The manuscript

The chart forms the recto of a 195 x 24.5 cm paper manuscript, catalogued by the RGS as ‘A native Indian chart of the coast of Arabia and the Red Sea’, borrowing from a note handwritten on it by its donor, Alexander Burnes (1805–1841; Figure 1).Footnote ² The note continues:

Figure 1.

The recto (l) and verso (r) of the Kachchhi-Gujarati manuscript (mr Asia S.4) donated to the Royal Geographical Society in 1835 by Alexander Burnes under the English title: ‘A native Indian chart of the coast of Arabia and the Red Sea drawn by an inhabitant of Cutch and used by pilots at the present time in that navigation.’ The recto comprises the chart in question, and the verso a series of ten texts on papers pasted onto the back of the chart to reinforce it. Source: Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers.

There is no corresponding Devanagari title.

An additional 21 x 24.5 cm-long piece of paper pasted at the right-hand end of the chart stabilises the manuscript’s tattered edge (Figure 2); it repeats the title and adds the following:

Figure 2.

‘A native Indian chart of the coast of Arabia and the Red Sea’. Alexander Burnes’s note attached to the right-hand end of the RGS chart. Source: Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers.

In its present archival context, the manuscript is folded for storage, leaving transverse creases at 56 cm, 119 cm, and 174 cm from the left margin. The rightmost fold corresponds to the edge of Burnes’s added paper, suggesting that the folding post-dates Burnes’s acquisition. This, together with the document’s 5:39 aspect ratio, its eroded right edge, and light creases running transversally along its entire length all suggest that folding was not the original storage method, but rather that the document was originally a scroll, rolled from left to right, thereby leaving the right edge vulnerable to the wear it clearly exhibits. This change in method of stowing the document materialises its transition from navigator’s chest to imperial storehouse.

The manuscript’s recto (Figures 1 and 3) presents a navigational chart of the Red Sea south of Jeddah, and of the Gulf of Aden as far east as the island of Socotra. Its verso (Figure 4) comprises ten sheets of pasted paper arranged in three rows, applied as reinforcement. Each contains text, mostly fragmentary, in one of two scripts (see the ‘Verso texts’ section below).

Figure 3.

The RGS chart of the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, with annotations indexing its Devanagari and English toponyms, rhumbs, coastal profiles, buildings, flags and identifiable-but-unnamed places. The numerals in the margins indicate Polaris altitudes. Source: (image) Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers; (annotations) the authors.

Figure 4.

The verso of the RGS chart, with annotations indexing the individual sheets of paper (T1–10) bearing texts. The arrows indicate the overlaying of the sheets: the base of the arrow denotes the overlaid sheet and the point its underlaid counterpart. The texts relate broadly to commercial and property matters (Table 6); they make no direct reference to the chart. Source: (image) Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers; (annotations) the authors.

The focus of our attention is the chart, which is drawn and annotated in black ink, with red ink highlighting features such as coastal outlines, flags, buildings, detail of ships, etc. A third colour, today appearing as ochre, is also used to colour some ships’ sails. The chart remains unfinished at its left end, with the image reducing to outlines north of what we identify as Shiʿb al-Jeffin (TD9; 20°16′N) on the Arabian coast and Suakin (L50; 19°07′N) on the African. The damaged right-hand edge leaves the original eastward extent of the cartography unknown.

The chart arranges the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden along a common axis, rather than setting these basins at an angle of circa 90° to each other in the Cartesian manner: the Arabian coast thus appears as a continuous line of scalloped bays along the chart’s upper edge, with the African coast arrayed along the lower. The cartographer depicts over 180 islands, together with reefs and other features. Crucially, the chart includes 66 Devanagari toponyms along with the 21 English toponyms that Burnes added in June 1835 (Figure 3, TD1–66 and TE1–21 respectively).Footnote ³ It also presents 19 coastal profiles in the Gulf of Aden indicating significant landmarks (Figure 3, P1–19), while numerous lesser ones appear throughout. The chart depicts three religious buildings (Figure 3, B1–3) and nine flags (Figure 3, FL1–9).

As B. Arunachalam first noted,Footnote ⁴ numbers inscribed along the margins of the chart indicate latitude in terms of the altitude of Polaris, the pole star (Figure 3). The easily observable fact that Polaris appears at a higher altitude to an observer at a more northerly latitude, and lower to one further south, informs a long-standing Indian Ocean navigational tradition of establishing latitude according to this variation.Footnote ⁵ The numbers comprise a scale of whole numerals, with quarter divisions indicated by tally marks (I, II, III). The tacit unit is the standardised thickness of a finger—iṣbaʿ in the Arabic traditionFootnote ⁶—measured simply using the fingers of an outstretched hand or hands, or with a kamāl, a small wooden board fixed to the end of a string.Footnote ⁷ The numbers appear on the chart along both coasts of the Red Sea, but only along the Arabian shore of the Gulf of Aden, for reasons discussed below. We also identify three further ‘spot’ altitudes within the chart itself: two are on the island of Socotra—one halfway down its ‘vertical’ coast and one at its southern point; the third is at Ra’s Filuk (TD53) on the Somali coast.

Confirmation that these numbers are indeed Polaris-altitude markers comes from the appearance alongside most of the arrow-like symbol for Polaris used in regional stellar compasses (Figures 3 and 5). The absence of this symbol from the African coast north of Massawa (TD61) reflects a sketchier notational approach in this portion of the chart generally. Elsewhere, however, there appears a certain precision of intent in their positioning: one of the numbers—7(III) on the Arabian coast—has been correctively repositioned (Figure 3).

The chart also shows 29 stellar sailing rhumbs (Figure 3, R1–29), all but four of which have a ship depicted as if sailing along them. In most cases, the ends of each rhumb terminate with a symbol representing a direction on the western-Indian star compass (Figure 5). This is usually accompanied by one of two Devanagari letters: ઉ (u) is an abbreviation of Gujarati ugman, meaning ‘rising’, while the letters (ā) and (a) are abbreviations of āstaman, meaning ‘setting’.

Figure 5.

“Star compass” diagram summarising the sailing directions indicated on the RGS chart. The outer circle indicates whether the directions are based on the rising (right) or setting (left) positions of the star (or stellar group) in question, with N and S notionally stationary. The segmented circle within shows the symbol for each stellar direction as given on the chart, together with its western-Indian name and notional azimuth, based on equal divisions of the circle. The inner portion shows the astronomical names of the stars/stellar groups indicated by these symbols, together with their actual rising and setting azimuths: note the discrepancies between notional and astronomical azimuths, which are most stark for stars in the southern sky. Source: John P. Cooper.

