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The First Great World Travellers & Nomads

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Nitin in a camp inside the Sahara Desert

All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian

By Nitin Gairola

In the ‘History & Geography of Travel’, I will now shift gears to specifically talk about world travelers and explorers from the last 800 years to today, covering the first great ‘global travellers’ in this feature. The earlier articles were to give a big picture view of humanity from then to now, but from the last eight centuries or so, we have documented accounts of great travellers and I can now go into their stories. After this one I will move into the era of great voyages of discovery of Columbus and the like, the first European exploration of the newly found Americas, Australia and of Africa – all in the next 4 features. Finally I will close this series with an article on extreme exploration in the 20th century.

After these pieces, I will again be writing about what I love the most – the deserts of the world. Richa and I would be going on our Central Asian adventure into all the ‘Stans’ and their barren deserts and mountain ranges like the Tien Shan, Pamirs and Hindu Kush. I will have so many personal travel stories to share from this part of the planet.

The same market where Ibn Battuta may have been

With that glimpse into the possible future, here we go today into the lives and times of the first mega world travellers and nomads. These people travelled more than most of us do here in the 21st century. And they did it all without motors, rails or wings; just on sheer curiosity and a prayer.

 The Viking Explorers

In Europe there was one set of people, who above all else, can collectively be called adventurers and explorers and not just farmers, traders and empire builders. These people from the Nordic nations (such as Norway, Sweden and Iceland), were the Norsemen. Fierce warriors and equally fearless seafarers, they had their famous Norse boats with one large sail on which they charted far off into cold worlds of the Arctic and Greenland, sometime in 800-900 AD. The ones who were seafarers, pirates and explorers were called Vikings and one such famous Viking explorer was Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red from Iceland. He is supposed to not only have reached Greenland but also mainland North America, near present day Newfoundland, off the east coast of Canada. All this happened around 1000 AD, almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus would be credited with the discovery of the Americas for Europeans. Long poems or sagas were written to honour the Viking heroes such as Erikson.

Vikings reached Greenland & N.America in 1000 AD

The Mongol Nomads

Besides the adventures of the Vikings, we had some of the fiercest land warriors on the plains and cold deserts of Mongolia in the east, like on the Gobi Desert and Taklimakan. From the early part of the 13th century the Mongol dominated central and eastern Asia, including China under the leadership of the ruthless Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan’s sons even raided Russia and Eastern Europe and his grandson, Kublai Khan, went on to conquer China. In between they sacked Bagdad and Damascus in the Middle East as well. Much later we would have a Mongol, Tamerlane or Timur (1336-1405) whose descendants would become the Mughals. With this we can see the spread and influence of the Mongols in this slice of human history.

Turning the clock back by a 100 or so years, by around the mid-1200s the Mongols had become more fragmented due to their ever expanding empire. But the dark cloud of the Mongols was ominously heading west towards the European continent. It is then that the Pope decided to contact the Mongols. A monk named Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and a group of other monks left France in 1245. They met the Mongol leader, Kuyuk, somewhere near present day Ukraine. This mission gained valuable initial insights into the Mongols and would later open the way for future explorers such as the legendary Marco Polo. In 1252, another monk, named William of Rubruck left Constantinople (Istanbul) in Turkey on behalf of French King Louis IX and met the new Mongol leader, Mongke. While as a missionary he failed to convert the Mongols to Christianity, William’s visited greatly added to the little knowledge the Europeans had about these nomads.

Forbidden City, Beijing from the time of ZhengHe

Multi-Year Journey of Marco Polo

The stage had been set for further land expeditions east, especially China. The Chinese had, by this time, invented many things which were not known to the rest of the world such as porcelain, a very fine type of ‘china’. They also had invented the compass for navigation, wooden blocks to print books and by the 13th century had discovered gunpowder too. All this, of course, made everyone want to trade with the Chinese. The Arabs were trading quite a bit with them already, all along the silk route, and the Europeans didn’t want to miss in on the action.

Some of the earliest traders from Europe were the Polos of Venice, Italy. The brothers, Niccolo and Mafeo Polo, undertook a long journey in 1259, which took them across Russia and the vast plains of Central Asia all the way up to Beijing (which was called Khanbaliq back then). They met Kublai Khan, the grandson of Mongol leader Genghis Khan. The Polos presented Kublai Khan with gifts from Europe and also took exotic articles from China. In 1271 the brothers again returned to China, this time with little Marco Polo, the son of Niccolo. This visit would have a very deep impact on the young Marco Polo as over the next two decades he would work for Kublai Khan, as his trusted subject. During this time, Marco Polo travelled extensively across Eastern China, Indonesia and even made it to the southern coast of India before taking the sea route to Iran and finally returning back to Venice in the 1290s. Marco Polo’s travels started with trade in mind but turned into a multi-year slow travel driven by curiosity of the unknown. He even dictated a book about his travels and it became a bestseller of that time in Italy. Marco Polo can really be said to be the first true globetrotter and the amount of land he covered without motorized transport is absolutely astonishing.

