An ocean of history: navigating Dhivehi seamanship

That knowledge passed from one generation to the next by every method a working craft uses: writing on paper and board, oral instruction and practical demonstration. But in the Maldivian written record itself, the traces are thin.

What survives falls into two categories, and neither is what a historian would wish for. The first is foreign testimony – the merchants, traders and pilots who first encountered Maldivian seafaring. The second is our own memory, preserved not as science but as story. But both kinds of evidence, pressed hard enough, can yield a great deal.

The oldest surviving document that touches Maldivian seafaring comes not from a Maldivian archive, but out of a storeroom in Egypt.

In the 1880s, the ‘geniza’ – the discard chamber – of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo gave up a vast hoard of paper which, today, has been posted online by Princeton University. The trove includes a letter written in 1141, from the Sudanese port of Aydhab, by an Arabic-speaking Jewish merchant named Nahray b. Allan.

The letter is in Hebrew characters, Arabic language – the same trick as writing Arabic sentences in Thaana script. Nahray was an Alexandrian, but traded in partnership with merchants in Yemen and Egypt.

Writing about an approaching journey, he uses the phrase: wa-anā musāfir fī markab al-Dībajī – “I am travelling in the ship of al-Dibaji”. He closes by saying that, God's will excepted, there is no profit in this voyage. The phrase hādhihi al-safra (this voyage), is worth pausing on. A man does not say “this voyage” unless there have been others.

The English introduction renders markab al-Dībajī as “the ship of the brocade merchant”. But the phrase can just as legitimately be read as “the ship of the Maldivian” – because one of the names by which Arabic writers of the 1100s knew the Maldives was al-Dībajāt.

The great study built on these Geniza letters says this ‘Dibaji’ was not the owner of the ship but its nakhudha, a word that survives in the Dhivehi dictionary as the master of a vessel. It gives his name as Ali, and remarks that neither his name nor his epithet reveal his religion or his origin. Analysis reveals that the owners included the Muslim governor of Aden, that the ship was called al-Mubarak and that it had carried coppersmiths from Yemen to Ceylon around 1139 with cowrie in the hold.

The letter also reveals that he sailed in the middle of May, the time when the southwest wind sets in and when a ship can clear the Red Sea and run east. That date is not a coincidence, but the very first thing an Indian Ocean navigator knows. 

Between Nahray’s letter and the coming of the Portuguese to the Maldives in the mid-sixteenth century, the character of the evidence changes completely. The foreign observers fall silent. What comes next is Maldivian memory, in the shape of a story.

The great narrative of the Hilali family, of Fehendhoo Usman Radhun, of Buraki Ranin and of Bodu Thakurufaanu was told by Buraara Mohamed Fulhu, written down by Al-Haj Ibrahim bin Ismail Feeboa, and printed in parts between 1959 and 1970.

When it was published, its editors were careful to say they took no responsibility for its historical content. But we are not asking whether these things happened, only what technical knowledge the teller and his listeners took for granted. In this way, folklore provides evidence that history books cannot; detail that nobody understands does not survive a hundred years of retelling.

The Buraara Vaahaka opens with an astronomer: Nisfu Handheygirin, the chief minister of the 14th century sultan, Fehendhoo Usman. The minister is depicted as a great nakaiytheri and, to raise a building, the exact auspicious moment for driving the four corner posts was read from his books. This process – unrolling the book, setting the board, calculating and fixing the moment – never varies anywhere in the narrative.

But the most revealing scene is the smallest. Nisfu Handheygirin takes the Hilali boy outside, shows him the night sky, points out one particular star, and tells him to wake him when that star reaches the meridian. This is precisely the observation a pilot makes at sea to fix the hour of the night. It carries an assumption that even a household boy could be expected to use a named star as a clock.

The most technically loaded passage in the Buraara Vaahaka is the story of Buraki Ranin and Gaafaru Kalhu Ibrahim, also known as Ubushemu. Buraki Ranin was the most celebrated of the wives of King Kalhu Mohamed, who first took the throne in 1490. 

Ubushemu enters the story as a boy who washed the writing boards for the royal children's tutor and learned their lessons in secret. The tale then sees Buraki Ranin sail south to Huvadhoo Atoll, to Vaadhoo. The ship is fitted out with twenty-five crew, a commander, and – specified separately – an experienced malimi. 

When crossing Huvadhoo Kandu, Buraki Ranin asks Ubushemu whether he dares take the ship down beyond the channel. She observes that the malimi will be exhausted as he has been at the helm since they left Malé. The malimi replies that, of the twenty-five men aboard, not one knows how to hold a helm. Buraki Ranin answers that Ubushemu grew up sailing between Malé and Gaafaru, and will be well practised at the helm.

