Histories of the Sea

HISTORIES OF THE SEA

Part 1- In Times Immemorial

Cuckoo wrasse change gender. Male sea horses give birth, their young emitted like spurts of semen. Portuguese man o’war create houses of multiple occupation. And all the strange creatures too that forsook the sea that was once their common home. At first they lived ambivalently before declaring that terra firma was their permanent and only home. Some took to the skies, others found new eggless ways to procreate. Fierce beasts roamed the earth so the more timid and vulnerable made trees their home. Four legs became the norm.

When did the first timid creature climb down from those trees and brave the tigers and mastodons beneath? A foolish fellow in many ways, he who bears responsibility for the emergence of the strangest creature of all. And he is the one to blame for all who suffer from back pain and arthritis and numerous other ailments that arise from standing on two feet. But would we be on Instagram if he had not taken that long vertical journey? Or eat Belgian buns baked miles away across the sea.

Homo Sapiens never forgot its marine origins. It returned many times to empty shores of sand and pebbles. Fish were caught; primitive boats built. There was one latter day saw, though that HS could never quite accept. If it ain’t broke it don’t need fixing. No, much better the catchphrase of every business guru that ever lived- continuous improvement. So along came the mill, along came the canal, along came the stirrup, essential tools all, so called, in the development of the species. Later came the likes of Thomas Edison who destroyed darkness but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let us dally for a moment at Lothal, now forgotten but the site of the world’s first ever dock. And with the first dock came the beginnings of long-distance trade.

The river flowed mighty to the sea, to the far Rann of Kutch. Their flat bottomed boats bound for Lothal carried items for trade and boasting that would stamp them in the eyes of the world. They took peacocks in huge cages, their tail-feathers defying description or definition, the colours changing with the light, the perspective, even with the twitch of a man’s head. These were colours that no man could ever reproduce like the precious blue of the lapis they took from their mines and which was sought across the world. They carried cardamom too to flavour the foods of men who lived in distant lands, and faience beads and onagers.

In Lothal they had built the world’s first dock and men journeyed from there far to the West. They took with them their language of three vowels with the one preponderant and sat under the stars in Bahraini deserts that burn hot in the day and are parched and rainless.

That was for the future as Pancha and his party were taken slowly down the river by their oarsmen. They passed reed beds and once an abandoned town where the river had silted. A sump rested on the sandy bank and effluent from it oozed into the water. At night Pancha would hear the screeches of birds and the clicks of small night animals that he felt in his half-sleep were the souls of the recent dead passing by. Once he saw a pair of disembodied yellow eyes staring at him from some dense waterside foliage. They made him shiver; even eyes can seem poised to pounce.

The river widened as they approached the Rann. It spread across the land and broke into channels. Pancha felt it stultifying under the beams of his boat, tiring, unsure of whether it could take them further. Had the prayers to their gods sufficed only for this far? Pancha sat in the prow trying to make connections- gods and crops and sweet rain. How did things happen?

Then Lothal and its wharves came in sight where they would rest for the evening. They ate, and Pancha sat on the shore and watched flocks of pink flamingos flying into the marshes against the darkening blue sky. The contrasting colours of birds and sky mesmerised him. Breezes seemed to change course as they blew around the boy. It was a time for forgetting, for surrendering to the instant. His comrades called him to play board games with their ivory castles. They did not seem to see the flamingos as he saw them. The great pink birds in their congregations, their clan gatherings, their calls to each other, captivated Pancha. He just wanted to watch them. Were these flamingos all the same too? Did they all subscribe to a common purpose? Did they build identical nests? His companions seemed oblivious and Pancha did not understand that. There was a word that he was beginning to use for himself but it was a dangerous word not recognised either there or in Black Bangle City miles to the east.

A huge civilisation that left us nothing but buried ruins and deep underwater channels in rainless deserts. And scraps of writing still undeciphered. We know the names of not a single person of these people, no king nor warrior, quite possibly because they had none. There is one thing we owe them but let’s first continue a bit with Pancha’s journey.