The ‘compass’ in question is not an instrument, but rather an intangible knowledge system based on celestial observation whereby a navigator uses the known rising and setting azimuths of 15 stars (or star clusters) on the horizon, as well as the almost-stationary Polaris and a notional due-south point, to establish direction of travel. The compass-card diagram itself is simply an aide memoire. Figure 5 is our own version of such a card, consolidating the information found on the RGS chart. The outer portion of the card presents each stellar symbol alongside the name attributed to it in the western-Indian tradition, as well as its notional rising and setting azimuths, implicit in the geometry of an equally segmented circle.Footnote ⁸ Meanwhile, the inner circle provides the astronomical names of the stars those symbols represent, together with their true azimuths, drawing on both ArunachalamFootnote ⁹ and Hasan Shihab.Footnote ¹⁰

Some rhumbs also have numerals written alongside them, roughly midway along their length. These are, implicitly, journey time/distance measurements in the jām unit, a hypothetical measure of time/distance representing the typical sailing distance covered by an ocean-going vessel under favourable conditions during a standard three-hour watch.Footnote ¹¹ It equates to a change of one-eighth of a finger-width on the Polaris-altitude scale when sailing due north–south, or some 20 km.Footnote ¹² The division of the day into eight jāms appears to be linked to the eight Indian pahars, by which the nautical watch was counted.Footnote ¹³

Acquisition history

The chart transitioned from working navigational document to imperial trophy through Burnes’s acquisition of it in May 1835.Footnote ¹⁴ A lieutenant in the East India Company Service and assistant to the British Resident in Kachchh,Footnote ¹⁵ Burnes had by that time won celebrity through his 1832 imperial expedition across Central Asia, which had resulted in a best-selling book,Footnote ¹⁶ honours from London learned societies, including the RGS,Footnote ¹⁷ and an audience with King William IV.Footnote ¹⁸ It was soon after returning to Kachchh following these adventures that Burnes made his acquisition. His declaration that it would ‘form a specimen of naval surveying … unequalled in any of the cabinets of Europe’Footnote ¹⁹ underlines the reciprocity of imperial endowment inherent in his donation of it to the RGS; it was one of several such gifts he gave to London learned societies, including the Royal Asiatic Society.Footnote ²⁰

Of the acquisition, Burnes writes: ‘I procured it from the “moalum”Footnote ²¹ (pilot) of a boat which had just finished the voyage, and in which I myself sailed from Bombay to Kutch [Kachchh].’ He declines to name the pilot, though he remembers that of the vessel: the 30 t Veerasil had sailed from Mandvi, Kachchh, in early 1835, commanded by ‘a Mahommedan’ with ‘a crew of five Moslems, three Rajpoots and a young negro boy’Footnote ²²—all terms exposing Burnes’s colonial gaze. The ‘voyage’ in question had ‘stretched out at once to the sea, made the coast of Arabia, and touched at Sere [=al-Shihr], Maculla [=al-Mukalla], and Aden, disposing of […] goods as they proceeded, till they reached Barbar[a] [=Berbera], in the sea of Babool-Mandeb [=Bab al-Mandab], and outside the Straits of that name’.Footnote ²³ Berbera was the site of an annual fair attracting around 100 Indian vessels, he says.Footnote ²⁴ Burnes does not relate the vessel’s itinerary thereafter, but he reports that the chart had successfully ‘served the purpose of the voyage’.Footnote ²⁵

Dating

Burnes’s 1835 acquisition provides a secure terminus ante quem for the manuscript’s production.Footnote ²⁶ Previous scholars have suggested composition dates in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries without offering rationales,Footnote ²⁷ but their view is tacitly supported by Burnes’s report that it had been a working document used on board ship—an environment that does not make for the longevity of a work on paper. Norbert Weismann suggests an eighteenth-century date, based on the illustrated ship types.Footnote ²⁸

Palaeographic evidence broadly concurs. The chart’s toponyms are written in a script that retains the shirōrēkhā, suggesting it was written before the nineteenth century, by which time Gujarati script had largely dropped this feature.Footnote ²⁹ Retention of the shirōrēkhā in a nineteenth-century document would suggest an official or elite document—uncharacteristic of this chart. Moreover, the Devanagari is archaic in other ways: for example, the letter ‘a’ appears as , rather than evolved Devanagari अ.Footnote ³⁰

Establishing a terminus post quem for the chart is more challenging. A typological comparison with other Kachchhi-Gujarati nautical documents enables us to place it within a wider regional chart-making tradition, conventions of which were already in place in the seventeenth century.Footnote ³¹ Arunachalam describes two manuscripts in India’s National Archives, one (m.s. 82.263) dated to VS 1720 (1663–1664) and the other to VS 1836 (1785–1786). The former contains five charts, covering Karnataka, Kerala, southern Tamil Nadu, and Sri Lanka;Footnote ³² the latter includes a single chart of the island of Diu, off Gujarat.Footnote ³³ These show multiple similarities with the RGS manuscript that Joseph Schwartzberg describes as ‘striking’.Footnote ³⁴ They include schematic coastlines, Polaris-altitude indicators, stellar rhumbs with associated jām measures, ship illustrations, coastal profiles, flags, and symbolic conventions for coastal trees, islands, reefs, and shoals. Meanwhile, the treatment of Diu in the second manuscript is almost identical to the RGS chart’s treatment of the island of Socotra. The same (second) manuscript also presents a star-compass card that uses stellar symbols similar to those of the RGS chart.Footnote ³⁵ However, the symbologies appearing in the other manuscripts do differ somewhat;Footnote ³⁶ for example, the charts of m.s. 82.263 indicate bathymetry and use an anchor symbol to signify an anchorage.Footnote ³⁷

In contrast, a manuscript chart at St John’s College, Oxford, dating from circa 1750Footnote ³⁸ and reported by Samira Sheikh,Footnote ³⁹ demonstrates a distinct, albeit contemporary, western-Indian approach to marine cartography. Part of a sailor’s manual, this representation of the Gulf of Khambat is projected onto a graticule, north uppermost, a feature that Sheikh interprets as a product of European–Indian knowledge exchange in the cosmopolitan context of Gujarati ports.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its depiction of a mosque at Khambat city nevertheless resonates with the portrayal of Islamic buildings on the RGS chart.

