Sailing from China - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 111

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Sailing from China
'Once you are through the harbour entrance, the spray from the whitecaps fills the
air and the surging waves leap as high as the Milky Way. No longer can you track
the bluffs along the coast. No longer can you note the villages as you pass through
them or count off the post stations stage by stage. The senior officers ply the oars
and raise the sails, cutting a path through the flood of waves with only the com-
pass needle to show them the way. They rely on its readings to forge ahead, some-
timeslettingtheneedlestayononeofthemainbearings,sometimeslettingitpoint
in a direction between them.' This is how Zhang Xie describes the exhilaration of
launching a junk out of Moon Harbour and heading out onto the open sea. The
coast falls away, and with it any fixed point that can tell the pilot where he is go-
ing.Nowhehasonlyhiscompassestoshowhimwhichwayheisgoingandwhere
he might be. This is anything but stale academic language. Zhang is obviously en-
thralled with the adventure of seafaring and is determined that the reader should
draw the same charge from the thrill of going to sea. Some people have the notion
that Chinese were not seafarers and disapproved of compatriots who went to sea,
but Zhang clearly is not one of them. I would dearly like to know, but probably
never will, whether the author of the Study of the Eastern and Western Seas ever
got a taste of blue-water sailing. I hope he did.
Even if Zhang did not himself sail through the entrance into Moon Harbour and
out into the Taiwan Strait, he knew enough to point the way for us. Fortunately,
we have the Selden map and the Laud rutter to confirm and in many places sup-
plement the network of routes that Zhang describes. If each of the three sources
mostly confirms the other two, it is not because it had any links with the others.
It is simply that the routes they record constituted a stable network that had long
been in use by generations of Chinese mariners. Even though we come so many
centuries after them, having all three sources makes it easy for us to acquire fairly
complete knowledge of the maritime system of which the Selden map is the first
fully visualised version (Fig. 1).
There is one small point of disagreement between two of the sources, about
which the third equivocates, and that is where they start. Zhang Xie starts unequi-
vocally in Moon Harbour, the port for the prefectural city of Zhangzhou at the