The malimi gives him the tiller, shows him the compass and the course to steer and marks that course on the compass with a lump of quicklime before retiring by the stern. When Ubushemu is sure the malimi's is sleeping, he sets the ship below the course he was given, and makes his own mark on the compass. The tale repeatedly used detailed knowledge of sailing to tell the story

Later, when blown off course to Indonesia, Buraki Ranin then refuses to come home for a year – and she refuses in the language of the nakaiy. Every time the malimi requests leave to sail, she names the next asterism and defers. 

While remaining aboard the royal vessel with 25 gentlemen, the southwest monsoon of that year came to an end and the Mula nakaiy of the following year set in. Thereupon, the navigator addressed her: ”Will you not proceed to the Maldives?” Buraki Rani replied: “Navigator, will not the sea be rough during Mula nakaiy?”

While waiting for Utura Haḷa to end, thinking "She will embark when Furahaḷa sets in," the navigator went and addressed her. She replied: "Navigator, this is a voyage with a woman; if a wind comes and Utura Haḷa turns strong, the sea may become rough. I shall embark when Fura Haḷa sets in."...

The joke works because the audience knows the calendar. Each nakaiy is a period of roughly a fortnight, with its own wind and sea state, and is fixed by naming a pattern of stars. For the Arab pilots, this function was performed by the mausim: Ibn Majid and Sulayman al-Mahri counted the sailing seasons from Nairuz while Maldivian practice did the same thing by nakaiy.

The spine of the Buraara Vaahaka is based around Uthemu Bodu Mohamed Thakurufaanu, who ended the 15-year Portuguese occupation in 1573. He is remembered as a warrior but also a navigator, and on this the narrative is unusually explicit.

As a boy, his tutor on Nolhivaranfaru trains him to read the sky. As each nakaiy rises, the teacher quizzes him on the rising and setting of the stars, using the vocabulary of a man who knows the whole celestial circle. 

The most important passages of Bodu Thakurufaanu’s story are the Ceylon voyages. Returning from one of them, every day at the sun's zenith, he takes the latitude:

Each day when the sun came to noon, the nevi would take the board and go into the niyamige, and Mohamed Thakurufaanu would take the board too.

The master takes his sight, goes into the navigation house, and works his reckoning. Thakurufaanu then takes his own sight and keeps his own reckoning, writing his workings in charcoal on the galley bulkhead.

The instrument in that scene has two names in Dhivehi: dhigufilaa and goidhuruvaan. Goidhuruvaan is a Portuguese loanword, but dhigufilaa is the Dhivehi word for the Maldivian board used to measure the altitude of a star. This tells us that graduated European altitude instruments reached Maldivian hands in the Portuguese period, but that Maldivians could already measure stellar altitude, with no new word needed. The hardware changed, but the skill was already there.

And dhigufilaa has a sibling in the instrument used by Ibn Majid and Sulayman al-Mahri, called khashaba, which is Arabic for ‘board’. Both techniques use a small plank on a knotted cord, the knot held to the teeth, the board held between horizon and star and the altitude then read. The art described in Majid’s 15th century maritime guide, Kitāb al-Fawāʾid, was not foreign to Maldivians.

Seventeenth century records give three things no earlier source can give for an understanding of Maldivian seamanship: a list of subjects taught, a named institution and a library. These come courtesy of the late Mohamed Ibrahim Luthfee's study Dhiyamigili Dharikolhu, which combined gravestone inscriptions, royal faiykolhu grants and Luthfee's own field notes. 

The royal line ends with the Dhiyamigili sultans – a family in which navigation was not just craft, but rank. Luthfee writes that the Dhiyamigili men were practising nevin even before the legend that supposedly gave them the art – al-Wazir Ibrahim Dhoshimeynaa Thakurufaanu, and his son al-Wazir Mohamed Dhoshimeynaa Thakurufaanu, later Sultan Mohamed Imaduddin II. 

Nevikan is used by men who sailed abroad in their own vessels, navigating themselves. But above them sat a state office: the Ranahamaadi – master of all the King's vessels, commander of the royal fleet, and agent for the state's trade. 

The study includes the legend of Dhiyamigili Kureli Kalo who, while on a voyage to Malé, fell overboard with the anchor. When the anchor was raised, there he was, holding a sword, a ring and a lodestone of the kind used to set a compass. He said the King of the Sea had given him these things, with instructions to give the sword and the ring to the eldest son, and the rest to the youngest, who was to be taught how to make and use a dhigufilaa.