Further intimations of the terminus post quem for the chart—or an earlier version from which it might have been copied—come from its treatment of the city of al-Mukha. The name the chart gives to the city is Bandar Baṣā, or ‘Port of (the) Pasha’ (TD33), reflecting, possibly retrospectively, Ottoman control of the city from 1538 to 1636.Footnote ⁴¹ More specifically, the toponym given might reference Hasan Pasha (d. 1607), an Ottoman governor of Yemen who developed al-Mukha port significantly and who in 1590–1591 ordered the expansion of al-Shādhilī mosque and tomb, likely the building complex depicted on the chart (see the ‘Buildings’ section below).Footnote ⁴²

The backing papers of the manuscript offer little further insight into the dating of the chart, since they make no reference to it (see the ‘Verso texts’ section below) and could have existed for any duration before being attached: we know only that they were in place when Burnes acquired it.

Past treatments

Since Burnes, the main interpreters of the RGS chart have been: Albert Kammerer in 1947, assisted by Edgar Blochet, who mainly transcribed and proposed some toponymic identifications; B. Arunachalam in 1987 and 2002,Footnote ⁴³ who focused on its navigational qualities; and Norbert Weismann in 2012,Footnote ⁴⁴ who restricted his interpretation to the depicted ships. The chart has also featured in a riposte by Lieutenant Dickinson to Burnes’s 1836 JRGS article,Footnote ⁴⁵ in broader surveys of Indian cartography by Susan Gole,Footnote ⁴⁶ Joseph Schwartzberg,Footnote ⁴⁷ and Jean Deloche,Footnote ⁴⁸ and by Samira Sheikh as a comparator to her Oxford manuscript.Footnote ⁴⁹ It has also appeared in a volume celebrating India’s maritime heritage prepared for the Indian navy by Sadashiv Gorakshkar and Kalpana Desai,Footnote ⁵⁰ and in a 2012 British Museum exhibition on the Hajj, there supporting a maritime-Hajj narrative.Footnote ⁵¹ More recently, Joy Slappnig has interpreted it as an artefact of imperial encounter with indigenous mapping traditions. Footnote ⁵²

In concurrence with Burnes’s early characterisation of the chart as ‘rude’,Footnote ⁵³ several (Western) scholars have overlooked the chart’s navigational affordances. As recently as the 1980s, both DelocheFootnote ⁵⁴ and GoleFootnote ⁵⁵ echoed Burnes’s counterfactual claimFootnote ⁵⁶ that the chart is ‘without any reference to longitude and latitude’. Kammerer, meanwhile, noticed that the coasts on the chart are ‘divided into equal intervals with signs of numeration marking distances or serving as a scale’, without realising that these are Polaris-altitude indicators—hence, the very latitude indicators that he too claimed were absent.Footnote ⁵⁷ Burnes, Deloche, and Gole are correct that the chart does not indicate longitude directly—but again the stellar rhumbs and jām measures written alongside provide important east–west dimensionality.

Following Burnes,Footnote ⁵⁸ and followed himself by GoleFootnote ⁵⁹ and Schwarzberg,Footnote ⁶⁰Kammerer also claims that the chart is presented ‘without taking into account the 90° angle that the axis of the Red Sea makes with the Gulf of Aden’ (our italics).Footnote ⁶¹ While it is true that the Arabian and African coastlines are drawn on the same alignment, the chart nevertheless does account for the angle: the Polaris-altitude scale along the Arabian coast ascends numerically as one heads in both directions from the Bab al-Mandab Strait, hence indicating the coastal inflection. Meanwhile, the directions indicated by the chart’s stellar rhumbs—particularly those indicating the main coastal and mid-sea trends (see the ‘Rhumbs’ section below)—further emphasise that angle. Kammerer incorrectly describes these rhumbs as ‘unusable’.Footnote ⁶²

Deloche, meanwhile, acknowledges the presence of rhumbs (his ‘marked bearings’) on the chart, but he singularly fails to see their significance to astronomical navigation. This failure leads him to conclude that ‘it was the coast which served as the primary reference’ for the region’s navigators and that their wayfinding skills were limited to ‘going from a recognizable promontory via such-and-such a rock formation to another cape’—in other words, not straying far out of sight of land.Footnote ⁶³ Bizarrely, he argues that Kachchhis did resort to astronomical and/or magnetic navigation—but only once they were in the open ocean ‘[b]eyond [i.e. east of] the Soqoṭrā islands’.

It was Arunachalam who first recognised the astronomical affordances of the chart.Footnote ⁶⁴ His relatively brief treatment does not delve into toponymy, but he does present a projection of the chart that takes into account its Polaris-altitude and stellar-azimuth data as well as jām measurements which, he argues, ‘speaks for itself of the richness and precision of detail’ of the work.Footnote ⁶⁵ His contextualisation of the chart within a western-Indian manuscript tradition, and with it an intangible knowledge tradition, informs our interpretation.

Identifying and locating the chart’s Devanagari toponyms has been the principal focus for a number of researchers, albeit with limited success. Burnes’s English notations identify 13 of these—about a fifth. Kammerer later presents Blochet’s attempted Latin transliterations of them all:Footnote ⁶⁶ between italicisations in Blochet’s list denoting ‘identified’ locations and the marginal notes appearing on accompanying plates, Kammerer claims, implicitly, to have identified the real-world locations of more than one third. Yet he does not detail these in his publication. Arunachalam’s 1987 projectionFootnote ⁶⁷ identifies a further two locations—Jabal Fartak (TD45) and Maydh Island (TD54). In sum, previous works have left some 55 per cent of the chart’s Devanagari toponyms unidentified and without real-world locations—with more still lacking precision. The results of our efforts, presented in the ‘Devanagari toponyms’ section below, propose coordinates using the WGS84 system for all 66 toponyms, improved transcriptions of the Devanagari script, and contemporary names for all but two of them (TD6 and TD7).

Analysis

We now discuss the outcomes of the application of these methodologies.

Polaris altitudes

The Polaris-altitude scale on the chart ranges from a low of 4(II), at Socotra (TD48) and Ra’s Filuk (TD53), to a high of 11 at Jeddah (TD1). On the Red Sea’s African side, the scale’s upper limit is 9(II), considerably further north than the most northerly toponym there (Difnen, TD65). Numerals along the Arabian coast of the Gulf of Aden ascend to 7(II), just north of the al-Qara mountains in modern-day Oman (TD47). Table 1 shows the distribution of Polaris-altitude indicators on the chart relative to the toponym sequences.

