The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [44]
Another obscure category of people have also used the sea from the very earliest times, that is fisherfolk. It may be however that fishing in our ocean was, at least for early people with primitive craft, more limited than in other oceans. The continental shelf in the Indian Ocean is mostly much narrower than in other oceans, so there is less area from which to take demersal fish. And coral often gets in the way. We can assume that traditional fishing was mostly done close inshore, and also that few would be full time piscatorial specialists: rather, most of them were peasants as well. We quoted some descriptions of their humble craft earlier in this chapter. Another category again is pearl fishing in three different locations: the Gulf, between India and Sri Lanka, and in the Sulu archipelago. Again the sailors and divers would probably not be specialists, but rather have occupations on land also for the time outside the pearl fishing season.
We will quote a vivid account of a storm in the Bay of Bengal presently, but there was another invariant hazard to navigation which was man-made, in other words the prevalence of piracy, something which continues to today. Piracy is a surprisingly controversial matter. Some have seen pirates as macroparasites, human groups that draw sustenance from the toil and enterprise of others, offering nothing in return. Others point out that they are at least a sign of prosperity, for they need something to prey on; similarly, only a rich port is worth plundering. In rather sanguine fashion, Horden and Purcell claim that they are not really separate from others at sea: 'Piracy is the continuation of cabotage by other means.'40 Piracy was endemic from the earliest times in both the Red Sea and the Gulf. Often it was a matter of tribal raiders simply extending their activities to the sea, this then again reflecting the fact that most people at sea at this time also had links and occupations on land.
Not surprisingly, most rulers tried to ward them off, or even eliminate them. In the seventh century BCE the Assyrian King Sennacherib sent out an expedition against Gulf pirates, and over 300 years later Alexander the Great's fleet was harassed by them. Even the distant Roman emperor Trajan led a naval expedition to the Gulf to try and root them out. In the first century of the Common Era Pliny noted that ships in the Red Sea and those going across the Indian Ocean to southwest India carried archers to ward off pirates.41
Navigation in this early period is probably better depicted as wayfinding. A description of this in the Pacific fits very well with what we know of early Indian Ocean practice. Wayfinding is 'navigation by "reading" the stars, sun, ocean swells, wave patterns, cloud formations, wind directions, colour of the sea, flight of sea birds, and integrating all this information with the aid of a mental compass to determine or maintain a sailing course toward an unseen or unknown land target.'42 An early Pali text says that a navigator needs to know how to dock a boat, and take it out to sea, know the seasons, and the stars, and be able to find his location at sea 'by observing the fishes, the colour of the water, the species of the ground, birds, and rocks.' The magnetic compass came late to the Indian Ocean as compared with Chinese practice, but the astrolabe, the kamal, was used in the Indian Ocean from quite early times. Observing stars made finding a ship's position much more precise.43 Dr Varadarajan did a series of interviews