Detail from the “Catalan Atlas.” Source: gallica.bnf.fr
This is the script of an episode that can be listened to here.
Quote:
“Ahmed, son of Ali, son of Mounir, the ship’s captain, a native of Siraf, and another of those far-famed sailors who scout the seas and bring home glory and renown, has informed me that a respectable person of India once told him the following story.”
He told him that in the region of Serendib, our Sri Lanka, a ship was once wrecked and broken. He told him that some of its people managed to escape by boat and make their desperate way to an island off the coast of India, safe for now, but due to either damage to the boat or its basic unseaworthiness on open ocean, unable to leave that place.
For some time they stayed there, time enough for many of them to die, reducing their number to seven, time enough for them to notice the unusual bird that sometimes lit upon those shores.
It came by evening, settling down to find its food and then taking flight, and it was truly gigantic, enormous enough to give them an idea. One by one they would tie themselves to the bird while it fed and let it carry them where it may. Truly, they knew it to be an option of last-resort, but then that was where they found themselves, with little hope of escaping their lonely exile that island where they would surely otherwise end their lives. Should the bird kill them, or just drop them to their deaths, they would hardly be worse off, so let them at least try this before they succumbed to the same fate as their shipmates.
So try it they did. One brave one among them hid in the trees and crept up as the bird ate. Then, as it made ready to leap up, he used fibres of tree bark to lash himself to its side, and he clung on with arms and legs.
He held as the bird took him ever higher and over the water. He held until sunset, when the bird landed on a mountain, and he, half-dead from terror and exhaustion, untied himself and collapsed.
In the morning, he woke and gathered himself. He encountered a friendly shepherd who fed him with milk and directed him to nearby Indian city. And one after the other his six fellow castaways made their way by the same route and to the same city, each surviving their flight to find one another again and be reunited in its streets.
From there, they would make their way to a seaport. They would find a ship bound for home, and they would live to tell the tale there of the sunken ship and the strange bird, a story that would reach us through our source today.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of those who travelled through it. And this is the part of the episode where I point out that the podcast has a patreon, that you can find it at patreon.com/humancircus or through my website, which is humancircuspodcast.com, that there are 1, 3, and 5 dollar options, and also that on that patreon, you could be listening to this and other episodes ad-free and with extra listening on the end. And this is also the part where I send out thanks to new Patreon members, so today I want to thank, Julia. Your support is very much appreciated.
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Today, it’s something of a continuation of the episode I did recently on Abu Zayd and on the merchants who sailed to India and China in the 9th and 10th centuries. I mentioned in that episode that there was an effort made in the Abu Zayd text to distance the accounts there from the more fanciful fabrications of sailors. Here in this episode, we’ll erase that distance entirely and speak of some of those sailors’ stories. That episode was concerned with the shifting realities of trade with China, this one with matters that sometimes strayed a little outside those realities.
The source this time is the mid-10th-century text known as the Kitāb ʻajāyib Al-Hind, or the Book of the Wonders of India, though really the wonders it contains range all the way from East Africa to the China seas and even to a place that may have been Japan. By the title page of one 13th-century manuscript, we know it to be the work of Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar al-Ramhormuzi, a seafarer, traveller, and collector of accounts and anecdotes, he or his family originating in Ramhormuz, a small town in present day Khuzestan Province, Iran. But there is some question as to that attribution, with a more recent suggestion pointing to Abū 'Imrān Mūsā ibn Rabāḥ al-Awsī al-Sīrāfī, a Baghdad educated scholar who lived much of his life in Cairo, who is less of an unknown quantity, and for whom we have lengthy fragments from a text that contained strikingly similar anecdotes to those connected to al-Ramhormuzi.
Issues of attribution aside, the stories this text contains are rich and varied, the world it depicts abundant with marvels and terrors. There are such serpents that if they see a person before the person spots them, they die, but if it is the other way round and the human notices them first, then it is the human that dies. There are sea monsters that are sucked up into the clouds, passing through the skies until dropped back to earth, emptying it of human and horse, sheep and camel before, having consumed all that country contains, they perish of hunger. There are flying scorpions whose venom causes the victim’s skin to fall away in ribbons before death, birds that lift elephants and then send them plunging to their doom below, ants large as cats known to tear men apart, and enormous turtles that populate the cavernous depths, large enough to be mistaken for islands when they come to the surface, at least until fire is lit upon their backs.