The particular importance of the altitude of Polaris in north–south navigation is reflected in the presence of this scale on both of the Red Sea coasts and on the Arabian coast of the Gulf of Aden, all of which display a pronounced north–south trend. The scale is not depicted along the primarily east–west oriented Somali coast: the single marker at Ra’s Filuk (TD53) reflects the headland’s northerly projection into the Gulf of Aden, and suggests that sailors sought to hold that latitude while sailing east to clear the Horn of Africa and make the Socotra archipelago on their return voyage to India. The more northerly of the two points marked on Socotra, meanwhile, provides a latitude-keeping reference both to navigators heading east and those using the north-east monsoon to enter the Gulf of Aden from across the Arabian Sea: were a ship to veer further south, it might make landfall south of the Horn of Africa and be pushed off course down the African coast by the Somali current and monsoon winds.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, the lower of the Polaris-altitude indicators on Socotra indicates the latitude to maintain for vessels leaving Socotra for Cape Guardafui (TD52).

Rhumbs

The chart’s 29 rhumb lines serve three main purposes: establishing the principal trend of a coastline (rhumbs R9–11, R22, R27–28 in Figure 3); indicating a direction of travel across open water (R6–8, R12–21, R23–26, R29); and, in possibly two cases (R1 and R5), showing safe passage into and out of port. The information contained in these rhumbs is summarised in Table 2.

Table 2.

Summary of the 29 stellar rhumbs depicted on the chart, arranged by region and showing stellar azimuths and their geographical termini

* Although the rhumb is effectively bidirectional, we seek to avoid ambiguity by designating as 'bearing' the direction of travel shown by the ship drawn alongside the rhumb in question. The 'recipriocal' is, by definition, the reverse. Where no ship is depicted, we assign the leftmost end of the rhumb as the bearing, or the upper end of an absolutely vertical rhumb.

In most cases, as Figure 5 shows, some deviation occurs between the notional and real azimuths of a given stellar indicator in the star-compass system, particularly for stars in the south: Agasi (α-Eridani), for example, diverges a full –18.75° from its notional direction of 168.75°. Setting aside the fact that this situation reveals a poverty of indicators for directions tending south, this may initially appear more of a problem for diagrammatic representations of the compass than for its practical application—after all, seafarers derived actual direction from sighting actual stars, not from abstract diagrams. However, the problem becomes real when comparing the symbols at each end of the same rhumb. In principle, each of these should constitute a reciprocal bearing of the other. For example, setting (and rising) Uttadi appears on the star-compass card as the reciprocal of rising (and setting) Toran. In reality, the stars signified by the former, α(β)-Cassiopeiae, has an azimuth of –35.4°, and hence a reciprocal of 144.6°. Yet the true azimuth of αβ-Centauri, the stars signifying Toran, is 149.1°. Such a 4.5° deviation would put a vessel 4 NM off course after sailing 50 NM, when compared to sailing on the true azimuth of Toran. For rhumb 25, representing a 321 NM sailing between Ra’s Filuk (TD53) and Sadil (TD46), sailing on a true reciprocal would generate a deviation of some 113 NM compared to sailing on the stellar azimuth for that direction as the chart stipulates. This cannot be explained away by claiming that this was an attempt by the author(s) to compensate for the effects of wind and current: all but three of the complete rhumbs depicted on the chart have pairings of stellar symbols that are reciprocals of each other, in accordance with star-compass convention. The few exceptions are rhumbs R4, R19, and R20. In the first two of these, setting Ghosgir (α-Lyrae) is paired unconventionally with rising Sravan (α-Aquilae). Far from being mutual reciprocals, these azimuths intersect at 134°. On rhumb R20, meanwhile, Kritika (Pleiades) is presented at both ends: here the intersection is an angle of 157.5°. These might be errors on the part of the chart’s creator(s), or they might constitute some form of correctivefor wind and current, even though such corrections are not applied to other rhumbs. What we must conclude in any case is that navigators were able to mitigate the errors inherent in the star-compass system by recourse to complementary situational wayfinding methods.

In addition to providing directional information, nine of the rhumbs guiding open-water crossings in the Gulf of Aden are accompanied by jām measurements written alongside them in numerical form (R16–21, R23–25; Table 2).Footnote ⁷⁴ In contrast, the chart applies no jām measurements to rhumbs in the Red Sea. Further, all those jām measurements in the Gulf of Aden inform open-sea crossings: those rhumbs without jāms are either coastally aligned or incomplete due to damage. We argue, contra Arunachalam,Footnote ⁷⁵ that the reason for this is not that the creator(s) of the chart knew the Red Sea less well, but rather that dependence on the relatively inaccurate jām system was restricted to open-water crossings with a marked east–west component, making landfall on coastlines with a marked east–west trend. In coastal sailing generally, navigators could rely upon landmarks to mark progress. On routes with a significant north–south component, such as in the Red Sea, they could additionally draw upon Polaris altitudes. It was only when no other corroborating information was available that navigators had recourse to the jām system.

The two information systems of Polaris altitudes and rhumbs should not be seen as always operating in isolation from each other. For example, it should be noted that the northern ends of Red Sea rhumbs R2, R3, R4, and R8 (Figure 3) do not end at named destinations. Indeed, two of them terminate mid sea. This suggests that they were intended to deliver the navigator safely north to a desired latitude rather than to a specific location, after which decisions on where to go next could be made. A passage from Kachchhi sailing manual m.s. 82.263 of 1663–1664 (VS 1720) suggests how this worked.Footnote ⁷⁶ It describes how a ship reaching a latitude of 6.5 ‘fingers’ when sailing north from the Bab al-Mandab Strait should head on a bearing of setting Pohi to reach Kamaran Island (TD30), while taking a bearing on setting Uttadi at a latitude of 8 fingers would lead to Jizan (TD18).

The spatial data provided by the rhumbs, taken alongside the Polaris elevations, allows us to attempt a spatial projection of the chart (Figure 6). This projection prioritises Polaris-altitude data and uses the stellar azimuths of key rhumbs to establish the central axis of the Red Sea and the trajectory of coastlines as well as triangulating the latitude of points on the Somali coast where no latitude data is available. We project each rhumb according to the stellar symbol at its more northerly end. Where following a stellar azimuth generates an obviously inaccurate outcome, we anchor the rhumb instead to the known toponyms at each end. The projection that emerges stands a refutation of those authors who claim, in Burnes’s words, that the chart was effectively ‘without any reference’ to latitude or longitude.Footnote ⁷⁷

Figure 6.

