Discovering the Red Sea

Few seas have been the subject of descriptions for as long a time as the Red Sea.^[519] Naturally, periods characterised by international commercial expansion and imperial vying spawned the production of new knowledge about the Red Sea from the particular vantage points of outsiders to the region (focused on long-distance transit trade and strategic importance).

Though navigation in the Red Sea was already recorded during the Bronze Age Pharaonic state - most famously Queen Hatshepsut’s expedition to the Land of Punt around 1400 BCE (Dynasty XVIII) - it was under the Ptolemaic dynasty (332 BCE-30 BCE) that enduring Red Sea maritime communications were significantly expanded and consolidated. The Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt invested state resources in the Red Sea, established a number of ports on the sea’s western shores (e.g. Berenike), and laid the foundations for the famous ‘India trade’.^[521] This began the process of further integrating the Red Sea region into what would later become a more or less coherent regional space.

The production of knowledge about the Red Sea in this period reached its peak with the mid-first-century CE anonymous Greco- Roman merchant guide the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Periplus Maris Erythraei) ^[523] The composition of a merchant handbook by an experi­enced mariner describing in detail the area between the Mediterranean and India may well have reflected the apex of the India trade in the Roman era. The Periplus provided detailed information about sailing conditions, winds, reefs, harbours, entrepots, markets, trade goods, traders, trading practices and ethnographic descriptions of the coastal inhabitants of the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean (to which the appellation Maris Erythraei referred). All in all, intensified political, commercial, social and cultural exchanges in the Red Sea during the two centuries before and after the start of the Common Era integrated and consolidated ‘the Red Sea as a discrete unit of human geography’, in Power’s words.^[524]

The rise of Islam in western Arabia and its gradual spread north and south, through land and sea, induced a new phase of knowledge production on the Red Sea. Arab geographers and travellers such as Al-Masudi (tenth century), Ibn Jubayr (twelfth/thirteenth centuries), Ibn al-Mujawir (thirteenth century) and Ibn Battuta (fourteenth cen­tury), provided descriptions that usually highlighted the fickle winds and the hazards of sailing in Red Sea waters.

The sixteenth century represented a momentous turning point in Red Sea history. The Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt (1516-17) and the advances of Portuguese ambitions in the western Indian Ocean brought these two powers to compete over ascendancy in the area and inscribed the Red Sea into the arena of global imperial politics. The most perti­nent of several Portuguese Red Sea ‘explorers’ was Dom Joao de Castro (1500-48) whose expedition from the island of Socotra to Suez in 1541 may be considered the first European scientific exploration of the Red Sea.

The European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century marked a new era for the production of ‘scientific’ geographic knowledge about areas outside Europe.^[530] The Red Sea was one of the first areas to be explored and studied, mostly by way of an interest in the history of Egypt, but also in ancient history and the ancient world more broadly. The middle of the eighteenth century inaugurated the beginning of a long-standing French fascination with the Red Sea. The geographer and cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697-1782) produced the first - to my knowledge - rigorous scientific attempt to describe the topography of the Red Sea in his Memoires sur l'Egypte ancienne et moderne, suivis d'une Description du Golfe Arabique ou de la Mer Rouge (Paris, 1766). In the sixty pages devoted to the Red Sea, d’Anville described his efforts to draw up a map of the Red Sea as an integrated space (Golfe Arabique ou Mer Rouge, 1765), making exhaustive references to Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, Portuguese, French and English sources and unpub­lished manuscript maps.^[531]

Not unlike the early sixteenth century, the turn of the nineteenth century positioned the Red Sea at the centre of global imperial rivalry, this time between the French and the British. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798-1801) was in part motivated by the objective of hinder­ing British communications with India via the Red Sea. The British, for their part, were looking for new ways to speed up access to India.

As suggested in the context of Albert Kammerer’s scholarly enterprise, the 1920s and 1930s present particular interest for the Red Sea histo­rian. In France, journalistic, literary and scholarly fascination with the Red Sea produced a boom of publications that captured the popular imagination. Investigative journalists (Grands reporters) such as Albert Londres and Joseph Kessel travelled to the region and produced intrepid first-hand accounts that denounced abiding slave trafficking, rampant piracy, smuggling and the harsh labouring conditions of Red Sea pearl- ers.^[534] Such politically progressive undertakings were blended with (or fuelled) by an esprit d'aventure that seized the popular imagination at times removed from such high-minded political inspiration. No one epit­omised this trend better than the eccentric adventurer, maverick and pro­lific writer Henry de Monfreid, who published Les Secrets de la mer Rouge in 1931 (translated into English in 1934 and released as a feature film in 1937). Les Secrets quickly became a classic of the travel-adventure writing genre and Monfreid continued to release many more books recounting his Red Sea adventures, real and imagined, to popular acclaim. Some of Monfreid’s books are still in print in French.