Monsoon Winds
From: Bill Hayton
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 4:26 PM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Dear All,
I'm looking for a more detailed outline of the way sailors managed the monsoon winds when sailing across the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal. There are plenty of bland descriptions saying the winds change direction in summer and winter but I can't find anything which says that a sailor would have to leave Malacca/Funan/Guangzhou at a specific month in order to reach their destination by the required month to trade and then return home safely and speedily.
Can anyone provide?
Many thanks
Bill Hayton
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From: Dave Paulson
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 5:08 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Bill,
Not so much in the Bay of Bengal, but the documentary Ring of Fire: an Indonesian Oddyssy has an interesting example of anthropological filmmakers negotiating a trip across the archipelago with the Bugis people. I recommend seeing the entire series, but the first episode features what I'm talking about.
See here to link directly to that point in the film.
Also, there is a book version of this work.
All the best,
Dave Paulson
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From: Li Tana
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 5:32 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi Bill Hayton,
On the two monsoon system see Tony Reid's "Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce", vol.2, p.65.
Chinese merchants would leave southern China in Jan or Feb (no later than Feb) for Southeast Asia and make the return journey no later than late July.
Best, Tana
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 7:13 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Leonard Blusse published Visible Cities about 2-3 years ago. The book is about Nagasaki, Batavia and Canton, three cities that had quarters set aside for sailors who had to remain for several months, witing for favorable winds. He could have included Hoi An, and for much earlier, Oc Eo. I can't remember whether he mentioned specific months; I only listened to the talks on whch his book is based.
Hue Tam
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From: David Waters
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 11:51 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Bill,
Track down a copy of Jacq-Hergoualc'h's The Malay Peninsula: Crossroads of the Maritime Silk Road. It has some helpful charts featuring Southeast Asian surface winds and surface currents in the South Sea from April to July, August to November, and December to March.
Best
D. D Waters
UW-Madison
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From: cwheeler
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 3:38 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Bill,
For specifics about sailing, I always turn to Stephen Davies at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum. Incredible knowledge. I asked him for more information about sailing navigation to help me annotate a translation of Dai Son's voyage to Hoi An in Hai ngoai ky su, and got a pile of information. See below. From my experience, sources like Mannivellette gave me the best sense of what the sailing voyages were like at that time. Earlier sources are too vague and later sources too technical. As for Chinese itineraries, most are not translated into English. One geography, however, is, and gives a pretty good impression of the sailing route from Xiamen to ports in Southeast Asia:
Oey, Giok Po. "Record of the Southern Ocean." Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1953. This is a translation of the Haiwai wenjian lu, an 18th century piece.
For a great description of the experience of sailing on a merchant vessel from Guangzhou to Hoi An, see Thich Dai Son, Hai ngoai ky su (1699, translated into Q.ngu by Tran Kinh Hoa [Ch'eng Ching-ho] in 1963, I think), chapter 1. I have an article mss. about this voyage, and if you're interested, perhaps I can share it with you.
Another thing to check out is the Selden Map, which is causing a stir. It is supposedly a map of China, but its best geographical information is about sailing routes of the South China Sea, in particular Dang Trong and Dang Ngoai:
http://seldenmap.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
OK, hope this is all helpful. See Stephen's message below:
Monsoon sailing. The earliest instruction as to sailing with the monsoons, with a very rough timetable explaining when to sail, is the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea of the 1st century CE by an unknown Graeco-Egyptian trader (trans and ed. GWB Huntingford, London: Hakluyt Soc., 1980, chs 6, 14, 24, 39, 49, 56 and 57), though the instructions are fairly vague and confined to passages from Egypt through the Gulf of Aden and to either the Persian Gulf or across the Arabian Sea to the Malabar Coast of India (with vague mutterings about trade with Malaya and probably China at the end).
Next up come the more detailed instructions, again primarily for the Arabian Sea, of the great Ibn Majid’s Kitab al-fawa’id fi usul al-bahr w’al-kawaid (aka the Fawa’id) of c.1488. Instructions as to sailing dates are scattered throughout and all well-summarized in a nifty table by the editor and commentator Geoffrey Tibbets in the Arab navigation in the Indian Ocean before the coming of the Portuguese, Oriental Translation Fund New Series Vol XLII, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1981 – for the tabular summary see interleaved between pp.366-367.