By early morning they had left Lothal’s trapezoid dock and were on a ship bound for Bahrain, a big ship with wooden planks held together by palm fibre, and a single lateen sail to catch the winds of the ocean. This ocean beyond Lothal was vast. Were the hymns of praise to the Sarasvati written by men who had never seen the sea? He watched its waves and currents and tried to make sense of them. Like the shore breezes of the night before these waves seemed variable and random, but his upbringing made it hard for him to accept that randomness could play a part in anything. Everything had reason and everything had purpose; that is what they taught in the schools of Black Bangle City.

The first night afloat on the great sea he ate sesame for his meal and again in that darkening world he sucked on a date. His eyes began to close and thoughts formed that went a way in their logical progression, but when he opened his eyes again they proved to be chimeras and their meaning disintegrated. His sleep became deeper. When he next awoke he felt the world had changed. It was darker and an unremembered clamminess filled the air. A darkness superimposed on the ordinary dark of the night. It felt threatening and it was choking him.

But there was light and at first he could not fathom its source. Then his eyes were lifted upwards. He saw the corposant blue at the top at the mast. It seemed to dance. He had never seen its like before shimmering on the masthead, an electric blue that was foreign and mysterious and a bit foreboding. Now he noticed other luminations far away over the water. Lightning flashed silently across the distant and ionised air. The corposant above held him in its unearthly power, a manifestation of something teasing him beyond the borders of his ken. The air seemed as wet as the water beneath them.

He fell asleep again and when he next woke the corposant was gone and it did not return. The deck was damp but this boat would see no more rain. Night after night he slept fitfully as the boat rose and fell on the welling sea. He sat slumped against the side panels and the sea felt removed from reality, some sort of backdrop such as the travelling gypsies made for their puppet theatres when they passed through Kalibangan. Sometimes birds appeared from nowhere and followed the boat before disappearing with equal mystery. On the morning Bahrain was sighted a distant sun burned in a blank blue sky; the clouds that had first accompanied them had long since evaporated. Did Pancha’s people’s gods still reside in such a sky?

In those days the sea was everything. There were no wheeled land vehicles and certainly nothing skyborne. The first man to jump on a horse (But why? Some teenager showing off is my best guess) was too recent so walking still prevailed. But the sea, the sea. Which allowed two clever sets of people to show each other their produce, made or excavated, and come to some terms of exchange. Let us rejoin Pancha and see the sort of things that might have happened. His whole story is not for these pages- it would not fit- but every tale needs its protagonist. And he, just like we its readers, are seeing these things for the first time.

On the first night ashore they slept in hammocks stretched across acacia trees. When he woke in the morning he stared dreamily at the pinnate leaves of the acacias above him. The lustrous green of the leaves and the deep blue of the sky beyond, worlds of primary promise, new paradises. It was a child’s view of the world but Pancha somehow understood that a child’s perception was different, more immediate, unmediated, and that men must hold on to childhood memories and that those memories would themselves mediate between the grown man and the shrunken world he must inhabit.

After breakfast they met the traders and exchanged goods. The lapis they left till the end and Pancha watched how his comrades struck bargains and he learned as he watched. They squatted in rough circles and scraped patterns in the sand with sticks. There was some language too and fingers held up and sometimes thumbs were placed across the heel of the hand. Pancha watched the workings of multiplication. He saw the greedy and lascivious eyes of the Bahrainis as they touched and examined the lustrous blue gems. Pancha’s comrades struck hard bargains and required sackfuls of balsam, arsenical bronze ware and big Bahraini horses in return, horses that it was said carried an extra pair of ribs. They did not stay long in Bahrain; there was a lengthy overland journey home.

We are not concerned here with overland journeys only with how an amphibious empire exploited its resources to make long distance (which meant by sea) trade a possibility. This resource which marks these people as different was mined far from the sea, and not even within the normally accepted boundaries of Pancha’s folks who in the main lived on the banks of the Sarasvati- they had built their houses on the floodplain- the mythico-real river that they worshipped.

The asset was lapis lazuli, a shimmering blue mineral, much admired and sought after. Pancha first saw the mines on that overland journey back to his domains. His party clambered high into the mountains their beasts struggled to maintain their footing, their hind legs kicking away stones and shard and threatening at any moment to follow them down the valley. The mines of Shortugai were the beating heart of their people’s prosperity, and Pancha had seen what men would pay for the gorgeous blue gem. He watched as the miners worked the slaked rocks with their chisels.