There is an elephant that goes every day to collect its master’s needs from the market, laying waste to any stall where it is taken advantage of in trade. And there are people who are part fish, part human, and of these the text is not short on examples.
We read of an old sailor dining in Sri Lanka and presented with a soup on the surface of which bobbed distinctive shapes. Identifiable as hands, feet, heads like those of small boys, they swirled up into view before disappearing back into the broth. He was, understandably, disturbed by the sight and would not eat a drop, but then the next day, by way of explanation, was presented with squirming scaled fish, that did indeed otherwise seem very much like a human child.
We read of a man having returned from travels in east Africa where he’d seen from the seas there a fish that was very much like a human. It’s said that the poorest fishermen of the region, those forced to go furthest afield in their work, would sometimes come across and have children with these creatures, that the breeding of humans and certain fish over the centuries had probably led to their existence, just as that of people with panthers had led to the hyena, and with other beasts the monkey. And there are other examples given in the text. The pig and buffalo had together produced the elephant, the dog and goat the wild boar, and, less fantastically, the donkey and mare the mule. The world was alive with crossbreeds of these kinds, and there’s a more lengthy example given of a man having children with a monkey, but that’s not the one I’m featuring here.
This story is presented as having been heard from Captain Abu Zahra al-Barkati, and it should be noted that many of this text’s stated sources were characters still known by Ibn Magid in the 15th-century, and that even in this book full of fairly wild tales of worlds beyond the shores, there is a concern for the credible chain of transmission, for assuring the reader that these accounts were not merely plucked from the writer’s own excessive imagination. In this case, that captain had it from his maternal uncle, his uncle in turn from his father, and this is how it goes.
The father used to tell that he set out one day in a great ship of his possession, that the ship was driven into a bay which, when sounded, was more than a thousand fathoms deep. For thirty-three days they were kept by a windless calm from making their departure, and with little else to do, the ship’s occupants let the currents carry them where they would, drifting in and among a group of islands until on the beaches of one they spotted people, people who swam, and plunged, and played in the surf. Making gestures of their friendliness to those ashore, they directed their ship in to land.
The people ashore spoke in a language unknown to any of those from the ship, but they seemed intelligent and amiable enough, and the two sides soon made themselves understood by signs. When the sailors signalled that they wished to purchase foods, the islanders brought forth rice, chicken, ewes, honey, butter, and fruit, and from the ship came iron, copper, kohl, beads, and cloth. Goods were pushed about on the sands, and a deal was soon negotiated that was pleasing to all.
“Have you anything else?” the people of the ship then asked.
“Only our enslaved,” signalled those of the island.
“Then bring them out,” came the answer.
And so the people of the island brought forth the merriest and most lovely examples that the sailors had ever seen, people who frolicked and played and seemed ever on the verge of taking flight. Only their heads seemed a little odd, unusually small, and there on their flanks, small wings like those of a turtle. The sailors were a little confused, but the islanders waved away these minor details as utterly insignificant and unworthy of worry. And besides, these peculiarities aside, they were astonishingly beautiful.
Emptying their ship of all goods save food, the sailors purchased and packed in as many of the enslaved as they possibly could. They had spent all they had with them, but in those bodies now aboard they had wealth enough to enrich not only themselves but their children and then their childrens’ children after them.
A promising wind picked up that would carry them home. They bid farewell to their hosts and received a very cheerful one in return, the islanders wishing them very well on their journey and urging them to make their way back to that island as soon as they could. The ship departed, and the captain, thinking he might do just that when unencumbered by merchants and other unnecessary cargo, took careful note of the constellations that night.
However, with the light of the next day came problems. The enslaved, understandably enough, became dismayed as their home island disappeared over the horizon. They became extremely, outwardly upset, so that the crew worried over it and became irritated. But it passed. They seemed to calm down considerably, and the crew was back to going about their own business when as if all at once, the enslaved from that island flung themselves from the ship.
