Apr 2013 Issue - the Aberdeen Boat Club

learned as a child, often in the form ofchanted songs – a common, age-oldfeature of vernacular navigation. Thereare indications of route songs in classicalGreek epics (think of The Odyssey),in Viking sagas, in 15 th -century Arabnavigational sources and in the world ofPolynesian navigators. But, given the lowstatus of China’s mariners, few if any ofthese route songs appear to have beenrecorded, and the last junkmasters whoknew them are today long gone.How were the routes the hè zhǎngsailed and recorded, when they were?We do not know for sure. China’smaritime world was always somethingof a Cinderella despite its amazing reachthroughout Asian waters. That meant thatits massive practical database did notleave behind it the huge printed recordthat we see beginning to accumulate inthe western world in the 15th century,first growing slowly and then, in the 18thcentury, beginning its mad acceleration tothe millionsof written and printed records extant bythe end of the 19th century.We know that junkmasters keptpersonal rutters that recorded theirknowledge and experience in the set ofzhēnlù that represented the network oftheir home port’s traditional trade. Almostnone have survived.We have examples in the beautifulYale maps in the Sterling MemorialLibrary of Yale University, and inwonderful compendia like the MáoYuányí’s ( 茅 元 儀 , [1594–1640?]) MaoKun Map (more properly the 鄭 和 航 海圖 [Zhèng Hé hánghăi tú], Zhenghenavigation map) and in Xiè Zhāng’s ( 張燮 ), Dōngxī Yáng Kǎo (An investigation ofthe East and West Oceans). And in thenewly restored Selden Map ( 東 西 洋 航 海 圖 ,Dōngxī Yang Hánghǎi Tú), contemporarywith Xiè Zhāng’s work. Taken altogether,the many individual or home port routepatterns coalesced into the core routenetwork that centuries of coastal andoverseas trading had created,including the Eastern Passage ourGuangdong junks sailed.Today even yottigation, the lastlink to a traditional world of sailingand navigating, is going. A worldthis author grew up in – one notso far-removed from the last ofTongjiang map, courtesy of the Sterling MemorialLibrary, Yale Universitythe junk sailors – is fast dying. No neednow for long-honed seamanship skillsand a good visuo-spatial memory storingmental route maps of headlands andchannels, islands and hazards, roadsteadsand havens. We have our iPads andiPhones with built-in GPS systems andapps with all the charts to take us fromhere to Australia. And with the app to theHong Kong Observatory, Predict Windor Windguru, the tides and the weatherliterally are at our fingertips.Do we have the same experienceas the old hè zhǎng as his junk dipped,curtsied and creaked its way throughthe D’Aguilar Channel and out into theEastern Approaches? Maybe not.Stephen Davies with Graham Aldrich at the ABC book launchJunks in Central HarbourP.32