INDIAN BOAT DESIGNS. 205 



end of the reign of Ch'eng Tsue of the Ming dynasty, a ruler noted for his aggressive 

 overseas poHcy/ 



To sum up the deductions obtained from an analysis of our knowledge of ancient 

 sea- trade with India as derived from ancient sculptures and from classic and mediaeval 

 writers, we find that : — ■ 



{a) Phcenician influence was negligible. We have no direct evidence whatever 

 to support the view that the Phoenicians ever voyaged regularly to India or had trade 

 settlements in India. There seems no basis for the idea of a busy Phoenician trade 

 route to India either from a base in the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. On the con- 

 trary the concentration of all their sea effort was directed to the westward — to go east 

 involved enterprises strategically unsound. The weightiest fact against the supposi- 

 tion that the Phoenicians had vessels in eastern waters is that Solomon, Sennacherib 

 and Alexander would have chartered such vessels for their use had there been any, 

 instead of constructing new ones. 



(b) The Egyptians certainly never went beyond the land of Punt in any of their 

 eastward sea voyages, that is, they never passed east of Hadramaut or of Sokotra. 



(c) The Babylonians and Assyrians were not a maritime people and the biggest 

 ships they had, as shown in Sennacherib's records, were rowing galleys, usually unpro- 

 vided with sails. 



{d) The Greek and Grseco-Roman traffic that flourished exceedingly between Egyp- 

 tian Red Sea ports, Arabia Eelix and the Indian coast, roughly from 200 B.C. to 200 

 A.D., and lingered on another two hundred years in ever decreasing importance, was 

 of very great extent and value, requiring the employment of annual trading fleets. 

 We have no information as to the kind of ships engaged in this traffic, and whether 

 they were built and manned by Greeks or built and owned by Greeks and manned by 

 Arabs. Probably the latter was the case — it is the more probable, and this would 

 make it clear how and why the Arabs later came to dispute with Indians the carrying 

 trade of the Arabian Sea, as had also been the case in the days prior to Greek mari- 

 time predominance. 



{e) The Sabaean Arabs of Southern Arabia appear to share with Indians the hon- 

 our of having been the earliest carriers on the waters of the Arabian Sea ; it seems 

 certain that this traffic was comparatively petty and restricted prior to the opening 

 up of the East to European enterprise by Alexander's pioneering of the Persian Gulf 

 route. With Rome's absorption of Egypt, direct trade between India and Egypt in- 

 creased enormously and was, I believe, largely in the hands of Arabs employed by 

 Greeks. Anyway, from the fall of Rome, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf trade was run 

 solely by Arabs and Indians with a distinct tendency to pass into the hands of the 

 former in the period immediately preceding the arrival of the Portuguese in India. 

 With the decline of the Portuguese, Arab and Indian sea-trade again increased con- 

 siderably and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was of great import- 

 ance till the advent of steam-power in Indian seas reduced its scope enormously. 



1 Yule, Cathay, I, 87. 