For those on board, with a stiff gale pushing them on atop mountainous waves, there was no question of turning about to capture the escapees. The people of the ship could only carry grimly on towards home and contemplate their losses. With little left to trade, only the remnants of their provisions when they reached port in India, they found their capital diminished to but a tenth of what it had been. The entire voyage, so briefly so promising, was now nothing short of a disaster.
As their strange tale spread, an elderly man came to them with his own story. He already knew the islands they’d visited, had been born in that place he called the Islands of the Fish, and he told them of how the islanders there had long ago coupled with the creatures of the sea and how that coupling had produced a people both of the land and of the sea. Their ancestry equally human and fish, they could not resist the call of the water, and there was nothing that could be done to keep them from it. Those of the ship could only accept their losses and resolve not to repeat the mistake, and that would have been the end of the story.
But one of the enslaved islanders had not escaped. There was a woman who had been trapped in a cabin when the moment came and unable to dive overboard with her fellows. She would be brought back with the ship and be married to its captain, the father I mentioned at the start of this story, and for years, he kept her in his home, never letting her leave it. She was a prisoner, more enslaved than married, even as she gave birth to six children, as she waited for her captor to relax his hold.
When the captain died, the children set their mother free. They’d always blamed their father for keeping her locked up, no matter what stories there may be of her home. But they were not expecting what happened next, for immediately she flew from the house, quick as could be and ever before them as she raced through the town toward the waterfront, her children on her heels.
Some who saw them as they ran called out to her, “What are you doing and where do you go? Leaving your children behind like this?”
But she was not to be dissuaded.
“What have they to do with me?” she called out by way of answer, and racing ahead of her pursuers, she flung herself into the water, her fish nature on full display and at last free, never to be seen by her children or the people of the town again.
That was the story that Captain Abu Zahra al-Barkat passed on of his uncle’s family to be recorded in today’s source.
After this break, more from the Book of the Wonders of India.
…
Not everything from this book of wonders is entirely unfamiliar. From my recent reading of the Abu Zayd text, there are many details here that indicate a shared body of knowledge, concerning for example the knife-point ransoming of merchants in the marketplaces of India or a mention of crabs which turn to stone.
And these common threads make sense, what with just a rough 30 years separating the compilation of the two and their shared world of trade on those seas. But there are also anecdotes that are recognizable to us from other sources, and one of those is the Valley of the Gems.
The story here, heard from a traveller to inner India, is that there is a gorge there between two mountains where a fire never ceases to burn and where the finest of diamonds are to be found. They cannot simply be collected or mined though. There is, for one thing, that fire; there are, for another, the serpents, numerous and poisonous enough that entering the valley was simply not to be done.
The clever solution was to catapult chunks of slaughtered sheep down into the valley. It was not in itself particularly productive, but when eagles would dive down for the meat, the gem-seekers would follow them as they flew away. Sometimes diamonds that had stuck to the meat on impact would fall in flight and could be easily collected. Sometimes it was necessary to track the eagles all the way home and collect diamonds from their droppings, less convenient, but also less fatal than going down into that valley itself.
It’s a fairly odd tale of invention and on reading it I could not remember what travel narrative I’d read it in before, but as I tried to retrace my steps and find it, I found that the story was much more well-travelled than I had imagined.
You find it written of by 4th-century Cypriot bishop Ephiphanius. In the 14th-century, you find it wonderfully illustrated in the Catalan Atlas - a bird flying with something in its beak, below two mountains with a snake-filled hollow in the middle, and in the centre two men hacking and pulling apart a lump of meat. The story stuck around until the early 17th-century when William Heth located the valley 15 days from the Indian port of Cambay, our Khambhat. It’s in the Travels of Marco Polo, Nezami’s Romance of Alexander the Great, the stories of Sindbad, the Song Dynasty histories, and it’s here in this 10th-century collection.
And there’s another story in today’s source that seemed very familiar to me, the match less exact maybe, but still pretty strong.
This story comes from a resident of Basra - we’re even given name of the street where he lived - and it goes like this:
The man had suffered a shipwreck or better to say he had survived one, for he was alone of the crew in doing so, the only one to be washed ashore still alive. He found shelter for the night up a tree and he woke to the sound of approaching sheep.
