed, but I will merely point out that the Indian censuses of 1891, and 1901 demonstrate that the numbers engaged in anything to do with the sea are infinitesimal as compared with agriculture. In 1891 61 per cent of the Indian population were identified as being in 'Pasture and Agriculture', while the total from even a very generously defined maritime category is still well under 1 per cent. The figures for 1901 are similar.
As is only appropriate, we will give Braudel the last word. He ended his classic work with these words:
the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly a world of peasants, of tenant farmers and landowners: crops and harvest were the vital matters of this world and anything else was superstructure, the result of accumulation and of unnatural diversion towards the towns. Peasants and crops, in other words food supplies and the size of the population, silently determined the destiny of the age. In both the long and the short term, agricultural life was all-important. Could it support the burden of increasing population and the luxury of the urban civilization so dazzling that it has blinded us to other things? For each succeeding generation this was the pressing problem of every day. Beside it, the rest seems to dwindle into insignificance.64
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Chapter 3
The beginning of the ocean
Most human cultures have myths associated with the beginning of life, such as those found in Sumerian, Hindu and Buddhist literature (we will discuss Islam in the next chapter). The Sumerians believed that the founders came to the Tigris-Euphrates valley from the sea to the south. Sea travel was intricately tied in with the gods, especially Utu, the Sumerian sun god: 'The ship bent on honest pursuits sails off with the wind, Utu finds honest ports