The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [86]
In short, the air of the sea having become more salubrious, gave me the hope of a perfect cure; the morning of health began to dawn upon the longing of my hopes; the wounds caused by the sharp arrows of my malady began to heal, and the water of life, hitherto so troubled, recovered its purity and transparency. Before long a favourable breeze began to blow, and the vessel floated over the surface of the water with the rapidity of the wind.155
We can end this long chapter by returning one last time to our hero, Ibn Battuta. As a landlubber he left invaluable accounts of what it was like at this time. We have commented frequently on how his status as a prestigious scholar eased his passage, for everywhere he was accepted and patronised and helped by fellow Muslims. His Rehla also gives us evocative accounts of many different sorts of travel by water, and many different perils and pleasures, just as Abd-er-Razzack found too.
His maritime career began inauspiciously. In 1329 in Jiddah he embarked on a jalba (a small sewn craft) which belonged to a person from Abyssinia. A sharif wanted him to travel with him on another jalba, 'but I did not do so on account of there being a number of camels with him in his jalba, and I was frightened of this, never having travelled by sea before.' Later that year he tells us what he had to eat. He was near Oman on a small ship:
My food during those days on that ship was dried dates and fish. Every morning and evening [the sailors] used to catch fish. . . . They used to cut them in pieces, broil them, and give every person on the ship a portion, showing no preference to anyone over another, not even to the master of the vessel nor to any other, and they would eat them with dried dates. I had with me some bread and biscuit... and when these were exhausted I had to live on those fish with the rest of them.156
Later he had good times and bad times at sea. Once he had a most luxurious trip with the governor of Lahari in Sind on the river of Sind. There were fifteen small ships to carry baggage and various retainers. Some were musicians and singers.
First the drums and trumpets would be sounded and then the musicians would sing, and they kept this up alternately from early morning to the hour of the midday meal. When this moment arrived the ships came together and closed up with one another and gangways were placed from one to the other. The musicians then came on board the governor's ahawra and sang until he finished eating, when they had their meal and at the end of it returned to their vessel.157
Another voyage a few years later was a very different matter. In the mid 1340s he was shipwrecked off the Coromandel coast:
During the voyage a gale sprang up and our ship nearly took in water. We had no knowledgeable pilot on board. We came to some rocks on which the ship narrowly escaped being wrecked, and then into some shallows where the ship ran aground. We were face to face with death, and people jettisoned all that they had, and bade farewell to one another. We cut down the mast and threw it overboard, and the sailors made a wooden raft. We were then about two farsakhs from the shore. I was going to climb down to the raft, when my companions (for I had two slave-girls and two of my companions with me) said to me: 'Are you going to go down and leave us?' So I put their safety before