Looking out he saw a massive flock approaching and with them their equally massive shephrd, a toweringly hideous fellow of monstrous appearance, in his hands only a great stick, round his middle only a large leaf. The shepherd threw himself facedown on the grass and idled through the morning while his flock grazed. He waded in the shallows a while and then coming back up to his creatures, seized one by its leg and drank from its udders, tossing it aside for another ewe and then another, and then he glanced at the tree where the shipwreck-survivor still hid. First, he saw the bird. He lashed it to the ground with a well-thrown stone, plucked it while still alive and bashed its head in before consuming its substantial body, down to the bone. Then, he saw the man. The shepherd gestured for him to come down, and shaking with fear and hunger the sailor did so. At first he suffered no ill treatment.
When dusk came, the shepherd only made known by signs that he should join the flock and with those sheep the sailor was herded along, first to a pool of sweet water from which he drank like all the rest, and then, not to a cave, but to a kind of paddock, formed by the trunks of trees, and within it a log cabin.
The night passed without real rest for the sailor. He watched the shepherd kill a sheep with a rock and then tear it to pieces. Then, as the giant slept, he crawled forward to take some scraps for himself, before settling still on the ground, fearful to move lest he wake his captor and suffer the same treatment as the sheep.
In the morning, he was walked out with the rest of the animals and then at the end of the day returned to that paddock and house, and so it went for fifteen more days, the shepherd grunting at him in a language he did not understand, him helping the shepherd gather wood for the fire and, as another forty-five days passed, noticing that the giant was becoming more and more pleased with his appearance, that he would surely soon be eaten just as birds and sheep were every day. He resolved to escape.
He waited until the giant had drunk himself into a deep slumber on the fermented fruits of the island, but he didn’t then drive a burning length of wood into the giant’s eye. Instead he crept out, climbed over the paddock fence and rushed without break across the island. He made himself a cudgel from the heavy branch of a tree and resolved to kill or be killed should he be overtaken.
He travelled on through the day, into plains populated by monstrous birds and creatures he could not identify. He drank from sweetwater springs, ate bananas and other fruits. And eventually, having prepared a cord of tree-bark fibres, he roped one of those birds and rose with it into the sky and away from his tormentor. But his difficulties were not over.
After the harrowing flight to a mountain peak, the sailor fell into fresh dangers, this time into the hands of some unfriendly villagers. He was housed with some other captives, also victims of a shipwreck, and together they were fed; they were very generously fed with sesame, bananas, butter, and honey, and they watched in horror as one of their number was selected, set aside, oiled up and made to sit in the sun for 2 hours, and then slaughtered before their eyes, carved and eaten, some portions roasted, some stewed, some salted and swallowed raw. And then four days later, the same again, but this time the prisoners took action.
They waited until the villagers had settled down for the night, fully sated on human flesh and liquor, and they cut their throats in their sleep. They each took a knife, a little butter and honey and sesame, and they set out towards the sea, the seven or eight now remaining that had survived the two shipwrecks. Gaining the beach, they followed its line, putting some distance between themselves and the land of the cannibals and then, finding a place that provided fruit and shelter enough to live, they resolved to wait for a ship to take them off that island or death, whichever came first.
For some, it was the latter. Only three of them were left on the day that, walking along the beach, they chanced upon a longboat that the ocean had flung into their path. It was in rough shape to be sure, and crewed by rotting corpses, but it was their way out. The three set about making it seaworthy, using clay for a sealant, a trunk for a mast, coconut tree fibres for rigging, and sails of flax. They set in supplies of fruit and water, and they made their way to safety, the sailor eventually finding his own way home to Basra.
He found he had been gone forty years, that his kin were mostly dead. His father had left other children and they refused to acknowledge this long lost brother. His property had been divided, and try as he might, he failed to recover any of his affluence before dying. There was no beloved pet to recognize this Odysseus. He had overcome his Polyphemus and had returned to his Ithaca, but he had not seen to the suitors and sat once more in his own throne. And so his story ended.
At times, this text is quite a magical one. We read for example of a place in inner India where among its shadowy gardens the marketplace of the djinn can be found, where they can be heard making their trades and purchases, but they cannot be seen. We read of magical spells performed, to heal or harm, and of a practice in Sri Lanka of putting people bitten by vipers into a litter on the river and allowing them to float away. As they floated towards the sea, they would be pulled in by magicians along its course that would all make every effort that their powers would allow. If the stricken individual were healed by their spells, then they would walk home well. But if they reached the sea still sick, then they were drowned and disappeared.
