Page 18 - Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean (before portuguese)_Neat

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24 ARAB NAVIGATION
After the FawaHd we have three more dated works, the Sofaliya
of Leningrad, and the Mukhammasa (no. 10) both dated c. 1500 and
the small poem on the Banat Na'sh dated 1494-5. By this time, Ibn
Majid was in decline; the Mukhammasa is noteworthy only for its
curious form, an old man’s experiment with poetical form, and the
Sofaliya is by no means a good example of his work nor a great
piece of navigational literature. Its main importance seems to be its
ravings at the Portuguese. Whether the other two Leningrad poems
are products of this decline or are earlier works remains to be seen.
It is possible that as they were copied at the same time as the Sofaliya,
they belong to this post-FawaHd period; they were never quoted,
neither were they mentioned by Sidi £elebi who listed some of Ibn
Majid’s works.
(e) The Hawiya
This is a long poem in rajaz metre, consisting of 1,082 verses
dated a.h. 866 (1462). Its full title is Hdwiyat al-ikhtifdr fi u$ul Him
al-bihar; “the gathering of the summarising concerning the first
principles of the knowledge of the seas”. It represents Ibn Majid’s
first attempt at a complete conspectus of navigational theory. The
poem mentions no sources except the “three lions” mentioned above,
so Ibn Majid had seen their writings at this early date, probably in
the manuscript mentioned several times by him in the FawaHd.
Whether he was writing an all-inclusive navigational work in
imitation of their work or the work of some other unknown writer
we shall never know. Perhaps it was his own idea to produce such
a work after producing other shorter, simpler works, on one par­
ticular subject and then extending and coalescing them into one
complete poem. All we know is that it is his earliest dated work and
that none of his undated poems can be attributed to an earlier period.
Certainly several years experience as a practical navigator must have
preceded the writing of this poem, if not several attempts at writing
rajaz poetry. The style of the poetry is hardly less immature than that
of any of his poems, even the extremely late poems of the Leningrad
manuscript.
The Hawiya appears in three versions of differing lengths in three
different manuscripts and . none of these having as many verses as
the figure given above which is the total given by Ibn Majid in the
work itself.45 This figure he. then divides into sections of so many
" ? -
4‘ MS 2292 f. 116v, 1. 11. Fenrand works out the arithmetic for each manuscript
in Instructions nautiques, t. 3, p. 203. However he has the wrong figures in
several places. For the 4th section under the Damascus manuscript he has
18 verses; this should read 158 (cf. p. 204). t
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THE NAVIGATORS AND THEIR WORKS 25
verses each and the re-constituted total comes to yet another figure
even larger than the previous one (1,105 verses). The respective
lengths of the poem in each manuscript is MS 2292, 1,071 verses;
MS 2559, 963 verses, and the Damascus manuscript 1,061 verses.
Altogether there are only three verses which have survived which do
not appear in MS 2292, the manuscript which Ferrand published in
his Instructions nautiques and hence the one readily available for
study. In all cases the manuscripts suffer from the same , scribal
inconsistencies as does the text of the FawaHd and these I shall
mention below: a poem however usually suffers in transcription by
having verses omitted and as we can see the Hawiya has not escaped
this fate.
The poem is divided into eleven sections fu$ul of irregular length;
and certain sections have suffered more than others in the manu­
scripts. In MS 2292 no section is more than three verses short of
Ibn Majid’s stated figures except the fourth which is 23 verses short.
In MS 2559 the fourth section is the same length as in the previous
manuscript; the seventh is 37 verses and the first 10 verses short and
the second section is missing altogether. The Damascus manuscript
is again fairly complete except that the fourth section is 33 verses
short of Ibn Majid’s figure.
The contents of these eleven sections are as follows: 1. Introduction
and signs (ishdrat) for the look-out to watch for; landmarks, sea­
weed, etc. 2. Basic measurements. 3. The same including an ex­
planation of bashi (variation of Polaris’ altitude), nairuz (first day of
the nautical calendar) etc. 4. The lunar mansions (manazil with
bashi and stars used for latitude determinations at their culmination).
5, 6 and 7. Routes (the roteiros) across and round the coasts of the
whole Ocean, ending with an appendix on routes across the Gulf
of Aden. 8. Masdfdt; longitudinal distances across the Ocean.
9. Latitude measurements for ports on the shores, of the Ocean.
10, 11. Miscellaneous and astronomical matter.
(f) The Fawa'id ■
(I) The Manuscripts. The FawaHd is the work of Ibn Majid of
which this book is basically a translation. Its full title is the Kitab
al-FawaHd fi u$ul cilm al-bahr wayl-qawaHdf “the book of profitable
things concerning the first principles and rules of navigation”. It
has survived in one of the manuscripts of the Bibliotheque Nationale,
MS arabe 2292, and also in the manuscript from the Library of the
Arab Academy in Damascus and the. text of the FawaHd appears as
i the first work in both manuscripts, i
The nature of the FawaHd is very obscure and the scribal mistakes