This cavalcade, incorporating the fifteen Chinese emissaries and their servants, travelled for only a few days before reaching a town under attack from ‘infidels’; that is, Hindu enemies of the sultan. Ibn Battuta and his colleagues decided to use their escorting force to mount a surprise counter-attack. Even allowing for some boasting on his part, this was a considerable success. The infidels were cut to pieces. But one important casualty was the eunuch Kafur, whose special responsibility had been to look after the presents for the Chinese ruler. A messenger was sent back to Delhi, telling the sultan what had happened.
Meanwhile, Ibn Battuta became caught up in a series of skirmishes with the enemy, and it was not long before calamity befell him. He became separated from his cavalry troop, was chased by the Hindus, hid in a ravine, lost his horse, and was soon taken prisoner. All his costly clothes and weapons were removed, including a gold-encrusted sword, and he expected at any second to be killed.
At the crucial moment a young man helped him to escape, and from then on Ibn Battuta’s account of his tribulations takes on a dreamlike quality. He wanders through ruined villages, eating berries and looking for water. He hides in cotton fields and abandoned houses. In one house he finds a large jar, used for storing grain, and climbs into it through a hole in the base. There is some straw in the jar, and a stone he uses as a pillow. ‘On the top of the jar there was a bird which kept fluttering its wings most of the night. I suppose it was frightened, so we were a pair of frightened creatures.’
After eight days of wandering, Ibn Battuta found a well with a rope hanging over it. Desperate to relieve his thirst he tied to the rope a piece of cloth used to shield his head from the sun, then lowered this down the well. After pulling up the cloth he sucked the water from it, but thirst still afflicted him. He then tied one of his shoes to the rope, and pulled this up full of water. At the second attempt he lost the shoe, then started to use the other one for the same purpose.
In this dire moment a ‘black-skinned man’ appeared beside him and gave the Muslim greeting, ‘Peace be upon you.’ Salvation was at hand, for the stranger not only produced food from a bag he was carrying and drew up water from the well in a jug, but even carried Ibn Battuta when he collapsed. Then this mysterious figure vanished, having deposited his human burden near a Muslim village.
After rejoining his companions and resuming his ambassadorial role, Ibn Battuta learned that the sultan had sent another trusted eunuch to replace the ill-fated Kafur. Then the expedition resumed its journey towards the coast. Progress now being relatively uneventful, there was time for him to study the behaviour of Indian yogis. They are as astounding to Ibn Battuta as they had been to Marco Polo: ‘The men of this class do some marvellous things. One of them will spend months without eating or drinking, and many have holes dug for them in the earth which are then built in on top of them, leaving only a space for air to enter. They stay in there for months, and I heard tell of one of them who stayed thus for a year.’
Progressing from city to city, the expedition reached the coast near the great harbour of Cambay and boarded a fleet of ships.2 In these it travelled south, calling at many of the ports Marco Polo had visited half a century before. One was Hili, which Ibn Battuta names as ‘the farthest town reached by ships from China’. He adds that it was on an inlet which could be navigated by large vessels; his Venetian predecessor had described the port as being on ‘a big river with a very fine estuary’.
At the end of this voyage, the sultan’s mission to China, with all its slaves, eunuchs and horses, was to be transferred to junks. These were to sail south-east to Sumatra, then north towards Zayton (Quanzhou), the port in south-east China where most foreign ships unloaded their cargoes. The natural place to switch to the junks was Calicut, a port founded some forty years earlier and already dominant in the export of pepper from the entire Malabar coast. Much of the pepper and other spices traded here were destined for Europe.
Calicut (more accurately, Koli Koddai, the ‘fortress of the cock’) would eventually be destined to play a central role in the history of the Indian Ocean. Its very name was to become a tantalizing challenge, almost a synonym for the wealth of the Indies. As Ibn Battuta’s expedition entered Calicut harbour, he counted thirteen large junks lying at anchor. There were also many smaller Chinese ships, for each junk was accompanied at sea by supply and support vessels. He now had three months to wait before the monsoon winds would blow in the right direction for the voyage, so he passed the time by learning all he could about the place.
The ruler of Calicut was an old man, with a square-cut beard ‘after the manner of the Greeks’, bearing the hereditary title of Zamorin, meaning Sea-King. One explanation for Calicut’s growing popularity with merchants and captains was that when a ship was wrecked on any part of the coast under the Zamorin’s control, its cargo was carefully protected and restored to the owners; almost everywhere else along the coast any goods washed up were simply expropriated by local rulers. The Sea-King was a Hindu, not a Muslim, but he provided houses for all Sultan Muhammad’s emissaries.3 When the monsoon was due to start blowing southwards, and the time for the voyage to China was at hand, he saw to it that they were fittingly accommodated in one of the largest junks.
However, a disaster exemplifying the hazards of Indian Ocean travel was about to occur. Ibn Battuta survived it only by chance, through his insistence on his personal comforts. He had told the commander of the junk: ‘I want a cabin to myself because of the slave-girls, for it is my habit never to travel without them.’ The Chinese merchants had taken all the best cabins, however, so he decided to switch with his retinue to one of the support vessels.
The junk, anchored offshore, was about to sail when a violent storm blew up. The great vessel was hurled on to the coast in darkness. Everyone on board was drowned, including the learned Zahir ad-Din and the second eunuch appointed to guard the presents intended for the Chinese ruler.
Ibn Battuta had delayed boarding the support vessel because he had wanted to go to the local mosque for the last time before the journey, so he was one of those who went out after the storm and found the beach strewn with bodies. The support vessel had escaped disaster by reefing its sail and heading off down the coast – leaving Ibn Battuta on land, but carrying away all his slaves and goods (he mentions the goods first in his narrative). He was left with only a former slave whom he had just freed, a carpet to sleep on, and ten dinars. As for the former slave, ‘when he saw what had befallen me he deserted me’.
The expedition to China, which had set off with such pomp, was now in ruins. Ibn Battuta thought first of turning back to Delhi, then decided that the half-crazed sultan might well vent his rage upon him for the disaster. Anxious about his goods and his slaves he set out southwards towards the port of Quilon, having been assured that the support vessel would have called in there. Part of the journey was by river, and he hired a local Muslim to help him on his way. But every night his new servant went ashore ‘to drink wine with the infidels’ and infuriated Ibn Battuta with his brawling.
Despite the plunge in his fortunes, Ibn Battuta managed to pay heed to the passing scene, noting for example that one hilltop town was entirely occupied by Jews.4 But when he reached Quilon after ten days there was no trace of the ship he had hoped to find there, so he was driven to live on charity. Some of the Chinese ambassadors who had accompanied him from Delhi turned up in equal straits: they had also been shipwrecked, and were wearing clothes given them by Chinese merchants in the town.
Having no compatriots to turn to for succour, Ibn Battuta was at a loss about how to escape from his state of beggary. His credentials as the sultan’s ambassador were gone, and all the presents for the Great Khan of China were either at the bottom of the sea or dispersed. As a qadi, a law-giver, he had the status which put an obligation on Islamic rulers to offer him hospitality, but without the conventional entourage of slaves, or the clothes and other regalia