David McGee, Alan M. Stahl, and Pamela O. Long, eds. The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript.
Over about two years ending in early 1436 a nonnoble maritime officer completed a manuscript summarizing knowledge he had gained in a career on board Venetian war and merchant galleys that began, as a rower, in 1401. After its sale in 2000 the new owner made the 440-folio work available for scholarly examination for the first time. David McGee took responsibility for the elegant reproduction in full color, Alan Stahl the more onerous task of translating the difficult text from Venetian, and Pamela Long the editing of eight studies that developed from the conference. Stahl recreates a chronicle of the mariner’s service, detailing his successes and failures at winning appointment to various ranks. He allows Michael’s career to illustrate Venetian trading networks, political structures, and the power of patronage in the republic. Subsequent studies in volume 3 take up the sections of the manuscript on mathematics, shipbuilding, time reckoning, the images (probably drawn by the author), and the lists of sailing instructions. Each study places Michael’s work in the context of his life and of the sources he imitated or copied. The longest section of the manuscript, almost half, deals with mathematics. It bears the stamp of teaching in abacus schools, institutions for training potential traders in the basics of that science. It also bears the stamp, as does the section on calculating dates of Easter and of phases of the moon, of an autodidact struggling to develop answers himself and correcting his own mistakes. The many errors in the sections on calculation and sailing instructions show that Michael was not always successful in absorbing knowledge. While McGee and Mauro Bandiolo disagree about whether or not Michael wrote a treatise on shipbuilding, they are both impressed by what is the oldest surviving work on the topic. That is the most extensively illustrated part of the manuscript with the earliest known drawings about the trade. They serve more as mnemonic devices, as vehicles for saving abstract information, than as representations of how to build a vessel. Less evident than in the sections on reckoning time is the desire to meld mathematical calculation with graphic display, a talent Michael probably wanted to demonstrate. The shipbuilding discussion is in fact more about how to fit out a ship and make it ready for a voyage, something Michael had to do a number of times in his career as a junior officer.
There is some repetition in the studies, and a summary essay drawing together the findings of the various contributions is missing. The work on time-reckoning and the intricacies of some mathematical calculations are difficult in the original and the commentaries do not always fully succeed in the task of making them transparent. In some cases Stahl has to give up on translating obscure technical terms and simply leaves them in Venetian, puzzles for others to solve just like the mathematical ones that Michael enjoyed including in his manuscript. The sumptuous, luxurious production of the three volumes along with efforts to bring to bear the best in scholarship on all aspects of the impressive manuscript serve to create an invaluable contribution to understanding a central part of life in fifteenth-century Venice and give to Michael of Rhodes an importance that, probably to his regret, he never enjoyed in his lifetime.
2. Enlightment Maritime
Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route. By Steven E. Sidebotham.
Beginning in the mid-1970s and early 1980s with the pioneering fieldwork of Abel Moneim A. H. Sayed at Wadi Gawasis and D. S. Whitcomb at Quseir al-Qadim in Egypt, together with J. Zarins at Sihi in Saudi Arabia, the archaeology of the Red Sea over a very long time span from the Middle Stone Age to the mid-second millennium c.e. has been emerging as an area of investigation at the interface between various disciplines. This investigation includes both coastal sites and shipwrecks, which are the subject of study of maritime archaeology, and sites in the hinterland of the Arabian and African coastal plains. At present, however, the only link between the projects is the geographical location of the individual sites in the coastal regions of the Red Sea (and in a slightly larger perspective the Gulf of Aden), without an appreciation of the Red Sea as a specific geo-cultural region that played a crucial role in the development of the macro-scale network of social, economic, and cultural interactions between Europe, Africa, and Asia in the last five millennia, and was thus a decisive factor in the origin of the modern global world system.
Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route is an exhaustive synthesis of Sidebotham’s research along the Red Sea and in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and demonstrates his ability to integrate the archaeological and historical record into a coherent picture of Ptolemaic and Roman maritime trade in the late first millennium b.c.e. to the mid-first millennium c.e. Many archaeologists conduct multi-disciplinary research and employ different specialists in the field or laboratory, but few are capable of integrating the information they receive from the individual specialists with textual evidence to provide a solid reconstruction of ancient history, as Sidebotham is doing at Berenike.
