A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (16 page)

The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon in his
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
saw the ‘triple scourge of war, pestilence, and famine' as a factor in the transition from the world of late antiquity to the dark age that followed. But it was not all descent into darkness; one development in Christianity at the time of the Church Wreck strengthened the faith and saw continuity rather than change. In an era of increasingly obscure theological debate about the nature of divinity, disputes that only served to distance the church from the people, a monk in Italy named Benedict of Nursia wrote a book that made Christianity part of the economic survival of communities in the west, helping them to weather the events of history such as wars and political change. The
Regula Sancti Benedicti
, the ‘Rule of Saint Benedict', written in 516, provided a guide for monastic life, a constitution for running monasteries that was to be influential on Charlemagne and other medieval rulers and a renewed focus on the morality that had drawn people to the teachings of Jesus in the early years of Christianity. Monks not only brought closer communion with God for worshippers but took Christianity further than Belisarius' armies had ever done. A monk from Rome named Augustine converted the Kingdom of Kent in England from Anglo-Saxon paganism in 597, and on the other side of the world Christian monks reached as far as Tibet – where they would have found much that was congenial in the ascetic lifestyle of another monastic tradition that was flourishing at this period, that of Buddhism.

The scriptoria of monasteries in the west ultimately ensured the survival of many of the works of Greek and Roman literature that are extant today. In the first instance, though, it was not Christianity that provided the conduit but the rise of another great religion, Islam,
with its intellectual focus in Baghdad, Basra and Cairo, where the philosophical and scientific legacy of antiquity can most clearly be seen in the centuries that followed Justinian – in a dazzling new world of seafaring and trade on the Indian Ocean and South China Sea that is revealed in the next chapter in this book.

This passage describing a shipwreck comes from Sir Richard Burton's translation of the
The Sixth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor
, first published in 1885 and complete with Burton's archaic words and spellings. Burton was one of the great scholars and individualists of the Victorian age – soldier, explorer, prodigious linguist who mastered six Indian languages as well as Persian and Arabic, a convert to Islam who became a h
ā
fiz – one who can recite the Qur'
ā
n from memory – and famously one of few Europeans before the twentieth century to make the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca. At a time when Western perceptions of the ‘Orient' were still filtered through writers who were largely ignorant of it, Burton's immersion in the Arab and Hindu worlds provided a new perspective that was embedded in those cultures rather than observing them from outside. It was a world of forbidden pleasures that fascinated the Victorians – Burton was best-known for his unexpurgated translations of the
Kama Sutra
and
The Perfumed Garden
– and of the supernatural, with Sinbad encountering all manner of monsters on his voyages including a fearsome eagle shown attacking his ship in the woodcut at the beginning of the translation. But it was also a world of huge cultural efflorescence and artistic achievement, and of maritime connections over great distances that had been established long before the first European seafarers arrived on the Indian Ocean in the late fifteenth century
AD
.

The stories of Sinbad are first recorded in a seventeenth-century version of
One Thousand and One Nights
, a collection of Arabic tales that originated in the eighth to ninth centuries
AD
during the Islamic ‘Golden Age'. Under the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (
AD
786–809), the ‘House of Wisdom' in Baghdad became a focus for the translation of works in Greek and Latin into Arabic, ensuring their survival and forming a basis for advances in science, technology and philosophy. The intellectual focus provided by Constantinople at the time of the Marzamemi Church Wreck in the sixth century
AD
had shifted to Baghdad two centuries later, and the ascendancy of the Mediterranean region in that respect came to an end. At the same time, the material culture of the Arab world was greatly diversified by a trade network that linked the Vikings of Scandinavia with Arab merchants in the Middle East and the Tang Dynasty of China – with
the route from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Canton in China being the longest regularly plied sea route in history before Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498 and opened up the east to European shipping. The discovery of a ninth-century shipwreck of probable Arab origin off Belitung Island in Indonesia gives a marvellous insight into this trade and the eastern world that so fascinated Sir Richard Burton, providing not only one of the richest cargoes of Chinese origin ever discovered, but also unique evidence of the reality of seafaring at the time of Sinbad the Sailor.