The Whirling Dervishes-A Sufi dance

Zheng-He’s Voyages from China

At the time of Marco Polo’s travels, the Mongol empire was in decline due to infighting and being spread too thin. By 1368 the Mongols were overthrown in China and the Ming Dynasty was born. In 1405, Emperor Yongle was the ruler of the Ming Dynasty and he wanted to display the might of his great empire to all neighbours so that no one would dare to invade his land as the Mongols had done earlier. To this effect, he sent his fleet of ships over multiple voyages under the command of Zheng-He, also known to the world as Cheng Ho. As many as 28,000 sailors were needed to sail this enormous fleet of ships. In his seven famous voyages to India, Sri Lanka, Arabia and East Africa, the Chinese gave silk, porcelain and other exotic luxuries to the locals and merchants in all these lands to show their dominance over world trade. All in all, Zheng-He visited over 30 kingdoms of that time, which was a truly remarkable feat of travel as well. His secret to navigation was the compass that Chinese had already invented. Zheng-He died in 1433 AD, fittingly aboard a ship over the Indian Ocean. Talk about dying with your boots on.

The Chinese naval might was for all to see and it certainly didn’t go unnoticed in Europe. There was soon to be a great shift in the balance of power and the tables were about to turn. It all centered on who could master the seas & oceans and hence control trade with the eastern side of the Earth. The irony is that the Europeans were pushed into finding the solution in the sea, when the Turks (and not the Chinese), had blocked their land access to the lucrative silk route. Also around this period, the Chinese themselves were trying to revert to their policy of isolationism, which would have a deep impact on them for centuries to come and would be the reason why Europe would overtake them for the next 500 years.

Driven by the magic of strange lands

Ibn Battuta – The Great Desert World Traveller

At this point in history, the Arabs lived in far better conditions than those in Europe and were more advanced in the sciences, technology and certainly in trade. They had absorbed many of the Greek and Roman ideas upon capturing those lands and trade had made them prosperous. From the Arab world, there was a legendary world traveller, who by many is considered the greatest of all time. His name was Ibn Battuta, born on the western fringes of the Arab world in Tangier, Morocco in 1304. He was a scholar and explorer and was driven by an urge to see the world. He once quoted “Travelling – It leaves you speechless and then turns you into a storyteller”

Battuta’s first ambition was to go on the Hajj, all the way from Morocco to Mecca, crossing the African continent from west to east. And so began his journey in 1325 at the age of 21 years. But little did he know how long he would be gone from home. Besides Mecca, over his 3 decades of travel, he would visit present day Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, all the Stans of the former USSR, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Indonesia, Philippines, China and a few more….phew !!! And these travels would take him through many deserts as well such as the Sahara, Arabian and Syrian deserts, as well as those in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, China, Mongolia and of course our very own Thar.

By the time he died, Battuta had travelled to as many as 44 present day countries and covered a distance of approximately 117,000 kilometers, way more than the next in this ranking, Marco Polo who did around 50,000 kilometers but 6 decades before Battuta. This amount of travel made Ibn Battuta the most travelled man of his time by a ‘country mile’ and he too released a travelogue of his exploits around the world. It is mind boggling to think of his journey now, most of it on camel caravans, horseback and foot, and on the kindness (or not) of strangers.

Two Desert Travellers

His adventures in India in the court of the maniacal Muhammad ibn Tughluq are the stuff of travel legend. Tughluq was actually mad and Battuta had to escape the court as the deranged Tughluq could whimsically order a beheading on any given day, even if he did not wake up on the wrong side of his bed that day. And despite all his dangerous adventures, he died in his home of Tangier, Morocco in 1368 or 1969. Talk about living a charmed life but more importantly, a fulfilling one. But Ibn Battuta wasn’t the only global traveller from the Arab world as there was another by the name of Ibn Fadlan. Four centuries before Ibn Battuta, he visited the present day Volga river area where it is believed that Fadlan met Russian Vikings and they feasted with him (thankfully, not on him). However history doesn’t remember Ibn Fadlan too well, since he has been overshadowed by the ‘Big Ibn’.

Guru Nanak’s Journeys from India to the World

Besides these famous first independent globetrotters, we also have the incredible journeys of the Sikh saint, Guru Nanak. He is said to have travelled nearly 30,000 kilometers and moved in all directions from India to the world. He went as far as Bangladesh in the east, Sri Lanka in the south, Tibet in the north and Afghanistan, Iran and the Arabian lands in the west. He would travel between years 1500 to 1524 and as we all know, Guru Nanak was also the spiritual founder of Sikhism.  In fact, I got to learn of Guru Nanak’s world travels quite recently and I am sure it would have given him a great perspective on the world. This is the transformational power of travel. It allows us to live a larger life.

Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet, and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home. Reach him at: www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/ ; www.instagram.com/MostTravelled_Indian/