Paul Wheatley, in The Golden Khersonese (Kuala Lumpur, U of Malaya Press, 1961) indicates, at least by implication that one can glean a broad sense of seasonal timetable from Chinese narratives and in Ch.4 for example shows this for I-Ching’s Memoir on the Eminent Monks who sought the Law in the West during the Great Tang Dynasty
>From that point you’re into whitey’s day and the beginning of systematic routeing guides which, in English, start with the notes in John Sellers The English Pilot. The Third Book. Describing the Sea-Coasts, Capes, Headlands, Straits, Soundings, Sands, Shoals, Rocks, and Dangers. The Islands, Bays, Roads, Harbours and Ports in the Oriental Navigation of 1702.
Much of the running here was made by the Dutch and later French, especially d’Apres de Mannevillette, whose Neptune Oriental was adapted and turned into the 1780 (and multiple subsequent editions), A new directory for the East-Indies: containing, I. The first discoveries made in the East-Indies by European voyagers and travellers. II. The origin, construction, and application of nautical and hydrographical charts. III. The natural causes, and observed phænomena, of the constant and variable winds, trade-winds, monsoons, and currents, throughout the East-India oceans, and seas. IV. A description of the sea coasts, islands, rocks, harbours, shoals, sands, sea-marks, soundings, &c. in the Oriental navigation. V. Directions for navigating in the East-India seas, to the best advantage, at different times of the year. VI. Directions for sailing to and from the East-Indies, as recommended and practised by experienced navigators and mariners of which you can download an electronic copy at http://archive.org/details/newdirectoryfore00herb. The commentary on timing departures is diffuse and not very systematic, but the contents page, whilst very typically 18th century, is a sound guide.
Things begin to get a bit (though not much) more systematic with Joseph Huddart’s Oriental Navigator (again downloadable fromhttp://ia600402.us.archive.org/21/items/orientalnavigat00huddgoog/orientalnavigat00huddgoog.pdf), especially from p.318 onwards.
Modern stuff begins really with the inestimable James Horsburgh whose India Directory, (1st vol. 1804, going through 8 editions until the last, edited by Edward Dunsterville in 1884, before the new edition by A.D. Taylor in 1874, subsequently succeeded by the appearance of the British Admiralty’s 5 volume (now 3 volume) China Sea Pilot (there are the US equivalents, though these come in two variants, one serving offshore routes and the other coastal work)) was the entire universe’s stand-by for three or four generations. The 1841 edition of Horsburgh can be downloaded from http://archive.org/details/indiadirectoryor02hors (that’s vol.2 which covers China and the passage from India – Vol 1 is the passage out from Europe and available from the same source). He prefaces each section of the passage from India to China with a discussion of broad climatology and passage timing in relation to it.
Today we all use the British Admiralty’s Ocean Passages for the World (1st ed. 1895), though one needs a pre-1980s edition to have the full benefit of the routes for sailing vessels (Part II, Ch.10 for you).
The distillation of all this was begun by the wondrous Matthew Fontaine Maury of the US Navy in c.1850, who had the brilliant idea of taking all the collected logbooks of sailing vessels lodged in the chart depot in Washington and consolidating the information on weather and routes that the data therein contained. The result, after a couple of bum starts, was the brilliant series of routeing or pilot charts for the world’s oceans, covering month by month and showing, graphically, the prevailing winds and their variation, currents, air temperature and much else besides for squares of ocean. You can download these for free from thehttp://msi.nga.mil/NGAPortal/MSI.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=msi_portal_page_62&pubCode=0003. Each file is bloody huge, so takes a while to download but, by golly, they are absolutely wonderful and one can pore over them for hours.
Charles J. Wheeler
Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of Hong Kong
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From: Michele Thompson
Date: Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:03 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Charles,
Thanks for acquiring this very detailed information and putting it all out on VSG. The next time I am in Hong Kong (other than just the airport) I think I have to visit the Maritime Museum!
cheers
Michele
Michele Thompson
Professor, Dept. of History
Southern Connecticut State University