Ahmad ibn Majid: master navigator of the Indian Ocean

Sailors of the Indian Ocean travelled for weeks on the open sea. They had knowledge of the stars and a reckoning of the seasons of the winds. They also had information about coasts, rocks and ports that had been handed down from generation to generation. In the fifteenth century, one sailor gathered all this knowledge in a book. His name was Ahmad ibn Majid.

In a family of sailors

Sources differ on the birth of Ahmad ibn Majid. Historian and Arabist Paul Lunde wrote an article on him in Saudi Aramco World in 2005. According to it, he was born in Oman, probably in 1432. According to Muslim Heritage, a website on the history of science and civilisation, he was born in the 1430s in Julfar, today’s Ras al-Khaimah.

Both sources agree that he came from a family of sailors. According to Lunde, his father was also a famous sailor. According to Muslim Heritage, he began to navigate ships at the age of 17. He was given the title “Lion of the Sea”. Lunde writes that about 40 of his works are known, in verse and prose. The last of them, a poem about the sky, dates from 1500. He therefore probably died soon after that.

“Kitab al-Fawa’id”

According to Lunde, his most important book is “Kitab al-Fawa’id fi Usul Ilm al-Bahr wa’l-Qawa’id”, meaning a book of useful information on the principles and rules of navigation. It was written in 1490. It is a kind of encyclopaedia of navigation. It contains the history and basic principles of navigation, the lunar mansions, the compass directions, the difference between coastal and open-sea voyages, and the positions of ports from East Africa to Indonesia. It also gives the positions of stars, an account of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, and a description of storms. In Lunde’s words, it contains his own experience, his father’s, and the knowledge of many generations of Indian Ocean sailors. G. R. Tibbetts translated the book into English for the Royal Asiatic Society under the title “Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean”.

Knowledge of the winds

According to Lunde, the book does not speak only of the great monsoon system. It also describes the small winds of each region. Ibn Majid writes that the winds of the Red Sea north of Jeddah were the most difficult, because they blew from the north all year round. So the usual practice was for large ships to go as far as Jeddah. From there, cargo was either loaded onto small boats whose pilots knew the conditions between Jeddah and Suez, or sent overland. Even reaching Jeddah was possible only in the north-east monsoon, from October to mid-March. South of the equator, trade winds blew in place of the monsoon, and the China Sea had a separate system. In Lunde’s words, only a lifetime of voyaging could teach all this to a “mu’allim”, a master navigator.

Measuring stars with fingers

According to Lunde, Ibn Majid and his fellow sailors made use of the Pole Star. Its height above the horizon gave the latitude. If the height was kept constant, a ship could sail east or west along the same latitude. This height was measured in finger-widths at arm’s length. For example, Cambay lay at the latitude where the Pole Star stood eleven fingers above the horizon. Lunde writes that the method was more accurate than it seems, because each “finger” was divided into eight parts.

The second instrument was the “kamal”: a small wooden tablet with a cord tied to it, with knots on the cord. Each knot marked the latitude of a particular port. The sailor held the knot of the cord in his teeth and held the tablet before his eye, aligning its lower edge with the horizon. When the upper edge touched the Pole Star, the ship was at the latitude of that port. Distance east and west was measured by time, in a unit called the “zam”, a watch of three hours, measured by burning an incense stick of fixed length.

Ibn Majid was proud of his tradition. Lunde quotes him as saying: “We have the thirty-two rhumbs, and the tarfa, and the zam, and the science of measuring the height of the stars … We can understand their (the European sailors’) method, use their system and sail their ships.”

Counting the days

According to Lunde, Indian Ocean sailors used a solar calendar for voyages, known as the “Calendar of Yazdagird”. In it, the days of the year were simply counted from one to 365, and the first day of the year was the longest day of summer. Ibn Majid describes one of his voyages in 1471 in this way: “We set sail on day 135 … on day 175 we sighted Ras Hafun and on day 200 we entered Bab al-Mandab against strong northerly winds.”

The compass and an old question

Lunde writes that Ibn Majid’s fame can be judged from the fact that Arab tradition attributes the very invention of the compass to him. In Lunde’s view, he may have introduced a pivoted compass enclosed in a box, with the needle mounted on a card. He also writes that the method of measuring the height of the Pole Star in the first book on navigation printed in Europe, in 1509, almost certainly came from Indian Ocean sailors. The oldest European charts of the Indian Ocean give the positions of ports in “fingers”.

A well-known story about Ibn Majid is that in 1498 he guided Vasco da Gama from Malindi to Calicut. But according to Britannica, the pilot taken on at Malindi was a Gujarati. According to E. G. Ravenstein of the Hakluyt Society, Portuguese historians write his name as “Malemo Cana”. According to Muslim Heritage, Tibbetts, the leading scholar of the subject, also disagrees that he was Ibn Majid.

His real distinction lies in his books. They preserve the knowledge of the winds, stars and ports of the fifteenth-century Indian Ocean, which would otherwise have remained only in the minds of sailors.

Next instalment: Christopher Columbus: the first voyage across the Atlantic.