A projection of the spatial information represented on the chart based on Polaris altitudes and stellar rhumbs, together with the contemporary places indicated by its Devanagari toponyms. The projection privileges Polaris-altitudes where these clash with rhumbs. It uses the stellar azimuths indicated by rhumbs to establish the axis of the Red Sea as well as coastal trends, where available. Rhumbs indicating sea crossings that appear contradictory are reconciled with reference to toponyms and Polaris altitudes. Source: John P. Cooper.

Devanagari toponyms

The Devanagari toponyms locate sites of navigational, economic, and political relevance to Kachchhi-Gujarati seafarers in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden: a complete inventory appears in Table 3, alongside our identifications of their real-world locations, including WGS84 co-ordinates.

Table 3.

Summary of the Devanagari and English toponyms depicted on the chart, transcribed and correlated with real-world identifications^a

*Key: A. Resemblance to contemporary toponym; B. Toponym and location indicated in historic cartography/pilot guides; C. Position in toponymic sequence; D. Position on Polaris-altitude scale; E. Location at terminus of rhumb.

^a R. Kirk, Kotumbool bearing E, pencil drawing, 6 x 17.5 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1831); Survey of Egypt, Farisan Bank: Northern Portion and Approaches to Lith (Cairo, 1917); J. B. B. D’Anville, Africa, performed by the Sr. Danville under the Patronage of the Duke of Orleans, revised and Improved by Mr Bolton (London, 1774); G. H. Richards, Harbours and Anchorages in the Red Sea (London, 1873), T. Elwon and H. Pinching, Chart of the Islands and Outer Reefs from Ghesan to Cameran (London, 1804); R. Kirk, Loheia, Red Sea, ink, wash and sepia drawing, 10.5 x 10 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1852); R. Kirk, Jibul Teer, watercolour, 14 x 27 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1841); W. J. L. Wharton, Kamaran Passage and Southern Approaches (London, 1919); R. Kirk, Jibul Zugger S by W, 25 miles volcanic, pencil drawing, 6.5 x 15 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1833); J. De Castro, Tábuas dos roteiros da Índia (Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, 15–); Admiralty, A Rough Plan of Sheikh Syed near Bab-El-Mandeb by the Officers of H.M.S. Nassau (London, 1870); J. Walker, Chart of the Gulf of Aden, Surveyed by Captain Haines, Lieuts Barker and Grieve, Indian Navy (London, 1847); S. al-Mahrī, ‘al-Minhāj al-Fākhir fī ʿIlm al-Baḥr al-Zākhir,’ in al-ʿUlūm al-Baḥriyya ʿInd al-ʿArab: Taḥqīq wa-Taḥlīl, (ed.) I. Khūrī (Damascus, 1970); S. B. Haines, Chart of the South East Coast of Arabia on Mercator’s Projection, Compiled from a Trigonometric Survey (London, 1858); A. Lasor a Varea, Universus Terrarum Orbis Scriptorum (Patavii, 1713); R. Kirk, Island Howakel, Island African Coast, SW 1/2 S, 12 Miles, pencil drawing, 10 x 24.5 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1832); W. J. L. Wharton Anchorages of the Coast of Arabia (London, 1888); F. J. Evans, Musawwa’ Channel, Surveyed by Captain T. Elwon and Commander R. Moresby I.N. 1830–34 (London, 1876); F. J. Evans, Musawwa’ Harbour (London, 1878).

English toponyms

Burnes’s English toponymy (Figure 3; Table 3) comprises 21 additions to the chart and constitutes a first attempt to orientate the document for a new, European-colonial readership. These are written in two distinct styles: a cursive script of variable neatness identifies ‘The Red Sea’ (TE20) and ‘Straits of Babool Mandeb’ (TE21) as well as the regional ports of ‘Hodeida’ (TE3), ‘Mocha’ (TE5), ‘Maculla’ (TE9), ‘Sere’ (TE10), and ‘Musooah’ (TE19): all have flags and/or buildings to underscore their prominence. The only other English toponym written cursively is ‘Barbara’ (TE18)—again a port, but not one that is noted at all in Devanagari, even though the last-ever practical use of the chart, on the Veerasil, included a visit there. The navigationally important islands of ‘Jabbul Zekir’ (TE4) and ‘Abdool Curia’ (TE13) are noted in the same hand. The remaining 11 English toponyms are written in a cruder block script; all but two (‘Perim Island’ (TE6) and ‘Aden’ (TE8)) have Devanagari correlates. Again, all of these represent ports or locations of primary navigational significance—‘Jedda’ (TE1), ‘Kamran Island’ (TE2), ‘Perim Island’ (TE6), ‘Aden’ (TE8), ‘Sadil’ (TE11), ‘Socotra/Socotra groupe’ (TE12/TE14), and (for a second time) ‘Barbara’ (TE18).

It is noteworthy that almost all of the English toponyms identifying locations appear at the ends of rhumbs. This might suggest a first-pass attempt by Burnes to understand the chart, led by its rhumbs and flags, and presumably assisted by his uncredited informants.

Landmark profiles

The importance of terrestrial landmarks—islands, headlands, and mountains—in the wayfinding strategies of Indian Ocean sailors is abundantly apparent from the chart. Identifiable by their unique outlines, often visible from far offshore, such elevations offer definitive visual confirmation of location. The inclusion of such landmark profiles is widespread within western-Indian manuscripts,Footnote ¹¹⁰ Arab pilot-books,Footnote ¹¹¹ and European cartography, including British East India Company and Admiralty charts. Footnote ¹¹² The orographic formation of stationary cap clouds above high peaks can make these locations apparent long before they are directly visible.