We read of an unfortunate fellow in India who had a pretty good trick that he one day showed a friend. He took him down to a bay infested with crocodiles. He spoke an incantation, and he invited his friend to swim out among them, promising his safety. Now his friend was not so easily convinced, and fair enough really, so the magician demonstrated the efficacy of the spell himself, paddling out with the crocodiles all around but none attacking.
The local king heard word of this feat, and thinking it a very useful one, called for the magician. Was it true, what had been said. Could he really cast a spell to make the bay safe? Of course he could, answered the magician. Then, the king said, he should do so, and he would be richly rewarded.
On the appointed day, the enchanter worked his magic. He swam to and fro in the bay to prove his success, and when the king was satisfied and the spellworker back ashore, a signal was given, and a man stepped forward and cut off the enchanter’s head. Better not, the king must have thought, leave alive one who could with a word undo such good work. Sometimes it did not pay to rise to the attention of kings.
In among the magic and “wonders” of this text, there is much that is much less fantastic. The ocean is a big place, and not every voyage involves for example monstrously large crabs. It is true that there will be an anecdote of a ship dropping anchor with no effect, only to find when they send down a diver that an enormous crab is now tugging the ship along by that anchor; there is an account of another ship that passes between two mountain peaks, only to find as they come closer that those peaks are instead the pincers of crabs
However, in and around such unearthly delights, there are things that seem to us entirely natural. Along with giant crabs there are giant fish. There’s one that washed up on the beach with immense quantities of oil produced from it; there are others that are fended off with loud bangings of clappers when it sea, something that also came up in the Abu Zayd episode; they are described as blowing water from their spouts so that sheets of water are like sails. Pretty clearly, these monstrous fish are whales, and the mighty river running between Khanfou and Khamdan, the one broader than the Tigris, that is the Zhujiang, though with the added embellishment that iron horseshoes and iron boat-fittings are unusable in the region due to the mountains of lodestone.
But there’s more that does not neatly fit into a catalogue of wonders, at least for us. There is a customs house on the shores of Sri Lanka. There is a place where the waters abound with crocodiles, the shores are infested with tigers, and the ocean around is patrolled by cannibalistic pirates. There’s certainly an exotic and dangerous element to all of it, but it’s no enchantment or unlikely creature, or at least to us it’s not. To the writer, it seems perhaps that it is.
There are also other bits of identifiable normalcy woven in. Sometimes the “wonder” in question is really a piece of great fortune, a merchant’s goods making their unlikely way back to him across the oceans when thought surely lost. Sometimes there was no such good luck.
After all, not every shipwreck could end happily enough for some chosen few who were flown away on unlikely wings. For others it was all much more natural, more expected, more sad.
In one story, passed to the writer by a ship’s pilot named Imran, son of a man known as the Lame One, a group of Jeddah-bound ships from Oman were caught in a storm fierce enough to force them to throw some of their cargo overboard. This storm, they dealt with well enough, but later a gale picked up, strong enough to tear them from their anchorage, bearing them away onto the water. There were ships with them from Aden and other cities, and then there was one particularly magnificent vessel, one that Imran saw “driven by wind and waves into a peak, jutting from the sea,” and then capsized and every last person on board sinking with it. There were no wonders or marvels there.
And there was no miraculous escape for the girl who is mentioned in another account, the one who suffered one of the sailors’ attentions on a journey from Oman to Basra. When their ship capsized and the survivors clung to the rigging overnight, she was among them, but she survived that first disaster only to be assaulted in the night, and in the light of morning to not be among those few still holding on. There had been no giant bird or happy chance for her, no wonder to speak of.
On that sad note, I think we’ll finish for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I’ll back again shortly, though I’m not sure exactly what with. I have an idea for an upcoming series, but I might fit in another one-off or two before that. In the meantime, if you are listening on the Transcontinental Friar feed on Patreon, keep listening for a little something on the non-combat cutting of bodies, on autopsy in the medieval period. If not, I’ll talk to you soon with more medieval travels.