Arab voyages of another era

By Fran Gillespie         

Title: The Principles of Arab Navigation
Authors:  Ed. by Anthony R Constable and William Facey
Publisher: Arabian Publishing Ltd
Date: February 2013
Description: Hardback, jacket, 160 pages; 258 x 200 mm; Colour throughout; 11 maps, Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Index
ISBN: 978-0-9571060-1-7
RRP: £35.00

For centuries, the Indian Ocean and Arabian Gulf were the means of linking far distant civilisations through their ports. Along with trade goods, the dhows that sailed on the monsoon winds helped to spread knowledge and information about new discoveries, either orally or through books and manuscripts written in Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Hindi.
The seamen who travelled over distances of thousands of miles made use not only of the reliable winds for power, but also the night sky to find their way across the oceans. The complex art of stellar navigation was passed down from generation to generation, and using the simplest of tools a skilled captain could travel with confidence far out of sight of land.
This book is a collection of chapters by six Arab, British and American scholars specialising in Arabian maritime history and culture. It covers the ideas and techniques employed in navigation, and includes an account of the voyage from Muscat to Singapore in 2010 of a replica early medieval sewn-plank dhow, during which experiments were made to apply the ancient navigational skills.
The opening chapter by editor Anthony Constable looks in detail at the Arabian sailing compass with its 32 standard points, which was in use for hundreds of years, each point being associated with a particular star group. Magnetic compasses did not come into use until the 13th century, being at first no more than a piece of magnetic ore, a lodestone, placed on a piece of wood floating on water. Many myths grew up to explain why it always pointed to the north.
Of particular interest in this and the following chapter is a clear explanation, with diagrams, of exactly how the kamal worked. Measuring the height of certain stars was an essential method of navigation for determining latitude. The kamal is a simple rectangle of thin wood with a knotted length of string passing through a hole in its centre.
The lower edge of the rectangle was aligned with the horizon while the operator held one end of the string in his hand or between his teeth, and the wood was then moved along the string until the upper edge aligned with Polaris, the Northern Pole Star, which hangs closer to the horizon in this region than in northern oceans. The position of the wood in relation to the knots could then be used to determine the altitude of the star.
In practice, however, the mariners on the 2010 voyage to Singapore found that to keep the edge of the rectangle aligned with the horizon while standing on a deck bucking about on a choppy sea was no easy task, and discrepancies inevitably occurred.
According to Eric Staples who was the navigator on the replica ninth-century sewn-plank ship, the Jewel of Muscat, there is little concrete evidence for methods of navigation from this remote period, so their experiments were made using Late Islamic/Early Modern Arab navigational methods.  
They tried out different types of star measurements, and expanded the simple basic kamal  into a beautifully carved wooden instrument, a khashaba, which is known to have been in use 200 years ago and which measures the height of stars in finger-widths. The conclusion of the experiments at the end of the voyage was that although the Pole Star was the foundation of the system by which the altitude of stars was measured using a kamal, as the ship sailed southwards other star combinations were more useful and must have been used far more often in the old days of sail than has been previously recognised.
Other sections of the book consider the sailing routes taken by ancient voyagers. A modern map shows the astonishing range of journeys made by the early 16th-century mariner Sulayman al-Mahri, who published his navigational treatises at the time when the Portuguese were establishing themselves in East Africa, western India and the Gulf. Living in the same period as the greatest of all Arab navigators, Ahmad ibn Majid, the ‘Lion of the Sea’, Sulayman’s voyages took him from southern Arabia to Madagascar, ports all down the western coast of India, and to Burma and Indonesia.
A handful of Europeans have written accounts of sailing in traditional dhows, before engines took over in the 1950s, and in Chapter 7, Yacoub Yousuf al-Hijji discusses that of Alan Villiers. Himself a master mariner, Villiers sailed with a Kuwaiti captain from Aden to Zanzibar in 1938. The Kuwaiti turned out to be a poor navigator, and al-Hijji regrets that Villiers did not sail with a more competent captain, as he formed a somewhat prejudiced view of Arab navigation. However, his book Sons of Sindbad not only left a detailed record of a way of life which was shortly to vanish forever, but also includes a series of photographs by Villiers which are among the finest images ever taken of sailing dhows and daily life on board.
The final chapters in The Principles of Arab Navigation look at the voyages made by early Arab navigators in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Although some chapters of the book require a working knowledge of mathematics, in particular basic geometry, on the part of the reader, there is much in this book to interest those who wish to learn more about the fascinating history of Arab exploration and the way in which the known world was steadily expanded.
The driving force was, of course, trade, and through the courage and determination of the Arab seamen not only a vast range of trade goods but culture, art and new scientific theories were disseminated, along with the tenets of Islam. Delving into this well- illustrated book, one can but marvel at the incredible skills of the navigators of long ago.
* A kamal being used to measure the height of the Pole Star above the horizon.

 1 A twelve-finger khashaba.

 2 The Jewel of Muscat under sail.

Arab voyages of another era