Amid the generic, lobular, black-and-red indication of mountainous topography suggested along all coasts, the chart also individuates specific headlands, mountains, and individual islands by way of distinct drawn profiles—mostly in black silhouette edged with red. The most prominent of these are in the Gulf of Aden (features P1–19; see Table 4 and Figure 3). Nine are shown as the landfalls of rhumb-guided open-sea crossings and the rest as confirmatory waymarkers along coastal routes. Of the landfalls, Mayyun Island (P1, 65 m) and Ra’s Bab al-Mandab (P2) with the adjacent Jabal Manhali (232 m) signify arrival at the pivotal Bab al-Mandab Strait,Footnote ¹¹³ while Jabal Khawz (P3, 805 m) and Jabal Shamsan (P5, 541 m) indicate the safe Yemeni-coast harbours of Khawr ‘Umayra (TD38) and Aden (TE8), respectively.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Cape Guardafui (P18, 276 m) marks the critical inflection point of the Horn of Africa,Footnote ¹¹⁵ and the lofty Hajir mountains (P14, 1,519 m) and ‘Abd al-Kuri Island (P17, 571 m) confirm landfall at the main islands of the Socotra archipelago.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Maydh lsland (P19, 125 m) is the only prominent island along some 950 km of Somali coast; as well as a highly visible waymarker, a ‘remarkable cove’ there offers anchorage.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The remaining landfall indicator is the ‘very conspicuous’ Hawf mountain range (P12), which rises to almost 1,400 m.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Coastal profiles not occurring at the end of rhumbs include Ra’s ‘Imran (P4, 202 m), Jabal al-Dabab (P8, 392 m) and Jabal Dabdab (P9, 285 m), these indicating proximity to the significant Arabian ports of Aden, al-Mukalla, and al-Shihr, respectively;Footnote ¹¹⁹ the others are the prominent coastal headlands of Ra’s Fartak (P11, 901 m) and the twin ‘Ass’s Ears’ sugarloaf peaks near Ra’s Sharwayn (P10, 581 m).Footnote ¹²⁰ Also represented are the exceptionally high mountain ranges of Jabal Yafai (P6, >1,980 m), the first range on the Arabian coast east of Aden,Footnote ¹²¹ and Jabal Fadli (P7, 1,659 m), further east again,Footnote ¹²² as well as Darsa and Samha, the lesser islands of the Socotra archipelago (P15, P16).

Table 4.

Identifications of coastal profiles depicted on the chart^a

^a R. Kirk, Aden, ink drawing, 22.5 x 36.5 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1841); R. Kirk, Jebul Dabab NNE, ink drawing, 6.5 x 18.5 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1832); R. Kirk, Jibel Dabab bearing E, pencil drawing, 7 x 15.5 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1832).

The chart does also present individual landmark profiles in the Red Sea, but none are represented as major landfalls—a fact reflecting the north–south orientation of the sea and resultant lack of dependence on coastal features for rhumb-based open-sea crossings. Reflecting the sea’s topography, and in contrast to the Gulf of Aden, all profiles on the Red Sea are islands. Indeed, a great many of the circa 147 islands depicted in the sea are drawn with a sense of individuality—for example, as rectangles or with distinct numbers of lobes, suggesting various shapes and hence real, distinguishable, islands. The fact that some are shown with black fill and others unfilled presumably suggests the visual characteristic of the island in question: this certainly holds for the dark geology of Hawakil (TD58)—although hardly for Dahlak (TD60).

It is curious, meanwhile, that the chart apparently shows the major islands of the central Red Sea—Jabal Zuqar (TD32) and Jabal al-Tayr (TD28)—in plan view: it does the same for key reefs marking the approaches to Jeddah—Shi’b Mismari (TD2) and Gāphāt/Gārāt (TD6). Since it is otherwise uncharacteristic of the chart to depict features in plan, it might be that these suggest a borrowing from contemporary European charts, where plan views were standard.

Unnamed locations

Our identification and real-world location of the toponyms and landmark profiles allow us next to consider individual features on the chart that are represented but not labelled with toponyms, proposing identifications by virtue of their positions relative to these now-identified locales, as well as Polaris altitudes, the termini of rhumbs, and their drawn appearances.

The features in question are predominantly islands but also include reefs, shoals, promontories, and sea-bottom features. In some of the cases we present here, we have been able to identify individual features; in others, we have assigned names to groups of features belonging, for example, to an archipelago or a less-readily defined sequence of islands. Table 5 offers our identifications for 50 such ‘features’.

Table 5.

Proposed identifications of unnamed features (and groups of features) depicted on the chart^a

^a H. P. Douglas, Farasan Islands, principally from a compilation by Lieut. G.M. Stitt, R.N. (London, 1929); R. Kirk, Jibul Zugger S by W. 25 miles volcanic. pencil drawing, 6.5 x 15 cm (Picture Store, RGS-IBG Collections, 1833); J. Washington, Sketch of Perim Island by Lieutenant H. Lamb I.N. 1857 (London, 1858); J. Walker, Chart of the Gulf Aden, surveyed by Captains Haines & Harless, Lieutenants Barker and Grieve, Indian Navy, Sheet 2 (London, 1853); A. Day, Gulf of Aden and Southern Part of the Red Sea (London, 1952).

Unsurprisingly, given the Red Sea’s navigationally challenging topography, almost four-fifths of these unnamed feature-groups occur there (L1–21; L33–50). On the Arabian side, these can be summarised (north to south) as reefs on the approaches to Jeddah (L1 and L2, located alongside named reefs TD2, TD3, and TD5); the many reefs and islands of the Farasan Bank (L5–8); islands of the Farasan archipelago (L9–14); shoals and islets north of Kamaran Island (L15); the Katib peninsula (L17) and associated shallows (L18) north of Hodeida; the peninsula and Tarafa islands that bound Khawr Ghulayfiqa (L18), terminating at Ra’s al-Mujamila; and hazards on the approaches to the bay of al-Mukha (L19).

Examination of these features helps explain their inclusion. The many reefs of Jeddah Bay often required the expertise of local pilots for successful navigation.Footnote ¹²³ According to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot, ‘being acquainted with the reefs and anchorages from eyesight, [these pilots] are always able to take a vessel among them with safety’.Footnote ¹²⁴ As already noted, it was at Shi’b Mismari (TD2) that de la Rochette says such pilots boarded inbound ships.Footnote ¹²⁵ Further south, the many shoals and islands of the Arabian coast (L5–16), particularly those of the Farasan Bank and Islands, as far south as Kamaran (L15), remain challenging to this day. Elaine Morgan and Stephen Davies warn that even contemporary charts are inaccurate and counsel sailors to ‘always navigate […] with circles of probable error […] of at least 2 miles’ and to ‘make daylight landfalls’.Footnote ¹²⁶ At Kamaran, the shoals indicated on the chart at the northern side of the island should be understood as those fringing the southern edge of the same channel leading to Kamaran Bay that is bounded to the north by the islands of ‘Uqban (TD27) and al-Bawdi (TD26), discussed above. Further south, the peninsula spit and associated islands of Katib (L17) waymark the northern approaches to Hodeida: the enclosed bay there ‘is both irregular and shoal’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Below al-Hodeida, a second spit, ending in Ra’s al-Mujamila, encloses Khawr Ghulayfiqa (L18), which the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot considers a good anchorage, albeit with a difficult entrance.Footnote ¹²⁸ Finally, at al-Mukha, the chart is careful to note what the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot calls the ‘North’ and ‘South’ shoals (L19) flanking the al-Mukha roads.Footnote ¹²⁹ Morgan and Davies also note the challenges posed there by strong south-east winds and dust storms. Footnote ¹³⁰