In 1998 a local diver searching for sea cucumbers off Belitung came across a coral-encrusted mound of pottery on the seabed. Located at a depth of 17 metres, it lay off a reef called Batu Hitam, ‘Black Rock', in an area called ‘Treacherous Bay' in old charts. Pottery raised by the diver was identified as Chinese Changsha Ware of the Tang Dynasty (
AD
618–907). The location of the site was acquired by a company holding a shipwrecks excavation permit from the Indonesian government, which requested an intervention because of looting taking place at the site. Over two seasons much of the remaining cargo was excavated and large parts of the hull were recorded; the second season was directed by Dr Michael Flecker, who made an extensive study of the hull and the cargo. By the end of the second season in 1999, it was clear that a wreck of major international significance had been discovered – one of the oldest and most important in South-east Asia, providing unique evidence for trade between Abbasid Persia and Tang China during the formative period of the ‘Maritime Silk Route'.

The most astonishing revelation was the size of the cargo. Tightly packed in a helical arrangement inside large stoneware jars were more than 57,000 bowls from the Changsha kilns, many of them beautifully decorated in brown underglaze paint. As we shall see, the decoration, including Buddhist symbols and imitation Arab lettering, points to these being made specifically for the export market. Almost three thousand other ceramic items were recovered, including white wares and green stonewares from southern and northern China, and several plates that are the first intact examples of stoneware painted in cobalt blue – a pigment probably imported from Persia – and thus a precursor of China's first blue-and-white porcelains of the thirteenth to fourteenth century. Most of the pottery was utilitarian: bowls, jugs,
jars, cups and cup-stands, vases, basins, circular boxes, candlesticks, spittoons, lamps, incense burners. The decoration is of great interest not only on the Changsha bowls but also on the jugs and jars, with moulded appliqués showing mythical beasts, foliage and humans – one of them a warrior in full armour with a shield and curved blade, running forward while looking back, an image redolent of Chinese art since the time of the first emperor a millennium earlier and the famous Terracotta Army of Xi'an.

The wreck also contained an extraordinary treasure in gold, silver and high-value items of bronze, including cups and dishes of solid gold, silver bowls, platters and boxes, silver ingots and bronze mirrors. Some of these items may have been present not for commercial trade but instead as gifts for diplomatic exchange or to facilitate transactions of the main cargo in foreign ports. Other cargo included a ‘paying ballast' of at least ten tonnes of lead ingots, laden along the keel of the ship, and large quantities of star anise, the eight-pointed star-shaped pods of the evergreen tree
Illicium verum
that were used as a spice. The crew's equipment included a bronze balance scale, cast iron vessels, copper-alloy bowls, a grindstone and bundles of arrows. An ‘inkstone' of Chinese origin – used for preparing and containing ink – may have been the belonging of a literate merchant. There were also many ‘cash' coins, the distinctive Chinese copper-alloy coins cast with a square central hole – some inscribed
kaiyuan tongbao
, ‘circulating treasure of the new epoch', that were minted throughout the Tang Dynasty, and others
qianyuan zhongbao
, ‘heavy treasure of the Qianyuan era', cast in large quantities in 758–9 and in circulation for decades afterwards.

The ceramics, coins and other artefacts point to a Chinese origin for the cargo – they are in fact the largest number of Tang artefacts ever recovered from an archaeological site. Belitung lies in the Java Sea opposite Sumatra, site of the fabled kingdom of Srivijaya and mid-way between China and the Indian Ocean; to the north-west lies the Malacca Strait, gateway between east and west. One of the most exciting revelations was that the ship itself had very probably been of Arab-Persian origin, and that the cargo may well have been destined there. The surviving timbers showed that the ship had been about 18 metres long and had been put together by stitching – the same technique that we saw in the Bronze Age Dover Boat, and the main technique used
around the shores of the Indian Ocean until the Portuguese introduced iron nails in the sixteenth century.

