Temple reliefs lead to epic trip

THEY were the first seafarers to cross the oceans in the search of trade, yet little is known of the Indonesian expeditions to Madagascar and eastern Africa.

Now a Scots captain is to sail a replica of an eighth-century ship, based on designs found on stone carvings, on a voyage that will take four months.

The Borobudur, named after the temple where the carvings were found, set sail from Jakarta at the weekend.

The expedition is the passion of Philip Beale, a London fund manager, who

20 years ago stumbled across the beautifully carved stone reliefs of simple outrigger boats on the eighth-century Buddhist temple Borobudur in Java. He wondered whether the boats were the same ones that had transported Indonesian explorers to Madagascar.

Now, in an attempt to answer that question, 42-year-old Mr Beale has assembled a 15-strong international group of crew, marine archeologists and a Scots skipper, Alan Campbell, and built a replica of the Borobudur reliefs.

Mr Beale and Nick Burningham, a British marine archeologist who supervised the boat’s construction, believe the reliefs depict what was a common trip to Madagascar and eastern Africa for Indonesian seafarers.

"Long before Europe was doing any ocean sailing, when nobody was doing back and forth trips of 3,000 to 4,000 kilometres, Indonesians were far and away the first global traders, way back before the Portuguese, the Arabs or Chinese," said Mr Beale.

Madagascar’s Asian-looking inhabitants, plus the fact that the language spoken by both black and Asian inhabitants of Madagascar is the same as that spoken on Indonesian Borneo, have led historians to believe that the island was first colonised by Indonesians, who then sailed to eastern Africa and began exporting Asian rice, bananas, yams and betel nut.

Mr Beale suspected these ancient traders might have even made it as far as Ghana in west Africa, and the new voyage will prove whether this was possible, with plans to sail around the tip of South Africa and up the western side of the continent.

Mr Beale further pointed out that the Chinese did not reach the Indian Ocean until the tenth century and while Arabs did it shortly after, the Portuguese did not sail round the cape of Africa until the late 15th century.

Rebuilding one of the boats that made this epic voyage has not been straightforward, with the team having no models or drawings, only the reliefs, on which to base the construction.

And unlike some of the replica European tall ships which have plied these difficult routes, this compact little boat does not necessarily look capable of sailing across the Indian Ocean and withstanding the notorious winds around the Cape of Good Hope.

At 20 metres long and built - without a nail - of various hardwood timbers, bamboo, rope riggings and koroco, a type of traditional sailcloth, the replica looks fragile compared to European sailing ships. In light winds, the crew might be forced to row it, possibly for several days at a time.

However, amid all the paraphernalia of the ancient world there are a few modern amenities, such as liferafts, a GPS and satellite equipment for navigating, as well as solar-powered computers to allow the captain to download the latest weather maps from the internet.

Mr Campbell, 59, is a veteran of such recreated sailing trips, having made about a dozen of them in the past three decades, but he knows there is always a certain unpredictability about them.

"We should get the south-east trade winds as far as the Seychelles, but we can’t predict until we clear land what the winds will do. So I guess we’ll just deal with it when we get there," he said.

If the winds are favourable around the African cape, they should reach western Africa by late December or early January.

Mr Campbell, a Glaswegian who has lived in Australia since the 1960s, discovered this love for such historical voyages and began to pick up sailing skills after travelling as a passenger on Eye of the Wind, a riveted iron 1900s ship, in the 1970s.

"I fell in love with the ship, I fell in love with the lifestyle and that was it," he said. Now he intersperses his sailing trips with stints lecturing at the Australian Maritime College in Launceston, Tasmania.

Despite expressing doubts before departure about the expedition’s state of readiness ("I can’t see how this is all going to come together") Mr Campbell got the boat under way on schedule, confirming the truth of his additional observation that "I always say that before I take off on a trip like this and then magically at the last minute it all comes together".

Mr Burningham, who has acted as an adviser for other famous recreated ships such as the 16th-century Dutch vessel Duyfken, which sailed from Sydney to Amsterdam two years ago, is not so certain that the boat in its current form will make it as far as Madagascar.

One question is how the bamboo outriggers, which appear to be there to stabilise the boat but do not actually function that way, will behave in strong winds.

"They were on the Borobudur reliefs but what they’ll do in a storm, I just don’t know," he said. "I think it might sail better without them."

But having made short trips in the craft, Mr Burningham is pleased with its progress. "She slips through the water beautifully," he said. But he was "not surprised", given the skills of its builders on Pagerungan Kecil, one of the Kangean islands,70 kilometres north of Bali.