THE Indian Ocean, despite its stormy nature, was the nursery for long-distance navigation and was thus mastered long before the Pacific. Early navigators learned to exploit, the regularity of the monsoon system, enabling them to have fair winds on both outward and homeward journeys.
North of the equator north-east winds prevail in the winter and south of the equator it is the north-west zephyrs; for the rest of the year the winds blow steadily from the south and west.
Into this ocean came intrepid seamen: first Chinese and Arabs, later Portuguese and Dutch. The great names of Indian Ocean navigation accordingly make their predictable appearance in Hall's narrative: Ibn Battuta in the 14th-century, Cheng Ho in the 15th, Vasco da Gama in the 16th, Brouwer in the 17th.
The subtitle of the book is, however, a misnomer. After an account of the explorers that plays up the more sensational aspects - the incursion of the Portuguese into the ocean in this version is a pure blood-and-guts saga - Hall settles down to what really interests him: the history of the Indian Ocean coast of Africa. The author should really have come clean about this, and the reader is left to find the true story in the notes and acknowledgments.
The book, it seems, began life as a biography of the African explorer John Hanning Speke, but Hall became, on his own admission, bored with him and the search for the sources of the Nile and diversified into a larger text. A proper subtitle would bill the book as the history of those parts of the East African littoral the author found interesting.
Maybe this explains the uncertain feel of the non-African sections of the book. There is a puzzle right at the beginning when Hall announces: "Unlike the Atlantic and Pacific, merging at their extremities into the polar seas, this is an entirely tropical ocean."
This statement is just plain wrong. The Indian Ocean extends from the Indian Cape Comorin down to Antarctica. Hall claims that an imaginary line from Cape Town to Perth is the southern limit of the Indian Ocean, but this is entirely a conceit of his own, with no warrant from the best geographers. The universally quoted figure for its dimensions - 28,350,000 square miles - makes sense only if the Antarctic region is included.
The errors continue. Hall states that Napoleon wrote to Tippu, Sultan of Mysore on January 25th, 1799, and then left Egypt a fortnight later. In fact, Napoleon did not leave Egypt until August 1799.
Carelessness of this sort does not inspire confidence in our author, nor does his reliance on certain secondary sources in the bibliography which have been shown to be deficient or inaccurate. And I do not understand how one can write about Richard Meinertzhagen without taking account of Mark Cocker's first-rate biography.
There are really two ways of approaching this book. One is to be harsh and say that it contains nothing new, and that its insights are largely a rechauffee of the work of acclaimed scholars like Kirti Chaudhuri. The other is to be charitable and say that, for those who can take the grasshopper leaps from one bloodbath to another, Hall's book is entertaining, enough at an elementary level.
But therein lies the rub, for one is left puzzled about the target readership for this book. It is both too much and not enough. It is far too long for the general reader to absorb comfortably, yet not scholarly enough to appeal to an academic audience. For all that, it probably ranks as Hall's best book to date.