Fascinatingly, an account from China at the time of the wreck, Liu Xun's
Ling biao lu yi
, ‘Strange things noted in the south', records that the ships of the merchants ‘… do not use iron nails; their (planks) are strapped together with the fibres of coir-palms. All seams are caulked with an olive paste which is very hard when dry.' This describes ships from the western Indian Ocean, with the ‘merchants' being foreigners from those parts, and shows that some of those vessels were reaching China itself. Either there or in the intermediary ports of Indonesia the stitching would have been repaired or replaced: Giovanni da Montecorvino (1247–1328), a Franciscan missionary who went to China, stated that once every year the ships of Arabia needed mending, and the
Pinghzou ketan
by Zhu Yu of the twelfth century records that ships sailing from China routinely had repairs in Sumatra, with the annual delay waiting for the monsoon to change direction allowing the time needed.

Further evidence for a Middle Eastern origin comes from the identification of timber from the wreck, including hardwoods likely to have been from Africa and India – traditional sources for shipbuilding timber in the Persian Gulf, where the local palm trees and cypresses are not suitable. The term ‘dhow' is used for traditional sailing vessels of the Indian Ocean, usually with one or two triangular ‘lateen' fore-and-aft sails or a ‘settee' rig where the front corner of the sail is cut off. A classic image of a dhow is in the woodcut from Sir Richard Burton's
One Thousand and One Nights
, showing Sinbad's vessel being attacked by a giant eagle, though it is anachronistic – the lateen rig of the depiction only became widespread in the Indian Ocean from about the fifteenth century, and at the time of Sinbad and the Belitung wreck most ships of Persian or Arab origin would have been square-rigged. In other respects, the ship probably shared many of its build characteristics with later dhows, including a steeply raked bow and slender lines compared with Mediterranean merchantmen of the period.

This design was put to the test when a reproduction based on the Belitung ship,
The Jewel of Muscat
, was constructed in 2008 in Oman, using
Afzelia africana
timbers from Ghana with the planks sewn together with rope made from coconut fibre. The sails were made from palm leaves woven together by traditional weavers in Zanzibar, and the ship had quarter-rudders correct for the period – axial stern
rudders only appeared on the Indian Ocean and in Europe in the twelfth century
AD
. With a crew of eight, the ship made a voyage of nearly 5,000 kilometres from Oman to Singapore via Galle in Sri Lanka. To navigate across the open ocean they experimented with a kamal, a simple device for determining latitude by celestial observation that probably originated with Arab seafarers at about the time of the wreck. By making the voyage from February to July, they were emulating the sailors of the past – ships would sail eastwards from July to September with the south-west monsoon and then back from China and Indonesia from October to December with the north-east monsoon. This pattern is the key to understanding not only navigation in these seas but also the organisation of trade and its cultural impact, as the turnover time between the monsoons was often not enough to complete transactions, and ships frequently spent a year in China or the intermediary ports of the Malay archipelago.

A wonderful picture of this trade can be gleaned from accounts by Arab merchants of the ninth century
AD
. Until the eighteenth century the only first-hand description of China widely read in Europe was that of Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in 1283. That was to change with the appearance of Eusèbe Renaudot's
Ancient accounts of India and China by two Mohammedan Travellers, who went to those Parts in the 9th century; translated from the Arabic
, published in London in 1733. One of those accounts was by Sulaim
ā
n al-T
ā
jir, ‘Suleyman the Merchant', and dates from the Hijri year 237 – the equivalent of
AD
851, making him a near-contemporary with the Belitung ship. In it he describes the voyage to China from Siraf, the great port on the eastern side of the Persian Gulf to which goods were transhipped from Basra, the city on the Shatt-al-Arab at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that was the gateway to Baghdad. From Siraf, ships ‘make Sail for a Place called Mascat, which is in the extremity of the Province of Oman', and thence to India and across to China, a dangerous passage because of piracy and rain. At Guangzhou (Canton), where there was a large Arab enclave, the Chinese charged a high rate for imported goods and the emperor appointed one of the community as judge and imam. Most interestingly, Suleyman marvelled at the quality of the local porcelain: ‘They have an excellent kind of earth, wherewith they make a ware of equal fineness with glass, and equally transparent.'