Luthfee also transmits the story of a night when the two brothers were fishing on Fahala lagoon, on the fourteenth night of the month. The elder is casting the net while the younger keeps glancing at the horizon. By the time they reach a large coral head, the stars he has been watching are close to the meridian. 

He then takes his brother by both shoulders, seats him on a great coral, lifts a coral stone above his head and says: brother, you have been seated on the throne of the Maldives, and what is raised above you is the sevenfold canopy. This is nakaiytherikan. The elder brother became a bodun (high official), and when the King went to Hajj the elder brother’s son took the throne. 

With the crown came the memory of that night on the lagoon and the King grew afraid of his uncle the navigator. So, the King fitted out a great vessel, brought his uncle to Malé, gave him a faiykolhu addressed to the revenue officers of Huvadhoo Atoll, and sent him south with the chief malimi. This was an effective exile, and the account of that voyage is the clearest description of navigation in any Maldivian source.

Clearing Gaadhookolhu and shaping a course for Suvadeeb, the malimi asked for the compass to be set. The younger brother set it – but, unseen by anyone, laid a piece of iron beside it, to throw off the compass lodestone. Running before a fair wind, they carried on until the sea should have closed around Huvadhoo Atoll, but no atoll appeared. 

After days lost at sea, the younger brother told them to throw a wooden log overboard and put the ship about. In the confusion, he lifted away the iron. They ran on a distance, tacking and dropping a log at each turn, until the last log went over and the ship was put on the opposite tack. 

Three nights and two days later, on the morning of the third day, they came upon the first log they had dropped. They took it aboard, steered a new bearing and sighted the second. Recovering the logs one by one, the ship came round onto a course for Malé.

Back in the capital, the navigator found his nephew trembling with fear but said – in the words Luthfee transmits – that the kingdom was his nephew's and that, if he had been sent without trickery, he would have gone willingly to Huvadhoo Atoll.

Sailing south a second time, the uncle landed at Gaafu Dhaalu Maathodaa and settled in the gedhoru of the island's khateeb. That year, in the badhuruva season, the ships from Malé brought a faiykolhu making the house ‘Maathodaa Ganduvaru’ and granting it every island in the Maathodaa lagoon.

Luthfee wrote that Dhiyamigili Hagu Kalo chose the island as it lay eighteen minutes north of the equator, where he founded a school. Luthfee concluded that, in addition to the edhuruge (house of knowledge) of Faafu Himithi in the middle of the country, Maldivian navigation was born at the ‘Maathodaa edhuruge’.

The teaching line is visible across three generations. The founder was Hassan Ranahamaadi Thakurufaanu, whom Luthfee describes as the master who spread navigation and the science of the nakaiy through the southern atolls. His grandson, Mohamed Manikufaanu was known as ‘Maathodaa Edhuru Manikufaanu’. In 1983, Luthfee went to the island and saw both graves.

During his visit, the oldest man on Maathodaa told Luthfee that the Ganduvaru held a great many writings: niyamikamuge foiythah – books of navigation, and nakaiytherikamuge foiythah – books of the science of the asterisms. 

The man had seen some of them himself, as late as the Second World War, though no-one could locate them. But on that same journey, at Gaafu Dhaalu Vilingili, Luthfee found one. Adam Kalefaanu, son of the island's former katheeb, had a book of the nakaiy from Maathodaa Ganduvaru, written by hand in Dives Akuru script. He would not agree to give it to the state, however, and Luthfee could not even obtain a photocopy. 

But Luthfee’s account debunks the claim that Maldivian navigation was never written down. It was committed to paper, in Dhivehi, in Thaana characters, by the practitioners of the art themselves. And one of those books was sitting in a house in Huvadhoo within living memory.

What was lost was not the books, but their custody: scattered out of a palace into an atoll, never catalogued, never edited and never printed. But their fate supports the argument for putting Ibn Majid’s 15th century maritime guide into Dhivehi. 

The Kitāb al-Fawāʾid is the great systematic statement of the science that Maldivian pilots practised. It is the khashaba that is our dhigufilaa, the mausim that is our nakaiy, the lines that Buraki Ranin's malimi marked with a lump of quicklime. 

Reading it in our own language gives us back the vocabulary. And with the vocabulary, we might finally be able to read our own books – the ones that are out there, waiting to be found – and learn once again to navigate the Maldives’ long ocean history. .