Page 268 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

(1) for your ship to reach Calicut, [take] a bearing of 45⁰ for 50 earlier sources and at the same time their internal
watches and of 60⁰ for 25 watches and you reach your inconsistency. For there to be this many variations, mostly
destination. minor, in the information transcribed into late Ming
(2) follow a 97½⁰ bearing for 25 watches and you reach your sources, there had to be a large body of records available at
country of destination. least in private archives, and possibly in state archives as
well. This at least is what these three versions of the sea route
(3) follow a 82½⁰ bearing for 28 watches and your ship reaches
Calicut. from Calicut to Hormuz tell us.
The question these traces of the Zheng He voyages then
(4) follow a 90⁰ bearing for 15 watches and you reach raise is why the Selden cartographer – or indeed, why Mao
[indecipherable]; then follow a 90⁰ bearing for 16 watches and Yuanyi or the editor of the Laud rutter – chose to include
you reach Jiamao* 加卯.
sailing directions from India to Arabia in their texts at all.
(5) follow a 105⁰ bearing for 28 watches and you reach Calicut. One reason could be a sense of fidelity to one’s sources: the

(6) follow a 300⁰ bearing for 85 watches, then a 292½⁰ bearing obligation to be as complete in reporting knowledge of the
for 40 watches, and your ship reaches Qalhat. past as possible. This explanation applies best to Mao
Yuanyi, whose explicit concern is to show the routes that
(1) 船收古里國，艮针五十更，寅針二十五更，收相接。
Zheng He’s ships sailed. Mao is intensely interested in
(2) 用乙卯針二十五更，收相接國。 history, but his greater purpose is to provide information
(3) 用甲卯針二十八更，船收古里國。 that may be of use in the future: to indicate all sea lanes that
might become potential avenues of military attack. His book
(4) 用卯針十五更，收口口口，用卯針十六更，收口口口。
is a bei zhi 備志, a ‘record to prepare for the future’. The
(5) 用丹[单]乙針二十八更，收古里國。 Laud editor similarly looks back to the Zheng He voyages as
(6) 用丹[单]戌針八十五更，又用辛戌針四十更，船收加剌哈。 14 he compiles his rutter, and yet he too declares that his
purpose is to provide knowledge that will be of use to
15
Only two of these routes actually name the port at the ‘shipboard’ (zai chuan 在船) men. The knowledge he
other end of the route, neither of which is Aden, Dhofar or provides may rely on sources from the 15th century, but his
Hormuz. Aden is clearly marked on the map, but without intention is to make it available for future use. Zhang Xie
being explicitly connected by a route line to anywhere. provides something of a negative confirmation by not
Otherwise the Arabian peninsula fades off beyond the including Indian Ocean routes in Dongxi yang kao. His
left-hand edge of the chart, giving no indication of where the mandate was to produce an overview of current maritime
Persian Gulf might lie. The navigational data in Mao practices, not a history. Accordingly, he left out the routes to
Yuanyi’s Zheng He atlas are accordingly not easy to and from Calicut. The rutters he consulted must have
correlate with either the Calicut colophon or the Laud included them, but they were not relevant to his purpose.
rutter. The only readily useful comparator is the sixth route, The Selden cartographer is similarly presentist in his
from Calicut to Qalhat, which lies across the mouth of the concerns but takes a middle position. He is concerned to
Persian Gulf from Hormuz. Mao’s version lacks precision, represent maritime routes as they were at the time he drew
but it does repeat the main compass bearing given in both the map, which is why the north end of Sumatra exhausts
the Calicut colophon and the Laud rutter of 300⁰. Not only the geographical extent of the routes he depicts. From this
that, but it replicates the advice in the Laud rutter that the perspective, the Calicut colophon is not so much a curious
pilot should turn off that compass bearing after 85 watches if exception as a telling inclusion. Like the Laud rutter and
the winds are not favourable. It then follows this data with Mao’s Zheng He atlas, it provides information that might
the instruction to sail on a 292½⁰ bearing, which some day become relevant to Chinese mariners. The
corresponds to the next bearing on the Selden map, though Chinese knew very well that this was the zone from and into
the latter directs the pilot off that bearing after 15 rather which the European merchants with whom they had contact
than 40 watches and breaks down the remainder of the route were now trading; they were also encountering South Asian
into a more detailed series of segments. The Mao version traders in considerable numbers travelling the trade
ends at Qalhat – which may be a variant rendition of what corridors around the South China Sea. By including data
16
the Laud rutter calls Shalacemo and which it locates five about these routes on his map, the Selden cartographer was
watches due south of Hormuz. Finally, the Mao chart tucking into his panorama of the Chinese maritime trading
severely reduces the distance by about 100 watches – which world information that one or more of his sources happened
is almost perfectly in line with what the actual distance is. to furnish, and that could have future use. That Zheng He
Without Mao Yuanyi’s source, we cannot recreate his sailed these Indian Ocean routes two centuries earlier was of
reconstruction of the Zheng He sailing routes. We can, no particular account. The Calicut colophon may have
however, appreciate from the number of routes running in preserved traces of the past, but its stronger intention was to
and out of Calicut which he records that the variations found provide traces of the future.
between the Selden map and the Laud rutter are
outnumbered by yet further now unknown variants, Notes
suggesting that an even wider trove of route documents 1 Further comments on these three sources may be found in Mills
survived down to the late Ming. What this observation does, 1979.
of course, is simply strengthen the conclusion we drew 2 The cover of the book bears a later inscription, Shunfeng xiangsong
順風相送 (Dispatched on Favourable Winds), which is how Chinese
earlier regarding the relative unity of data recorded in

258 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450