Indian monks spread Buddhism to the Indonesian islands; it was traders who brought Hinduism. In later centuries, Hinduism was to advance well beyond the Indian Ocean, extending northwards through the China Sea to what is now Kampuchea. The surviving monuments to this expansion are great temples and palaces overgrown by jungle, the best-known being Angkor Wat.
Relations between India and its trading settlements across the ocean to the south-east were not always friendly. Hindu armies were active in Indonesia during the tenth century, and later a warlike Sumatran state, Sri Vijaya, sent its fleets northwards to attack Ceylon. Such events belong to the complex, interwoven history of the Indian Ocean spreading over several thousand years, and it is only in this context, of the sea as a cultural and geographic entity, that the Waqwaq migrations westwards from Indonesia become credible. Even so, the French historian Hubert Deschamps has called them ‘one of the greatest mysteries of mankind’, and only fragments of the story have so far been assembled from archaeology, linguistics and anthropology.
Why the Indonesian seafarers known as Waqwaqs acquired such a curious name is, like much else about them, obscure; it may simply have been a mocking imitation by their enemies of the sound of their speech. More probably the source is waka, the name given in parts of Indonesia to the type of outrigger canoe the Waqwaqs used. The one indisputable fact is that they voyaged 3,500 miles from their homeland to discover and settle in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa.
Their migration to what would prove to be one of the world’s biggest islands, a semi-continent, never until then inhabited by humans, is an astonishing chapter in the annals of ocean travel. The date when the first wave of Waqwaq migrants reached Madagascar is a matter of controversy; one clue is in the language they brought with them (and which still makes up more than nine-tenths of the Malagasy vocabulary, a bond across the ocean). It includes many Sanskrit loan words, and Sanskrit influence was at its strongest in Indonesia in about A.D. 400.1
The Waqwaqs were setting foot in a land where the animal life had developed in almost total isolation for 150 million years. There were no elephants, giraffes or lions, as on the African mainland 300 miles further west; but species which existed in Africa before Madagascar ‘broke away’ had lived on undisturbed, including the agile, wide-eyed lemurs, from the same stock as apes and humans. There are hundreds of varieties of insects found nowhere else in the world. In the deep seas near Madagascar lives the coelacanth, another survivor from the remote evolutionary past, a clumsy fish with huge scales and fins resembling legs.
Perhaps most remarkable of all the animals there when the Waqwaqs arrived was the Aepyornis maximus, a flightless bird which stood ten feet high and laid eggs more than a foot long. It probably gave rise to the persistent myth of a monstrous eagle, variously called a rukh, peng or gryphon, living in the Indian Ocean and believed capable of picking up an elephant, bearing it to the heavens, dropping it to earth, then devouring it. The Chinese were especially devoted to this fantasy, and described the bird as being able to fly 19,000 li before needing a meal. It must surely be more than a coincidence that the Aepyornis maximus became extinct around the time that the first Waqwaqs reached Madagascar. These awkward, inoffensive creatures would have been easy prey for humans equipped with bows and arrows; tales spread by the Waqwaqs of a bird which laid a huge egg may well have grown into something far more extravagant in the course of a few retellings.
The Waqwaqs’ original landfall was almost certainly the African mainland, rather than Madagascar. They were eventually driven out by the local inhabitants, but left on the coast as reminders of their stay some Indonesian words and maritime techniques, such as outriggers to stabilize canoes. The intrepid newcomers set off again, travelling south for another 1,000 miles before sighting Madagascar. This time, there was nobody to challenge them: it was a long journey’s end. In many places they found the coastline hostile, with sand bars or coral barriers, and parts of the island were dry and infertile; but there were also rich volcanic soils.
Most of the Indonesian boats were probably small and simple – little more than canoes, each carrying five or six men and women – with square sails and the outriggers to help them keep upright during storms. These small vessels may, however, have acted as escorts to larger ships, called kunlun bo by the Chinese. (The ancestors of the Maoris were to migrate to New Zealand in such vessels.) A Chinese account from the third century A.D. claims that these boats, which were also used to take Buddhist pilgrims from Sumatra to India, were large enough to carry hundreds of people and heavy cargoes. They had four sails, so skilfully rigged that the ships could set their course ‘without avoiding strong winds and dashing waves, by the aid of which they can make great speed’.2
The Indonesian fleets undoubtedly travelled fast: from Sumatra, their most likely starting-point, it would have taken little more than a month to Madagascar in the May – October period, when the equatorial trade winds blow towards Africa. The strong east–west Malabar current would also have helped the travellers, carrying them first towards the 1,100 Maldive islands or, on the most direct route, to an uninhabited scattering of fifty coral atolls now called the Chagos archipelago, exactly halfway between Sumatra and Madagascar. Together these two island chains extend more than 1,500 miles from north to south.
The Indonesian voyagers would have found drinking water, to replenish their supplies, by digging shallow trenches on the islands. On beaches lined with coconut palms, takamaka trees, and other Asiatic plants – progeny of seeds borne for vast distances on the ocean current – they could mend the hulls and sails of their boats. When they set off again, out of the lagoons and through the reefs surrounding these lonely islands, navigating was simple: the rising sun was always on their backs, the setting sun in their eyes.
There were other places to pause and hunt for food on this bold journey, for the Indian Ocean is dotted with coral atolls, specks of greenery in an amaranthine sea. Most have never been inhabited by humans, but are alive with animals. Turtles drag themselves on land to breed and giant tortoises march ponderously through the undergrowth. The brightly-coloured birds, unused to being hunted, could also be caught for the pot.
For their great trans-ocean venture the Waqwaqs had unique advantages. They were islanders, seafarers from childhood, and their needs afloat were few. Many Pacific islands were to be populated by similar long-distance voyages into the unknown. The boats carried baskets of rice, dried fruits wrapped in banana leaves, animal skins to hold drinking water, spears and lines for fishing, and live chickens for slaughtering en route. Rice was essential for survival on such voyages, because it did not go rotten; and if food ran out, aromatic leaves were chewed to fend off hunger-pangs.3 How many of the migrants died on their way can not even be guessed at.
At the time when the first Indonesians set off across the Indian Ocean they lacked a written language, so there is no record of why or precisely when their great journeys were undertaken. They appear to have spoken a tongue now long forgotten in Indonesia, known as Old Javanese; it is likened to the language of the Batak people of northern Sumatra.4 Some of Madagascar’s religious rituals still retain vestiges of Hinduism, so it is likely that there were later migrations, over several centuries, by communities escaping from wars between rival Indonesian states.
The Indonesians who settled later in Madagascar – some after A.D. 1000 – probably did so because they discovered that people with origins like their own had survived and settled peacefully in a new island home. Such information may have come from China, that great storehouse of knowledge. References to the western flank of the Indian Ocean occur at various places in the records of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 619–906); in 863 the scholar Duan Chengshi was able to describe the Somali people. They were, he said, feuding pastoralists, living on a diet of blood and milk and ‘drawing fresh blood from the veins of their cattle with a needle’. This was an exact description of the habits of the Galla (or Oromo), who inhabited the Somali hinterland at that time. Duan went on to say that the women were ‘clear-skinned and well-behaved’; the people of Africa did not hesitate to ‘make their own countrymen prisoners and sell them to foreigners at prices many times