John Mack - The Sea: A Cultural History

There are two separate strands which have come together in the planning of this book or rather two separate, but in the end related questions. The first is a negative one: why did no one apparently think it worth settling on the large island of Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean until late in human history? It is an island well-endowed by nature and, other than being inhabited by ferocious mosquitoes along its coasts, not inconvenienced by the lions, leopards or other predators that stalk the hinterlands of the nearby African continent. Its famous lemurs are benign residents posing no physical threat to human settlement. A second question is why coincidentally at about the same time as Madagascar was finally being colonized did the people of East Anglia take to burying a leader in a huge ship on the top of a hill? Sutton Hoo is a pleasant place above a sheltered inlet, a good place to bury a prominent person who would have been familiar with the maritime world along this part of the English coastline. But why drag a huge ship all the way up there to do it?

The questions occurred in this sequence but at different moments several decades apart. The first obliges a reconsideration of what it means to be at sea and how the maritime world is constituted; the second implies bringing the subject back onto land to think about how the maritime and terrestrial worlds interact. The movement of the book that follows reproduces that sequence: it starts by thinking about human engagement with the sea in maritime terms, rather than merely as an extension of the activities of the land; and it ends by seeking to bring together the argument round a consideration of the grand ritual gesture of ship-burial. In between it ranges widelyacross the literature on the human experience of the different oceans and seas.

After working in various inland parts of eastern Africa and having had the opportunity to spend time along the Swahili coast of Kenya and latterly Tanzania the outbreak of civil war in southern Sudan in the early 1980s made it inadvisable to continue working with pastoralist communities in what was to become a war-torn area. The opportunity arose to begin an ethnographic survey on the island of Madagascar, which in those days was mostly approached by plane from Nairobi. The route lay over the north-west coast of the island with a clear sight of the soils leeching off the central highlands and turning the rivers and a wide semi-circle of the waters of the Mozambique Channel a distinctive brownish-red colour. Flying in to land in the highlands near the capital of Antananarivo has become the usual way of getting there. However, on subsequent visits I have been able follow an older practice and approached by sea from Zanzibar entering the ports at Mahajanga, Antsiranana (previously Diego Surez) and, on the east coast, at Toamasina (Tamatave). What this experience makes entirely evident is both the proximity of la grande le to inhabited lands and islands in the vicinity and also the availability of a number of sheltered harbours. So the island is vast, neither remote, lacking appropriate harbours (albeit dispersed ones) nor short of resources. True, it lies at the extremities of the monsoonal system which linked together the trading practices of the wider Indian Ocean world. Being off the beaten track, however, was not a criterion which limited the exploration and settlement of the Pacific, the North Atlantic or other areas which were colonized much earlier than Madagascar. Madagascar was not occupied until very late in human history probably only within the last 1,200 to 1,500 years.

The big question which has preoccupied those concerned with the antiquity of human activity in this part of the Indian Ocean concerns the question of who first colonized the island in the context of increased precision about when the event might have happened. Even if we set aside the questionable assumption that it was a single event, the whole detective cast to this search is hard to avoid. There are a limited number of candidates who might have committed the deed, and, while the scenarios are conflicting, all have persuasive aspects. Much is down to the imaginative powers of reconstruction of the researcher and the assessment of new pieces of information as they arise. However, as in the standardmystery story, none of the current occupants is saying anything definitive: Madagascar stands out amongst island populations in retaining virtually no oral tradition about sea voyaging from anywhere else. Even relatively recent arrivals retain only the vaguest history of having come from elsewhere. And for inhabitants of an island nation with an immensely long coastline, very few contemporary Malagasy derive a living from the exploitation of the sea itself.

Contrast that with, for instance, the Polynesians sense of their origins and connectedness. There, the accounting of ancestral voyaging is an established part of oral tradition and distinctions between first occupants and later arrivals is part of the understanding of hierarchical relationships. Individual clans may be identified, as in Fiji, as people of the sea rather than the land, expressing or at least implying their more recent arrival. In New Zealand the Maori recount their genealogical descent, linking themselves across the generations to the voyagers who first settled the islands, and thence backwards in time to the divinities from whom the Maori derived.

So there are other fundamental questions to be posed than those of a whodunnit kind. Why not? is surely an equally pressing and complex issue to be raised why was an island the size of Madagascar running parallel to the coast of Africa at a distance of only 400 kilometres, lying within the compass of the Indian Oceans monsoonal winds, not occupied much earlier than it was? And, beyond that, why does the sea not feature in symbolic or political contexts amongst the peoples of Madagascar in the way it does elsewhere? The fact of Madagascar being both accessible and thinly occupied was, after all, precisely what made it so attractive to the pirates who based themselves in the Bay of Antongil as late as the early eighteenth century, returning for what would nowadays be called rest and recreation from preying on merchant shipping in the rest of the Indian Ocean or pilgrim ships heading to or from Mecca. It is in trying to understand the answers to these questions that the wider treatment in this book arises, for what is implied is not a specific set of historical reflections but a more fundamental rethink of the ways in which maritime cultures are configured by scholars.