This book provides the reader with a very useful introduction to the Red Sea trade in Ptolemaic and Roman times, on both a regional and an interregional scale. It is divided into thirteen chapters dealing with five main arguments, directly related to one other: 1) a general outline of geographical, environmental, and historical background to the study of the Red Sea coast and the Eastern Desert in Egypt: chapter 1, Introduction; chapter 2, Geography, Climate, Ancient Authors, and Modern Visitors; 2) a review of the pre-Roman infrastructures and Ptolemaic activities in the Eastern Desert and on the Red Sea: chapter 3, Pre-Roman Infrastructure in the Eastern Desert; chapter 4, Ptolemaic Diplomatic-Military-Commercial Activities; 3) description of life and trade at Berenike in Ptolemaic and Roman times: chapter 5, Ptolemaic and Early Roman Berenike and Environs; chapter 6, Inhabitants of Ber-enike in Roman Times; chapter 12, Trade in Roman Berenike; chapter 13, Late Roman Berenike and Its Demise; 4) logistical aspects of the trade in the context of the economic exploitation of the Eastern Desert: chapter 7, Water in the Desert and the Ports; chapter 8, Nile-Red Sea Ports; 5) maritime trade in Roman times: chapter 9, Other Emporia; chapter 10, Merchant Ships; chapter 11, Commercial Net-works and Trade Costs.
Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route is thus a very important contribution to recon-structing the early phase of development of the spice trade and understanding the origins of the global economy. This book should be on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in the history of humankind, not only those specializing in ancient Roman history.
3. Post Modern Maritime
Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West. By
Shih-Shan Henry Tsai.
The author, who is a native Taiwanese and has taught at several universities in Taiwan and the United States, presents a unique global perspective. The book is divided into nine chapters, each dealing with an important phase or international connection in Taiwan’s maritime tradition. While the sources are adequately noted in endnotes and bibliography, and there are numerous useful supplemental tables and illustrations, the book should have had more maps, given the many place names that would be unfamiliar to most readers. The chapters clearly illuminate how not only China, but also Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, France, the United States, and Japan, all vied for access or outright possession of the island. The island was not simply an important way station for maritime traders but also important for its rich natural and agricultural resources, such as camphor, coal, tea, sugar, and rice. Because of its strategic location and valuable resources, Taiwan has played a key role in Asian and world trade since the seventeenth century and has spawned intense international competition and several conflicts. This book does a good job in highlighting these important but often neglected topics.
While placing Taiwan in the broader scope of world maritime history, Tsai’s underlying premise is that Taiwan was never fully incorporated into the larger Chinese political and cultural realm. These assumptions place this book right at the center of the ongoing, heated debates on whether or not Taiwan is Chinese. Much of the debate, however, is ahistorical and highly polemic. The author claims that Taiwan was not thoroughly “Sinicized” and that the Chinese “ultimately failed to fundamentally convert Taiwan into a genuinely ‘Oriental’ Chinese society”. Nonetheless, keeping the author’s predilections in mind, this is an important and useful study of the history of Taiwan. It is a very readable book and one of the few serious scholarly studies that manages to get beyond today’s polemics to present hard evidence. Maritime Taiwan is a valuable book for anyone interested in learning more about Taiwan’s past and present.
4. Modern Maritime
Pathway to Indonesia’s Maritime Future: The Role of Maritime Policy, Doctrine, and Strategy
Salim joined the Indonesian Naval Academy in Surabaya, East java in 1992 and was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in 1995. In 1996, he served as the navigation officer onboard KRI Hasanuddin, before being selected to attend the international navigation officer course at HMS Dryad, Portsmouth, in 1997, the minor war vessel navigation course at Sydney in 1998; and the specialisation course for navigation officers at the Indonesian Naval Education Command in 2000. He was the operations officer of KRI Sultan Hasanuddin and commanding officer of KRI Untung Suropati. In December 2012, he graduated from the Indonesian Air Force Command and Staff College, and in 2013 he attended the command and staff operational law course in Sydney. His current position is staff officer for Assistant of Planning and Budgeting, Navy Headquarters.
Under the Defence Coopeartion Program, over the 13 April-10 July 2015, Commander Salim was the Indonesian visiting naval fellow at the Sea Power Centre-Autralia.
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