Page 29 - Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean (before portuguese)_Neat

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46 ARAB NAVIGATION
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predecessor Piri Reis is well known for his maps drawn from \
Mediterranean portolanos.
Sidi £elebi brings the Indian Ocean tradition of navigational
V writing to an end, although there is no doubt that navigators of X THE ARAB SHIP
dhow traffic continued to use manuscript guides up to the present
Several treatises1 have been written on Arab ships as used in the
day. In the early nineteenth century James Princep was shown a i I
page taken from such a guide giving a drawing of the points of Indian Ocean, both dealing with the modern ships of the Persian
Gulf and those mentioned by classical authors. Hourani in his
the Arabic compass. The British Museum possesses a navigational
Arab seafaring2 gives a brief sketch of the ship and compares the
manuscript which was captured on board a slaving dhow about 1844,
I classical references and it remains to compare this information with
> and this gives similar diagrams, but on closer inspection it shows that i
the technique then employed was in the European tradition. The that which we can extract from the accounts of the navigators. f
The ships of Sulaiman and Ibn Majid were of several sorts and i
[!. nineteenth century dhow captain shot the sun with a sextant and {
[t: several names of types of ship appear in the texts, although those
not the Pole Star or Suhail or ‘Aiyuq and Vega with a piece of
B: wood and string. actually sailed in by Ibn Majid were never named. Presumably the
In the twentieth century we have the works of Tsa al-Qutami49 names were based as they are today on the shape of the hull.3 Those
who wrote pilot guides for pearling ships and for ocean-going dhows names which appear in the Faw c? id are jilab* khashab,5 tar arid*
b which were printed in Kuwait. This last has been recently (1964) qata'iV mismariydt,8 fur9 and 4aikar.10 The first three of this list
> re-edited by his son cAbd al-Wahhab: although much of the language appear in other texts and have been mentioned by Prof. R. B.
u ;
of the book would have been familiar to Ibn Majid, it follows the Serjeant in his book on the Portuguese in Southern Arabia.u Ibn
Majid mentions them as boats which may enter certain harbours,
. tradition of the British Museum manuscript. Thus the centuries old sail over or not sail over certain shoals or carry out certain sorts of
methods of finding ones way across the Indian Ocean had been
completely lost in favour of those methods learnt on the Atlantic \ voyage, but are not connected with himself in any way. The jilab ;
may be local Red Sea boats, the khashab are mainly Gulf of Aden
and. originally brought to the Indian Ocean by the Portuguese in
; Ibn Majid’s time. > . and Red Sea boats but some may travel to Hormuz and India (but
i presumably only Gujerat and Konkan). The fararid (sing, tarrad) !
49 al-Mukhtar al-kha$$ lil-masSfir wa1 l-fawwash wa*l-ghawwa$ written for pearl are found off the Orissa coast; they may be local boats, but if they
Cl
divers and Dalll al-mukhtdr fl Him al-bihar, Kuwait, 1915, 3rd ed. edited by are Arab they must certainly be long distance ocean-going ships
his son, Kuwait, 1964.
although obviously of a smaller size. The qa(d'il and mismariydt are
V
1 mentioned only in connexion with the Ifranj (i.e. Portuguese).
\
, Serjeant says that the qafd'i1 may possibly be the same as the Indian
!•
.V Kotia (Arab qutiya) which is a dhow with a transom stern, a type
:
which could not have existed in Ibn Majid’s time except as a Medi­
terranean or European craft. The mismariydt are certainly ships put
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. •S-. 1 A list of some of these may be found in the Bibliography, p. xix.
a Hourani, G. F. Arab seafaring. Princeton, 1951. Ch. HI, pp. 87-122.
3 Hourani op. cit. p. 89. A. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad. London, 1940. App. I, p. 337.
4 f. 87r, 1. 3; trans. p. 264.
•:. 6 f. 22v, 11. 17-18; f. 81v, 1. 7; trans. pp. 110, 251.
't».:. •' 6 f. 75v, 1. 13; trans. p. 235. \
< 7 f. 35r, 1. 9; trans, p. 138.
8 f. 35r, 1. 9; trans. p. 138.
: ~ ’-’O-v 9 f. 85v, 1. 17; trans. p. 262.
•< ■. 10 f.<71r, 1. 18;f.72r, 1.9; trans. pp. 226,227.
11 Serjeant, R. B. Portuguese, pp. 134-136. A jalba seen at Hudaida is mentioned
by Sir A. Moore in Mariners Mirror,\o\. 6, p. 76, although other authorities
■V*v: * • state that this is a mistake for jalbut.
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