On the African side of the Red Sea, this time moving from south to north, the chart indicates the complex inshore islands around Assab Bay (L33), Beraisole (L36), and Hawakil Bay (L40), together with those fringing Marsa Ibrahim and Marsa Mubarak (L47)—although not those around Khawr Nawarat further north. Other unnamed markers include the distinct and isolated volcanic peak of Sanahbor Gadir island (L34), the chain of volcanic islands between Beraisole and Halaba (L38), the low chain of islands between Ra’s Ardadda and Tio (L39), the islands near the tip of the Hartau peninsula (L41), and the myriad islands of the Dahlak group (L42–46). Offshore island groups include the Muhabbakah and Hanish Islands (L35 and L37), the islands of the Suakin Group (L48), and the island scatter including Talla Saghir, Talla Kabir, Taimashiya, and Dar Ah Teras (L49). These islands are clearly relevant to navigation out of sight of the coast; at least two—fringing features L37 and L48—seem directly related to rhumbs R4, R12, and R13 (Figure 3). Finally, our identification of L50 as the island-port of Suakin is certainly speculative, albeit following Kammerer,Footnote ¹³¹ and is based on our interpretation of the rosette-like symbol at that location.

The simpler coastal topography of the Gulf of Aden results in far fewer and more easily identified unnamed features than in the Red Sea. On the Arabian side, islands are limited to the small Shaikh Malu or Oyster Island (L20) close by Ra’s Bab al-Mandab, and the cluster of inshore islands by Qana (L23, TD42) that sit on the chart at the terminus of a rhumb. Meanwhile, the chart’s depiction of dot-stippling within bays such as Ghubbat al-Haykah (L21), Ghubbat Seilan (L22), Ghubbat al-Qamr (L25), and the bay at Salalah (L26), alert the navigator to sandy shallows and perhaps overfalls. On the African coast, the chart depicts just three unnamed features. Of these, the Khor Galweni lagoon (L30), near the landfall of Ra’s Filuk (TD53; also at the terminus of a rhumb) was accessible to larger vessels at high tide, with fresh water, cattle, and firewood available within.Footnote ¹³² The chart also indicates coastal shoals south of Zeila (L31, TD55), and the individual, lofty islands of the Sawabi’ group (L32; TD56), five of which the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot notes are visible from up to ‘30 miles [48 km] distant’.Footnote ¹³³

Within the Socotra group, unnamed locations include the small but navigationally prominent Sabuniya Island (L27) and the Ka’l Fir’awn pillars (L28); both features appear white from afar, their colour and height (circa 50 m and 86 m, respectively) making them visible from up to 30 km away.Footnote ¹³⁴

Buildings

The chart presents illustrations of three built structures, all of which we interpret as Islamic buildings—two mosques (or mosque-tomb complexes) and a maqām, or tomb-shrine. The mosque-tomb complexes appear at the major ports of al-Mukha and Massawa, and the maqām on the Arabian shore of the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

Views and charts of the city of al-Mukha in the early modern period often depict several minarets.Footnote ¹³⁵ Yet there seems little doubt that the building intended on the chart (B1, Figure 3; enlarged in Figure 7) is the mosque-tomb complex of the fifteenth-century patron sheikh of the city, Shams al-Dīn ʿAlī bin ʿUmar al-Qarashī al-Shādhilī (d. 1424). We interpret the image as comprising (l–r) a two-balconied minaret, a prayer hall, and two tombs. Hasan Pasha’s already mentioned commission of 1590–1591 comprised a grand nine-domed structure—the mosque we see today—named after al-Shādhilī. In addition to the mosque and al-Shādhilī’s tomb, the complex also included the tombs of his son ʿAbd al-Raʾūf (d. 1453), the religious scholar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Zabīdī al-Muqrī (d. 1505), and an Ottoman governor of Yemen, Sinan Pasha Kaykhiya (d. 1607).Footnote ¹³⁶ Al-Shādhilī’s tomb was destroyed in 2017 amid Yemen’s civil war, apparently by a Salafi group, but the mosque survives.Footnote ¹³⁷

Figure 7.

Details from the RGS chart showing the buildings it depicts: (A) the mosque-tomb complex of Shams al-Dīn ʿAlī bin ʿUmar al-Qarashī al-Shādhilī at al-Mukha; (B) a mosque-tomb complex at Massawa, which we interpret as that of Shaykh Jamāl bin ʿUmar bin Ṣiddīq al-Anṣārī; (C) a maqām (tomb-shrine) on the Arabian coast, very close to the Bab al-Mandab, perhaps that of Sheikh Saʿīd, after whom a headland on the Bab al-Mandab peninsula is named. Source: Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers.

The Sufi al-Shādhilī school enjoyed regional renown, and the site inspired frequent visitation and incremental expansion of the tomb complex, culminating in Hasan Pasha’s construction of the adjacent mosque. Local legend connects al-Shādhilī to the earliest uses of coffee, a beverage that established the city’s fame in the mid sixteenth century, solidifying his legacy in a port that became synonymous with this commodity.Footnote ¹³⁸

Meanwhile, the building depicted at Massawa (B2, Figure 3; enlarged in Figure 7) comprises three adjacent domed buildings, the centre one being the larger. The absence of a minaret suggests that it represents a tomb, although such venerated structures, as in al-Mukha, often prompted the construction of an adjacent mosque, which in turn took the name of the entombed person.

The identity of the Massawa building remains uncertain. The significant growth of Islam in the town during the second half of the nineteenth century brought the number of mosques there to some 65 by the early twentieth century,Footnote ¹³⁹ thereby complicating our search in what is a poorly researched field. We regard it as unlikely that the representation is of the town’s oldest Islamic building, the al-Ṣaḥāba mosque, which is reputed to have been established around the 620s by early Muslim migrants, thereby constituting Africa’s first mosque.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It is a low and therefore inconspicuous structure, despite being on the seaward edge of Massawa’s outer Bats’i’i Deset Island. There are, moreover, no historical records suggesting it was a focus of visitation or pilgrimage. Another candidate is the tomb and associated mosque of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (1077–1166), founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi order. Local legend holds that he spent time in Massawa, and a tomb commemorating him was erected after his death.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Our favoured candidate, however, is the Sheikh Jamāliyya mosque, named after JamālFootnote ¹⁴² b. ʿUmar b. Ṣiddīq al-Anṣārī (d. circa 1500), whose tomb was located alongside it.Footnote ¹⁴³ Entirely rebuilt in recent decades, the structure is also referred to as the Ḥanafī mosque, reflecting the Islamic Hanafi legal school’s influence during the Ottoman occupation of Massawa (1557–1865).Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This identification aligns more closely with other markers of Ottoman identity found elsewhere on the chart, including the al-Mukha mosque.

