Gregg Easterbrook - The Blue Age

WAVES SLAP AGAINST THE HULLS OF CARAVELS ON AN INKY night, ships tracking each other via lookouts who watch for wakes and listen for the creak of wood against water. Commanders of the Portuguese fleet waited for a crescent moon so they could enter the Strait of Malacca in near darkness. Sailors whisper, knowing they will be punished for loud talking. Sound carries on a flat seashould anyone on deck shout up toward the lateens, the cries might be overheard along the shores of this narrow passage.

Some of the sailors are nervous, knowing that within a few hours they may be dead or bellowing in agony as a surgeon hacks off a smashed limb. Others are eager to fight. The coming battle will afford the chance to win and return home in glory, claiming the reward promised by the thronegold sufficient for a mere sailor to enter a gentlemans life of ease.

A navigator consults the heavens. He locates the bright star Canopus, known as Suhail to Islamic astronomers of old; measures the apparent distance from Canopus to other named stars by holding up his hand and using the knuckle of this thumb as a scale. The navigator consults a Chinese map many men died to obtain. He informs the captain their small fleet will reach the Sultanate of Malacca before daybreak. The captain orders marines to dress for combat.

The voyage from Portugal to the Strait of Malacca was timed to variations of ocean currents, which appear to mariners as colored rivers in the vastness of the water world, and to monsoon winds whose direction varies with the season.

The Portuguese have come from Lisbon, all the way down the west coast of Africa, around Cape Agulhas at the foot of the continent that is a mystery to Castile, to Kochi on the west of India, then across the Indian Ocean.

Merely reaching the location for the battle has been expensive, exhausting, perilous. Sailors died en route, and combat survivors will die on the voyage home, if there is such a voyage. From the start everyone knew that if half the complement ever saw Lisbon Cathedral again, the quest would be blessed of God.

The year is 1511, and these are not the first wooden ships to endure the hardship of a transit from Europe to what was then called the Orient. In 1498, Vasco da Gama was the first European to sail to India. By 1511, Spanish, Dutch, and other vessels have made the passage. Not long after 1511, Ferdinand Magellan would organize ships for the initial circumnavigation of our pale blue dot. Five carracks with 260 men departed Seville. Three years passed. A single vessel, with 18 mena skeleton crew in more ways than onereturned to Seville. Their ships log was one day behind, confirming the disputed notion that there existed an international date line.

In 1511 there will be war along the Strait of Malacca, a complicated multiple-party combat among the Portuguese, the local sultanate, the Dutch, the Ming Chinese, and the Venetians. Portugal will prevail, taking control of a water highway thousands of miles from home.

Those aboard local junks that ply the Strait of Malacca do not know of Lisbons approaching fleet. Determining the specific location of ships at sea was a 3,000-year-old puzzle, from the Phoenicians through the late Cold War, solved only in the current generation by satellites and transponders. The instant locals sense a fight coming, they will race their junks to the nearest anchorage. When warships appear, most of what floats ends up sinking, including most of the warships.

For many centuries a trip down the Strait of Malacca was hazardous: pirates, boarding parties, armed ships of shoguns and royals were a constant danger because the water road between West and East ran through this contested channel, just as the water road to Athens of antiquity ran through the narrow channel at Artemisium.

Age-old kingdoms fought over the strait; navies of Renaissance Europe and Middle China fought over the strait; England devoted a hefty share of its collective wealth to establishing a fortress city at Singapore, to control the Asian entrance to the strait. In 1945 a powerful battle cruiser, Haguro, erred by steering into the Strait of Malacca. Soon the 927 men of the crew had gone to meet their ancestors.

THAT WAS THE STRAIT of Malacca in the past, war-torn and treacherous. Today the primary danger in these waters is collision caused by traffic.

The Strait of Malacca now suggests a Los Angeles freeway at rush hour, nearly as packed with ships as Interstate 5 is packed with cars. Now a lookout in the strait would observe reflecting off rippling waves in every direction the red, green, and white strobe beacons of merchant vessels. A warship would track the navigation beacons of dozens of large container ships, in addition to electronic signatures of tourist vessels, fishing boats, ferries, and privately owned yachts. The Strait of Malacca has become the busiest sea lane in the world, bearing more traffic than does the Strait of Hormuz, near the Persian Gulf. Nearly a third of international trade passes through the slender channel of the old Malaccan Sultanate, more than the share of trade traversing any other strait in the world. And today the Strait of Malacca has been peaceful for two full generations.