From the island kingdom of Bahrain lapis would spread ever westward. It was at the heart of a scarab beetle, and Cleopatra would later have it powdered and sprinkled on her eyelashes. Times were changing and Asia was struggling to retain its hold on the Earth’s waterways. Pancha would continue to make his westward journeys. His sons would follow in his footsteps and eventually some descendant would link with Cadmus as he searched for his sister, Europa, who had been snatched from her family by the marauding Zeus who presided over the continent she would give her name to.

Now it was Europe’s turn to patrol the seas and Phoenician biremes out of Tyre roamed the Mediterranean. To Carthage they came, and Syracuse. The Mediterranean Sea, Mare Nostrum for many Europeans, was in some ways a tideless sea but beware the Straits of Messina and the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. The Phoenicians and the Greeks were sailor tribes who understood the Med but the Romans became Emperors Absolute. Though they remained vitally dependent on the old Phoenicians who gave them an alphabet for their justification and robes for their adornment and power. Only the ruling classes could wear the “Roman” purple which in fact came from Tyre, from a small creature called a murex. Perhaps Tyre was really the head of that Empire and Rome merely its simulacrum.

Part 2- The End of Time Immemorial

Which was 1189.

A History of the Seas does not need to explain why this should be so either take it from me or get thee to an Encyclopaedia.

Part 3- Post Times Immemorial

After the end of Time Immemorial came the Renaissance, known for its Madonnas dressed in blue robes. Botticelli and his like painted these robes the same way that the Egyptians had decorated their scarabs- with lapis lazuli. By then it was called ultramarine- from beyond the sea.

As the Renaissance began to fade another great city began to rule the Mediterranean though it has never got the same credit as Rome. This was the age of the conquistadores and the “discovery” of America, though it had been known for thousands upon thousands of years by seafarers from Russia. Europe was inundated with silver. It all came through Seville. Another flota crossed the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila.

Nowadays huge container ships still cross the oceans of the world. The sailors on them lead a lonely life for their crews are minuscule compared to the biremes and triremes, the caravels and galleons and tea clippers of the old days.

But for most of us the sea is less important than it once was. There are other modes of transport, other things to do. Now the expression “all at sea” means loss and confusion. Pancha and his tribes moved ever west setting their sights on the setting sun over Seville and the Americas. Let us now imagine another everyman (me or him, her or they in the age of confusion of pronouns) standing one evening looking out to sea at Bexhill, some little way west of the Cinque Ports (which like Pancha signify five) and composing the following in his head.

All At Sea

On the sea strand the boats lie beached.

The rigging rattles round their metal masts.

All night the winds play their hollow symphonies,

And this is summer, and the sea is empty

Except for a foreign tanker lit up and far away.

On the sea strand the boats lie beached

Just as they did in the howling winter gone.

We have turned our backs on the sea,

Uncertain and suspicious of its welling waves.

We make our forays to distant coastal strips,

Forays of towel, sand and calamari

But the sea is far beneath us as we journey there.

True exploration now seems alien, our fate uncertain.

Great thalassic empires once came to visit,

Their boats hauled up on to the shingle of our shores.

Those empires that became us now dwindle in our souls.

We are all at sea and the wind tears at our rigging.

But we as individuals can take respite from societal woe and go once more to linger on our littorals. And hear the breath of the living sea. In and out breathe its wave and currents, so restful, so hypnotic. His dreams in that twilight are pitched between day and night and he remembers how we came out of that universal sea and will return there one day. A New World beckons.

There is the Brazos de Dios and the Trinidad,

The Colorado and the San Antonio,

On which stands the great city of Bexar.

And the Medina beyond Bexar where the land grows arid,

The Frio where there are cedars,

And the Nueces.

And there is the Brave River itself.

They are all alone in their beginnings.

They trickle and meander in empty lands and thirsty places

Once known only to the Comanche and the Lipan

And a few peripatetic friars.

But they grow aware of their thirst and their separateness,

And yearn to be one with the others,

With all rivers everywhere.

At last they are.

They dream together as they flow into the sea.

But by then they have forgotten everything.

Brave rivers are we all. Brave rivers that dream of the sea.