We have already noted in our discussion of the Makām Mēśan toponym (TD36) the depiction of a shrine-like building on the Sheikh Saʿīd headland in a 1914 Ottoman–British border agreement.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This appears as a simple, small-domed structure (B3, Figure 7; TD36, Figure 3). It might be that this shrine was built in honour of a local Sufi saint named Sheikh Saʿīd,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ but we have found no other evidence for the shrine itself.

It is the case, however, that multiple small local shrines occurred along the South Arabian coast, often serving as spiritual and navigational landmarks for mariners. The 1853 East India Company chart of ‘the Southeast Coast of Arabia’ depicts several such shrines along the Gulf of Aden coast (e.g. ‘Sheikh Othman’, ‘Sheikhe Marbat’, ‘Sheika Hamrba[?]’, and ‘Shaikh Abderaman Baddas’) plus generic markers such as ‘tomb’ and ‘mosque’. Just two years before Burnes’s acquisition of the chart, Rupert Kirk sketched the interior of just such a small tomb-shrine on the Yemeni Red Sea island of Antufash (our TD23). Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The chart’s particular interest in Islamic buildings cannot simply be a product of their respective navigational prominences: those at al-Mukha and Massawa were not particularly close to the shore and would have largely blended into their overall townscapes when viewed from the sea. Likewise, the shrine at Sheikh Saʿīd would have been dwarfed by the mountains around it. We must infer, therefore, that their function on the chart was primarily social and/or religious, even if we remain circumspect in attributing a clearly Islamic identity to the creator(s), and still less the intended users, of the chart.

Flags

In addition to buildings, the chart also depicts several pole-mounted flags—nine in total—at locations along the African and Arabian coasts (Figure 3). Always shown flying towards the right, these are pennant (FL1–2, FL6, FL9), double-pennant (FL3, FL8), and rounded-pennant (FL4, FL5) in shape. The single pennants all show a smaller chevron overlaying the field, broadly in the proportions of the flag itself; sometimes there is a further chevron embedded within. Most single pennants (FL1–2, FL6) show variations of block red and uncoloured space alternating between the field and the chevron(s), although the pennant at Massawa comprises red dots on an uncoloured field. The same dotted colouring is applied to both the chart’s double pennants (FL3, FL8), although flag FL8 additionally has a black-outlined circle at the hoist of each pennant. The two rounded pennants are each distinct: the elaborate one at al-Mukha (FL4) has alternating chevrons overlaying a red-dotted field, with alternating black and uncoloured bands at the fly; the other, at Aden (FL5), comprises a red field with two overlayed chevrons alternating between red and uncoloured.

As Arunachalam suggests with respect to other Indian charts,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ the flags probably signify political authority, given their general association with ports such as Kamaran (FL1), al-Hodeida (FL2), al-Mukha (FL4), Aden (FL5), al-Shihr (FL6), and Massawa (FL9). We take flag FL7 to signify Salala (L26) in modern Oman, albeit unnamed, and FL8 to signify the vicinity of Barbara or Zaila. We have not been able to associate the designs directly with regional polities contemporary to the chart. All those in the Red Sea (FL1–4, FL9) fall within the space of Ottoman influence yet are mutually distinct. It may be that the designs themselves are an invention of the chart’s creator(s).

Symbology

Beyond its toponymy and individuated features, we note the application within the chart of a relatively standardised set of symbological conventions (Figure 8). Indeed, it is these features that allow us to claim stylistic similarities between the chart and other Kachchhi-Gujarati manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Figure 8.

Tentative summary of the abstract symbology of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden chart. Source: John P Cooper.

Note: See Figure 5 for the full set of stellar direction symbols.

Most striking of all of these is the representation of the coastline, which by default comprises consecutive bays with a scalloped black line representing the shoreline and black lobes with red edging representing the landward side. Interspersed along this generic coast are the already discussed coastal profiles; these are in black silhouette and usually red-fringed. Islands take diverse forms, alluding, as noted above, to their actual shapes in some cases. Reefs (or shoals) are presented either as elongated polygons with dotted outlines (e.g. L8, Figure 3), or with a combination of dotted and solid lines (e.g. most reefs in L1), the latter perhaps indicating surface-breaking reefs. Occasionally, spits are indicated as linear protuberances from the shore (e.g. L2, L41), comprising solid and/or dotted lines, again distinguishing between submerged and breaking features. Some bays are stippled with dots—all black, or black and red—suggesting shallows or overfalls. Meanwhile, in a region of few trees, navigationally useful palms (e.g. TD34, TD35, L26) and mangroves (TD59, L43) are indicated with conventionalised symbols for each species. Flags, as we have noted, indicate a political presence. A military presence is perhaps indicated by rectangular symbols. We know that forts existed where these are depicted at Farasan (TD19)Footnote ¹⁵⁰ and Kamaran (TD30),Footnote ¹⁵¹ although not at Sirrayn (TD12). Finally, two rosette-like features occur, one in the bay of Massawa (TD61) and the other at what we identify as Suakin (L50), albeit partly based on this feature. Both ports have islands—Bats’i’i Desēt and Suakin Island, respectively—around which ships moored. The symbol might signify this, or perhaps a lighthouse or something else related to political control of these ports.

The verso texts

The manuscript verso comprises ten distinct pieces of paper pasted onto the back of the chart, presumably to reinforce it. All have text written on them, primarily in Gujarati using Devanagari script (Figure 4). They appear to have been pasted systematically: three bands of papers run the length of the manuscript, with the central band overlaying the two outer ones. The individual papers comprise fragmentary texts that are often partly pasted over or truncated; there is no consistency in their orientation. The texts are written in more than one script: in most cases, the shirōrēkhā line is present, while in others it has been omitted. As Burnes and later authors note, the texts have little to contribute with respect to the chart itself, or to navigation more generally.Footnote ¹⁵² The broad subject matter of each is summarised in Table 6.

Table 6.

Indicative descriptions of the ten texts on the verso of the chart